9/30/2016 -
Pat Buchanan Townhall.com
Is America still a serious nation?
Consider. While U.S. elites were denouncing Donald Trump as unfit
to serve for having compared Miss Universe 1996 to "Miss Piggy" of
"The Muppets," the World Trade Organization was validating the
principal plank of his platform.
America's allies are cheating and robbing her blind on trade. According
to the WTO, Britain, France, Spain, Germany and the EU pumped $22 billion in
illegal subsidies into Airbus to swindle Boeing out of the sale of 375
commercial jets.
Subsidies to the A320 caused lost sales of 271 Boeing 737s, writes
journalist Alan Boyle. Subsidies for planes in the twin-aisle market cost the
sale of 50 Boeing 767s, 777s and 787s. And subsidies to the A380 cost Boeing
the sale of 54 747s. These represent crippling losses for
Boeing, a crown jewel of U.S. manufacturing and a critical component of our
national defense.
Earlier, writes Boyle, the WTO ruled that, "without the
subsidies, Airbus would not have existed ... and there would be no Airbus
aircraft on the market."
In "The Great Betrayal" in 1998, I noted that in its
first 25 years the socialist cartel called Airbus Industrie "sold 770
planes to 102 airlines but did not make a penny of profit."
Richard Evans of British Aerospace explained: "Airbus is
going to attack the Americans, including Boeing, until they bleed and scream."
And another executive said, "If Airbus has to give away planes, we will do
it."
When Europe's taxpayers objected to the $26 billion in subsidies
Airbus had gotten by 1990, German aerospace coordinator Erich Riedl was
dismissive, "We don't care about criticism from small-minded
pencil-pushers." This is the voice of economic nationalism. Where is ours?
After this latest WTO ruling validating Boeing's claims against
Airbus, the Financial Times is babbling of the need for "free and
fair" trade, warning against a trade war.
But is "trade war" not a fair description of what our
NATO allies have been doing to us by subsidizing the cartel that helped bring
down Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas and now seeks to bring down Boeing?
Our companies built the planes that saved Europe in World War II
and sheltered her in the Cold War. And Europe has been trying to kill those
American companies.
Yet even as Europeans collude and cheat to capture America's
markets in passenger jets, Boeing itself, wrote Eamonn Fingleton in 2014, has
been "consciously cooperating in its own demise."
By Boeing's own figures, writes Fingleton, in the building of its
787 Dreamliner, the world's most advanced commercial jet, the "Japanese
account for a stunning 35 percent of the 787's overall manufacture, and that
may be an underestimate."
"Much of the rest of the plane is also made abroad ... in
Italy, Germany, South Korea, France, and the United Kingdom."
The Dreamliner "flies on Mitsubishi wings. These are no
ordinary wings: they constitute the first extensive use of carbon fiber in the
wings of a full-size passenger plane. In the view of many experts, by
outsourcing the wings Boeing has crossed a red line." Mitsubishi,
recall, built the Zero, the premier fighter plane in the Pacific in the early
years of World War II.
In a related matter, the U.S. merchandise trade deficit in July
and August approached $60 billion each month, heading for a trade deficit in
goods in 2016 of another $700 billion.
For an advanced economy like the United States, such deficits are
milestones of national decline. We have been running them now for 40 years. But
in the era of U.S. economic supremacy from 1870 to 1970, we always ran an
annual trade surplus, selling far more abroad than Americans bought from
abroad.
In the U.S. trade picture, even in the darkest of times, the
brightest of categories has been commercial aircraft.
But to watch how we allow NATO allies we defend and protect
getting away with decades of colluding and cheating, and then to watch Boeing
transfer technology and outsource critical manufacturing to rivals like Japan,
one must conclude that not only is the industrial decline of the United States
inevitable, but America's elites do not care.
As for our corporate chieftains, they seem accepting of what is
coming when they are gone, so long as the salary increases, stock prices and
options, severance packages, and profits remain high.
By increasingly relying upon foreign nations for our national
needs, and by outsourcing production, we are outsourcing America's future.
After Munich in 1938, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax visited
Italy to wean Mussolini away from Hitler. The Italian dictator observed his
guests closely and remarked to his foreign minister:
"These men are not made of the same stuff as the Francis
Drakes and the other magnificent adventurers who created the empire. These,
after all, are the tired sons of a long line of rich men, and they will lose
their empire."
If the present regime is not replaced, something like that will be
said of this generation of Americans.
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