A Perfect Example of What Killed American Democracy

No sooner did I publish yesterday’s post, in which I blamed the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision in 2010 for the death of American democracy, when a perfect example of that emerged.

Before I get into that, I have a question for you. What do you know about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and your own local chapter? Is it a branch of the U.S. Commerce Department? Is its purpose to promote commerce in America? The name of the organization would lead you to believe that the answer to both of the latter questions is “yes.”

You’d be dead wrong. The Chamber of Commerce is a French-based organization whose sole mission is the promotion of “free” trade. (Check out this post from 2009 for an explanation of this fatally flawed economic theory and how it has devastated America’s economy.) The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is that French organization’s American-based operation. Your local Chamber of Commerce reports to and funnels funds to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Here, it’s worth noting that in 2019, France – a nation whose workers enjoy benefits American workers can only dream of – enjoyed a trade surplus with the U.S. of $19.9 billion, despite being arguably the least productive nation on earth.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its local chapters makes a show of lobbying in favor of American businesses when issues important to them arise like taxes, regulations, minimum wage, etc. However, the effect of all of those issues combined is trivial compared to the one trillion dollars per year of business that is robbed from them through the world’s trade surplus with the U.S. On that issue, I challenge anyone to show me one single instance in which the Chamber has spoken out against the trade deficit and in favor of changes to trade policy aimed at restoring a balance of trade. No Chamber of Commerce organization, not the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or any one of its thousands of local chapters, has ever uttered a peep of protest about the U.S. trade deficit. The Chamber of Commerce masquerades as a pro-business lobby, all the while concealing the fact that it is working against American business on the one issue that dwarfs all others.

Thanks to the “Citizens United” decision by the Supreme Court, this French-based lobbying organization is considered to be an American “person” under the constitution. Its money – all the money collected in the form of membership fees from hundreds of thousands of American businesses that it strong-arms into joining its local chapters – is considered “free speech” which cannot be constrained under the 2nd amendment.

With all of that said, check out this article which appeared on Reuters yesterday. The CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce accuses Trump of undermining U.S. democracy. Scroll to the bottom of the article, and read this:

“… in a nod to Biden’s progressive agenda, he said lawmakers should fund “rapid training programs” to connect the unemployed with jobs in new sectors of the economy.

Donohue also said the Chamber will push for a new bill to boost legal immigration to help businesses deal with a shortage of workers.”

Pushing “training programs” is a classic pro-free trade gimmick used for decades to placate workers who have lost their jobs to off-shoring. And, incredibly, even in the midst of a pandemic when sixteen million Americans are unemployed, the Chamber has the audacity to suggest that we need to continue flooding the U.S. with immigrants “to help businesses deal with a shortage of workers.”

Earlier in the article, the Chamber CEO vows to cut off funding from Republicans who supported Trump. Is it Trump’s rhetoric that concerns him, or is it really the fact that Republicans began supporting Trump’s efforts at levying tariffs in an effort to fix our trade deficit?

This is a perfect example of the demise of our democracy. Our politicians are bought-and-paid-for by global corporations and foreign lobbying organizations. Your only choice is between two candidates who, on the most critical issues, take the exact same position – the position they’re paid to take. This isn’t democracy.

Capitol Building Riot: an attack on democracy? What democracy?

The democracy that our founding fathers envisioned, one where the people had the ability to choose our destiny by selecting from candidates with competing visions of how to improve our lives, has been gone for a long time. On the surface, that seems like a ridiculous statement, given how polarized our country is and how our candidates seem to be drifting toward the liberal and conservative extremes. However, exactly the opposite has happened. On the critical issues that have real impact on our standard of living, there is absolutely zero difference between the parties, while both use fringe issues to drive a wedge between us, making a show of offering a choice.

What are the critical issues? Two are chief among them – trade policy and immigration policy. Both parties have for decades been ardent supporters of “free” trade and open borders. Oh, they’ll each make a show of how they differ on minor details of how those policies are executed. The end result, however, is exactly the same – more jobs lost to globalist “free” trade policy, and more immigrants flooding the country to hold down wages for what jobs remain.

If there’s one issue that crosses party lines, it’s that Americans are nearly unanimous in opposition to the destruction of the manufacturing sector of our economy. Most everyone cringes when they look at the “made in China” or “made in Mexico” labels on everything we buy, and hate the fact that they can’t buy American. It’s a glaringly obvious opportunity for a candidate to win election in a landslide. Yet, at least until Trump came along, not a single candidate would touch the issue. Instead, Republicans and Democrats – the “Republicrat” party – told us, “too bad.” “Those jobs are gone forever.”

