At least the Chinese will pay top dollar for all these commodities that they are getting from North Carolina, right? Wrong.

They will walk off with all this stuff at about half of the price that we pay when we buy from our stores or when we shop as individuals.

• First, we take away any state and local taxes - they get rebated for export, of course.
• Second, we give discounts for volume. And
• third, the U. S. Government insures that the bills will be paid in full, on time.

Yes, the U. S. Government insures that the Chinese Government will pay - and thereby expects the chicken, pork and tobacco producers to take less for their products.

Another consultant showed me a catalog of new software for his computer, all of it Ag-related, all of it available at very low cost, all of it programmed in and distributed from China.

The News & Observer did not only tell the good news about chickens, pork and tobacco. It also told the bad news. With the new trade agreement with China, North Carolina would continue to lose textile workers.

Now here is the part that takes the cake. Why are we losing jobs in the textile industries? Because - the reporter says - the workers are low-skilled and the machinery they use is not state-of-the-art.

Lookie here, Mr. Reporter, the workers do not buy the machines: the company and its investors buy the machinery.

If they refuse to update the machinery, the owners' stubbornness has nothing to do with workers, skilled or not. The fact of the matter is that these same textile industrialists build state-of-the-art textile plants in China, hire low-skilled Chinese laborers and train them - what they refuse to do in the good ol' U. S. of A. Thus the American workers are left "unskilled" (actually, "untrained") while their counterparts in China are left with the latest technology and a "skilled" (actually, "trained") labor force.

So what is the scale of these losses in North Carolina so far? The reporter said that estimates by the industry set the current cost at 149,000 jobs. And they estimate that the losses will continue at a somewhat escalated rate to another 149,000 jobs. When industry gives out job-loss numbers, you can expect the result to be the lowest possible estimate: the truth is considerably higher.

Ah, but the difference comes when you go to KMart or WalMart. When the finished goods are sent back to the U. S. of A., are they made available at a price of less than half of the current price? No, of course not. The textile industrialists claim that they can produce the materials at less than half the cost in the U. S. of A. The difference in their costs, i.e. 50%, is the source of the new American prosperity. That is why we are so successful, so rich, so happy.

So, in exchange for almost 300,000 jobs we are going to have another half dozen to a dozen millionaires. And we will feed the competition with our very own chickens, pork and tobacco at prices lower than we pay. Then we will consume the goods that cost half as much but are priced at roughly what they were when we produced them. Thereby we create a whole new class of wealthy industrialists who take their profits to corrupt our government through lobbying and bribery.

Welcome to the global economy, suckers. You ain't seen nothing yet.

1. Whirled Bank
2. A16
3. Global Arcade