Bring our jobs and businesses back home
By
Thom Hartmann for the
How
did the Reagan administration and neoliberals ever since get away with making
our nation almost totally reliant on China and a handful of other low-wage
countries for everything from the chips in our cars to our cellphones to the
tech necessary to build a battleship or missile?
And
who turned our energy fate over to the Saudis?
Of
all the concepts that ground most Americans’ idea of our country, self-reliance
ranks among the top.
While
much of it is based in fantasy ideas and children’s tales about “pioneers”
carving their own lives out of the wilderness (in reality, community was the
main value that guaranteed success for frontier towns), it’s nonetheless a
foundational value intrinsic to Americans’ notion of themselves.
Self-reliance
is also the number-one meme promoted by rightwing media and billionaires,
celebrated by the Republican Party, and used to market everything from guns to
trucks to survival food for Trump-humpers.
“Stand
on your own two feet!” is a favorite GOP mantra, particularly when discussing
poor people looking for bootstraps to pull themselves up with.
Self-reliance is an entirely different thing when applied to nations, however.
George
Washington understood the concept of self-reliance on the national level; when
he became president he asked his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, to
come up with a plan to wean America off products manufactured in Britain.
Hamilton’s
11-Point Plan for American Manufactures, also known as The American Plan,
literally built this country.
From
1793, when the American Plan was largely put into place, until the 1980s
when the Reagan administration started taking a meat-axe to it in a big way,
negotiating the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, which led
to the World Trade Organization) and the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), we built things here.
In
1983 Louise and I moved to Atlanta and a new Wal-Mart had just opened down the
road from us in, as I recall, the suburban town of Alpharetta. The banner that
hung across the front of the massive building proudly echoed the title of Sam
Walton’s autobiography: “100% Made In America!”
But
in 1978 Lewis Powell of Powell Memo fame authored the Boston v
Bellotti Supreme Court decision, which doubled-down on previous rulings
that corporations were persons with constitutional rights. The decision also
changed our laws so that when corporations use their profits to buy politicians
it’s no longer bribery or corruption but, instead, constitutionally-protected
“free speech.”
The
result was Ronald Reagan floating into the White House in 1980 on a tsunami of
fossil-fuel and corporate money and a lobbying frenzy to deconstruct the
national industrial policy that Hamilton had so painstakingly put together and
had sustained America for 188 years.
Arguing
that labor was “just another commodity” and that corporations should be able to
“freely” seek out the cheapest labor they could find anywhere in the world,
corporate lobbyists and CEOs prevailed on Reagan and Congress to loosen or
eliminate protective tariffs and other trade restrictions that kept American
manufacturers here in this country.
The
result was, over the past 40 years (most of it in the first 30 of those years),
the closing of over 60,000 American factories and the transfer of over
15,000,000 good-paying mostly unionized American jobs to Mexico, China, Vietnam
and elsewhere.
The
era was epitomized by GE CEO Jack Welch, who famously argued that factories
shouldn’t be tied to any particular country but, as cheaper labor became
available across the horizon, should simply be able to float to that new
location.
“Ideally,”
went his famous and oft-quoted mantra,
“you’d have every plant you own on a barge.”
Car
prices account for about a third of our inflation rate today because supplies
are so tight. The reason? We no longer manufacture the
chips — invented here in America — necessary to operate today’s high-tech
vehicles. Much of that manufacturing was sent off to China, where labor is
cheap and there are no pesky unions to worry about…but the supply chain is now
disrupted.
And
yet Americans still believe in self-reliance. It’s baked into our psyches from
our earliest years in school.
During one of my teenage summers my best friend Clark Stinson, his girlfriend Colleen, and I headed up to the Chippewa National Forest in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with two 10-foot tipis and 100 pounds of dried fruit and grains.
With the help
of an old trapper who lived there, we hauled our gear three days back into the
forest to a small, unmarked lake, set up our tipis, and lived there for the
next few months.
