SOUNDING OFF:

Increasingly, over the last 20 years, Americans, especially business and government leaders, have sold body and soul to Asian leaders. Buoyed by low Asian prices and an unsatiated appetite for material things, American consumers are not far behind.

The lure of a global market and record profits has been too much for American corporations.

One by one, American business leaders have come to strike what have progressively become Faustian bargains with top Asian leaders.

But the Chinese, especially, with their lures of money, deception, and even lurid sexual favors, have provided American business representatives short-term profits and their own creature comforts.

You might say it began with the Jeep division leaders of American Motors Corporation (AMC), which was one of the first to set up a factory in China.

After three frustrating years of being constantly rebuffed by Chinese leaders in their attempts to implement American business methods, in 1986, AMC leaders cut themselves loose from Western values and adopted Chinese ways.

In return for turning a reasonable profit, AMC became a voice for the Chinese plan. It became an agent for the Chinese leadership’s one-child policy, providing incentives for Chinese women employees to have abortions. It sang the praises of China to other American business leaders and American political leaders, and became a selling point for what appeared to be joint efforts.

The company is now 50% owned by China.

American business had something entirely different in mind.

Arrogant, self-deluded and narcissistic, we chose to believe that a rich and growing China would become an Asian model of American market capitalism, mimicking us in this cycle: More wealth would bring more freedom, and more freedom, more wealth.

Instead many of our company leaders served as propaganda ministers for the Chinese way, among them Hank Greenberg of AIG and Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News. To that end, Congress was exhorted by compromised American businesses to grant a free-trade status to China by inviting them to membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the mid-1990s.

While various presidents, including Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43, whistled the Chinese tune, U.S. markets opened wide while China’s stayed closed, especially to us.

The Chinese led us to believe that they would come around, but they never have. Increasingly our businesses transferred crucial technologies to China, which promised trade opportunity, but never delivered anything but deception and promises.

China continued its mercantile policy, what it always intended to do: a policy of high tariffs against American imports, stifled Chinese consumption, forced savings by their citizens (near 50% of income), and a cheap Chinese currency to keep exported prices low and all imports high.

Instead of China joining us in our free enterprise system, our western individualism, and equal-opportunity democratic system, we joined China.

We promoted China’s system, one that demanded manipulation of our economic and cultural system — shedding manufacturing jobs to outsourcing and absorbing historic national debt — to suit theirs.

That is why we have a huge trade deficit with China, why China holds some $1 trillion of our debt, and why we are now submissively assuring the Chinese prime minister that our treasury bills are good.

We have also duped ourselves into believing that Japan and South Korea — mercantile nations too — are our friends and economic look-a-likes.

So what are we left with?

Our children and grandchildren will have trillions of dollars to repay for decades of consumer orgies — a buying and borrowing frenzy using inflated real estate values.

Even worse, distracted by here-and-now-grasping mentalities, we have become an economy of services with manufacturing and manufacturing technology outsourced, so much so that manufacturing is now a mere 10% of our economy.

In effect, American workers have accepted lower pay, fewer benefits, and fewer expectations of better lives for their children and grandchildren. Testimony to that, 3 million jobs in manufacturing are gone since 2001.

As Warren Buffett puts it, “Our country’s net worth is now being transferred abroad at an alarming rate.” We are forced to be more humble and cautious in our own domestic policy of deficit spending, this while the yuan is strong and the dollar shaky.

And as China, Japan and OPEC own two-thirds of our debt, we have no economic muscle to flex, only military.

But our military muscle is being secretly challenged by a growing Chinese and Japanese military presence. Both China and Japan have worked together and believe in our economic and military demise, for a weakening economy can’t support our military superiority.

Indeed, the dominance in our economy is now services, and even the financial part of these services — in league with our government leaders — has corrupted those services in the interests of personal gain. To defend our declining system, we signed on for the bailout of the very predators that corrupted the system, thus accruing even more national debt.

The remaining strength of our manufacturing base, aerospace is subsidized by government and the commercial half is increasingly outsourced to Japan, Germany, Great Britain and South Korea (the Boeing 787 especially). Ironically, most of these countries are in various stages of outperforming us regarding various important economic milestones.

Meanwhile, what with continuing hype of globalism helping all, many somehow believe we will return to prosperity when the pall of recession leaves.

Even before the recession, wages were stagnant or declining. Depressed housing can no longer sustain our consumer binge, and huge government deficits will assure austerity for our foreseeable future.

Judging from the present, the likely post-recession scenario is that powerful lobbies with legislative access will play the administration and Congress and plan their next profit scheme, this while Congress postures for reelection, a minority of Americans vote, and while the corporate media blather about superficial spectacle.

JIM HOOVER lives in Huntington Beach