Pridger vs. the New World Order

Thursday, August 4, 2005

THE CULTURE WARS

Pridger is hopelessly behind the times. He has discovered that the "F-word" is PG-13 fare, though it is not mandated as in the R-rated movies. The word is only occasionally thrown into PG-13 movies, just to make sure the younger crowd gets a modest taste of "adult language" during their formative years.

Children's programming these days has also dipped pretty low. It is rife with bad taste and just plain cheap, crummy, content. Cartoon characters are increasingly freakishly "multi-cultural" and culturally "diversified" icons, with characters with names such as "Butthead" and the like. All harmless stuff, of course.

Pridger's granddaughter, like most other children, watches a lot of this "juvenile junk food for the mind." It's unavoidable -- that's how our children get most of their education these days. The TV is the baby-sitter and the "University of the Home." And to be without one would be considered cruel and inhumane deprivation, bordering on criminal child abuse.

Pridger, like other parents and grandparents, tolerates it, however distasteful, and avoids looking on, hoping that the lessons learned will not be too harmful to the youngsters. But the other day an "educational short" on one of the kiddy channels his grandchild was watching caught Pridger's attention.

The fantasy cartoon fare was temporarily interrupted for a brief cartoon lesson on flatulence. They came right out and called it "farting." Farting! Now ordinarily (prude that he is), Pridger wouldn't print that word  -- he ordinarily avoids it as he does the other "F-word." But he'll let it all hang out here like the kiddy channel did. After all, Pridger assumes most of his readers are well inoculated adults. But back when Pridger was growing up, the polite terms used were "passing gas" or "breaking wind" (and sometimes a person "pooted"). The word "fart" was considered indelicate, coarse, and vulgar. At best, it was "male talk," never used in "polite company".

Anyway, in the educational cartoon, the kids were taught that "farting" is perfectly natural and that everybody does it, and that farting is okay. In fact, it's good. It went into the biological causes of gas production in the intestinal system, using scientific terminology, pictures, and diagrams. And it said that it's okay to talk about farting, since it is such a natural thing that everybody does several times a day. No need to try to hide or suppress it, or to spare anybody either the sound or the gaseous aroma. There was no mention that it was ever considered more polite to say "passing gas" or "breaking wind" rather than farting. Apparently that short of delicate prudery went out when the Supreme Court presumed to have discovered what "freedom of expression" was, some time back in the sixties or seventies.

The final scene showed a boy and girl sitting together on a couch, sheepishly grinning at each other, and apparently farting. There were, of course, appropriate sound effects added to the film for clarity. The final message was, whenever you feel a little gas buildup, don't hold it in, "Let 'er rip!" This is educational programming for our youngest children. No need for prudery these days.

Pridger wonders if there are similar educational cartoons being broadcast to our children on the subjects of pissing, shitting, or ass wiping.

Public radio is infected too, of course. The Prairie Home Companion now revels in cheap sexual innuendo and "off color" jokes. Pridger recently heard an old country joke he'd heard fifty years ago from a great uncle. The one dealing with a little boy and the school teacher in class. Prompted by the teacher, the boy told the class of a recent experience. A severe trauma had been dealt to the hind-most quarters of some animal. The boy used the indelicate term "ass" when describing the event. "Rectum, Billy, rectum!" the embarrassed teacher corrected. The punch line came when the child answered, "Wrecked 'im hell! It killed him!"

Pridger may as well tell another "ass" joke he heard fifty years ago from the same great uncle. Maybe the Prairie Home Companion will pick it up and favor the listening public with it.

A farmer and his small son were lumbering along in a farm wagon behind a big old horse. The horse lifted its tail and its anus protruded and appeared to turn a little inside out. Then, of course, it proceeded to expel a few "road apples."

"What's that?" the boy inquired of his father.

"Hush up son. That's just nature," the farmer replied.

A few days later, when the boy was in school, the subject of nature came up. The teacher was about to tell the children a little about the wonders of the natural world. Before she began, she asked if any of the children could tell her what nature was. Little Billy eagerly raised his hand and was called upon by the teacher.

