U.S. manufacturing employment declined again in June to 11,854,000 workers, down 136,000 since May, down 786,000 since President Obama took office in January and down 5,260,000 since President Bush took office in January 2001.
Candidate Obama won the final Presidential debate with Senator McCain when he said, "We should enforce rules against China manipulating its currency to make our exports more expensive and their exports to us cheaper." Senator McCain's weak response was that we should retrain the workers whose jobs were lost to China.
But as soon as he got elected, President Obama adopted Presidents Clinton and Bush's unilateral free trade policy. On April 15 his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner issued a report to Congress which pretended that China does not manipulate its currency, despite the fact that China had already collected about $1.7 trillion dollars as a byproduct of its non-existent currency manipulations. These dollars were purchased by the People's Bank of China and then loaned to America or used to buy American assets so that they would not be used by the Chinese people to buy American products.
President Clinton let China into the WTO without protecting American manufacturing. President Bush let China manipulate its currency to such an extent that the loss of American manufacturing jobs caused median incomes to decline throughout his Presidency.
And now President Obama is furnishing the coup de grace, allowing China to steal what is left of American industry through currency manipulations, export subsidies, tariffs on American vehicles and auto parts, increasing use of non-tariff barriers, and other actions designed to insure that China comes out of this world recession as an industrial dynamo while America limps out of the world recession as an economic has-been.
