America’s economy is locked in a downward spiral toward socialism.

Empty store shelves. Runaway inflation. Labor shortages. Auto production way down for lack of chips. The Federal Reserve ready to start jacking up interest rates and start dumping bonds into the market. And have you noticed what’s happening with the trade deficit?

Probably not, so I’ll fill you in. It exploded in September, soaring to $81.4 billion, crushing the previous record of $73.2 billion set the previous month. As announced by the Commerce Department last week, the trade deficit in November was just shy of that September record. But that doesn’t begin to tell the story. The deficit in manufactured goods soared to a new record of $96.3 billion in November, eclipsing the previous record set only two months earlier by a whopping $5 billion.

Look at this chart of the trade deficit in manufactured goods: https://petemurphy.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/manfd-goods-balance-of-trade.pdf. We’ve been told that those empty shelves are due to Covid-related labor shortages at overseas manufacturing plants. In light of the trade data, that’s clearly a lie! If it were true, imports would be declining instead of shattering records. And the trade data is corroborated by the massive backup of container ships waiting to unload at west coast ports.

The fact is that warehouses across the country are stuffed to the rafters with goods, so much so that they can’t keep track of where everything is. Items that you see missing from the shelves are here in abudant supply, but buried so deep in the warehouse by more recent shipments of other things that they can’t even get at it. As a perfect example, the state of Florida recently discovered a stash of a million Covid test kits that had expired, buried so deep amid other stuff that they had completely lost track of them. So they’ll head straight to the landfill.

Our economy is stuck in a downward spiral. Trade deficits suck money out of the economy – money that can only be pumped back in through deficit spending. A trade deficit of $96 billion per month requires federal deficit spending of at least a trillion dollars per year just to keep it from sinking into recession. The only way to pump that much deficit spending into the economy is through social programs – socialism – that only fuels more demand for imported goods, making the trade deficit bigger. More deficit spending, more inflationary pressure and higher interest rates, more disincentive to work for a living. More labor shortages. More socialism.

The U.S. ran its last trade surplus in1975. Thanks to both parties’ embrace of globalism and free trade since the end of World War II, we’ve now had forty-six consecutive years of trade deficits that have transformed America from the richest country the world had ever seen – the world’s preeminent industrial power – into a skid row bum, begging the rest of the world, especially China, to loan us money by buying our debt. The optimism I felt when the Trump administration recognized the problem and began slapping tariffs on Chinese imports is gone.

There’s no hope that Biden will lift a finger to address the trade deficit. Trump left him a perfect tool to tackle it – the “Phase 1” trade deal with China, in which China itself agreed that if they didn’t meet quotas for increasing the purchases of American-made goods, then the U.S. would slap a 25% tariff on the half of Chinese products that weren’t already hit with tariffs. By the end of 2020 they had failed miserably, making a mockery of the deal. Not only did Biden not follow through on the deal, it was many months before he even acknowledged its existence. With only one month of data left to be tabulated for 2021, China’s performance vs. their obligations is even worse. Still the Biden administration won’t act. Not surprising. Biden’s decades of experience in the Senate make him one of globalism’s architects.

“The Real Threat to American Democracy”

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/real-threat-to-american-democracy-by-michael-lind-2022-01

I came across this opinion piece a couple of days ago as I browsed Marketwatch, which reprinted it with the permission of Project Syndicate. In the opinion of professor Michael Lind (clearly no fan of Trump) at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, the real threat isn’t Trump, even if he were to re-take the presidency in 2024. The real threat is what led to the rise of Trump: “… the disconnect between what the bipartisan US political establishment promises and what it delivers.”

Embraced by both parties for decades, globalization has failed to deliver any benefits for the American people. Instead, it has transformed America, once the richest and greatest industrial power the world had ever seen, into a skid row bum, broke and utterly dependent on the rest of the world – most notably China, a communist regime that would like nothing better than to destroy the U.S. and assume its role as the most powerful nation in the world – for its most basic needs.

