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By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

Many economic Nostradamuses have long predicted that the epitaph on America’s tombstone will ultimately read, “Made In China.” But casual observers probably didn’t think the funeral procession would happen this fast. In the last year, though, most have wised up. Thanks to a spate of mind-blowing headlines, we are learning that the Chinese invasion isn’t just a distant possibility — it’s happening right now.

First, in February, ABC News reported that almost every Americana-themed trinket sold in the Smithsonian Institute is made in China. Then news hit that San Francisco is importing its new bay bridge from China. Then came the New York Times dispatch about the Big Apple awarding Chinese state-subsidized firms huge taxpayer-funded contracts to “renovate the subway system, refurbish the Alexander Hamilton Bridge over the Harlem River and build a new Metro-North train platform near Yankee Stadium.”

Astounding as all of that is, it was quickly topped by news last week reminding us that the new Martin Luther King monument in Washington was designed by a Chinese government sculptor and assembled by low-wage Chinese workers. (more…)

David Sirota

By David Sirota
In These Times senior editor and syndicated columnist

In the name of curtailing deficits, politicians across the country are hacking away at programs that aim to make children healthier. In Congress, for example, House Republicans are spearheading a budget that eviscerates funding for food assistance and effectively defunds the wildly successful Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Similarly, from Texas to California, state lawmakers are chopping children’s health programs in the face of budget shortfalls. In all these initiatives, the rhetorical leitmotif is “fiscal responsibility.” (more…)

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

When it comes to “free” trade, Ralph Nader (among others) often makes a profound but taboo observation: “True free trade would take only one page for a trade agreement,” he says before typically asking, “How come there are hundreds of pages and thousands of regulations” in these pacts?

The answer is that so-called free trade agreements (i.e., NAFTA, bilateral NAFTA replicas, the WTO regime, etc.) are free only of protections for human beings — that is, free of provisions that preserve, say, labor rights, human rights and the environment. But those deals’ “hundreds of pages” are chock-full of protectionist provisions for multinational companies — provisions that, for example, allow foreign firms to sue governments for lost profits and empower international panels to unilaterally override a nation’s domestic laws if those laws reduce corporate revenues. (more…)

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

The Great Paradox — that is what future generations will likely call this era, and rightly so. Our childrens children will look back and see that just a few years after the deregulatory agenda of anti-government ideologues resulted in a horrific recession, American politics somehow became even more dominated by anti-government zealotry than ever before.

Logic-wise, the situation seems to make about as much sense as the alcoholic drinking more to cure his addiction. Politics, though, is no longer even mildly related to logic. Its all about perception. And with so many media outlets using scare and scandal to chase audience share, “government” is now presented in almost exclusively headline-grabbing — and therefore negative — terms. Think: wasteful bank bailouts, never-ending wars, outrageous sexual escapades and any other government-themed stories that entice you to read, listen, watch, click and loathe.

The dynamic, of course, has disconnected the “government” brand from what Cornell University professor Suzanne Mettler calls the “submerged state” — i.e., the government services that we like but that we don’t notice. We’re talking about noncontroversial stuff like picking up trash, putting out fires, paving roads and paying out earned benefits. When those functions are performed properly, they rarely receive recognition as government successes because, by definition, performing them properly means being fast, efficient and thus almost invisible. (more…)

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

How aggressively stupid is America when it comes to our debates over taxes, budgets and the size of government? That’s been difficult to answer with any precision, beyond simply citing the Tea Partier who famously told his congressman to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” But now we have some hard numbers to tell us how deep this ignorance really goes.

According to new data crunched by Cornell University’s Suzanne Mettler, large numbers of Americans who receive benefits from government social programs nonetheless tell pollsters they “have not used a government social program.” And when I mean large, I mean large. For example, a majority of those who have received federally subsidized student loans, 44 percent of Social Security beneficiaries and 40 percent of G.I. bill recipients say they have not used a government social program.

These numbers go a long way to explaining why the economic debate in our country is so insane. Indeed, at a moment when taxes have hit a historic low, most politicians — from presidents to governors to state legislators — insist we must further cut taxes and shrink allegedly “Big Government.” And they are finding a receptive audience in the general public because, as the numbers show, so many Americans wrongly believe they don’t receive direct financial benefits from government. (more…)

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

The Super Bowl has become a true televisual non sequitur — a bizarre “Rocky”-style montage mashing together as many divergent strands of American culture as possible. This year’s blockbuster was no exception.There was former President George W. Bush sitting next to coach John Madden, who was obsessively texting. There was actress Cameron Diaz feeding popcorn to baseball bad boy Alex Rodriguez. There was Christina Aguilera belting out a “Naked Gun”-worthy version of the national anthem. There was even a melding of hip-hop, hair metal and sci-fi, as the Black Eyed Peas joined Slash for a rendition of “Sweet Child o’ Mine” — all in front of neon “Tron” dancers.

This was a bewildering assault on the senses, to say the least — and nothing was more singularly mind-blowing than the NFL using a Ronald Reagan eulogy to kick off a sports-themed tribute to socialism.

