Thom Hartmann: America - Still for Sale to the Highest Bidder

[thomhartmann]

Slowly but surely - the United States of America is being eaten alive by foreign transnational corporations. Today - news broke that telecom giant Sprint is being bought by the foreign Japanese corporation Softbank for more than $20 billion. According to the deal - which is the largest American acquisition by a Japanese company in history - 70% of Sprint will now be owned by overseas investors. The deal will likely be approved next year - making Softbank Sprint the third largest mobile phone company in the world. Not only that - this deal will suck billions in future revenue and profits out of the American economy - and into the Japanese economy.

That's already the case with the nation's fourth largest mobile phone company - T-Mobile - which is owned by the German company Deutsche Telekom AG. In fact - there are so few American telecom companies and manufacturers - that our nation will likely have to rely on foreign telecoms like China's Wa-Wei to build the next generation of telecom infrastructure in the United States. That's how bad things have gotten for American industries. Every single second in America, over $4,000 worth of our own industry is sold off to foreign investors.

By the time we hit our first break tonight - over 3 million dollars worth of American-owned industries - will have been sold off to wealthy foreign investors. When Ronald Reagan came into the White House, we owned more foreign companies than any other country in the world - and now it's the reverse. Why? Because of insane so-called "free trade" policies. Free Trade policies that today are allowing us to be eaten alive by foreign transnationals. Free Trade policies that leave our nation with as much as an $800 billion annual trade deficit.

Think about that - every single year - we hand other nations $800 billion US dollars in exchange for things we just as easily could have made here. And since they are US dollars - then these foreign nations eventually have to spend that money back here in the United States. And that's exactly what they're doing - buying up U.S. companies - and buying up our commons. They're buying up Sprint - already bought up up T-Mobile - they're buying up parking meters in Chicago - water systems around the country - and toll roads in Indiana, Virginia, and Texas. Not to mention tens of thousands of for-profit companies.

As we'll talk about later in the show - they're even buying up private charter schools to educate our kids. And each time a foreign company buys an American company or buys a chunk of our commons - that's future profits getting sucked out of our economy and dropped into that foreign nation. But that's just one example of this foreign corporate takeover \\

Just look at what's happening with the Canadian corporation TransCanada - which, as we speak, is bulldozing private property in Texas to build a massive pipeline across the United States, down to the Gulf Coast where toxic tar-sands oil will be refined and shipped all over the world. We get higher prices for gasoline and the pollution from refining; Canada gets the money from selling us the tar-sands oil; and England, Brazil, and China get the gasoline and diesel fuel these companies will export from our Gulf Coast.

As we talked about last week - 78-year-old Eleanor Fairchild was arrested for trespassing on her own property as she tried to stop TransCanadas bulldozers from clearing away trees on her land. We're quickly becoming the world's mining and pollution waste pit. And while all Americans should be outraged by this - there are some American companies that are actively participating in this predation. One of those is...Bain Capital. Yep - that business that Mitt Romney started back in the 1980s and that he still gets a $90,000 a day paycheck from - has made billions seizing control of American companies - gutting them - and then selling them off to foreign investors.

In his own words - Mitt Romney described the business model at Bain as "harvesting" companies. Today - one of those companies getting harvested is Sensata Technologies in Freeport, Illinois. Despite being more profitable than ever - Sensata's American factory is currently being deconstructed - with its components being shipped off to China - and all of its 170 workers set to lose their job at the end of the year - replaced by Chinese workers. That's the decision being made by Bain Capital - which owns Sensata.

Workers at the factory have been begging Mitt Romney to intervene to save their jobs - but he won't. He - and the other corporate outsourcers - are committed to getting all the short-term profits they can, even though it means the long-term death of the American economy. Welcome to third world America, courtesy of Reagan's, Clinton's and Bush's embrace of so-called Free Trade.

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