Both parties are equally culpable for getting us into this mess, not because they believed in it, but because it’s what their corporate benefactors paid them to do. They went along because they didn’t understand how disparities in population density drive massive global trade imbalances, making it certain that badly overpopulated nations, desperate to employ their bloated labor forces, would ravage America’s economy. Globalization was never about benefitting Americans. It was all about using America’s wealth to boost corporate profits by turning such nations into western-style consumers at America’s expense.

Lind closes with this:

Many of the architects of these colossal disasters have gone on to establish lucrative careers as respected experts. Few have suffered financial or reputational losses. When a national establishment fails so often and at such cost, and when mainstream media sources remain complicit in those failures, no one should be surprised if citizens look to alternative media sources, including crazy ones, or turn to outsider politicians, including narcissistic demagogues like Trump.

… the real long-term threat to American democracy is the lack of popular trust in conventional politicians whose policies have repeatedly failed. And for that lack of public trust, American elites have nobody to blame but themselves.

Inflation / Supply Chain / Worker Shortage Crisis. What the hell is going on?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. It’s because I’ve been analyzing the most recent economic data in the hope of being able to relate it in some way to my theory that worsening overpopulation, and trade with overpopulated nations, is driving unemployment and poverty higher – ultimately leading to mankind’s undoing.

I find myself at a loss, however. None of what’s going on in the economy today adds. Finally, I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t make sense because something fishy is going on. So I’m just going to present the data and let you decide for yourself.

Trade Data:

Let’s begin with this chart of our trade deficit in manufactured goods. It had begun to show signs of leveling off until June of 2020 when it took off again, but has leveled off again for the past five months, setting a record in September. The trade deficit with China soared to its highest level since December 2018, as imports rose and as China continued to renege on its commitments to buy U.S. exports, confident that the Biden administration doesn’t have the backbone to enforce the “Phase 1” trade agreement. At any rate, it seems that companies who switched to their secondary suppliers in other countries when tariffs were imposed on China had no choice but to order more from China when those secondary suppliers were unable to keep up with demand. That’s not cheap and surely factored into rising prices.

The soaring trade deficit kind of makes sense. As the pandemic began to bite and as stimulus money fattened up wallets, consumers began to simultaneously hoard some items while soing on a shopping spree for others. Companies increased their orders for foreign goods by $20 billion per month until the supply chain was choked off by a shortage of shipping containers and a glut of cargo ships stalled at inbound ports. Now, here’s a chart of our overall trade deficit. As you can see, it was fairly stable at an average of about $50 billion per month but, sometime around June of 2020, it began to soar, reaching an all-time record of $80.9 billion in September, the most recent month for which trade data is available. That’s a jump of $30 billion per month. The increase in manufactured imports explains most of it. The rest is due to a huge jump in oil imports. In May of 2020, oil imports had fallen to a modern-era record low of $5.95 billion. In September, imports were back up to $18.9 billion and climbing.

Last week I saw a news report that said the number of ships anchored offshore from the port of Los Angeles had risen to over 100. It was also reported that warehouses across the entire U.S. are completely full. So full are the warehouses that truckloads and containers full of goods are being parked in empty lots and anywhere they can legally park.

At the same time, we see rolling product outages of everything on our store shelves, including domestically produced food items. There is talk of turkey shortages and cranberry shortages for Thanksgiving. One day you’ll see an empty shelf where some commonly used item once sat. Next week, that space is full but some other items are now gone. You never know what you’re going to be able to get.

It’s these shortages that are blamed for soaring prices. But how the hell do we have these shortages? The trade data and news reports about ports clogged with offloaded containers and warehouses stuffed to the rafters all paint a picture of a glut of products beyond anything that anyone could ever have imagined.

I’m telling you, something’s not right. I believe global corporations have learned a new trick, using the pandemic as cover to create an illusion of shortages to justify big price hikes, all in an effort to grab up as much government stimulus money as they can. Domestic producers and shipping companies are also capitalizing, and blaming it all on the pandemic – something that was a factor early on but hasn’t been – at least economically speaking – for a long time now.

