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Let's Protect American
Sovereignty
By Phyllis Schlafly
The Outrageous WTO
WTO now stands for World Trade Outrage rather than its original name,
World Trade Organization. The WTO just ruled that the Caribbean nation of
Antigua and Barbuda can freely violate American copyrights and trademarks in
order to punish the United States for our laws prohibiting internet
gambling.
Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in 2006
after finding that "internet gambling is a growing cause of debt collection
problems for insured depository institutions and the consumer credit
industry." The social and financial costs of gambling would be greatly
increased if we permit internet gambling.
The WTO ordered this punishment because it says U.S. laws interfere with
free trade in "recreational services." The foreign tribunal ranks free trade
as more important than the intellectual property rights Americans have
enjoyed since our Constitution was written. The WTO's 88-page decision
issued in December contained the panel's remarkable admission that "we feel
we are on shaky grounds." But that didn't stop the Geneva tribunal from
issuing its ruling anyway.
We have every right to protect our people against the corruption and
loss of wealth that result from gambling on the internet. It is shocking for
an unelected foreign tribunal to tell our Congress and President they lack
the power to protect our people. Even American supremacist judges would not
have the nerve to authorize stealing copyrights and trademarks as a remedy
for one side in an unrelated dispute. But the WTO granted what has been
called a "piracy permit" that allows a small Caribbean nation to "pirate,"
or steal, U.S. property rights.
The WTO has ruled against the United States in 40 out of 47 major cases,
and against us in 30 out of 33 trade remedies cases. After the WTO ruled
that the U.S. cannot divert tariff revenue to U.S. companies that are
injured by foreign subsidies to their competitors, Vice President Dick
Cheney provided the tie-breaking vote in the Senate on December 21, 2005 to
kowtow to the WTO.
For many years, opponents of the WTO have predicted that this foreign
bureaucracy would massively interfere with our sovereignty. This new ruling
is crazy, unjust and impertinent, but without a lot of public protest, it
looks unlikely that our "free trade" President or Congress will do anything
to protect us from the WTO.
How is a foreign tribunal in Geneva able to put the United States in
such a box? It's because the internationalist free-trade lobby cooked up a
sleazy deal to force the WTO on us back in 1994 during the week after
Thanksgiving when Americans were preoccupied with Christmas shopping and
festivities.
The deal to lock us into WTO consisted of three parts. First, the
14-page WTO agreement was surreptitiously added, without debate or
publicity, to the 22,000-page revision of the GATT (General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade) implementing legislation, and was voted on under "fast
track" rules which allowed no amendments or changes, severely limited
debate, and forbade any filibuster. Second, the Treaty Clause in the U.S.
Constitution for ratification of treaties was ignored, and WTO was declared
passed by Congress as a non-treaty. Third, the GATT/WTO agreement was passed
in the December lame-duck session with the votes of dozens of Congressmen
who were looking for lucrative jobs representing foreign interests because
they had already been defeated in the Republican landslide of November 1994.
The WTO is not "free trade" at all, but is a supra-national body in
Geneva that sets, manages and enforces WTO-made rules to govern global
trade. The WTO includes a one-country-one-vote legislature of 151 nations
(we have the same one vote as Cuba), an unelected multinational bureaucracy,
and a Dispute Settlement Board which deliberates and votes in secret and
whose decisions cannot be appealed or vetoed.
WTO is a direct attack on our sovereignty because it claims it can force
us to change our laws to comply with WTO rulings. Article XVI, paragraph 4,
states: "Each Member shall ensure the conformity of its laws, regulations,
and administrative procedures with its obligations." The WTO has the final
say about whether U.S. laws meet WTO requirements.
Where are the presidential candidates who speak up to defend our
sovereignty against the globalists who, under the mantra of "free trade,"
willingly allow the WTO to tell us what laws we may or may not adopt?
College Not Necessary for Many
Careers
U.S. News & World Report,
which has made a name for itself by ranking and announcing the Best Colleges
every year, is now ranking and listing the Best Careers for young people. A
comparison of the latest lists shows a shocking disconnect and makes for
dispiriting holiday reading.
While the price of a college education has skyrocketed
far faster than inflation, many careers for which colleges prepare their
graduates are disappearing. U.S. News' Best Careers guide concludes
that "college grads might want to consider blue-collar careers" because B.A.
diploma holders "are having trouble finding jobs that require
college-graduate skills." Incredibly, U.S. News is telling college
graduates to look for jobs that do not require a college diploma. Among the
31 best opportunities for 2008 are the careers of firefighter, hairstylist,
cosmetologist, locksmith, and security system technician. Where did the
higher-skill jobs go? Both large and small companies are "quietly increasing
offshoring efforts."