"Billy, what is nature?" she asked.

Much to the teacher's embarrassment, and prompting suppressed giggles and laughter among his classmates, Billy answered, "Nature is a horse's ass turned inside out."

These would hardly seem appropriate jokes on a PBS radio program which was once the very epitome of wholesome family entertainment. But times have changed.

John Q. Pridger
4 August, 2005. Last post of the year.

Tuesday, August 2, 2005

THE EAGLE AND THE DRAGON

Only time will tell whether the Chinese Dragon or the American Eagle will predominate as the world's greatest economic and military superpower. But the if numbers mean anything, China will win hands down.

Already our trusty mis-representatives in Washington have handed our Eagle's laundry over to China's Dragon, and the feathers of some of our valiant leaders seem to be getting a little ruffled in the wash.

The "Made in China" label is already much more common in America than "Made in America." This is not only an amazing development, but evidence that somebody hasn't been minding the store. Only recently has some of our national leadership begun wringing their hands a little, praying that China will devalue and float its currency and give us a chance to compete in the New World Order -- the one that was supposedly "Made in America" and supposed to serve American interests.

The biggest players are the ones who design the game and make the rules, and we have been both arrogant enough, and blind enough, to think that we are, and will always be, the biggest boy on the global stage.

Of the three currency notes depicted below, only the middle one is not "FUNNY MONEY"
"...There is a Chinese saying, 'Either the East Wind prevails over the West Wind or the West Wind prevails over the East Wind...'" (Chairman Mao)	The "Made in China" Dollar cartoon at left, by Etta Hulme, published and © 2005, by Fort Worth Star-Telegram, aptly illustrates our current  and festering self-inflicted national dilemma -- a dependence that goes far beyond trade alone. The 100 Yuan note, with the face of the late Chairman, Moa Tse Tung, father of Communist China as well as the "modern" China, is the currency that has our leaders scratching their heads, fretting, and praying about the predicament they have managed to get us into. Ironically we say the Yuan is under-valued. We want "cheaper dollars" in terms of THE Yuan.
The Clinton Three Dollar bill, © 1993, by Slick Times, is quite indicative of the genesis of the problems we presently face with regard to China. Though the machinery of national economic suicide was already firmly in place when Clinton ascended to office, he went the extra mile to help put China on fast-track to both economic and military superpower status.

"The United States has set up hundreds of bases in many countries all over the world. China's territory of Taiwan, Lebanon and all military bases of the United States on foreign soil are so many nooses round the neck of U.S. imperialism. The nooses have been fashioned by the Americans themselves and by nobody else, and it is they themselves who have put these nooses round their own necks, handing the ends of the ropes to the Chinese people, the peoples of the Arab countries and all the peoples of the world who love peace and oppose aggression. The longer the U.S. aggressors remain in those places, the tighter the nooses round their necks will become.
     "...Riding roughshod everywhere, U.S. imperialism has made itself the enemy of the people of the world and has increasingly isolated itself. Those who refuse to be enslaved will never be cowed by the atom bombs and hydrogen bombs in the hands of the U.S. imperialists. The raging tide of the people of the world against the U.S. aggressors is irresistible. Their struggle will assuredly win still greater victories.
    "If the U.S. monopoly capitalist groups persist in pushing their policies of aggression and war, the day is bound to come when they will be hanged by the people of the whole world. The same fate awaits the accomplices of the United States." (Chairman Mao's Little Red Book of Quotations)

    
The warning was clear -- so, what have our sterling leaders done? Continued to make enemies, of course -- and tie even more nooses around our national neck. They have even gone the extra mile and placed our economic future in the hands of Chairman Mao's successors (who now claim to be our friends). What a brilliant national strategy! Our leaders seem complacent, effectively saying, "Why, that warning is fifty years old -- before the Chinese awakened and took to the capitalist road -- surly the new Chinese leadership will play our game by our rules now!

