A Tale of Two Valleys

It seems Silicon Valley could be where fast track authority for the Trans Pacific Partnership will succeed or fail. Moderate Dems are needed to get the bill passed and it would seem logical that if Nancy Pelosi is trying to get the deal passed, she might turn to some of her colleagues in Silicon Valley.

Why would Silicon Valley provide TPP and fast track authority the needed votes? Cheap/slave labor in South East Asia is how many of these tech companies gain a competitive advantage:

Nearly a third of some 350,000 workers in Malaysia's electronics industry - a crucial link in the international consumer supply chain - suffer from conditions of modern-day slavery such as debt bondage, according to a study funded by the U.S. Department of Labor.

But not only do many tech companies gain from slave labor, many also are hoarding the profits made with slave labor off shore, rather then re-patriated them back into the United States and allow them to be taxed and reinvested into local communities:

Eight of the biggest U.S. technology companies added a combined $69 billion to their stockpiled offshore profits over the past year, even as some corporations in other industries felt pressure to bring cash back home.
Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc., Google Inc. and five other tech firms now account for more than a fifth of the $2.10 trillion in profits that U.S. companies are holding overseas, according to a Bloomberg News review of the securities filings of 304 corporations. The total amount held outside the U.S. by the companies was up 8 percent from the previous year, though 58 companies reported smaller stockpiles.

Meanwhile, 50 miles to the east of the Silicon Valley in the California Central Valley, community after community is being sucked dry and hollowed out by free trade and trickle down economics tax and budget policy that benefits the tech industry:

These demographic trends, combined with the water shortage, are causing worry. The Central Valley is already one of the poorest regions of the country. And its population, about 6.7m in 2008, is among the fastest-growing; it is expected to double in the next 40 years, as new immigrants continue to pour in looking for farm work.

This has led to comparisons with Appalachia, which has also relied on a declining extractive industry (coal mining) and has suffered from high unemployment, poverty and a relatively unskilled workforce. A report commissioned by Congress in 2005 argued that the San Joaquin valley is in some respects behind Appalachia's coal country in diversifying its economy.

It probably wouldn't surprise you to learn that in the hollowed out shell of the Central Valley's formerly thriving communities has sprung up the Crystal Meth Capital of the World:

Robert Pennal, head of the Fresno (Calif.) Methamphetamine Task Force, starts seeing large meth labs in California's Central Valley. Four out of every five hits of meth consumed in the United States are coming from these industrial-scale labs.

"The Amezcua brothers revolutionized the meth trade. They turned it from a small mom-and-pop backyard operation to an industrial-scale production line. They made possible the super lab, which is capable of producing 1,500 times what an ordinary user can make for himself." - Steve Suo, investigative reporter for The Oregonian.

Central Valley, California, is home to some of the most impoverished rural towns in America, where crystal meth addiction is prolific. In Fresno, Louis Theroux finds a community ravaged by this cheap and highly addictive drug. ... He sees its impact through the eyes of the local police, and meets Diane and Karl, a couple who have sustained their marriage despite a 25-year meth addiction and losing custody of their five children. He witnesses arrests of sons doing meth with their mothers, and family after family broken apart from generations of meth abuse.

How is it that our free trade economy for the 1% can create the absolute best of times for Silicon Valley and its tech industry, but just 50 miles to the east, a Crystal Meth Valley that is the epicenter of the drug trade?

Couldn't Silicon Valley tech moguls and empires decide to make a little less profit and put a little more investment into the state that has given them so much? Is it so much to ask that Silicon Valley put more of its business into the California Central Valley and create jobs in their home country?

Democrats need to stop selling "Free Trade" as the golden elixir to all our socioeconomic problems. Free Trade is not some Voo Doo potion that can be administered and suddenly America's problems will all go away.

Instead, Democrats should face up to the realities of free trade - they make some communities and people incredibly, insanely rich, and others, just right next door, incredibly depressed.

Dems should not take the easy way out and vote for TPP and fast track authority.

Instead, they should take the more difficult path that leads to better results for more Americans. They can start by voting down fast track authority for the Trans Pacific Partnership and then taking a more realistic look at how trade and economic policy can better work for the American working and middle classes and their communities.

A next step down that path should be to begin implementing a new plan:

We all know that inequality has grown in America over the last several years. But the conventional wisdom among conservatives and even many liberals has always been that inequality was the price of growth–in order to get more of it, we needed to tolerate a bigger wealth gap. Today, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the Columbia professor and former economic advisor to Bill Clinton, blew a hole in that truism with a new report for the Roosevelt Institute entitled “Rewriting the Rules,” which is basically a roadmap for what many progressives would like to see happen policy wise over the next four years.

Rewrite the Rules