Blogs

It wasn't that many years ago when East Liverpool, Ohio, served as the nation's pottery capital with more than four dozen pottery factories, employing much of the town's population. Increased foreign competition from China and other countries, however, decimated the industry, taking the area's economy with it.

Right before the Great Recession of 2008, Sacramento businessman Doug Stabler had a dream -- to sell as many deeply discounted Chinese-made all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), motorcycles and scooters to Americans who didn't recognize their brand names as possible. He succeeded in the face of daunting odds, unfortunately.

The U.S.-Mexico border town of Nogales, Ariz., used to be a major tourist destination for northern Mexican consumers seeking American-made clothing and appliances until NAFTA changed everything. The town's major department stores, which also attracted U.S. tourists on their way south of the border, have given way to less tourist-friendly warehouses dotting the town's downtown.

Europe's debt crisis doesn't seem to have slowed down the China's exports in May, growing at twice the clip that economists predicted. The world's second-largest economy continues to move along as the nation's bank cut interest rates to stimulate investment and consumer spending.

Blind legal activist Chen Guancheng's former neighbors in the northeastern Chinese village where he used to dwell still cower in fear of reprisals from Chinese authorities but have begun to allow foreign reporters in their homes as long as they aren't named.

It appears that the recently implemented U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement has gone some good -- for America's ally, that is. Just a month after the pact went into effect, the United States racked up a trade deficit in April that was triple what it was in the previous month, the U.S. Commerce Department reported.

India, the world's largest democracy, seems to be getting quite undemocratic in its efforts to regulate its citizens' Internet use. It's gotten so bad that the natives seem to be getting very restless and are taking to the streets for a good-old-fashioned protest -- occurring in 18 cities across the nation today.

Back in the late 1970s, Harvard professor Ezra Vogel made waves with his best-selling book "Japan as Number One." More than 30 years later, he could easily substitute South Korea into its title, observes an American Jobs Alliance board member recently returned from a whirlwind jaunt through Asia.

In light of a sluggish economy, reduces exports and decreased investment. China moves to cut interest rates, the strongest action the nation's central bank has taken to date to fend off a looming recession that is hanging over Europe and the United States.

U.S. high-tech companies, stung by reports that they rely too heavily on overseas, mostly Chinese, labor to manufacture their products, are desperately scrambling to prove through various statistical studies that they've underwritten that they're not the bad guys and actually drive American job creation. Yada, dada, dada.