How the hell did this happen? I would argue that the demise of American democracy is rooted in a fatal flaw in our constitution. Back in the 18th century, when the Constitution was written and the U.S. was made up of only thirteen states, Article V of the Constitution, which spells out the procedure for amending it, may have seemed reasonable. It requires that a proposed amendment must first pass both houses of Congress by a two-thirds majority. Then it must be ratified by three-quarters of the states. In 1776, that was 10 states. Today it would require ratification by 38 states. In essence, it’s now impossible (and has been for a very long time) to amend the Constitution. That leaves it up to the Supreme Court to interpret how this antiquated document applies to the complicated issues of our modern times.

The very first words of the Constitution are “We the people … ” Seems pretty straightforward, right? Yet nothing has been more contentious than the meaning of the word “people.” It took a long time for it to be interpreted to include blacks and women, which now seems obvious. But what about corporations? They’re made up of people. Do corporations have the same rights as individual people? Click here for a good history of how the Supreme Court’s interpretation of that issue has evolved over the centuries.

It came to a head with the “Citizens United” decision in 2010. Click here for a good explanation of what that was and what it’s done to our democracy. This incredible decision gave corporations – even global corporations – all of the same rights as individuals. Even worse, it also equated money with speech. Now there are virtually no limits to how much corporations can spend to influence elections, because it would infringe on their right to free speech. Free speech is now a commodity, for sale to the highest bidder. Global corporations can run ads in the national media promoting their causes. You can’t because you can’t afford it. Your opinion has been priced out of the market.

To quote the above-linked American Promise web site: “… corporations, for which changes in regulatory policy may equate to billions of dollars’ difference to their bottom lines, have unique motivations to support or dispute policy and election outcomes, which may not align with the well-being of the American people. Indeed, corporate interests are often contrary to the interests of the general public, and studies find that elite interests are much more likely to be reflected in policy outcomes than those of the general public.”

With money comes influence. Who do you think wields more influence, a corporation who donates $100,000 to a campaign, or you with your $10 donation? You? Don’t make me laugh. The end result of all of this is that the candidates of both parties are literally bought and paid for by corporations. And corporations hedge their bets by donating to both candidates so that, regardless of who wins, the president and members of Congress are deeply indebted to them. You? They don’t give a rat’s ass about you! Your plight is irrelevant to them. You think your vote matters? Each candidate will tell you anything in the hopes of getting 50.1% of the vote. Once in office, you find out who they’re really working for. It’s not the American people.

If, somehow, a rogue candidate emerges who isn’t aligned with their globalist agenda, as Trump did, they kick their media campaign into high gear to destroy them. Easy to do, since they own the media. Freedom of the press? Gone. All employees of media companies do exactly what their bosses tell them and brainlessly read the script from their teleprompters. Facts are presented selectively to skew public opinion. Even “fact-checkers” are bought-and-paid-for employees of their corporate owners.

There’s actually little difference between our “democracy” and what masquerades as a democracy in other places, like Russia, for example. It’s a foregone conclusion that Putin will win election by something like 95% of the vote. In the U.S., it’s a foregone conclusion that the bought-and-paid-for Republicrat party will win. Which Republicrat candidate makes no difference.

For years I’ve been warning of the economic consequences of ever-worsening overpopulation – how it erodes employment and how trade with overpopulated nations accelerates the effects. For decades the world has been locked in an ever-escalating global war for jobs – jobs that have been steadily pirated from the American economy, facilitated by global organizations like the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and others – organizations to which the U.S. has gradually and foolishly been ceding control of its economy. The global war for jobs has intensified and finally arrived in America, where it’s had the most devastating effect, and has manifested itself in the riot at the Capitol building.

America’s democracy has been gutted through decades of misinterpretation of its constitution. Global corporations didn’t like it. No problem. Just change the definitions of words until the whole document is unintelligible. Corporations are now people. Money is speech. Hell, thanks to Bill Clinton, now we’re not even sure “… what the definition of the word ‘is’ is.” We can’t clarify the constitution to make it work again for the America people, because it’s impossible to amend. We can’t change the amendment process because, well, that would require an amendment.

I don’t know where we go from here. It’s hard to see how this can possibly turn out well.

Capitol Building Riot “Unthinkable?”

