As far as free trade goes, his district was dying by the end of the 1970s when the first of the major corporations started moving manufacturing centers to China under their regime's impetus to open up their economy to the west. Both political parties are on record as supporting free trade and things like NAFTA.
Stopping global labor arbitrage, or "free trade" as the captains of industry like to call it, was something that should've been done roughly 1984.
It's 2012.
As far as dollars and cents go, there's no way they're going to hire Americans when they can pay Chinese workers 60 cents an hour to do the same thing. You can do it in Viet Nam for 40 cents and less. There's just no way. The borders are wide open to allow any businessman to exploit differences in labor costs.
Those manufacturing jobs are long gone as well as the middle class base that was built upon it, and we're going to have to accept the reality that the United States is dependent upon China and India for many of its manufactured goods.
For the record, I'm not a supporter of free trade as much as I am of fair trade. If there are no minimum safe labor standards, environmental protocols, or agreements to respect the right of workers to assemble as a union and to account for pay disparities, then I would be opposed to all these agreements, and I largely am.
If I had 75 Bernie Sanders in the US Senate, one in the White House, and another 300 of him in the US House, I'd tell them to begin a crash course in reviving American manufacturing with fair trade policies, not free, A Manhattan Project to build up US manufacturing and make the United States reclaim the title of industrial powerhouse.
But with the way our Republic operates with these privatized elections, two-party system, and the level of the population being propagandized to accept right-wing ideology as "conventional wisdom," I can tell you that it will NEVER HAPPEN.
I don't mean to come off as overly gloomy, but we're in a real bind here, and we should all recognize that blaming Ryan for disastrous free trade policies is somewhat dishonest if we're going to remain silent on the same policies pushed by Democrats on the dole of Wall Street finance.
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