What our illustrious brain trust in Washington, and their corporate manipulators, apparently overlooked in their greedy quest to capture the world was the fact that the international trade game is ultimately very much a numbers game. And it's a game where brains and people count even more than money does. It may yet dawn on them that, by any measure, China has more brains and people than we do -- a whole lot more! In population alone the Chinese have us beaten by at least four to one. When it comes down to brass tacks (whether it be trade or war), we haven't got a "Chinaman's chance," as the saying used to go.

It is also significant to note that Red China, in spite of having the largest standing army in the world, has never played the role of international aggressor, and has never attacked, or attempted to subjugate, any nation except those, such as Tibet, on its national defensive parameter.

While the shepherds of Wall Street were busily developing China into "America's" primary production machine, thinking all the while that China would merely be a commercial vassal to the interests of America capitalists (and politically unwilling to offend the world's only superpower), the Chinese leadership undoubtedly have had other ideas. Unlike the American leadership (unless Pridger is sorely mistaken), China does not share in our national death wish. China is not awakening and modernizing in order to become a commercial colony of the United States. No way! The United States, as the primary repository for Chinese production, is unwittingly becoming (nay, it has already become!), a commercial dependency of China.

The vast internal markets of China, that American commercial interests have been salivating over for a generation, are going to continue to be Chinese -- not the happy hunting grounds envisioned by American capitalists. Oh, China will allow the Western Capitalists their small share, provided America doesn't balk when Taiwan is finally subjugated. But the lion's share is going to China, as is only right.

Ironically, as of now American consumers and taxpayers are the largest financiers of what is still the "Communist" Chinese government, its growing industrial base, and the Red Army. Why would China want to change that unnecessarily? The situation suits them admirably well, and they can afford to give a little! And by giving a little, they suck us further into a crippling dependence on them. If things ever go sour (and they probably will), China still "commands" it's own economy.

If the China trade were to be curtailed tomorrow, Wall Street would crash so resoundingly that it would make the crash of 1929 seem like a Sunday school picnic. WalMart would be in serious trouble. Where would we get our stuff then? Mexico? Central America? Deprived of the American market, China would also be seriously crippled, but not nearly as crippled as most experts think. It need only turn its production inward to become an even greater nation. It need only take a lesson from American economic history.

Ironically, it isn't Red China running in the red, it's the United States of America! China has been too smart to become another Soviet Russia. Communist China is running in the black, and the bastion of capitalistic imperialism is running in embarrassing oceans of red ink. America looses on every trade (each of which is a transfer of American dollars to China), and China gains all the profit (with enough going to Wall Street, to keep everybody who counts happy). In fact, China is undoubtedly running the largest national profit of any nation in the history of nation states, and we have an unimaginably large trade and current accounts deficit with them to prove it.

The Chinese don't have to tax their people to death to deliver government goods and services, but we do! Naturally, China already has national health care -- something Americans only dream of and our leadership considers as "too expensive." Yet, American consumers are eagerly, if unwittingly, helping to underwrite China's entire system.

Our policy-makers have eagerly managed to make America into a commercial dependency of China. China makes so much of what we conspicuously consuming Americans need for basic economic survival, and owns so much of our obscene national debt, that we find ourselves in a fix that will be much more difficult to get out of than it was to get into.

The red Chinese yuan has trumped the American greenback dollar. Our leaders pray, and even demand, that China reform it's monetary system and revalue it's currency upward, in order to erode its own trade advantages. We Americans are the only ones stupid enough to play the game that way! Even before China entered the picture, we had already repudiated every natural national economic advantage that we once had, along with effectively repudiating our own Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and the wise guidelines handed down by our own national founders -- not to mention the lessons of the first two hundred years of our own history.

It is abundantly ironic that despite its growing international stature, trade, and national wealth, China has continued to maintain firm control over its national currency. We, on the other hand, having provided the world with its reserve currency, have all but totally lost control over our own national currency. The dollar, as the international reserve currency, belongs to the world rather than the American people. Congress, as the representative of the people, has absolutely no control over our national currency. The Chairman of the Fed, and the Federal Reserve Board itself, only has the power to raise and lower interest rates as a means of manipulating the cost of national and international credit. But this is by no means real "control" over the money supply.

