Wilkes alumnus outlines keys to economic recovery in book

A Wilkes University alumnus believes he holds the key that will jump start the troubled United States economy and bring 30 million factory jobs back to America within a year.

Robert Ciali, a retired physicist and engineer who graduated from Wilkes in 1973, names four actions that Congress must take in order to make it all happen in his newly-published book "Robbing Peter: How to Take Back Every Job and Factory Lost to China."

"I began my research simply because I wanted to know how we got ourselves into this mess and if there was anything we could do to get ourselves out of it," said Ciali, a native of Pittston. "I wrote my book to tell everyone what I had learned and to enter it into the permanent record, so we wouldn't make the same mistakes again."

According to Ciali, recessions are nothing new to the United States. The problem, however, is that many of the tactics used by past generations to battle out of recessions are now banned by international free-trade agreements and Congress doesn't really know how to fix the problem.

In "Robbing Peter," Ciali illustrates four loopholes in America's present free-trade agreements that Ciali believes, when exploited together, will bring jobs and factories back to the United States.

"There's one thing my proposals have going for them. If Congress decides to try them out but tires of the millions of jobs they create, it can reverse course in a heartbeat," Ciali said. "My proposals don't lock us into anything, unlike our free-trade agreements, which have held us captive for over 60 years."

Put simply, a free-trade agreement is a deal between two or more nations that regulates what those nations can do to help their domestic manufacturers to win sales in markets at home and abroad. Two ways for the United States to do this are through the limited use of tariffs, which are taxes on foreign products that encourages people to buy American instead, and subsidies, which are government grants to American manufacturers.

According to the World Trade Organization, the United States currently has free-trade agreements with 152 countries around the world.

"In 1934 Congress turned over its tariffing authority to the State Department — a big mistake," Ciali said. "From that point on, the executive branch has been giving our jobs away to foreign countries by granting their products overly favorable import tariffs and quotas in exchange for their support for U.S. foreign policy."

One example Ciali gave was when George Herbert Walker Bush doubled the amount, or "quota," of Turkish textiles the government allowed to be imported annually into America in exchange for the use of Turkey's air bases during the first Gulf War.

"It turned out to be just another nail in the coffin of America's textile industry," Ciali said. "Bush may have destroyed the lives of a number of American textile workers and their families just to help him achieve a goal he could have achieved in some other way."

When interviewed, Ciali touched briefly on the proposals in "Robbing Peter" while being careful not to reveal what he calls "the surprising secret to winning at free trade."

"My proposals create an alternative to the tariff and would essentially return tariffing authority to Congress, where labor and business interests could influence their rates," Ciali said. This he accomplishes without violating any of America's present free-trade agreements.

If Ciali's proposals are implemented – and work the way he thinks they will – many of the laws that have been destroying jobs would begin to have the opposite effect. Minimum wage increases would face little opposition in Congress because they would no longer encourage companies to send jobs overseas. Most importantly, Ciali said, a resurgence of the middle class would be an absolute certainty.

But the author is having a difficult time convincing people that there's a way for the United States to get its economy out of the gutter and create new jobs for nearly 10 percent of its population within a year because it almost sounds too good to be true.

"Americans have been beaten down by free trade for so long, they aren't likely to believe anyone who says it is possible to correct matters quickly," Ciali said. "It's as though we've been kidnapped and locked in a room for a very long time. Then one day we wake up to find our door unlocked, and we don't try to escape because we think it's some kind of trick."

He insists, however, that it isn't. He invites everyone who reads his book and agrees with it to pass a copy along to his or her congressman or senator.

"Once we take the plunge, we'll never look back," Ciali said. "Job seekers – including college grads – will have a much easier time finding a job, and at a higher rate of pay. And we'll have an industrial base to be proud of."

"Robbing Peter: How to Take Back Every Job and Factory Lost to China" is currently available at Amazon.com and may be ordered at any bookstore, including Barnes and Noble