Bill Clinton and American Financiers Armed China | Hacker News Reader

Bill Clinton and American Financiers Armed China

mattstoller.substack.com

93 pointsJDulin27 comments

It was MFN classification and the fast tracking into the WTO that enabled this result: hollowing out of American manufacturing, wage stagnation for blue collar workers resulting in economic instability which in turn had an effect on health and substance abuse. And of course “wage gap” everyone laments.

People like bringing up good old Ronald Reagan, who had faults and was simplistic about the economy, but Clinton (as mr Perot presciently warmed us) truly did drive the stake through the blue collar workers back and left them where we are today, moribund looking for salvation.

Yes, mr Clinton, you did it. It was done eloquently and with the backing of neoliberal elites, and the then mainstream media. The sophisticated approach is why he doesn’t get the vilification Reagan does amongst the working class. But it’s long deserved.

Don't forget to add Rubin, Goldman Sachs, and the whole kabal. Someday the truth will really come out how they destroyed the US while enriching themselves beyond all belief.

I feel like this is very unfair. In my narrative, the Clinton administration saw the writing on the wall. Jobs would be outsourced regardless. The win-win was to get China into the global economy ASAP and retrain the displaced workers. What happened instead was that retraining budgets were unnecessarily thin because the GOP-lead congress cried "socialism" and funneled all that reduced budgetary outlay to for-profit colleges.

I suspect this comment would be much stronger with some sources that show your narrative to be correct—have sources that document the GOP funneled money earmarked for retraining into for-profit colleges?

Those jobs were going to be outsourced either ways. There was no way the US could compete with Asian labor prices. It wasn't just the US either, it was most of the developed world.

indeed, the cheap labor source was always there, for at least a century. What changed? Cheap shipping. as in 90-99% reduction in overseas freight costs within less than two decades. blue collar workers can thank the humble intermodal shipping container and its systems integration refinement by malcolm McLean for much of their plight. oceans became lakes almost overnight.

Intermodal containerization is one of the most underrated and underappreciated technologies of our civilization. I'm not saying it's unappreciated, but people don't realize the extent that it's changed the world.

But it didn't happen in a vacuum. Cheap shipping certainly wouldn't be possible without containerization and improvements in logistics, but the new system only made sense when scaled up to giant ships (fuel and crew size efficiency), which in turn only became feasable when ships could quickly/easily onload and offload at multiple ports in multiple countries, without quarantine/ security/ customs delays at each port.

You could say it's a chicken & egg situation, but the scale of the containerization age only began to make sense in the context of relaxed regulation and efficient import/export policy.

Also, it wasn't a case of non-existant regulation racing to catch up with a booming new technology (ala the internet or Uber/Lyft). International trade regulation has been around since before, well, nations were even a thing. It's the original bureaucracy. The regulation had to be addressed first, or at least simultaneously. Which to me is as impressive, if not moreso- cutting through a worldwide rats nest of bureaucratic red tape in so little time. (Regardless of if you agree with the resulting policy.)

It's also worth noting China's effort to apply some of these same principles in the shape of their massive Belt & Road project, and the unintended consequences of trying to force "free" trade using planned market tactics:

https://pandapawdragonclaw.blog/2019/08/23/empty-trains-on-t...

I believe there was a HN discussion on the article when it came out.

Let's not forget NAFTA. Especially what it did to textiles and the car industry. (Mexico's not manufacturing the raw and intermediate materials they're making our car parts from.)

I think the three strikes law he signed helped to offset the long-term effect of those job losses on the unemployment rate as well.

> For instance, during the Obama administration, Mack McLarty - President Bill Clinton’s first chief of staff - made $300 million in luxury auto dealers in China after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff helped broker an introduction to key Chinese leaders.

Conflict of interests doesn't begin to describe it...

It is interesting to see the donations to the Clinton Foundation have dropped significantly since the 2016 election. [1] Its almost as if the gravy train has been derailed.

1. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2018/nov/11/money-to-cli...

Glad this subject is starting to see light. China's totalitarian rise is due to America's own internal corruption, political deadlock, and inability to grasp reality.

