Here are some of the U.S. companies, law firms and businesses lobbying in China.

*  Jones Day, Hogan & Hartson (law firm)

*  DLA Piper (law firm)

*  Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld (law firm)

*   Lucent Technologies (4 executives removed for past bribery of China officials)

*  APCO Worldwide (lobby firm)

*  Fidelity National Information Services (accused of bribing Chinese banking officials)

*  Henry Kissinger (former U.S. Secretary of State)

*   Reed Hundt (former FCC Chairman)

*   Gary Locke (former governor of Washington state)

*  Microsoft

*  Starbucks

Our trade policy debate is stuck in the 1950's.  Comparative advantage does not matter now.  It has been supplanted by capital mobility.  GE's Jack Welch wanted to put every factory on a barge, traveling between countries as necessary to take advantage of the lowest cost country of the day - based upon currency manipulation, tax rates, fleeting subsidies, cheap labor, etc.

Tom Palley has a wonderful explanation of this new math below.  Talk "comparative advantage" if you want, but if you do, you are either deceitful or have not progressed in trade policy thought since Eisenhower.

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Jack Welch’s Barge: The New Economics of Trade
Copyright Thomas I. Palley
 
The classical theory of comparative advantage has driven US trade policy for the past fifty years. That policy, in combination with technical innovations that have lowered costs of transportation and communication, has opened the global economy. Yet paradoxically, this opening has rendered classical trade theory obsolete. That in turn has left the US economically vulnerable because its trade policy remains stuck in the past and based on ideas that no longer hold.

(Read More) 

The small minded, but financially well-endowed folks that profit from trade deficits by taking our tax breaks and innovation oversees for individual profit are shaking our foundations.  The foundations of America. 

We think highly of ourselves.  We feel good about our grandeur, our grand ideas, our grand accomplishments, our grand place in the world.  But we are disintegrating as our economy leaves us...  as our innovation leaves us... as our ideals become hollow.

This blistering article goes beyond trade, but our current trade policy is a major cause of the ills diagnosed.  I don't know Charley Reese, but this article is powerful.

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The Empire Is Over by Charley Reese
 
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese399.html

The American government has come to resemble the characters in The Wizard of Oz. We have the Cowardly Congress, a president without a brain, and a foreign-policy establishment without a heart.

Our politicians are still trying to play the empire game long after the age of empires has ended. Blinded by arrogance, they cannot see that with every passing day, the world needs us less and less and hates us more and more.

We are passing through that phase when the grandeur of the empire exists only in the minds of politicians who have insulated themselves from reality.

(Read More)