Employment Data:

The most recent employment data is even more confusing. We see the “help wanted” signs posted on the door of virtually every establishment we walk into. We hear the news reports about shortages of workers in every industry, from manufacturing to fast food. Companies are boosting wages and offering various kinds of “signing bonuses,” yet still can’t attract workers. The worker shortage is constantly cited as the reason behind empty shelves and soaring prices.

But wait a minute. The Labor Department reported last week that unemployment fell to 4.6% in October. That’s a pretty low level of unemployment. In the past fourteen years, it was lower than that for only a three-year period from March of 2017 to March of 2020. And look at this chart of per capita employment, which is essentially the same thing as the “labor force participation rate” which is tracked by the labor department. It fell like a rock at the onset of the pandemic, but has almost completely recovered just as quickly. Today, it stands at the same level as it did in September of 2016. (It has never yet recovered to the level that existed before the global financial crisis of 2008.) In September of 2016, we were in the final months of the 2016 election, and the Democrats were touting the strength of the economic recovery from the financial crisis. Inflation was nearly non-existent. Shelves were fully stocked. Every establishment was fully staffed. Unemployment was 5.0%. So how is it that today, in spite of the fact that the labor climate is almost exactly the same now as it was then, and the fact that we have two million more workers employed today than we did then, shelves are empty, prices are soaring and everyone complains that it’s because of a worker shortage?

I believe part of it can be explained by the explosion in highway construction work and in residential and commercial construction. Perhaps there’s even some element of growth in manufacturing employment as companies grow more disgusted with the global supply chain. I’ve said for a long time that a return to domestic manufacturing would transform the economy, creating millions of high-paying jobs that would siphon workers away from low-paying jobs in industries like fast food. We may be witnessing exactly that kind of transition. If we are, don’t be surprised if vast swaths of the fast food industry and others that provide very little value to consumers disappear. Don’t be surprised if restaurant chains like McDonald’s and Wendy’s bite the dust. How long will customers wait in long lines at drive-through windows before they wake up to the fact that they could pack themselves a brown-bag lunch at a quarter of the price and in one tenth of the time, not to mention the gas wasted and carbon emitted while they sit there with their engines idling for fifteen minutes?

Even so, such a transition in the economy would shift at most maybe five million workers from those low-paying industries to high-paying manufacturing and construction jobs. That’s five million workers out of 160 million. It doesn’t explain how every industry is complaining of a worker shortage. Just take a look around and you can’t help but be suspicious of something fishy. Fast food restaurants with closed dining rooms have “help-wanted” signs at the entrance to their drive-through window. Yet, walk into the Culver’s or Chick-Fil-A right next door and you find them fully staffed.

A big part of the explanation of the supply chain crisis is that trucking companies can’t find enough drivers to move the goods. But then you take a trip in your car and find the truck volume on the interstate highways is worse than you’ve ever seen it.

I could go on, but you get the idea. None of this adds up. You can’t help but wonder: is this fast food restaurant really trying to hire any workers, or is that “help wanted” sign just there to create a phony narrative that justifies their higher prices and your long wait in the drive-through lane? Are these rolling outages on store shelves really due to product shortages, or they engineered to justify higher prices. Are all of these companies using that same narrative to raise prices not because they need to, but to suck up their share of pandemic stimulus money and social spending money that’s pouring into the economy by the trillions?

If you’re a domestic manufacturer of consumer staples, are you going to stand by while manufacturers of televisions, computers, cell phones and others rake in huge profits from people spending their stimulus money, or are you going to get in on the action by creating an illusion of shortages to justify higher prices and profits?

Where are the journalists who should be asking these tough questions? Where are the regulatory agencies who should be overseeing this crap? And why is the Federal Reserve sitting on its hands while inflation escalates out of control?

This whole supply chain/inflation/worker shortage crisis is a bunch of BS that doesn’t add up until you look at corporate profits and then realize that we’re all being taken for a ride.

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.

