Exporting Jobs And Importing Students

It is always fascinating to see how cultures or nations both grow and collapse.  The US has been on a downward trajectory since losing the Vietnam War, for example.  Fixing the post-war inflation/recession was done by committing economic suicide.  That is, inflation magically vanishes if a country allows a flood of imports from cheaper labor/cheaper currency venues.  This, in turn, kills domestic industries and job losses rise.  After a country does this long enough, it slowly is colonized by foreign powers.  So it is in the US.  I speak now not of the invasion of millions of illegal aliens but legal people from countries running huge trade/labor surpluses with the US.

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I live in the Northeast US and have watched, ever since NAFTA and all the other trade deals, all our domestic businesses collapse and fail or move to where there is an international airport where they can become a funnel for imports.  Berlin, the town I live in, has been absolutely savaged by this.  We are now embroiled in endless school funding debates that are very heated and which have divided the villages here due to lack of corporate taxes thanks to free trade.

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I suggested last year we send a delegation to Congress and the White House to demand an end to free trade but this was rejected due to massive public propaganda supporting free trade in our media.  People just don’t know how both political parties are nearly equally corrupt due to bribes from foreigners as well as the richest Americans who have gotten very, very rich exploiting foreign workers.

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Desperate schools across the nation are now selling to the Chinese and Indian elites or people who can muster the funds in other ways, positions as students in our high schools.  Here is a recent example in the news of this process:  Public Schools Recruit Tuition-Paying International Students To Boost Revenue

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Next fall, Millinocket Superintendent Ken Smith hopes to have at least 60 Chinese students – each paying $13,000 in tuition and another $11,000 for room and board – at Stearns High School. Stearns at one time had close to 700 high school students, but enrollment has fallen over the years to under 200 this year….As Maine’s overall population has aged, the student population has shrunk. That’s particularly true in remote areas where jobs have disappeared, forcing young people to leave.

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Millinocket’s population has fallen 30 percent in the past 20 years. Two paper mills that used to be the lifeblood of the regional economy, employing more than 4,000 workers at their peak in the 1980s, are skeletons of their past selves – one is idle and the other employs about 450 workers.

 

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The US was totally capable of producing paper sufficient for our needs.  We didn’t need any paper from anyone else.  But what we needed was cheap paper so we could paper over the effects of inflation whereby our government grossly overspends and undertaxes  in order to have many military bases and quite a few futile or stupid wars.  The latest folly is Libya: we are losing that war, too.  One way to not support an uprising is to have the Great Powers enter and begin bombing everyone from the air!  I thought Vietnam showed us this clearly.

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The bombing of the Serbians did cause a surrender and retreat.  But solved no political problems and the former Yugoslavia simmers with resentments and disorders.  In Libya, the bombers hit the ‘rebels’ almost as often as the Gaddafi forces.  The opposition is fractured and weak and Gaddafi is now winning due to people siding against the European and American invaders, as we see in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Pakistan.

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Back to our schools: as we desired to kill war-generated inflation, the method chosen was ‘free trade’ which would decimate all our native industries.  We have plenty of natural materials for making any sort of paper we desire.  But this might cause ‘inflation’ which is mainly due to our government and the Federal Reserve printing money via creating vast debts.  So we killed a perfectly good industry that functioned just fine and replaced it with imports.

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There was a feeble move last year to correct this mess:USW: USW Commends Antidumping Tariffs for Paper Imports

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Leo W. Gerard, President of the United Steelworkers (USW) cited the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) announcement yesterday to place antidumping duties of up to 99.65 percent on coated free sheet, or glossy paper from China as “finally showing that enforcing trade rules can make a difference in defending American workers’ jobs and the industries they work in.”

 

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But by then, the importers were very entrenched and simply rolled onwards.  Of course, to fix the price differentials, US workers in this industry were told to take wage cuts.  Cutting wages rages here and instead of fixing the free trade problems, makes this worse since rival empires then buy and hold US dollars in their FOREX accounts to fix any wage cuts we make.  Japan, this last month, was allowed to openly do this and thus, their FOREX holdings rose to over $1.3 trillion dollars.  All, so they could fix their own domestic problems via exports to the US.

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Even if there is a small, nearly useless tariff on foreign paper, there are other paper products that still come in:  USW Joins School Book Paper Trade Case to Fight Unfair Imports.  There are two reasons to have tariffs: to protect domestic industries.  And to fund the national government!  The second reason is nearly totally ignored and this is no surprise since the income tax was launched (which taxed only the wealthy, not the lowest classes of workers!) the excuse has been made, we don’t need tariffs anymore to fund the government, ergo, free trade is the goal.

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Ever since we tossed tariffs as the way to fund the Feds, our national debt has ballooned.  The recent game of cutting the national debt is a total failure since the GOP has no, absolutely no alternative ways of funding our government and they cut the taxes on the rich ruthlessly and repeatedly and even if we cut government spending, they still cut taxes more than the spending cuts and this ridiculous game of ratcheting downwards will continue until there is a popular uprising.

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NAFTA is the granddaddy of our free trade woes:  USW: Steelworkers File NAFTA Labor Complaint Against Mexico not that Mexicans have benefited all that much from NAFTA:  10 Years After NAFTA, Mexicans Still Work in Unsafe Conditions.  And here is some surprising news which doesn’t surprise me:  USW: U.S., Mexican and Canadian Labor Organizations Charge North Carolina with Violating NAFTA Labor Rules:

 

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The complaint, to be formally filed Tuesday in Mexico by the Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT – Authentic Labor Front), charges that North Carolina and the United States are violating NAALC and international law by denying the right to engage in collective bargaining to 650,000 public employees in the state.

