“Lenin said that capitalists would sell the Communists the rope to hang them. But as matters turned out, capitalists let China sell them the labor that served to hang American capitalism.” - Michael Hudson
When the Soviet Union unexpectedly and suddenly collapsed, China and India gave up on socialism and opened their economies to Western capital. The Soviet Union did not collapse because Reagan won the cold war, a goal that Reagan disavowed, but because hardline elements in the Communist Party leadership were concerned that Gorbachev was careless in trusting the Americans....
The conclusion reached by India and China, the countries with the largest populations, was that socialism leads to collapse, but capitalism leads to riches. For the first time the vast under-employed labor resources of the world’s two most populous countries were available for foreign exploitation....
...China worked to make offshored production a lucrative adventure, and manufacturing jobs left the US by the droves. The consequence was that the US Middle Class shrunk, and with it the tax base of states and cities. America ceased to prosper....
In other words the “Chinese import problem” was in fact the offshored production of US firms brought back to sell to Americans who no longer were involved in the production of the goods and services and, therefore, did not have any income from the production of what they purchased....
The offshoring era wasn’t a six-month economic recession. It was years when skilled and experienced labor aged and died, and no new entrants learned the skills and work discipline....
For the US corporations to come back home, they have to leave a developed economy in China for a semi-developed or undeveloped one in the US. If they are compelled to do this all at once, they will lose their production in China before they can recreate the plant and equipment, work force, supply chains, and transportation systems essential to renew the US as a manufacturing and industrial power....
Trump can make the argument that the offshoring deal only worked for the corporations, not for the American people. “Free market” economists gave assurances that better jobs would take the place of the manufacturing jobs moved offshore and that offshore production would pay back to the US consumer in lower prices more than the loss of wages from the offshored jobs. This was not the case....
.....today after the extraordinary accumulation of powers in the presidency from the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes, and the powers given by Congress to the executive branch to fight “the war on terror,” the president today can rule by executive order.
Based on the powers created by Republicans during the George W. Bush Regime and Democrats during the Obama Regime, President Trump has the power to arrest CEOs and boards of directors that have offshored production on the grounds that they are conspiring with China to steal American jobs and to drive the United States down into the ranks of Third World Countries....
To insure that he has the deep state’s support, all Trump has to do is to remind the US military/security complex that the United States cannot continue to produce the weapon systems necessary to remain as the world’s hegemon unless it can reestablish its manufacturing and industrial capability....
....If the deep state is on Trump’s side, he becomes a dictator who can dispense with elections and dispense with his opposition. To be clear, not only can Trump do this, but any future president can....
Complete article:
Can The American Economy Be Resurrected?
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/08/26/can-the-american-economy-be-resurrected/