Many political pundits and people in the media have described the riot at the Capitol building on Wednesday as “unthinkable.” Was it “unthinkable?” Actually, it was “thought” a long time ago when the issues were different and, politically, the shoe was on the other foot. The “thought” was expressed in the following song lyrics. It’s eerie just how prophetic these lyrics seem today.

“Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’”

The Times They Are A-Changin’, Bob Dylan, 1963

Is the United States the stupidest nation on earth?

In light of the trade data released by the Commerce Department on Thursday, it’s difficult to draw any other conclusion. In November the trade deficit worsened to a new record of $64.5 billion. Actually, the situation is much worse than that. Strip away the surplus in services, which are little more than paperwork transactions, and you’re left with trade in manufactured goods, where real jobs are won and lost. Look at this chart. I would say that it couldn’t get any worse if it weren’t for the fact that with each passing month, it does. The deficit in manufactured goods hovered at the record level of $82.5 billion set only two months ago. That’s an annualized deficit of one trillion dollars.

Think about this. We’re paying the rest of the world a trillion dollars per year, putting their citizens to work making all the things we could just as easily make ourselves while, at the same time, we have tens of millions of people out of work. In fact, we’re paying trillions of dollars per year to pay our own people not to work. And we keep doing everything we can – as fast as we can – to make the situation worse. Ten years ago, in the wake of our most recent economic disaster, part of the auto industry bail-out was to allow Fiat to scoop up the Chrysler corporation, giving yet another foreign brand (the worst on earth, in terms of quality) an entry into the U.S. market, making the challenge for American cars that much worse. Building on that mistake, last month, FCA (Fiat-Chrysler of America) joined forces with PSA (the French automaker Peugot) forming a new company called “Stellantis,” giving Peugot access to the American market and, in all likelihood, finally killing the Chrysler brand.

Now we’ve elected as president a man who has spent his entire adult life championing policies that have exacerbated this decades-long downward spiral of our trade picture and, consequently, our entire economy. What little progress has been made under Trump he has vowed to rapidly undo.

If this situation doesn’t make the United States the stupidest nation on earth, I don’t know what would. And we wonder why this nation has become so divided and how there could be those among us so angry and frustrated that they’d be willing to riot and attack the capitol building. Trump was accused of lying to the American people about the election being stolen. I’ve consistently voted for candidates over these many years who have promised to do something about our trade deficit, and every one of them lied to us. Trump is accused of having blood on his hands for his role in fomenting the capitol building riot. For his part, Biden should accept blame for his role in formulating policies over the decades that have stoked the anger we saw unleashed on Thursday.

I remain angry and deeply disappointed with Trump for allowing his style and ego to get in the way of the bigger mission of Making America Great Again. The American people can forgive gaffes and rookie mistakes (being a rookie to the political scene), but they just couldn’t take any more of the daily barrage of personal insults that had nothing to do with the mission he was elected to do. It’s just sad to see it end this way.

It’s hard to see any hope of things improving for the United States. It angers me and makes me sick to say that. Since writing Five Short Blasts years ago, I’ve tried to keep this forum apolitical and focus instead on trying to explain the unseen economic consequences of population growth, including the danger of trying to engage in free trade with badly overpopulated nations. Maybe that’s been a mistake. So I’ll now say this: for decades Americans have been getting economically slaughtered like a flock of chickens. It’s hard to see any hope of things improving when you elect the fox to run the henhouse.

Thoughts on Capitol Building Riots & Trump’s Presidency

I’m still trying to process my thoughts, which are still evolving, on the events of yesterday. But I’d be remiss to let too much time pass. I’m angry, saddened, disappointed, disillusioned and feeling just a little sense of hopelessness.

The media is laying the blame for the riot at the capitol building directly on Trump, on his refusal to accept his election defeat, his insistence that the election was rigged and should be over-turned, and his urging of the protesters to march on the capitol building. They’re right on all counts. Trump does have blood on his hands. They also point their fingers at Republicans in the house and senate for standing by these claims to the end.

There’s plenty of blame to go around. First of all, I blame Trump for losing the election. Had he followed through with his promise to “Make America Great Again,” the election wouldn’t have even been close. He did an excellent job of clamping down on our open borders, preserving jobs for American workers. He failed badly, however, in reducing our trade deficit and bringing manufacturing jobs back. In fact, the trade deficit exploded under his watch. Had he restored a balance of trade, the economy would have soared at a minimum of twice the rate of 3% growth he achieved – an improvement over the 2% growth rate (or less) under the Obama administration – but pitifully short of making America great again. Had he followed through on trade, he’d have won in a landslide and it might have been Biden complaining about a rigged election. Nothing frustrated me more about Trump than his failing on trade.