Ten years ago we were told we really didn't need
manufacturing because it can be done more cheaply elsewhere, that auto
workers and others should move to Information Age jobs. But now the
information jobs are moving offshore, too, as well as marketing research and
even many varieties of innovation.
The flight overseas includes professional as well as
low-wage jobs, with engineering jobs offshored to India and China. Thousands
of bright Asian engineers are willing to work for a fraction of American
wages, which is why Boeing just signed a 10-year, $1-billion-a-year deal
with an Indian government-run company.
Society has been telling high school students that
college is the ticket to get a life, and politicians are pandering to
parents' desire for their children to be better educated and so have a
higher standard of living. But it doesn't make sense for parents to mortgage
their homes, or for students to saddle themselves with long-term debt, in
order to pay overpriced college tuition to prepare for jobs that no longer
exist. Tuition at public universities has risen an unprecedented 51% over
the past five years.
U.S. News offers this advice
for the nerds who still spend five to six years earning an engineering
degree despite increasingly grim prospects of a well-paid engineering
career: "Look for government work." Or maybe you can be an "Offshoring
Manager" and be part of the process of shipping your fellow graduates' jobs
overseas.
A Duke University spokesman said that 40% of Duke's
engineering graduates cannot get engineering jobs. A Duke University
publication suggests that the best prospect for good engineering jobs is for
the U.S. government to start another major project like going to the moon.
U.S. News warns us that "government is becoming an employer of
choice." Corporations are getting leaner, but government can continue to pay
good salaries, with lots of vacation days, sick leave, health insurance and
retirement benefits, because government rakes in more tax revenue in good
times and can raise taxes in bad times; and if the Democrats win in 2008, we
can expect government to expand even more.
G.O.P. candidates haven't yet gotten the message that
jobs are just as big a gut issue as immigration. The Wall Street Journal/NBC
News survey conducted December 14-17 reports that, by 58% to 28%, Americans
believe globalization is bad because it subjects U.S. companies and
employees to unfair competition and cheap labor.
Where are the limited-government fiscal-conservatives
when we need them to refute the notion that the best anengineering graduate
can hope for is a job with the government? When are we going to call a halt
to the way globalism is destroying U.S. jobs by foreign currency
manipulation, theft of our intellectual property, shipping us poisonous
seafood and toys, and unfair trade agreements that allow foreign subsidies
(through the so-called Value Added Tax) to massively discriminate against
U.S. producers and workers?
How China Cheats the U.S.
Free trade with China means acquiescing in gross
discrimination against U.S. products and jobs. The Chinese avoid a level
trading field by artificially undervaluing their currency up to 40%,
subsidizing their products, and imposing import duties against U.S. products
that are ten times higher than tariffs on their products in U.S. stores. Our
free-trade negotiators routinely accept trade agreements that give other
countries the right to charge higher tariffs than we charge for similar
products. For example, the Chinese Chery car will face a 2.5% tariff when
sold in the U.S., but U.S. autos entering China will be taxed at 25%.
Foreign countries get by with this discrimination by
calling it a Value Added Tax (VAT) instead of a tariff, but it amounts to
just as high a barrier against free trade. The result is that millions of
American jobs have moved overseas.
All presidential candidates ought to be asked what they
plan to do about China's organized theft of our intellectual property and
counterfeiting of our products. Communist China is the world's top producer
of illegal copies of music, movies, software, designer clothes, and
medicines. All candidates should be asked what they plan to do about China
putting its billion dollars of profits from U.S. trade into military
weaponry to threaten, not only Taiwan, but the United States, especially our
communication satellites.
The toy advertised by Wal-Mart as the top toy of the
season had to be recalled after it was discovered that children in Texas,
Delaware, New Hampshire, Illinois and Utah fell sick and were hospitalized
because of swallowing the toy's bead-like parts. After 4.2 million were
recalled, China finally admitted that the beads in this toy, called Aqua
Dots, contained a substance that can turn into the "date-rape" drug after
children swallow them. That drug, gamma-hydroxy butyrate, causes breathing
problems, loss of consciousness, seizures, drowsiness, coma, and death. Aqua
Dots were supposed to have been coated with a nontoxic chemical, but that
chemical costs three or four times the price of the poisonous compound, so
the Chinese manufacturer couldn't resist using the cheaper product.
According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission's
website, 26 million toys and other products made in China have been recalled
by U.S. companies since August. Even the Boy Scouts of America had to recall
a million Chinese-made plastic badges that contained unsafe amounts of lead.
Australia recalled hundreds of blankets imported from
China in October because they contained formaldehyde up to ten times the
level permissible under international standards. The World Heath
Organization has classified formaldehyde as a known human carcinogen.