I waiver back and forth between thinking that this was just institutional naivete or an intentional graft based on the thought that "China will surpass us eventually ... so how do we profit?" held by a lot of Elites at the time (and probably today).

China will surpass us? How does a country which was in China's position during Nixon's time we're talking about a country of farmers, create such thoughts. No the prevailing thought was that if we bring China in line with our power structure their elites and their children will join us at the top and help us exploit their population so that we can continue to make untold amounts of profit. Unfortunately, China's elites decided against that dream.

During Nixon's time, maybe. But that hasn't been the tone for a while. Today it's "market of a billion people" this, "incredible growth curve" that (even if people suspected or even knew it was all BS). There was certainly a vein of neoliberal thought that went the way you are going, where the more their market opens up the more they "democratize".

>China's elites decided against that dream

For them I think it was much more a nightmare than a dream.

Greed. Western greed. Need for more power and money without doing hard work. Arrogance and thinking that their position is somehow special because of their culture, where freedom of speech has been actually shown to be bullshit. The same sort of tools that China is criticized for using are slowly creeping into the Western countries as well... etc. etc. You can write a book about it.

Someone has written a book about it. The Chinese government threatened to sue the Australian publishers, so they dropped it.

Eventually the book, "Silent Invasion", found another publisher: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36586726-silent-invasion

Hasn’t china’s cheap labour helped American companies to capture international market? If Americans didn’t do it, someone else would have leveraged China and owned these markets now.

McDonnell Douglas, not McConnell Douglas.

This was all known during the Clinton administration. Lot of good it did then.

This is not surprise at all. Even Clinton didn't do that, other president would it as well, since US politician just have a long sight no longer than 4 years or 8 years. And what they care most is the vote, and the party's interesting, instead of the country or the majority's benefit.

The US business community was very interested in China by the early 1980s.

Tragic, considering that the US has an arms embargo on China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_embargo#People%27s_Republ...

This piece assumes and depends on a fear of China. That is, it takes for granted that enabling the economic success of China is necessarily to the detriment of the U.S.

This is an assumption that is worth inspecting. While it is true that China's technological capabilities have increased dramatically since the Clinton presidency, it's also true that their economy has improved, lifting millions of Chinese into the middle class, and their trade with the U.S. has grown dramatically.

Trade is a stabilizing influence on international relations. Our huge volume of trade with China is why Trump is having a "trade war" with China today, not a real war. Trade wars are better in every way compared to a shooting war. But a trade war can only exist between nations that share significant trade.

Is our relationship with China perfect? No. Agree with the tactics or not (I don't, personally [1]), but the Trump administration is responding to real domestic concerns about how China operates.

Is China's governance and approach to their citizens' civil rights perfect? Definitely not!

But: it is a desirable goal is grow the international economy. Doing so lifts people out of poverty, gives them a reason to seek peace, and creates beneficial large-scale effects like improving efficiency and slowing population growth.

Growing the global economy means that other nations will prosper and develop their technologies, which include military technologies. One particular deal with China--bad as it was--was not the lynchpin of nuclear detente; China had the means to wipe the U.S. off the globe the day Clinton took office.

They don't want to. That preference for mutually prosperous peace is far more important to the national security of the U.S. than the details of a particular military deal.

The article depicts the Clinton administration as having "a fear of offending China." What they actually had (and share with a large number of other people) is a belief that China does not have to lose, or be "contained", for the U.S. to keep winning. In fact, everything we know about economic growth says that the U.S. will win more if we trade productively with growing nations.

[1] IMO the TPP with the U.S. in it would have been more effective at shaping China's behavior than the current U.S. tariffs, with fewer negative side-effects in the U.S.

This is a logical standpoint but also a naive one because it ignores China's end goal of erasing democracy and the silent means by which they have already started succeeding. This has been covered by numerous China experts over the years but largely ignored due to internal US corruption, which is not helped by bribery on the part of the CCP. In a vacuum, growing their economy could be seen as a good thing for the global economy but the reality is that by investing and empowering the CCP is actually strengthening their grip on breaking down democracies - which will actually be worse off for the world economy. Remember that most people are not looking for the demise of Chinese people, rather they are looking for an end to the CCP dynasty.

China has had the ICMB since 1981.

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