Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[Public Heel]

It's not a two-way street, at all. It's a whole lot of one-way streets, most of them going toward China.

There are a lot of players here, and hardly any of them have what you'd call a balanced perspective. Take the AFL/CIO, for example. Open trade with China can only hurt them. Take Boeing, as another example. China does not build passenger jets (yet), but they do buy them, so Boeing's interests are in opposition to the AFL/CIO's.

So who's stronger? No doubt the Boeings, not the unions. Even in a Democratic administration, the Boeings may be stronger. NAFTA got mostly Republican votes in Congress, but Clinton did not veto it.

The interests that are not well represented, at least by Congress and the shrubs, are the interests of those who are concerned about the long-term health of this country. Doing the right thing for the long term would reauire short-term sacrifices, and that's not something Americans want to hear, or at least our "leaders" think we don't want to hear it.