A rigged election? I don’t know, but it’s an easy claim to believe. From the moment the 2016 election was decided, Democrats and the media attacked Trump mercilously and relentlessly. Two years were wasted on the bogus Russia investigation, and then another year on the impeachment over the Ukrainian phone call and his request that they look into why the investigation of Hunter Biden’s role with the Ukrainian gas company was suddenly halted. (Many Americans would still like to know the answer to that one.) By this time it was clear that the Democrats and the media would stop at absolutely nothing to bring him down. A rigged election? Whether they actually rigged it or not, it’s not a stretch to believe that the Democrats would stoop that low.

If it wasn’t rigged (and I’m not saying it was for certain), it sure smelled rotten. I’ve lived through a lot of elections and have never seen one like it. It wasn’t unusual in past elections for vote counting to drag on into Wednesday in a really close election. However, in this election, vote counting dragged on for a week or even ten days. After a few days of everyone left wondering how it could possibly take days to count the last 5% of votes when the first 95% were counted in one night, the truth started to leak out. They weren’t “counting” votes, but tallying new ones that continued to trickle in days after the polls had closed. Worse yet, we learned that the delay was also due to a process of “ballot curing,” in which previously rejected ballots were fixed, supposedly by giving the voters a chance to correct problems with their signatures or other problems. You have to be pretty naive to believe that the activists who facilitated that process (who are almost universally Democrats) were fair enough to give Republican voters a chance to fix their ballots too. The end result was that those late-arriving ballots were almost unanimously for Biden/Harris, flipping the count in their favor. Counting and recounting those same ballots doesn’t answer the questions about whether they were cast legally in the first place.

Honestly, I wasn’t surprised at what happened yesterday. It wasn’t four years in the making. It’s been decades in the making as the standard of living of most Americans has steadily declined, especially among the middle class. Look at the people who made up the rioters. They were mostly young people. A few in their 40s. Maybe a few even older. Where did these people come from and how did they become so angry and frustrated?

I’ll tell you where they came from. These are the kids who sat across the table from their parents thirty years ago and looked on as their fathers and mothers wept and swore about the loss of their jobs to factory closures. They watched their families being torn apart by the financial strain. They experienced the same thing when they entered the work force, finding only low pay and few benefits. The globalists who engineered the destruction of our manufacturing sector saw nothing but dollar signs with no consequences. Now, however, those chickens have come home to roost.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for what took place yesterday. It wasn’t just Trump who has blood on his hands. The Democrats and media who scuttled him from the very beginning share some blame too. So too do decades of globalist corporate leaders and their bought-and-paid for politicians, both Democrat and Republican – what I call the “Republicrat” party.

I’m angry at Trump. Though the election was lost, the smart move would have been to use his considerable influence to continue to build support for the “MAGA” movement and fight another day, four years from now, either as candidate or supporting some other candidate willing to take on the mantle. Instead, he foolishly squandered it all in an effort to do only he knows what. Force Democrats to admit they cheated? Start a revolution? Who knows, but it was a truly dumb move. He’s tarnished his brand forever. He’ll never again have a role in influencing the direction of the country. He totally blew it.

In the wake of the riot, as senators reconvened in the capitol building and one-by-one rose to speak, nearly all denounced Trump and were ready to rejoin the globalist Republicrat party. Back to business as usual, selling out America to global interests.

That would be a mistake. As I said, this was a long time coming. It’s not likely to end here. What you saw yesterday was a disorganized mob that is no less fervent in their beliefs today than they were yesterday. What happens from here? Surely they can see that rioting will get them nowhere. What’s the difference between a mob and a political party? Leadership, organization, a strategy, fund-raising and suits – and little else. Someone amongst MAGA supporters needs to step up and take a leadership role. Maybe it’s some congressman or senator, or maybe just some supporter with real political savvy. Get organized. Lay out an America-first platform. Raise money. This could be the makings of a new political party that could quickly challenge the Repubicrats. This is what I pray happens.

It could go another way if politicians blow this off as a one-off, Trump-incited incident. All it takes is leadership, organization, a strategy, and fund-raising – pretty much the same as I outlined above – but substitute fatigues and camos for suits, and now you’ve got a revolution. Let’s all pray it never comes to that. The best way to avoid it is to take seriously those who have been so disenfranchised by globalism.

I’m not optimistic, though. America’s about to take a sharp left turn and return to its role as the world’s lap dog and sugar daddy.