#foreign competition

[kazifatagar]

Debate grows over foreign competition and its impact on local businesses.

Online Debate Emerges Over Impact of Foreign Competition on Local SMEs

[imkeepinit]

China’s increasingly aggressive geopolitical and economic stance in the world is unleashing a fierce bipartisan backlash in America. That’s fine if it leads to more public investment in basic research, education, and infrastructure – as did the Sputnik shock of the late 1950s. But it poses dangers as well.More than 60 years ago, the sudden and palpable fear that the Soviet Union was lurching ahead of us shook America out of a postwar complacency and caused the nation to do what it should have been doing for many years. Even though we did it under the pretext of national defense – we called it the National Defense Education Act and the National Defense Highway Act and relied on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration for basic research leading to semiconductors, satellite technology, and the Internet – the result was to boost US productivity and American wages for a generation.

When the Soviet Union began to implode, America found its next foil in Japan. Japanese-made cars were taking market share away from the Big Three automakers. Meanwhile, Mitsubishi bought a substantial interest in the Rockefeller Center, Sony purchased Columbia Pictures, and Nintendo considered buying the Seattle Mariners. By the late 1980s and start of the 1990s, countless congressional hearings were held on the Japanese “challenge” to American competitiveness and the Japanese “threat” to American jobs.A tide of books demonized Japan – Pat Choate’s Agents of Influence alleged Tokyo’s alleged payoffs to influential Americans were designed to achieve “effective political domination over the United States”. Clyde Prestowitz’s Trading Places argued that because of our failure to respond adequately to the Japanese challenge “the power of the United States and the quality of American life is diminishing rapidly in every respect”. William S Dietrich’s In the Shadow of the Rising Sun claimed Japan “threatens our way of life and ultimately our freedoms as much as past dangers from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union”.

Robert Zielinski and Nigel Holloway’s Unequal Equities argued that Japan rigged its capital markets to undermine American corporations. Daniel Burstein’s Yen! Japan’s New Financial Empire and Its Threat to America asserted that Japan’s growing power put the United States at risk of falling prey to a “hostile Japanese ... world order”.And on it went: The Japanese Power Game,The Coming War with Japan, Zaibatsu America: How Japanese Firms are Colonizing Vital US Industries, The Silent War, Trade Wars.

But there was no vicious plot. We failed to notice that Japan had invested heavily in its own education and infrastructure – which enabled it to make high-quality products that American consumers wanted to buy. We didn’t see that our own financial system resembled a casino and demanded immediate profits. We overlooked that our educational system left almost 80% of our young people unable to comprehend a news magazine and many others unprepared for work. And our infrastructure of unsafe bridges and potholed roads were draining our productivity.

In the present case of China, the geopolitical rivalry is palpable. Yet at the same time, American corporations and investors are quietly making bundles by running low-wage factories there and selling technology to their Chinese “partners”. And American banks and venture capitalists are busily underwriting deals in China.

I don’t mean to downplay the challenge China represents to the United States. But throughout America’s postwar history it has been easier to blame others than to blame ourselves. 

The greatest danger we face today is not coming from China. It is our drift toward proto-fascism. We must be careful not to demonize China so much that we encourage a new paranoia that further distorts our priorities, encourages nativism and xenophobia, and leads to larger military outlays rather than public investments in education, infrastructure, and basic research on which America’s future prosperity and security critically depend. The central question for America – an ever more diverse America, whose economy and culture are rapidly fusing with the economies and cultures of the rest of the globe – is whether it is possible to rediscover our identity and our mutual responsibility without creating another enemy. -- Robert Reich

[investmart007]

NEW YORK | More change ahead for New York's shrinking garment district

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/4YDY0I

NEW YORK | More change ahead for New York's shrinking garment district

NEW YORK— Hundreds of thousands of garment workers once toiled in the sweaty, elbow-to-elbow workshops of midtown Manhattan before the whirring of sewing machines was mostly silenced by foreign competition.

But the city’s garment district isn’t dead yet.

A group of manufacturers, landlords, designers and politicians has a plan to preserve a remnant of the garment industry in a neighborhood where about 5,000 people are still employed in workshops mostly serving higher-end designers, while doing away with zoning rules that critics said put onerous restrictions on prime real estate.

City Hall wants to preserve at least 300,000 square feet for garment manufacturing, but allow real estate developers to bring in more 21st century businesses. That’s millions of fewer square feet than factories occupied in the industry’s glory days from the 1920s to the 1960s.

The plan, if approved by the City Council, would lift 1987 zoning that reserved about 4 million square feet of space in the garment district’s high-rises for apparel-production businesses. Today’s garment workshops occupy only an estimated 700,000 square feet, according to the city’s Economic Development Corp.

And many say that number will likely dwindle away without the city’s protection.

“The truth is, it’s a dying industry in the garment district, and who knows what would have happened to the remaining jobs without the city’s intervention,” said EDC spokeswoman Stephanie Baez.

A Council vote is expected in the next few months, after more reviews to tweak details. Under the plan, landlords would get a tax break for setting aside at least 25,000 square feet in a building for manufacturers, with tenants offered the option to sign leases for at least 15 years. The city would also spend $20 million to acquire a building that would be dedicated to manufacturing.

The proposal represents a retreat from an earlier plan that would have done away with special protections entirely. That idea had been opposed by representatives of New York City’s fashion design and theater industries, which still need highly skilled garment workers close by.

“The New York fashion world depends on the Garment Center’s tight-knit cluster of specialty suppliers and skilled workers,” says Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, who teamed with Council Speaker Corey Johnson to craft the new plan.

Gabrielle Ferrara, who with her mother runs Ferrara Manufacturing, one of the neighborhood’s largest garment factories, said she supports the plan. Something needs to be done, she said, to stabilize the shrinking district.

“We’re at a crisis point, 100 percent at a crisis point,” said Ferrara, whose 30-year-old business employs about 70 people and works with high-end designers.

“When the city talks about investing in machinery and technology, the fact is, you can’t invest without permanent real estate space,” she said. “I’m nervous for the two-thirds of the industry with short leases of just months or a year; there’s no safety net for them.”

As recently as 1960, many of the clothes sold in the United States were made in Manhattan’s garment district, where the city now proposes to preserve apparel-production space from 35th to 40th streets, just south of Times Square, and from Broadway to Ninth Avenue.

Remnants of the old district remain. On the second floor of a massive building on West 37th Street is Absolute Couture, where ethnic Chinese workers sit all day at rows of sewing machines — not unlike the old days, at first glance.

But the workers are better paid and more skilled than the ones who once eked out a living in shifts of 12 hours or more, with an occasional rat or mouse scurrying by. Workers overheard on the street now speak Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Korean, with Yiddish still spoken by Jewish businessmen who once dominated the district.

Newcomers to the neighborhood include shiny boutique hotels, spiffy restaurants and bars, and even a tiny hotel called Nap York where guests may reserve a sleeping “pod” for as little as an hour.

Recent tenants also include artists, architects, and firms specializing in advertising, technology and media.

They mingle with old-fashioned wholesale storefronts that offer everything from clothing, buttons and beads to trimming, just pockets and pleating work. Outside, workers pushing racks of garments on wheels squeeze past a cacophony of trucks, cars, bicycles and people on foot.

Sitting on Seventh Avenue is a tribute to the human hands at the heart of the neighborhood: Israeli-born Judith Weller’s life-size sculpture of her father, a Jewish man wearing a skullcap at a sewing machine, next to a needle threading a button.

By VERENA DOBNIK, Associated Press

[parcellingcreatehigh-ig]

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[parceling-memorable-gold-kv]

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