Thom Hartmann: Ohio’s governor Ted Strickland signed an executive order banning the outsource of government IT functions. These are government purchases. Why can’s we do this at the federal level? Why can’t president Obama sign an executive order that says anything that has, anything that’s paid for with federal dollars, which is a hell of a lot of stuff, right? About a third of the entire economy is directly or indirectly paid for with federal dollars. You’ve got all the defense stuff, you’ve got all the, you know the education, you’ve got, I mean, or in partially funded, about one third of our entire economy, one way or another is coming from government. Why doesn’t the president simply say, you know if you’re taking tax payers dollars, tax payers who work in the United States and pay taxes on the money they earned in the United States, you cannot send that money outside the United States.
We borrow 600 billion dollars a year just to buy crap from overseas. Let’s put an end to that. 300 billion of that by the way is oil that we’re buying largely from the Middle East, from Mexico, from Venezuela and from Canada. I think in fact Canada might be our largest supplier of oil. And let’s put an end to that too. Let’s build a solar industry in this country?
Well there is one small problem with the idea of let’s build a solar industry in this country. This from today’s Financial Times. The headline, “Rare earth fears spear US review. The US is scrambling to resume production for raw materials vital for defense, equipment and green technologies.” These are called rare earths, they’re metals like Lanthanum and Yttrium and Europium. 17 metals. They’re not actually all that rare they’re just a little harder to refine than normal. And guess what, in 2002 during the Bush administration we closed the last rare earths mine in the United States. We don’t produce any of them in this country.
You can’t make a hybrid car without them, you can’t make a cruise missile without them, you can’t make a computer without them. You can’t make a space ship without them, you can’t make pretty much any kind of advanced technology, you can’t make a windmill without them, they’re used for the high, the new fancy high efficiency magnets. So who is producing 90% of the rare earths in the world? One country. China. Why is it China? Because when he was, Deng Xiaoping, when he was the political patriarch of China, he said China’s rare earths are comparable to Saudi Arabia’s oil, let’s develop them. This was 15, this was 20 years ago.
So China now produces 20% or 90% of the world’s rare earths. And that was fine, we’d just buy them from China until last week. Last week China said and it’s a big story, it’s on page 6, top story in today’s Financial Times. “Rare Earth Fears Spur US Review,” China has said we’re not going to export these things anymore or if we do we’re putting a huge export tariff on them.
They’re doing exactly what Alexander Hamilton prescribed for the United States in 1791 in his Report on Manufacturers. The first chapter of my new book, “Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild America,” the first chapter of my book is on this topic of foreign trade. And in fact I reprint Hamilton’s entire 11 point plan, lest there be any mistake. Because it was law in the United States from 1793 until Ronald Reagan became President. And during that time we built a country which was the largest exporter in the world of finished goods, the largest importer of raw materials, we brought raw materials in cheap, we shipped out finished goods expensive and therefore countries borrowed our money from us to buy our things. We were the largest first world nation in the world.
Now we’re the exact opposite. We are the largest importer of finished goods and our raw materials, we export them. We export trees, we export coal, we export iron oil, ore rather, to China.
Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.