A coming civil war? Is “Americanism,” or the lack thereof, driving us toward it?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/12/04/modern-day-civil-war-in-united-states-how-americanism-can-save-us-column/4309670002/

I came across this above-linked opinion piece on the USA Today web site yesterday and just had to comment.  As the author observes, we’re beginning to hear an undercurrent of rumblings about the potential for another civil war in America.  I’ve heard and read reports of groups – motorcycle gangs and clubs and various militias – that are reportedly prepared to take up arms in the event that President Trump were to be impeached.  (Kudos to the author of this piece for his even-handedness in laying blame on both sides.)

Let me preface this by saying that I voted for Trump in 2016.  I did so on the basis of his promises to do something about our trade deficit and about illegal immigration, the two issues which I believe lie at the root of the ills that have beset our economy for decades.  I also voted for Obama in 2008 for the very same reason – his promise to reduce our trade imbalance – a promise not kept.

I’m not a particularly big fan of Trump.  He can be obnoxious and arrogant.  He’s not a great communicator.  But, after many decades of do-nothing presidents who stood idly by while the rising tide of “globalism” plundered our economy and while other countries played us for fools, I’m thrilled that we finally have a leader who’s willing to stand up and tell the world enough is enough and we won’t tolerate it any longer. He’s backed up his words with action, levying large tariffs on Chinese imports in spite of the tremendous pressure from the Chinese and the global business community not to do it.  Good for him.  I want to see more of it.

Does that make me a Republican?  Hardly.  The Republican party has traditionally been a big supporter of free trade – even more so than the Democrats – and staunchly opposed to the use of tariffs.  So what does that make me?  An American, one who, like million of others, was infused with the spirit of “Americanism” as I grew up, the very kind of “Americanism” the author of this piece describes when he says:

America once was, and hopefully still can be, a nation for the ambitious, hard-working, creative, productive, adventurous and entrepreneurial. That is the meaning of Americanism and the spirit of American liberty.

America once was all of that.  A few paragraphs earlier, the author stated, “If we are to avoid civil war, Americans must rediscover the principles and promise of American life that united us for over 200 years.”  Interesting that the author takes note of the 200-year milestone of our country.  That bicentennial happened in 1976.  Coincidentally, 1976 was the year that America’s trade balance swung from a small surplus to an ever-growing deficit.  2018 marked the 42nd annual trade deficit and was the largest in history.  2019 will be the 43rd.  While “the promise of American life” united us for over 200 years, it didn’t last much beyond that.

I entered the labor force in the private sector in 1974 and spent my entire working career watching “the promise of American life” steadily eroded by the forces of globalism, as global corporations turned their backs on Americans, licking their chops at the prospect of more and faster growth in the underdeveloped world – primarily in China.  I listened to the daily drumbeat about how Americans could no longer compete with foreign labor and watched our factories shut down as “made in the USA” products on store shelves were steadily displaced by those from China and Mexico.

By 2016 “the promise of American life” was gone, replaced by a dog-eat-dog existence of working minimum wage jobs while the severance packages and retirement savings were slowly exhausted.  Americans were seething with anger and ready to elect anyone who promised to do something about it.

Hillary Clinton blamed her loss to Trump on the E-mail investigation that was announced by James Comey in the final week before the election.  Baloney.  Americans didn’t care about her E-mails.  That story was already old news.  But three other things happened in that final week that set Americans on fire:  first, the Social Security administration announced that, for the 2nd year in a row, there would be no cost-of-living adjustment to social security benefits.  That was followed closely by an announcement from the Obama adminstration that “Obamacare” premiums were being jacked up by a third or more.  Finally, that announcement was followed the very next day by announcements of similar huge premium increases for private health insurance.

A “coming” civil war?!?!?  We’ve been in one for three years, and those events of the final week of the 2016 election campaign that I just described were the opening salvo, fired by globalists at the downtrodden American workers, accompanied by their battle cry, “The American Dream is dead!”  The election a week later was the return volley, fired by furious Americans whose sense of “Americanism” was reawakened.  If there was any doubt that a war was on, it was erased on January 20, 2017 when, during his inauguration speech, Trump swung a rhetorical battle-ax at the heads of globalism.

