Obama’s push for all of us to “Buy American” should make us realize the need for real, raw information to be made readily available to consumers.
via NotionsCapital.com
Going to work today, I took a train made by an Italian company that was assembled here in California while sipping Ethiopian coffee and reading a book printed in China – a now almost-archetypal scenario replicated across communities throughout the U.S. with interchangeable products and origins. Whether it’s a car instead of a train or Mexico instead of China, it’s nothing new to say that our economy has long been inevitably and inextricably global.
Which is why President Obama’s push for all of us to “Buy American” seemed to be a very obvious rhetorical device aimed at placating the xenophobic masses. Indeed, we all know that conditions of “free trade” are often deplorable at best, but there is no return to a feudalistic retrofuturism when a global system of trade has been interjecting into our daily lives throughout the last millennia (or longer).
But what has changed in our lifetime is that global capitalism has gotten so complex and shape-shifting that we’ve long needed a redefinition of what “Buy American” really means.
A recent article in the New York Times that tried to sort out the anguishing identity crises of labeling automobiles as “American” or “foreign” found that:
… “domestic content” is not domestic at all. For the purposes of the window sticker, the government has decided that domestic content will include parts made in Canada. Under the North American Free Trade Act, domestic is even less clear because it also includes Mexico.
calcars, cars, cash for clunkers, consumerism, electric vehicles, energy, environment, government, green, hybrid, PHEV, plug-in hybrid, policy, pollution, technology, transportation
What ‘cash for clunkers’ could have been spent on
In Commentary, News on 2009/08/04 at 9:40 pmWith the program’s environmental and economic benefits nearly negligible, billions could have been better spent encouraging more people to buy cars that make a real difference – plug-in hybrids.
Much of the discussion around the “cash for clunkers” fervor is as polarizing as the politics involved – you either dismiss the program as a failure in both theory and practice or you declare the program a success while rejecting criticism of the program as GOP firestarting. With further consideration, one realizes that the cash for clunkers program actually has a lot of moving parts to consider before disassembly – unlike what they’ve been doing to the clunkers themselves.
On one level, cash for clunkers could be deemed a success – the program has so far increased sales in its brief period of activity, with Ford posting its first sales increase in two years and the overall industry posting its best month of 2009. The overwhelming popularity of the program has also been lauded as a measure of its success (or irresponsibility), with $1 billion exhausted in $4,500 increments in just one week.
Despite the fact that the Ford Focus (mpg: 24 city/35 highway) has been the top-selling one of the top-selling vehicles among those who traded in their “clunkers” for new cars, a closer look reveals that six out of the 10 best-selling anti-clunkers were from foreign automakers. Read the rest of this entry »