Cross posted from CWA's Resistance Growing blog:
There was a lot of talk about China at last night’s second presidential debate. But President Obama said it best:
When he talks about getting tough on China, keep in mind that Governor Romney invested in companies that were pioneers of outsourcing to China and is currently investing in countries — in — in companies that are building surveillance equipment for China to spy on its own folks. That's — Governor, you're the last person who's going to get tough on China.
Investigative reporters at The Washington Post discovered that at Bain Capital, Romney pioneered the practice of shipping call center jobs overseas. Now, Bain is keeping at it with the purchase of the call center division of the European telecommunications giant Telefónica, and it is poised to close the doors on Sensata Technologies, shipping 170 high-tech, American jobs to China.
Romney's "blind" trusts have traded more than 25,000 shares in Chinese firms, netting a profit of more than $90,000 in 2010 and 2011. Romney claims he has nothing to do with the management of the trusts, yet back in 1994 he told another story: "The blind trust is an age old ruse, if you will, which is to say, you can always tell the blind trust what it can and cannot do. You can give a blind trust rules.”
Ignoring Obama’s arguments, Romney kept going back to his Day One plan: “I will label China a currency manipulator, which will allow me as president to be able to put in place, if necessary, tariffs where I believe that they are taking unfair advantage of our manufacturers.”
But that “may merely be symbolic,” according to an AP analysis, since that simple act doesn’t carry immediate penalties. Plus, there’s little evidence of any benefits of doing so. In fact, it could trigger a massive trade war. After the debate, China’s state news agency Xinhua fired back:
If ‘President Romney’ was determined to keep his words by throwing punitive tariffs against Chinese products exported to the U.S. market on Day One, then China perhaps would be forced to fight back, and then his administration would be very likely to be on its way to a global trade war. Such a scenario would ultimately bury his other promises, not least the one to jumpstart the sluggish U.S. economic growth.
The real solution is to get tough on America’s bad actors. Like Obama advocates, we need to close the tax loopholes and stop rewarding corporations who move jobs overseas. Suddenly offshoring looks a lot less attractive.