Monday, March 28, 2011

Greider´s "End Free Trade Globalization"

My political economic imagination continues to focus on the social co-op democratic models of nations like Denmark, Germany, and Japan, and green employee-ownership models, and one of my great inspirations has been William Greider´s writing.
     I found the following selection in an interesting article by Greider from Nov., 2010 in the Nation addressing some of the underlying contradictions of the China and US roles in current prevailing political economic activity.


For Americans the most ominous development is that trade deficits, after shrinking during the recession, are expanding rapidly again. That stands in the way of recovery and helps explain why the federal stimulus of 2009 had less punch than expected. The trap is illustrated by a few recent statistics: the US economy expanded in the second quarter of 2010 by an anemic annualized rate of 1.7 percent. During those same months, however, the nation's trade deficit expanded by 3.5 percent. Do the arithmetic: the US economy would have grown at a much healthier rate if it weren't for its dependence on products made elsewhere. Yet getting different results will take much more than currency adjustments. It means reforming the dynamics of global trade and the US industrial structure, not just the bad habits of American consumers.

read the rest here: http://www.thenation.com/article/155848/end-free-trade-globalization