In an exclusive interview with the Wall Street Journal, President Bush stated his support for expanded trade as a cure for what ails the country. In his opinion, US exporters stand to gain through free trade agreements still pending with Columbia, Panama, and South Korea.
With growth of the gross domestic product slowing, it seems that past free trade agreements may not have been panacea to US manufacturing as advertised; so if a lot is not too good, will a little more be any better?
Answer; Yes. In Panama, Columbia, and South Korea.
Visiting a manufacturing plant in California yesterday Mr. Bush told laborers, "Free trade means good-paying jobs for Americans, Congress needs to pass these agreements for the sake of economic vitality."
But the President threatened to veto a bill that would have helped workers who lost their jobs when Congress seemed intent on including service workers in the plan. It seems that when workers lose their jobs, service workers are impacted by the fact that there are fewer people able to pay the cost of the service they provide. The President stated that he wanted to confine the program to those who actually lose their jobs as a result of trade deals. The Administration may use a shorter yard stick for jobs than they do for trade.
Congress and the President could debate that one for a long time. In the meantime, more pharmaceutical companies are accessing drugs and their ingredients, off shore, from India, with a growing move toward China where leukemia patients were recently poisoned by a contaminated chemo treatment.
Based on the news in WSJ today, when it comes to free trade, what doesn’t kill you will hopefully cure you. But at the very least, it may just take away your job.
Trade is the super-policy. Trade policy beats every other national concern in these upside down days. Food safety? National security? Fiscal and economic sanity? They fall like dominoes to the imperative... the Prime Directive... more trade even if it is imports.
U.S. multinationals are selling spying technology to the Chinese government. The Chinese government spies on its citizens, and us. General Electric, Honeywell, United Technologies and IBM are helping them in this post-Tiananmen Square modification.
The techno-crackdown fueling this U.S. assistance of communist government human rights violation is spurred by the Beijing Olympics. The Olympics must not embarass the government. So the rabble must be discovered and swept away so a nice, attractive, placid stage is preserved.
Here is what Honeywell is doing:
Honeywell has already started helping the police to set up an elaborate computer monitoring system to analyze feeds from indoor and outdoor cameras in one of Beijing’s most populated districts, where several Olympic sites are located.
And how about GE?
General Electric has sold to Chinese authorities its powerful VisioWave system, which allows security officers to control thousands of video cameras simultaneously and automatically alerts them to suspicious or fast-moving objects, like people running. The system will be deployed at Beijing’s national convention center, including the Olympics media center.
And IBM?
Julie Donahue, I.B.M.’s vice president for security and privacy services, told a technology news service in early December that by next summer I.B.M. would install in Beijing its newly developed Smart Surveillance System, a powerful network that links large numbers of video cameras. Company officials declined repeated requests to answer questions about the system or discuss Ms. Donahue’s remarks.
And United Technologies?
United Technologies flew three engineers from its Lenel security subsidiary in Rochester to Guangzhou, the biggest metropolis in southeastern China, to customize a 2,000-camera network in a single large neighborhood, the first step toward a citywide network of 250,000 cameras to be installed before the Asian Games in 2010. The company is also seeking contracts to build that network.
The Commerce Department has rules on selling surveillance equipment abroad, but that's not stopping the sales. The department is "reviewing" their rules now.
But there is major pushback:
William A. Reinsch, the Clinton administration’s under secretary of commerce for export administration, is now the president of the National Foreign Trade Council, a Washington group that represents multinationals on trade issues. Mr. Reinsch said that he was concerned that the new rules could limit American export opportunities and give new ones to European and Asian companies.
Can you imagine this argument during the cold war? Trade trumping the containment policy? I think not. China is not an enemy, but a geopolitical rival with bad habits. We should not enable those bad habits.
Many, many companies in China are owned by the government. Communism is, after all, government ownership of private assets.
One of those government-owned companies, Shanghai Hualian, is a very large drug maker. It has many plants. Dozens of plants, some of which supply the U.S. It manufactures cancer drugs, mifeprepristone (RU-486 - the abortion pill) among others.
Some of those drugs were contaminated, a leukemia drug, methotrexate. 200 Chinese cancer patients were parylized or otherwise harmed. When? Last summer. When did the contamination become public? Today. Months and months later.
What did the Chinese FDA equivalent agency do? Good question.
The director of the Chinese F.D.A.’s drug safety control unit in Shanghai, Zhou Qun, said her agency had inspected the factory that produced mifepristone three times in recent months and found it in compliance. “It is natural to worry,” Ms. Zhou said, “but these two plants are in two different places and have different quality-assurance people.”
Yes. But the same regulator. And the same regulatory culture.
Remember what happened to the last head of the Chinese FDA? He was executed by his employer. But before his government execution, his agency was very productive. They approved 7,500 new drugs each workday. 7,500 new drugs each workday.
The U.S. FDA approved 140 last year.
John Edwards will reportedly announce in New Orleans today that he is dropping out of the Democratic side of the Presidential contest.
While corporate owned networks generally panned his anti-corporate tirades, some of us appreciated hearing a politician state the obvious. After Xerox, regulators proclaimed “Never again”. And after the S&L scandal, regulators proclaimed never again. And after Arthur Anderson, regulators proclaimed “Never again”. And after Enron, regulators proclaimed “Never again”. And after AOL Time Warner, regulators proclaimed “Never again”. And after sub-prime mortgages, regulators proclaimed “Never again”. About all that changed was that infractions simply got bigger along with the national debt and “free” trade agreements.
So far the only thing to decline has been the US dollar.
Upon hearing John Edwards repeatedly call out “Never again”, some of us hoped that someday, “never again” might really come to pass. We hoped that Packers and Stockyards might be enforced. We hoped that free trade job loss might be replaced with fair trade job gains. We hoped that saner minds would decide that unregulated, unsafe imported food and drugs might be stopped at the border.
So the big question now is who will Edwards endorse? Will his fair trade, jobs, common man platform be judged in the corporate newsroom as boon, or bane, to the hopeful candidate he endorses?
Last but not least, will someday ever come?
Reported in the Wall Street Journal today is the following paragraph on FDA inspections of foreign manufactured medical devices; "In testimony scheduled to be delivered today before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee, the Government Accountability Office will tell lawmakers that it found "weaknesses" in the agency's oversight of an industry that makes products ranging from contact lenses to defibrillators. According to FDA officials' own estimates, overseas makers of the riskiest products, such as pacemakers, were examined only every six years, and moderate-risk device manufacturers on average went an estimated 27 years between FDA inspections."
27 years? No wonder manufacturers flock to foreign factories.
