Letter: Response to Kern column

Steve O'Connor
Posted 1/23/25

In a guest column on Jan. 12 entitled, “Ron Kern: New law on business ownership”, Mr. Kern, who is the manager of the Ogle County Farm Bureau, holds true to the tradition of talking heads of special interest groups like our farm bureaus: he shows zero concern for other groups.

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Letter: Response to Kern column

Posted

Dear editor,

In a guest column on Jan. 12 entitled, “Ron Kern: New law on business ownership”, Mr. Kern, who is the manager of the Ogle County Farm Bureau, holds true to the tradition of talking heads of special interest groups like our farm bureaus: he shows zero concern for other groups. In the second half of the editorial, he defends trade agreements that have devastated manufacturing and now are producing trade deficits for agriculture, a fact that no farm bureau ever predicted would happen. This lack of vision holds true for all free trade dogmatists who never predicted that the U.S. would now run 48 consecutive years (since 1976) of trade deficits, a record we have never seen before and transformed the U.S. from the world's largest creditor to the world's largest debtor nation once we destroyed our tariffs.

The screaming of these dogmatists about how terrible our tariffs were during the Great Depression (the Smoot Hawley fairy tale) is now silent since the situation has flipped and our trading adversaries pursue every means to continue these trade deficits, making it impossible for us to secure the funds to bail us out of our debtor status. Dogmatists and hypocrisy go hand in hand.

I called Mr. Kern and asked if there is any evidence that he would accept that trade deals have caused harm to the U.S. economy. His only response was “send me your evidence.” I doubt his inbox has the memory to hold it all. Here is my evidence for those that do care, in highly-edited form since our corporate media has censored all this information from our public airwaves.

First, you can visit my Facebook page, “Lost Illinois Manufacturing” for most of this information. I begin with trade agreements that give regulatory power to anything other than our Congress is in violation of our Constitution. It plainly states that Congress has power to regulate commerce with foreign nations - not the President, not the WTO, not NAFTA, CAFTA, or any other international kangaroo court. Go to your local library and check out “Opening America's Market” by former U.S. trade official Alfred Eckes. He documents how the first attempts to pervert our Constitution began in 1844 when President Tyler tried to pass a reciprocal trade deal inside a treaty. The Senate rejected it along party lines stating, “...the control of trade and the function of taxing belong, without abridgement or participation, to Congress.” Fast forward to the abomination of 2012 during the drafting of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal that banned every member of Congress from seeing what was negotiated while 600 corporations had secure internet access to all documents. Corporate fascism - 1: U.S. Constitution - 0. In 2015 the World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled that U.S. “country of origin” labeling on meat coming from Canada and Mexico was against their authority and forced our Congress to remove it. World government - 1: American people - 0.

The economic devastation these trade agreements have on us and the world are well documented. Northern Illinois University in 2008 and University of Illinois in 2013 wrote “The State of Working Illinois” studies which found manufacturing jobs are getting destroyed and replaced with service jobs with lower pay and less benefits. You can't blame this on automation as entire industries such as consumer electronics and clothing were shipped overseas. To quote the U of I study, “In Illinois, the rich have gotten richer while the poor and middle classes have suffered from income deterioration.”

The growing concentration of wealth in Illinois, duplicated in the U.S. and the world is covered in books by Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz (Globalization and Its Discontents), French economist Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century), Nobel economist Paul Krugan (The Conscience of a Liberal), American economist James Galbraith (The Predator State), his dad, economist John Galbraith (The Culture of Contentment), journalist Greg Palast (The Best Democracy Money Can buy), and journalists Claire Provost with Matt Kennard (Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy). Author Pat Buchanan (The Great Betrayal) explains how free trade is killing our national defense industrial base.

It is time we removed the chains of the “free” trade god before it ruins us. As Abraham Lincoln predicted in 1848, "Abandonment of the protective policy by the American government must result in the increase of both useless labour, and idleness; and so, in proportion, must produce want and ruin among our people.”

-Steve O'Connor, Rochelle