Millions of American workers are jobless because China has manipulated its currency and abused trade agreements to flood America with artificially cheap goods. Congress is looking at legislation to penalize China for its currency manipulation to try to protect U.S. jobs. The Alliance for American Manufacturing is a partnership between the United Steel Workers and some Fortune 500 companies trying to keep jobs in America. AAM’s Scott Paul says, “Across every state – not only the industrial heartland and the industrial heartland of the south, but also in places like California, Oregon and Minnesota we’ve seen massive job loss. In fact 2.4 million jobs lost since China joined the World Trade Organization.” Senator Chuck Schumer says, “This report shows that if China were playing by the same rules as the U.S. 2.4 million of those workers might be collecting paychecks instead of job hunting.” And if we were to blow up the rules – pull the US out of the WTO and go back to the tariff-based international trade system that served this country well from 1793 until the Reagan and Clinton administrations – we could bring back tens of millions of good manufacturing jobs. Going after China’s manipulation of their currency is a good start, but America needs to reject the so-called Reagan Revolution and go back to basics. Call it protectionism if you want, most American workers think that “protecting” their jobs is a good thing. It’s time for America’s politicians to wake up to this simple fact. Ross Perot was right, Clinton and Bush were wrong, and we need to admit it and move ahead.
In Strange news….Has even the Last Supper been supersized? Researchers reported in a medical journal Tuesday that the food in famous paintings of the meal has enlarged by biblical proportions over the last millennium. Using a computer, they compared the size of the food to the size of the heads in 52 paintings of Jesus Christ and his disciples at their final meal before his death. If art imitates life, we’re in trouble, the researchers conclude. The size of the main dish grew 69 percent; the size of the plate, 66 percent, and the bread, 23 percent, between the years 1000 and 2000.