We
were both junkies for Emerson and Thoreau and, infused with Emerson’s essay on
self-reliance and Thoreau’s example at Walden Pond, spent the summer gathering
wild plants, reading books on spirituality and wilderness survival, and
meditating.
The
biggest lesson I learned from the experience was that at the individual level
self-reliance is largely a fantasy.
We
all depend on each other, and without the infrastructure of a functioning
society none of us will survive long. Even homeless people form community; it’s
at the core of our humanity to be interdependent, even though that
interdependence is the foundation of our sense of individual self-reliance.
The
danger with interdependence, however, is when we become entangled with
predators. Whether its low-income people getting by with payday loans and
credit cards, workers so cowed they’re afraid to form a union, or diabetics
being charged thousands of dollars a year for drugs that cost pennies to make,
when predators have us by the neck all those high-minded notions of
self-reliance go out the window.
It’s
the same with nations.
We’ve
become dependent on predators for our oil and our manufactured goods, and it
has gutted America’s working class while putting us in dangerous military and
foreign policy positions.
Back
in 1975 during the Arab Oil Embargo, Congress passed the Energy Policy and
Conservation Act which required the president to put into place rules
banning the export of American-produced fossil fuels.
That
law stood until 2015, when neoliberal Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp of
North Dakota put forward the American Crude Oil Export Equality Act
that was, later that year, rolled into an omnibus spending bill and signed into
law by President Obama.
Wednesday
I suggested that, in response to Saudi
Arabia aligning itself with Putin, we should repeal Heitkamp’s legislation and
go back to banning the export of crude and gasoline.
In
seven short years we’ve gone from exporting none of our oil and being totally
energy independent — self-reliant — to now exporting fully 30 percent of the oil produced in
America.
Giant
international oil companies are even refining US crude here, leaving us with
the poisoned air, waste, and cancers, and then exporting the purified gasoline
to other countries.
Last
year, Bloomberg reported, gasoline exports reached a record high of 802,000 barrels a day, most going to
Brazil and Mexico.
At
the same time the fossil fuel industry pulled down an eye-watering $138 billion in profits in just the past
three months, gas retailers in America jacked up prices because of a supposed
gasoline shortage here. Right.
Now,
in a moment of clarity, the Biden administration is considering repealing Heitkamp’s law or promulgating
new export rules to return America to energy self-reliance.
It
can’t come soon enough.
Similarly,
we’ve allowed greedy manufacturing executives and corporations to move so much
of our manufacturing to China and other low-wage nations that little is left of
our nation’s capacity for self-reliance.
Congressman
Ro Khanna of California published a book on the issue back in 2012, Entrepreneurial Nation: Why Manufacturing is
Still Key to America's Future, and recently published an article in the Boston Globe outlining
his vision for a revival of American manufacturing, particularly in high-tech.
He calls it “Economic Patriotism,” a phrase that should find resonance across
the nation.
The
final third of my newest book, The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How
Reaganism Gutted America, is largely devoted to Hamilton’s American
Plan and how it was discarded by Reagan and has laid dormant through the
administration of every president since.
This
is a trans-partisan issue. In the 2016 election, Trump campaigned on bringing
our factories back from China — another Trump lie — and it probably accounted
for his taking several Midwestern states away from Hillary Clinton, who was
still defending Bill’s embrace of “free trade.”
The
myth of individual self-reliance has fueled libertarian and Republican
fantasies ever since high school kids started reading Atlas Shrugged.
Nonetheless, we truly are all in this together, and the more the morbidly rich
try to pull out of their societal obligations the poorer and more desperate our
nation becomes.
But
at the level of nations, self-reliance is not only good but essential. If China
were to attack Taiwan and simultaneously cut off all ships carrying goods to
America, our economy would be on its knees within weeks. If Saudi Arabia were
to cut off oil to the US, inflation would eat us alive.
Americans
can hold the same idea in two different contexts at the same time: we’ve done
it for centuries. While embracing interdependence at home, we must also embrace
self-reliance on the international stage.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of Neoliberalism and more than 30+ other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute and his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com.