 

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That story was from last year before the Tea Party numbskulls ran riot here in the US.  The ending of the last tiny shreds of collective bargaining by anyone at all are being enshrined in various draconian laws.  This is to stop inflation!  People want teachers to be poor.  While teaching Chinese students who come here to learn English not because they are our servants but because they are going to be our rulers.  They know that you can’t tell servants what to do unless you can talk to them.

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Eventually, we will learn their language, too.  It is a slow process that takes several generations to do.  I don’t mind learning Chinese. But it represents the end of power of the English Norman ruling elites, I being one of these creatures.  The labor battles between the states hark back to the previous slave state/free labor split when our nation was founded.  The South believes they can win the economic wars with the world and the northern US by having very cheap labor working under very unsafe conditions with lots of pollution.

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This is why the Tea Party is so successful with business leaders: they love this, too!  The Koch brothers embraced this pseudo-slave philosophy that says, the rich should get richer and the poor die.  The poor people in the US can barely rouse themselves to be political…so far…so this scheme works…so far…but there is this historical truism that says, if all of someone’s dreams of total power and control are finally reached, this is the point when the entire thing collapses.

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That is, when the French nobles removed all of their older obligations to society and cut their own taxes and protected their own power, when this happened, a huge revolution erupted.  And they were decapitated.  When the Soviets had total police/political/economic power over the Russian people and had lots of nuclear bombs and many soldiers to enforce this, it suddenly collapsed with barely a whimper.

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When Mao’s madness drove the Chinese into the great convulsion of the Cultural Revolution which sought to wipe out all Chinese culture and history, the entire thing collapsed quite suddenly and now the Chinese are embracing all the things Mao hated and embrace these things very energetically which is why they are triumphing today.  Out of the mess created by madness of Mao rose today’s dynamic, outward looking Chinese.

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Perhaps, after we finish utterly destroying our own selves, we shall also see better days, too.  It is quite possible. But first, we have to entirely kill the concept that slavery or weak, powerless workers is not a good thing but a terrible evil and should be a sign of a country destroying itself, not building itself.  Way back when we had the Industrial Revolution at the same time as slavery, it should have been made more obvious that slavery didn’t bring prosperity except for a tiny few and therefore, is a failed system.

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Alas, this lesson isn’t being learned:  Labor Battles Hit Washington State.  After killing the last unions in Ohio and Wisconsin, after decimating Michigan and New York, the anti-labor movement is hammering the last bastions of labor organizing.  As I said before, once the very last unions are killed and then all workers are semi-slaves and have zero rights and are taxed heavily while all social services are reduced to third world levels, then we shall have either a revolution or the US will be colonized by foreigners who will simply displace the remains of our nation.

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Since many ‘Christians’ are embracing bizarre and ridiculous scientific beliefs, the decline into primitivism isn’t going to be very difficult.  If the underclass servicing the foreign invaders can’t figure out basic scientific principals, all the better for the new elites.  But this works only if China keeps up with modern science and technology!  A key point here.  So they can feed into this country sufficient technological elites to keep the masses of lower level workers functioning smoothly.

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The Norman elites all believed more or less in education. But resisted spreading it to the masses.  The rising middle class in England had to struggle very hard to be educated and the battle for schooling raged for generations with England lagging far behind say, Germany or France or the US in devising public schools for the mass of workers.  Anti-child labor laws were passed so children could go to schools.  In Maine, the Tea Party is debating exactly that and they want to roll back child labor laws!  I guess, this means more schools will have to have more Chinese students to balance the budget and to replace all the US kids taken out of school younger and younger to work for starvation wages.

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The Chinese are going to other countries, doing this, too:  The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition): Daily News from Korea – Flogging Places to Chinese Students Will Do Universities No Good

 

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Among some 200 four-year universities in Korea, 30 have a hard time filling up even 70 percent of their student quotas. Many universities outside Seoul face shortages in numbers of juniors and seniors, since students often transfer to schools in Seoul after completing their freshman or sophomore years. These universities make up for the shortages by admitting Chinese students to the point where they account for 10 percent of some student bodies. Chinese students pay the tuition fees that keep shoddy universities afloat, and the universities offer degrees and visas.

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A proper university should at least review a foreign student’s academic capability before admitting them. But schools that are only after the fees have no intention of screening foreign students and rarely offer foundation courses that would allow them to adjust to the environment. A considerable number of Chinese students therefore ditch classes and find jobs, ending up violating their visa requirements or committing other offenses….By 2016, there will be more students at university in Korea than in high schools throughout the country. That is just five years away.

 

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Of course, Korea complains about the Chinese doing exactly what they have been doing for quite a while:  Prep schools consume Korean students’ lives in Ivy League quest … while there is this story from 2003:  Voices That Must Be Heard: Why Korean students do not attend …

 

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There are almost 50,000 Korean students in America; many thousands of them do not attend classes.

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Through the newly implemented SEVIS tracking system the government has figured out that many foreign student have illegally aqquired I-20’s from cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.  Harvard University’s Immigration Policy Research Institute announced that in the United States private organizations, like language schools, issue I-20 visas to paying students without regard to whether the students actually attend courses or not.

 

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HAHAHA…yes, they do this just as the Chinese are doing this to them.  What bothers me the most about debates about foreigners coming to countries or labor disputes and laws as well as the key issue of trade, is how dishonest news stories are since they seldom provide any sense of history or perspective.  This is due to an ideological bias of the owners of media: they hate unions, they are often internationalists who pretend to act as if they want to protect the sovereignty and power of their home states but really are lone wolves stalking the population.

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