Globalism is in a full-blown panic.  They’ve done a masterful job of portraying Trump as a self-serving oligarch that threatens our very democracy.  The American media, owned and controlled almost lock, stock and barrel by foreign interests, has been relentless and unmerciful in their efforts to bring Trump down.

Will this war turn into an actual shooting war?  God, let’s hope not, but globalism won’t go down without a fight.  You can bet on that.  “Americanism?”  It’s alive and well, much to the chagrin of the globalists.

 

“Embrace change,” corporate America!

I was there, working in manufacturing in the 1980s, when a cold wind swept across America.  I was there when our corporations, until then led by manufacturing and the engineers who rose up through its ranks, kicked manufacturing to the curb and replaced their leadership with marketing people, skilled in the art of B.S., and bean counters, focused on nothing but cutting costs.  I was there when the United Nations and the World Trade Organization embarked on their campaign of raising poor nations out of poverty through the systematic plundering of jobs from the U.S. – as many jobs as possible without tipping the balance of power in favor of bad actors who might threaten this new concept of “globalism” and the “New World Order” – the new regime of parasites dedicated to keeping its U.S. host alive just enough to keep the blood flowing.

I was there when they began scaling back manufacturing operations, laying off good workers and closing plants.  “Embrace change,” we were told constantly by business managers with an air of condescension, as though they were addressing fools too dumb to recognize good things and good opportunities when they see it.  We had made careers of embracing change – change for the better – changes that automated our factories, boosted production, cut emissions, improved quality and grew profits.  Now we were being insulted by con men whose only goal was the next promotion, which required laying off more people than the next guy.

I was there at a big division-wide meeting – one of those meetings whose purpose was ostensibly to gather input, but it was clear from the start that input was the last thing they wanted.  What they wanted was “buy in” for the new direction of the company.  In other words, you’d better accept what’s coming enthusiastically, with a big smile on your face, if you know what’s good for you.  The leader, the division manager, asked, “what are we going to need to succeed?”  I raised my hand and replied – perhaps naively or perhaps in a thinly-veiled attempt to stand up for what I and many others present had built our careers around.  “We’ll need excellence in manufacturing.”  I was stunned by his arrogant, dismissive reply.  “Why?  We don’t need that.  We can buy that!”  I thought to myself, “you dumbass, you can buy it if you want, but you still need it, and now you’re at the mercy of your supplier.”  But it would have been a pointless example of falling on your own sword to come right out and say it.  “Embrace change.”  Here it comes.

Our final days before closing the doors were spent writing operating procedures, documenting every detail of our operations, and then training workers brought over from foreign subsidiaries.  We were forced to facilitate the widespread technology transfer that played a critical role in ruining the American economy.

It’s decades later and the tables have turned.  As it always does, the pendulum swung too far.  The globalist corporations over-played their hand, planting the seeds of political change.  Americans are sick of working for minimum wages and being the world’s chumps.  America itself can no longer fund massive trade deficits.  The wind has shifted and now blows cold on globalist dreams of reaping big profits from a China transformed into western-style consumers and from plundering the American market with cheap products.  Those dreams never had a chance.  China will never be more than a sweat-shop labor pool with their gross over-population dooming any hope of a western-style, consumer-driven economy.

In the meantime, a lot of weeds sprouted in the devastated American economic landscape.  By “weeds,” I mean business models that bring so little value to the table that they are dependent on virtual slave labor wages.  Cheap junk of poor quality has perpetuated a throw-away mindset among consumers.  Cheap clothing made of thin, flimsy fabric.  Tools that break after one use.  Auto parts and appliances that break as soon as the warranty expires.  An economy dependent on consumers burning through their severance packages.  A retail economy that employed laid-off workers manning check-out lines until everyone had burned through their savings.  An economy totally dependent on consumers buying stuff that they had no hand in producing.  All the while the economy grew.  It didn’t matter if the growth was flowers or weeds, as long as the color was green – money pouring into corporate coffers.