Reagan, of course, made his political name regularly invoking the “s” word to demonize government. For such bombast, he gained many followers, most of whom nonetheless cherished the doctrinaire socialism that undergirded their communities in the form of public infrastructure and services.

This Reagan-inspired paradox of cheering anti-socialist platitudes while supporting socialism in practice was the tale of Super Bowl XLV. The game began with a jubilant Reagan biopic that approvingly flaunted his red-baiting past, including his 1964 warning about America “tak(ing) the first step into a thousand years of darkness.” The game ended with victory for professional sports’ only publicly owned nonprofit organization, the Green Bay Packers — a team whose quasi-socialist structure allows Wisconsin’s proletariat to own the means of football production. (more…)

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

“For me, but not for thee” — this could be the motto of 21st-century elitists, or Republican politicians (which are more or less the same thing) and two stories this week show how that mantra works in practice.

The first comes from ThinkProgress about how 97 percent of Republican congresspeople are keeping their taxpayer subsidized health insurance while voting to deny that kind of health insurance to other Americans… because, you know, government health care is great for Republican politicians, but apparently too lavish for the Rest of Us:

According to a ThinkProgress analysis, seven, or just three percent of all the Republicans in the House have agreed to give up their insurance while they vote to repeal coverage for some 32 million Americans…The majority of the GOP still sees nothing wrong in purchasing tax-payer subsidized insurance while trying to deny coverage to the taxpayer. (more…)

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

A sovereign nation investing its wealth in its domestic economy seems like a no-brainer, especially during a global recession. But in this crazy age of American politics, even that has become a controversial notion.

This is the subtext of a dispute that simmered beneath the pomp and circumstance of this week’s U.S.-China summit. As The New York Times previously reported, the Obama administration is calling on the World Trade Organization to use its power to halt the Chinese government’s wind-energy fund specifically because the money is “contingent on … manufacturers using parts made in China rather than foreign-made components.” The program, along with the Chinese regime’s broader domestic procurement requirements for wind farms, have helped the Chinese wind industry capture almost half of the global market for turbines.

Setting aside the bilateral wrangling over WTO arcana, China’s industrial policy success carries a basic lesson: When a nation couples public spending with incentives that encourage domestic corporate investment, an economy tends to grow its own wealth-building industries. That’s simple enough to understand, right?

Evidently, not within our own government. As “Buy China” policies now economically supercharge the world’s most populous nation, the White House and congressional Republicans have opposed many of the very “Buy America” proposals that might help us keep up—and that obstruction has come at a steep price. (more…)

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

I’ve just finished up 3 hours of the most difficult radio I’ve ever had to do. The topic, of course, was the horrific shooting in Tucson, which has deeply affected me, as it has many others. As someone who had to flee the Capitol on 9/11, was warned of anthrax contamination in the congressional office I was working in, and has faced various threats of violence during my media career, I was shaken by the scenes in Arizona more so than by any other news imagery in a long time.

The reason the radio show was so difficult this morning was because of the reaction. It was a telling commentary about the larger problems embodied by the weekend’s events.

My points this morning were simple: We know that some conservative media and political leaders often use their platforms to endorse violence as political expression, and both those leaders and all of us in media and politics need to reflect on the inevitable real-world consequences of that reality. Indeed, if we cannot reflect on this after this weekend, when can we?

This should be a point of consensus among the left and right. Regardless of what crazy theories motivated the Tucson shooter, and regardless of how insane he obviously is, we know our culture is now regularly infused with the radical notion that says political motives – whatever they are – can be legitimately expressed with violence. We know this because the examples are everywhere – and because Rep. Gabrielle Giffords explicitly warned of the “consequences.” And we should know that when you mix inevitably crazy people with notions that violence is acceptable politics, you are bound to get violence. This isn’t esoteric sociological theory – it’s basic common sense. (more…)

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

Thanks to near-ubiquitous national media coverage, you probably know by now that Ted Williams was a homeless and jobless man who is now being offered fairly major media jobs because he had the random luck of becoming a YouTube sensation. This is certainly a heart-warming story, and we should all be genuinely happy for Williams. It’s a blessing when anyone is lifted out of such destitution.

However, there’s a dark side to all this – not about Williams, but about the phenomenon he has come to represent.

In a country whose social class mobility has now dropped below many fellow (and often “socialist”) industrialized nations, Williams is being implicitly promoted by our media as a representative example of how the American Dream still exists. I say it is implicit because, of course, none of the media promoting the story comes out and says exactly this. But the very fact that this has become such a huge national story logically implies that the media promoting it believes it represents something bigger or national. Indeed, why else would the national media cover the story of one homeless person as a national story, if not to suggest it represents something of national importance?

This, then, is a microcosm of a media that has become far more a manufacturer of false establishment-serving storylines than a documenter of genuine everyday reality. The idea that the American Dream still exists and that everyone can “make it” like Ted Williams is, by all objective economic measures, demonstrably false. But that idea is nonetheless incessantly promoted by politicians, corporate leaders and their media servants because it convinces large swaths of the put-upon general public to refrain from asking fundamental questions about inequality, poverty and the punitive structure of our economy – ie. questions that corporate-backed politicians, pundits and media institutions do not want asked. (more…)