Chinese products are so cheap because the workers in
Guangdong, where most of the Chinese toys are made, are primarily females
age 17 to 25 who work an average of 16 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, for
about $50 per month. They live in unhealthy, overcrowded dormitories, where
a bed is all they have of their own.
Seafood from China is a potentially more dangerous
import. About 80% of seafood consumed by Americans is imported, and the Food
and Drug Administration inspects and tests only 1%. Lab tests show that
China uses antibiotics to treat fish raised in filthy waters where bacteria,
viruses and parasites breed. Lab testers say that when seafood is rejected
for an illegal chemical, the Chinese simply switch to another harmful
chemical. Often found in imported fish is a fungicide called malachite
green, which is illegal to use in food in the U.S. because studies show it
can cause cancer and birth defects.
Let's Protect American Jobs
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will
never hurt me" is an old verse that just isn't true. Indeed, words can hurt,
break up marriages, destroy careers, and defeat political candidates.
Even words out of one's own mouth can be destructive. We
recall such bloopers as presidential candidate George Romney
self-destructing his 1968 presidential candidacy with the word
"brainwashing," or Gerald Ford losing in 1976 after saying "there is no
Soviet domination of Eastern Europe," or Richard Nixon pleading "I am not a
crook."
In the fast-moving battleground of the internet, words
used as epithets can be powerful missiles to hurl at an enemy. Among the
arrows with poison tips designed to slay a political enemy are the words
"racist," "bigot, "fascist," "nativist," and "extremist."
The spin artists, now a fixture in modern politics, tell
us what we are supposed to think about what we just saw (such as a
presidential debate). They use word power to set the parameters of political
debate.
More insidious are the words that are redefined to stifle
political discourse. As Humpty Dumpty told Alice in Wonderland, "When I use
a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."
Alice demurred: "The question is whether you can make words mean different
things." Humpty Dumpty countered, "The question is which is to be master;
that's all." The word definers who choose to be master frustrate rational
debate by redefining good words into bad words, mouthing them with a sneer
until they become a smear.
Protect is an obviously good word. The dictionary defines
it as preservation from injury or harm. Most of us fervently believe in
protecting things that are precious to us. We all want to protect our homes
from being invaded by a robber. Parents want to protect their children from
predators in person or on the internet, as well as from immoral curricula in
public schools.
We want to protect the institution of marriage so we can
have a stable society based on the family, and so children can grow up with
a mother and a father. Most of us want to protect innocent unborn babies
from the butcher's knife and scissors. We believe in protecting our country
and our flag. Our soldiers fight to protect us from foreign enemies. Our
police stand guard to protect us from thugs on the street.
We want to protect our liberties from over-reaching
bureaucrats and from supremacist judges who pretend to "evolve" the U.S.
Constitution. We want to protect the Pledge of Allegiance and the Ten
Commandments from the lawsuits that try to ban them from schools,
courthouses and parks. We want to protect our borders from being invaded by
illegals who violate our laws. We want to protect Americans from the illegal
drugs that are smuggled across our border.
Protectionism is an acknowledged virtue in all areas of
life, except one. It is a semantic curiosity that, somehow, the word
protectionism has been placed in the globalists' quiver of arrows to shoot
down anyone who tries to protect the good jobs that have enabled millions to
rise from poverty into the middle class and live the American dream.
It's time that we denounce the semantic scalpers who have
perverted the word protectionism. It's time to say, yes, we do want to
protect American jobs and industries from global competition with slave
labor, inhumane working conditions, and countries that use the profits on
their sales to us to build a military force to threaten us.
Yes, we do want to protect American industries from
competition with foreign countries that engage in unfair trade practices,
dishonestly manipulate their currency, steal our intellectual property, and
then bring their products into our stores without paying the same border
fees that U.S. products must pay when we sell to foreign countries.
Yes, we do want to protect American workers against the
globalists' effort to locate manufacturing jobs in Asia where people work
for 30 cents an hour. Even the Wall Street Journal-NBC poll reports
that Republican voters, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, now believe that free
trade is bad for the U.S. economy because it costs jobs.
Yes, we do want to protect Americans from the low-wage,
non-English-speaking Mexican truck drivers whom George W. Bush is allowing
on our highways despite the law that prohibits this. Yes, we do want to
protect Americans from the poisonous petfood, seafood, toothpaste, and toys
that come from Communist China.
Yes, we do want to protect American sovereignty and
wealth from the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea which seeks to
control all the seas and the minerals under them. Yes, we do want to protect
American sovereignty from the foreign tribunals that rule against us, such
as the World Trade Organization that has ruled against the United States in
40 out of 47 cases and now is demanding that we repeal our law against
internet gambling.
It's time we reclaim the words protect and protectionism
and proudly say, yes, we believe in protecting American sovereignty against
unfair foreign tribunals that presume to dictate our laws and our trade.
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