In the wake of Trump’s tariffs on China, retailers are having a hissy-fit when their suppliers ask for a price increase to cover the cost of the tariffs.  Products with high perceived value needn’t fear.  They’ll always find a way to be marketed successfully even if their prices do rise a few percent.  Those with low value will bite the dust.  Good riddance.  And retailers who turn their backs on good products just because the supplier needs to raise prices to make a profit – whether to cover the cost of the tariffs or, better yet, to begin manufacturing domestically – will lose out to retailers who understand their value, and they too will fail and vanish.  Again, good riddance.  It’s not like there’s a shortage of retailers.

So, corporate America, the shoe’s now on the other foot.  EMBRACE CHANGE!  Think of the possibilities and opportunities – the opportunity to cut your shipping costs dramatically, to be in charge of your manufacturing again instead of being at the mercy of Chinese companies, to boost sales to American consumers with more buying power thanks to rising wages.  EMBRACE CHANGE!!  Maybe you can mitigate some of the increased cost by cutting fat at the top layers of your organizations – those con men who grew fat and rich by ruining the lives of the people who actually did the work.  EMBRACE CHANGE!!!  Maybe you’ll survive.  If not, good riddance and adios.  Don’t let the screen door hit you on the way out.  Your workers will be fine.  The winning companies will snap them right up.

“Collusion?” Where was the FBI when we needed them?

The news that broke yesterday about the FBI launching a counter-intelligence investigation of President Trump after he fired former FBI director James Comey got me thinking.  Where was the FBI when real collusion took place that has nearly destroyed the United States? Past presidents have colluded with other world leaders for decades to transfer all of the wealth of the United States to the rest of the world through a grand scheme of globalization that transformed America’s economy into a comatose host to be fed upon by hordes of parasitic nations.

Where was the FBI after World War II when Truman colluded with European leaders to establish the World Bank and the International Monetary fund, along with signing the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, unilaterally dismantling America’s protections against predatory trade partners?  Where was the FBI when George H. W. Bush colluded with world leaders to establish the World Trade Organization, surrendering America’s trade policy?    Where was the FBI when Clinton colluded with Mexico to pass NAFTA, or when he colluded with Chinese leaders to grant China “Most Favored Nation” status?  Where was the FBI when Obama colluded with South Korea to worsen our balance of trade with them?  Or when he tried to ramrod the Trans Pacific Partnership deal down our throats?

The result of all of the above is that the United States is a shell of its former self.  We are now nearly $22 trillion in debt to the rest of the world.  Stand on a rooftop and take a look around.  Everything you see – as far as you can see – is owned by foreign governments or corporations.  You think you own your house or, if you have a mortgage and are honest with yourself, that at least your bank owns your house?  Think again.  All such debt has been bundled up and sold to foreign interests.  The same is true of virtually all U.S. property, whether “owned” by private individuals, small companies, corporations, or even your local government, state government or the federal government.  They own us lock, stock and barrel.  And with ownership comes control.  Don’t think that it doesn’t.   Incredibly, past presidents have colluded to make a communist country led by a dictator-for-life the biggest benefactor of all.  How in the hell did all of this happen?  Where was the FBI?

Where was the FBI when these past presidents colluded with the rest of the world to unleash a relentless campaign of fake news and false propaganda to brainwash and assure Americans that all of this was done in their best interest?  “Trade deficits don’t matter.”  “Everyone wins in free trade.”  “We’ll retrain you to get an even better job.”

Where was the FBI while past presidents rendered America subservient to “The New World Order?”  They never uttered a peep of protest.  They never launched an investigation.  Some have likened Trump to the “Manchurian Candidate,” an old movie about a communist attempt to get a brainwashed traitor elected president.  Given all of the above, one has to wonder who was the real “Manchurian Candidate?”  Was it Trump, or was it the string of presidents who preceded him?  Is Trump now faced with fighting an entire system that they’ve created, including the media and all of the government’s bureaucracies?  Is the FBI now part of a “Manchurian” conspiracy?  Should Trump have gone beyond Comey and fired all of the FBI’s senior leadership?

