Steve Nash, the peerless point guard of the Phoenix Suns, offers up a saucy take on the need for basketball balance between fundamental play and the flamboyance of high-flying players.

“People say they want the league, (NBA), to have more (funadmental play), but if they’re going to choose one, they’re going to go with the badass dunks,” Nash recently told Sports Illustrated.

It reminds me, in a way, of your average American who whines about the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs to overseas factories and the corporations who ship those jobs to foreign locations. Greedy corporations, they say, robbing Americans of jobs while paying foreigners much lower wages and fewer benefits.

Then, later in the day, those same Americans are shopping at Wal-Mart, buying manufactured products at the lower prices that U.S. consumers demand and expect, which in good part, are made possible by manufaturing products in other countries. In other words, many Americans say they want manufacturing jobs kept here, (fundamental play), but then hurry off to the world’s biggest discounter to buy products at the lowest prices to save money, (the slam dunk).

“We want clean air, clear water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world,” said Steve Dobbins, the president of a North Carolina-based company that supplies thread, yarn and textile finishing to clothing makers. “Yet we, (U.S. consumers), aren’t willing to pay for anything manufactured under those conditions.”

Here’s what Dobbins is saying: Many U.S. consumers say they want America’s manufacturing base protected and restored, but don’t want to pay the higher prices it will take to provide the American worker with the pay and benefits he or she believes are entitlements to employment here. The proof: 97 percent of the U.S. population lives within 25 miles of a Wal-Mart as Americans clamor for the low product prices that the world’s largest retailer provides.

That statistic and the Dobbins comment are cited in the book, The Wal-Mart Effect, which details how the retail giant has wrung the lowest prices possible from its suppliers, who are also squeezed by American consumers who need and want lower prices, even if it means manufacturing has to go elsewhere.

“The cost structure of operating manufacturing plants in the United States is just enormously out of sync with what (American) people want to pay. Dramatically,” said Barbara Lucas, a senior vice president for Black & Decker, as quoted in The Wal-Mart Effect.

All of this ties into the rather pathetic pandering that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are currently displaying in Ohio as they scurry for votes leading up to an important March 4 primary in the Midwest state. At Tuesday’s debate in Cleveland, both Democratic presidential candidates said they would pull the United States out of the North American Free Trade Agreement unless Canada and Mexico agreed to renegotiate the pact.

NAFTA, you see, is the chief culprit to blame for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs since the pact was enacted in 1983. That’s right, folks, a nation, (Mexico), with an economy 1/20th the size of the U.S. economy is uniquely to blame for the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs in Ohio and other Rust Belt states. NAFTA has become such a handy scapegoat in Ohio that the New York Times  reports that the mere mention of the trade pact “provokes as much ire as the name Osama bin Laden.”

Ouch.

It’s quite handy to dump all U.S. manufacturing woes on little old NAFTA, but the long-standing trajectory of manufacturing in this country predates the passage of the trade pact. Jobs at steel plants in Pennsylvania were disappearing long before anyone thought up the concept of NAFTA, as were declines in U.S. auto plants as American consumers began to buy more Japanese and German cars because they preferred them over the crappy cars General Motors and Ford were making in the 1980s.

And isn’t it ironic that Honda and Toyota are opening new manufacturing plants in the U.S., (including one in San Antonio), even as Ford frantically tries to convince more of its workers to take buy-out packages as it moves to downscale manufacturing operations because, in part, it has not operated as efficiently and with the same competence as Japanese car makers.

I guess that’s NAFTA’s fault, too.

And isn’t it something that since 1993, the year NAFTA passed, that the U.S. economy has grown by 54 percent, and the national jobless rate has dropped from 6.9 percent to 4.9 percent today, not to mention that Canada and Mexico are now our first and second-largest export markets.

But, alas, every four years Democratic Party presidential candidates have to trudge through the Rust Belt, promising good Midwesterners who believe a good factory job is their birthright that they will work to bring back good times again. And, if they have to bash trade agreements, so be it, for it’s all part of the game, as is whining about the loss of manufacturing jobs while shopping for slam dunk prices at Wal-Mart.

Joaquin Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger

  

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.