I used to be a fan of Donald Trump’s many years ago when he had built so many charming tower buildings and one thing impressed me most was that he came to the rescue of New York City Hall by taking over the renovation of skate rink in Central Park, a job taking the government several years and a huge overrun on the construction budget and failed. He did it in a period of several weeks with his own money, a fraction amount of the government’s. But when he branched his business into gambling and casino hotel projects, revealed his flamboyant life style, and bragged about his senseless TV show, I started questioning his wisdom (he is smart, but narrow-minded and unbelievable cocky), his inner strength and his many distorted views. Sorry, Don.
One good example is what he said about how China, OPEC countries, Japan, India and Brazil ripping America off by selling cheap goods or high priced oil to the country. He emphatically maintains that China manipulates the currency rates to its sole advantages, thus earned so much money from the U.S. He sounded that it was the only reason that China could beat American manufacturers and became the factory of America by ignoring many true and deep rooted factors, such as over paid and less productive American labor force (many of workers are unionized with unreasonable demands), social problems (mostly, wide-spread drug abuses, racial inequality and breakdown of traditional values), poor K-12 education, ineffective and polarized political system which is financed largely by big corporations, complicated tax codes (in favor of those who are in high income brackets and could afford to hire tax lawyers), consumerism(0.6% saving nation-wide before 2008) and energy- wasting life style( spent much more than they can produce), financial gambling(busted in 2008), etc. Furthermore, who can judge so-called currency manipulation (by what criteria)? RMB has been roughly at same exchange rate for the past twenty- some years until three years ago to revaluate more than 30% up to now.
It is true that for the past thirty years, China has been benefiting in terms of building manufacturing base by the transfer of know how and capitals from the West. However, its remarkable achievement is not only because cheap labor. The disciplined, diligent and quick-learning workers at every level from manual to the hi-tech ones play a major role. But in my opinion, they worked as slave laborers for all these years by taking a meager pay from the factories owned mostly either by the West or the neighboring nations.According to an unofficial calculation, the manufacturing factories in Asia on average take in one sixth or one quarter of retail prices for a product sold in advanced countries, particularly America. When Apple sells an iPhone 4S at $600 in the stores, no more than $100 goes to Foxconn of Shengzhen ( a major supplier), out of which only $6.54 is its gross profit. So, where did the remaining of money go? It stayed in America and became part of humongous cash (more than 40 billions) held by Apple. That is why American giant corporations are sitting on a pile of cash roughly 3 trillions. That is why 1% of the U.S. population owns 36% of the country’s wealth (there are not enough factory workers to share).
Everyone participating in Occupy Wall Street Movement, especially those in America should reflect on their past life style first. For the past decades, have you enjoyed the easy credit (sub-prime mortgages), low inflation rate, housing appreciation, senseless and/or luxury goods, two or three cars per household, etc? If the answer is affirmative, then you are part of the problem, especially if you supported Bush to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, raised no questions on the entanglement in Middle East’s never ending conflict between Israel and Arab World, the meddling in many sovereign states’ internal affairs under the name of Democracy and freedom and maintaining huge military forces and more than 865 military bases(Pentagon’s list) around the world as if military superiority is the only way to defend the country and its increasingly empty rhetoric of American values.
Sorry to say, American problems are bigger and more complex than Wall Street, taxation, uneven distribution of wealth, certainly not because of those low waged produced products from the rising economies. One has to go deeper, much deeper with a lot of guts and honesty to find the true causes of all the trouble. People like Trump can only mislead the people to wrong solutions and dangerously so.
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