If you grew up during the Cold War, you notice a disconnect in public debate these days that’s monumental, like an elephant in the room.
Why do those who shout “socialist” at the Obama administration—who are either so genuinely frightened or cynically opportunistic that they plaster the word “socialist” all over the idea of universal health coverage and anything else that seems critical of late 20th-century-style capitalism—why do they never criticize the Bush administration and the plutocracy behind it for selling out a large interest in the United States to a country that still embodies the kind of totalitarianism that made Red a scare word 60 years ago and more?
It was the Bush administration, not the Democrats, that ran up such deficits that the U.S. ended up in unprecedented debt to China. It was not only the Bush administration that presided over the drastic shrinking of the American manufacturing base. But, given the Republican habit of damning everything that can be caricatured as socialism or communism, consistency should have dictated that the right take a stand against our becoming beholden to a country which, though its private sector is growing, still has a state-dominated economy.
The matter of the manufacturing base is important because it’s not just at the federal level that the U.S. has become a cog in the wheel of the Chinese economy. Examples: When the Talbots clothing chain ran into financial trouble, it became known that the firm not only bought much of its merchandise from China but borrowed from a Chinese/British bank to finance those purchases. Not only a cut of the take from each sweater or blazer but loan principal and interest were flowing back to that bank. L.L. Bean, which has make boatloads of money trading on its old New England name, carries scads of Chinese products; Wal-Mart is a pipeline through which Chinese goods flood the U.S. (Does anyone think it’s a mystery why Americans are out of work?)
The real logic here is not the logic of morality or ideology, but money. Large corporations protect their profits by screaming “socialist” at any government program that funnels money to the public instead of them, but they enhance their profits by seeking raw materials, cheap labor and new markets in any country, whatever its politics or human rights record.
In a world where globalism was managed for the benefit of ordinary people, there might be quite good reasons for trading with China. But that would be a world in which we’ve outgrown the habit of stigmatizing imaginary socialism while remaining oddly silent about real communism.