OK, I know, I’ve veered way off the road into the weeds of conspiracy theory.  But seriously, don’t you find it just a wee bit ironic that we finally have a president who is trying to extricate America from domination by world organizations and he finds himself under attack by the same FBI that was perfectly happy with America’s subjugation to foreign interests through the process of “globalization?”

Week 1 Done

The world is slowly awakening to a new reality.  It has profoundly changed.  And that may be an understatement.

Throughout the campaign, Trump’s “populist” rhetoric was dismissed by many – especially by those who stood to lose the most if globalization were dismantled – as exactly that, a play for votes or posturing designed to win concessions in the highly unlikely event that he would actually be elected president.  After all, this is the author of The Art of the Deal, a book about his tactics for winning in the business world.  He’s just  staking out his opening position.  Right?

During the transition, however, he doubled down on his rhetoric and stacked the cabinet mostly with people aligned with his positions.  The world grew a little more nervous.

Then came inauguration day and, I have to admit, that even I was taken aback by his speech.  It was as though he picked up a rhetorical two-by-four and began swinging at everyone who’d had a role in America’s trade mess and economic decline, and any who doubted his intentions or who stood in his way.

Now his first week in office is history, and what a week it was.  TPP (the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal) is dead.  NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Deal) is as good as dead.  The wall on the southern border will be built.  Tariffs on Mexican imports will pay for it.  Immigration from many Middle Eastern countries has been brought to a halt.  And, in stark contrast to Obama’s visit to Mexico in the early days of presidency to discuss renegotiating NAFTA, a humiliating experience that yielded only more Mexican tariffs on American goods, Trump has put Mexico on notice.  If you can’t accept the new reality of American tariffs on Mexican imports and an all-out effort to halt illegal immigration from your country, then too bad – we have nothing to talk about.

Some seem to get it.  Some American companies have begun hedging their bets with announcements of plans to invest in American manufacturing.  Still, the world is largely in a state of denial.  Markets around the world continue to rally on optimism over the aspects of the Trump agenda that it likes – corporate tax breaks and infrastructure spending – while shrugging off the possibility that Trump means business about imposing tariffs on imports.

The world is made up of only two economies, really.  One is the economy of the more sparsely populated countries, able to gainfully employ their workers, which is dominated by the United States.  The other is the rest of the world, badly overpopulated and heavily dependent on manufacturing for export to the aforementioned countries – again, most notably, the United States.  Tariffs on imports into the U.S. will  totally alter the host-parasite relationship that exists between the two.  Those who continue to blindly invest in the economies of the latter may be making a serious mistake.

Americans have finally gotten fed up with playing the role of enabler to ever-worsening overpopulation, using immigration as a relief valve and trade to prop it up.  Trump has hastened the day when the rest of the world must face the consequences on their own.

American Millenials Far Worse Off Than Their Parents at the Same Stage in Life

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/01/13/millennials-falling-behind-boomer-parents/96530338/

An analysis of Federal Reserve data by the advocacy group “Young Invincibles,” released on Friday, finds that the millenial generation – especially white millenials – are far worse off economically than their baby-boomer parents were at the same stage in life – in 1989.  (See the above linked article.)

• The median net worth of millenials is 56% lower.
• Median income has fallen 21% in spite of the fact that a larger percentage of millenials (approximately 50% more) have a college education compared to baby boomers.
• Home ownership is down by 3%.
• Millenials are saddled with “drastically higher” student debt.

The article observes that “the analysis fits into a broader pattern of diminished opportunity.”

Looking beyond the Federal Reserve data, millenials are clearly much worse off than their parents in many other ways:

• While most employers offered pensions in 1989, few do today.
• The cost of health care is orders-of-magnitude higher than it was in 1989.
• Good jobs were still fairly plentiful in 1989.  Not today.  The example cited in the article of a college-educated lady earning minimum wage making pizza isn’t a one-off.  It’s pretty typical.
• The millenial generation is famous for depending on their parents for housing and additional support beyond that.  It’s not a matter of immaturity among millenials.  They do it out of necessity.  In 1989, no self-respecting baby boomer would be caught dead living with his/her parents.  There was no need.

