* * Fixing our economy

Big global policies reach into our lives in meaningful ways. Everyone wants our Great Recession to end, but the policies recent administrations have put in place indicate otherwise.

As I walked on the north shore of the New River recently in Fries, Virginia, I could almost picture the grand cotton mill that operated there from 1903 until 1989. The buildings have been razed and only the dam, once used to generate power for the mill, remains. Its closing not only cost the employment of 1700 people, but sent the town into an economic tailspin from which it has yet to fully recover. Many locally-owned downtown retailers and support businesses are still closed.

The story of Fries is not unique. The demise of local manufacturing and independent retailing means the loss of core jobs throughout our region and nation. Outsourcing and corporatization has been the order of the day.

Today the economy is suffering from a widespread recession from which recovery has been slow and weak. It will remain slow and weak because everyday people aren’t spending. They’re not spending because they don’t have jobs. They don’t have jobs because the jobs have been shipped overseas. Rich people have benefited by the exploitation of cheap wages from overseas operations while our income gap widens.

Governmental polices have long made this happen and both parties are complicit.

Decades ago, Richard Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, said famously about farming, “Get big or get out.”  Southwest Virginia was once filled with small, family owned farms, but it is almost impossible for an independent farmer to make a living wage today. There are tragically few dairies, canneries, or meat-packing facilities processing locally grown food.

Ronald Reagan championed “Trickle-down economics” arguing that in making rich people richer the money would flow through job creation to the masses. Instead of flowing down, it flowed overseas where corporations could employ cheap labor unencumbered by workplace safety and environmental protections.

Bill Clinton brought us NAFTA and GATT (acronyms for North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement and General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade, respectively) which absolutely annihilated local manufacturing. To his credit, a decade later Clinton was contrite about it, admitting about his corporate farming backed initiatives to eliminate crop tariffs, “It was a mistake that I was a party to ... I had to live every day with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did.”  About his financial deregulation that paved the way to the current crisis, he said, “I think (my advisors) were wrong and I think I was wrong.” 

George W. Bush was worse, turning a total blind eye to the machinations of the financial industry and passing along massive tax breaks to the rich who often took their money overseas.

Barack Obama has favored stimulus packages and bailouts. While they have been successful in resuscitating Wall Street and the automotive industry, the costs have been on the backs of everyday taxpayers. Today’s recession is not of the upper class, which has continued to prosper at the expense of everyone else.

Globalization, counter to the prevailing myth, was not spawned organically or spontaneously from enhanced technologies for worldwide communication or the inevitable result of free markets.  Rather, it owes its prominence to deliberate, long-term, purposeful policy decisions.

Recently, Governor Bob McDonnell said, “We are continuing to improve Virginia's pro-business, pro-job climate by providing new tax credits for major job creators, streamlining our permitting process to get businesses up and running faster, protecting our sound right-to-work laws, proactively investing in economic development projects and balancing our state budget through reducing government spending, not by raising taxes on job-creators and workers.”

McDonnell seemingly understands the problem but his steps will be ineffectual because they don’t address the root causes. What will get us out of this mess? 

We must end the programs and policies that coddle corporations at the expense of small businesses.

We must recognize and reverse the policies that help ship jobs away.

We must as citizens, through our voting, support the candidates that make local development a high priority. We must support our local businesses, even if their products cost more, keeping the money local.

We must insist our trading partners provide the same environmental and workplace protections we have.

We must tax the energy used in transportation (and offset that tax through reductions in income and dividends taxes) to make locally-produced goods more competitive relative to imports.

We must overturn NAFTA and resume reasonable trade protections.

And finally, we must resume reasonable taxation of the wealthiest citizens to provide funds for infrastructure repair and development.

If this recession is to ever abate, it will be because we end the policies that killed local jobs. Where is the politician who “gets it”?