RANT: Did you hear that faint creak? It was America's problems passing the tipping point.

[JDPriestly]

43. Not for long. That is not going to last.

Right now, we live well because of the status and the value of our dollar.

Unfortunately, the industrial prowess that supported the dollar and placed it at the peak of the world's currencies is falling giving way.

I read an article today (posted on DU from the Daily News) about a Bible manufacturer who is outsourcing jobs to the Philippines. That is kind of a last straw for me. We cannot even produce Bibles at a competitive price.

Free trade is just another word for the US allowing foreign companies to dump cheap products into our economy, destroy our industry, decimate our tax base and crush our job market.

Free trade permits the transfer of our economic base to other economies.

We don't have raw materials to export -- not to the extent that countries in the so-called third world do.

Free trade encourages the transfer of our economic base to countries that are closer to the raw materials.

The wealthy don't need to worry they figure. They think that they will always be able to afford stuff. The rest of us know better. Our incomes have declined while the incomes of the rich have increased. That is just the first step. The whole country will become poorer. That is the next step.

I have a friend who can afford to shop in the best stores. Her clothes are still well made. I can't afford those stores. My clothes are really cheap. Back in the late 1980s, the big department stores, Buffums, Bullocks, the good quality middle class stores, sold their stock cheap and closed down.

They have been replaced by stores that sell poorly made Chinese and other foreign clothing. (I don't need to name them. They are the only places that middle class and poor people can shop.) Have fashions changed? Yes. But style changes have covered up an invasion of downright shoddy sewing and flimsy fabrics.

The same is true in nearly every area of our economy.

Think of all the Americans who are now buying computers made in Asia. How long do you think that our dollar will be valued enough to motivate the Asian manufacturers to sell them to us at prices we can afford? What are we selling to Asians in return for those computers? Bible factories? Factory equipment? Technology? Won't be long they will surpass in those areas too.

I am utterly pessimistic. Republicans are idiots who can't see further than their noses. At the moment they are rolling in dollars, but what they don't realize is that those dollars are probably worth more now than they will ever be in the future.

And when American businesses go to sell in countries in which English is not the primary language, they will find cultural barriers, racism and other problems that they cannot imagine.