None of this should come as any surprise to those who understand the consequences of the inverse relationship between population density and per capita consumption.  It’s precisely what I predicted in Five Short Blasts, which I began writing in 1993.  Since 1989, the U.S. population has grown by approximately 25%.  But, worse than that, our effective population density has exploded by 200% since 1989 by economically erasing our borders and attempting to trade freely with badly overpopulated nations who prey on our market and bring nothing in return to the trading table but bloated labor forces, hungry to take jobs from Americans.  Diminished opportunity and worsening poverty is inescapable in those circumstances.

Sadly, most millenials are oblivious to what’s been done to them through globalization, which has been slickly packaged and sold to them as some sort of utopian state where we all live in perfect harmony together, masking the underlying truth – that their economic civil rights have been trampled by the greed of global corporations who feed on population growth to stoke their bottom lines.

 

 

 

The New Civil Rights Movement

On Friday, Democratic Representative John Lewis, a pioneer of the civil rights movement, announced that he would not attend Donald Trump’s inauguration, denouncing Trump as “not a legitimate president.”  Mr. Lewis should rightly be proud of the major role he played in the civil rights movement of the ’60s, winning equal rights not just for blacks but for all minorities, and the nation owes him a great deal of respect and a debt of gratitude.

However, while Mr. Lewis and Dr. King and others were fighting for the right of minorities to be equal members of society, a new kind of civil rights abuse – one more subtle, arguably just as insidious and even more pervasive – was in the making.  The right of all Americans to make a decent living by putting their God-given talents to work as important cogs in their own economy, was already being usurped by global organizations bent on fleecing the American economy.  Americans – all Americans – black, white, Hispanic and all the rest – have become the new slaves to a new Confederacy of plantation owners:  the New World Order and its global corporations.

The American economy has been drained of trillions and trillions of dollars.  Americans’ savings have been depleted.  Wages are down.  Pensions are gone.  Health care is unaffordable.  Our infrastructure is crumbling.  Our youth are drowning in student loan debt.  No one today feels the lash of a whip, but the threat of being cast out into an economy practically devoid of opportunity might now be just as fearsome for American workers.

Mr. Lewis and others fought the good fight and won the battle.  Though prejudice will always be with us, equal rights for all are now codified into the law of the land.  So successful has that battle been that Barack Obama was embraced by the nation, including whites, as our 44th president, not once but twice.  But it was actually the dawn of this new fight for civil rights – Americans’ economic civil rights – that swept Obama into power.  Once the economy completely collapsed in 2008, American slaves to the New World Order would stand no more.  Obama’s promise of hope and change, his promise to fix our trade problems, and his “yes we can” mantra rang true to the majority of Americans who perceived the country to be “headed in the wrong direction.”

But Obama, along with both political parties, underestimated the depth of the bitterness Americans felt for their economic plight.  They propped up the bankrupt financial and auto industries, implemented some stimulus spending and, beyond that, simply set about restoring the status quo.  The G20, the World Economic Forum, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, just to name a few, happily returned to the task of sustaining the host-parasite relationship between America and the rest of the world.  Democrats and Republicans alike shamefully became willing accomplices, grovelling at the feet of the globalists to fund their campaigns.

In the 1960s, Bob Dylan sang:

“Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call.

Don’t stand in the doorways, don’t block up the hall,

for he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled.

The battle outside ragin’

will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls,

for the times, they are a-changin.”

Now, the times are changing again. Indeed, the windows and walls of Washington have been shaken and rattled to their very foundation.  Donald Trump has been swept into power by the same forces that caused Americans to put their faith in a black, freshman senator eight years ago.  This time, however, Trump has gone further, promising to break our enslavement by these global organizations.  The new civil rights movement is on.  The fight for all Americans of all colors to make a decent living and provide opportunity for their children, whether they live in the inner cities, in the suburbs or in rural America, has begun.  As Dylan said further on in his song:

“…get out anyone if you can’t lend a hand,

for the times, they are a-changin’.”

Be proud of what you’ve accomplished, Mr. Lewis, but either get involved in helping this fledgling new civil rights movement or “get out” and make way for others who will.