COMMENTARY
Brian French asks what he has wrong ... to start off with Apple is not a great American company. It is brilliant,. It is profitable. It has been a great investment. It has contributed to a global platform for new era communication. Etc. But it is not a great American company as Brian points out it employs a few Americans and a whole lot of people in China. By my standards it has done a less than satisfactory job of ensuring that the workers in China a reasonably paid and work in safe conditions ... in fact in this regard it has done an abysmal job, and has made little progress on improving this obscene situation in the past couple of years. Sadly, this is typical of the American investor class and the prevailing capitalist market economy.
Peter Burgess

Occupy Tampa: New Ideas to create change (please share and comment on this article)

No one is talking about the No. 1 economic issue: America cannot win in a 'free trade' world economy.

I attended the recent Republican presidential debate and walked away very disappointed. Here's why. No U.S. worker can compete against 25-cent-an-hour slave wages. United States corporations are happy to sell out U.S. workers for a few pennies a share in earnings.

The corporations are such a rich source of political campaign contributions, they may as well be the fourth branch of government.

Large companies have not created any new jobs in this country in the last 10 years. They have created millions of jobs overseas.

Real income for U.S. men has not increased in the last 35 years. That's the time lesser-developed countries started exporting to us.

Let's remember what our Founding Fathers thought about trade and tariffs. In 1792, trade tariffs financed 95 percent of the U.S. budget, and the average trade tariff was 15.1 percent.

In 2010, trade tariffs only financed 1.2 percent of the U.S. budget, and the average trade tariff was approximately 1.3 percent.

Even the greatest American companies, such as Apple, employ just 50,000 workers in the United States yet employ over 1 million in manufacturing plants in Asia.

We cannot educate or innovate our way out of job losses. If there are no trade tariffs, our wages will have to decline closer to lesser-developed countries.

Whose side is the U.S. political leadership on?

Where am I wrong?

I'm ready for the real debate to begin.

Brian French lives in the Tampa area and is CEO of FloridaWebsiteMarketing.com.

Why U.S. can't grow jobs tbo.com