The Chinese Dragon is smart enough to appease and humor the American Eagle a little bit -- just enough to keep him off balance and watch him drop an arrow or olive branch or two. China has pumped the Yuan up by about 2% in relation to the dollar to keep the Eagle happy. But that doesn't come close to the 40% our leaders think it is under-valued. But even if the Dragon totally caved in to the Eagle's demands, it wouldn't help the Eagle climb out of the deep economic hole it has dug for itself. China doesn't want to buy any of our goods, save for our profitable businesses and the few things we have available at fire-sale prices, such as soy beans and scrap iron.

The only areas where America continues to hold supreme (at least for the time being), are such things as global military mobility, weapons of mass destruction, and a still insatiable consumer marketplace -- a marketplace that increasingly depends on credit and the good will of others elsewhere to finance its national vices.

Oh yes, our agricultural exports are still pretty impressive, until you consider the prices that we get for them. America also reigns supreme in public and private debt, number of casinos, and the number of incarcerated citizens in prisons and jails. We are still a net exporter of food grains, scrap metal, trash, garbage, entertainment media, and pornography.

Speaking of entertainment and printed media, "both" Chinas have always flouted our copyright laws and international "intellectual property rights" agreements. That, of course, is another area of contention between us and them. We're hoping, praying, and demanding reform. But China merely says, "Okay, we'll look into this very serious matter." In the mean time, if you want to get a copy of the latest Hollywood movie, even before they are released to the public, just go to China or Taiwan. A buck will procure it.

As a matter of American trade policy, the task of supplying our huge consumer marketplace has been handed over (almost lock, stock, and barrel), to the foreign competition. We continue to consume and waste as if there were no tomorrow, and the foreign competition (which, of course, includes many so-called American corporations), manufactures and delivers the goods -- at prices that consumers find irresistibly attractive at the Wal-Mart checkout counter.

The hapless American consumer, of course, can be depended upon to vote with his pocketbook, always effectively voting for more dependency on foreign products, more dependency on China, and ultimately subservience to a system totally alien to the national policies that once made his the most productive and affluent society the world had ever known.

Until the advent of the "new international economic order," the American economy had operated at a profit. That's because the wealth of America had sprung from its own rich soils, mines, and factories, through the agency of productive American labor. Our wealth was "Made in America," and the profits produced the most broad-based national prosperity the world had ever known. And that wealth was shared with the world through mutually beneficial trade and aid. We shared our national profits and prosperity with the world as capital shared its profits with labor. We did not expend and spend our capital as we do now, we spent only our profits. Today that situation has been reversed, and we consume our capital while depending on international credit to maintain our national living standards -- a situation that is killing the goose that once laid the golden eggs.

To our policy-makers, the ideal world is one in which everybody in the world makes everything everybody else in the world needs, and all of these trade goods are traded back and forth, with the profits from every single trade transaction duly turning up on Wall Street and the other major stock exchanges -- so that everybody that counts gets their piece of the action. But in the end, it's all an impossible capitalist pipe-dream, fatally flawed at every juncture of planning and execution. Nothing will work as planned in the long term -- unless, of course, the "real" plan is actually something very different than what has been made public.

The very nemesis  of industrialization and capitalism has been the problem of overproduction. Yet the drive for more productive "efficiency" has been unending and unrelenting. Not even our spectacular levels of over-consumption and waste have been able to keep up with increased production. Yet, half the world's population is alleged to be hungry, and people continue to starve in spite of it.

There has never been an industrial balance achieved, nor an equitable distribution of wealth or food (in the United States, much less the world), because greed has always dictated that none be sought. More efficiency and profitability are the only things considered. The system thrives on imbalance, mal-distribution, and national wage and living standards differentials.

It was over-capacity and over-production that has traditionally and persistently forced unwanted trade on reluctant markets. And failing to successfully force trade through peaceful persuasion, economic coercion, or military intimidation, military force has routinely been applied. The colonial system, followed by capitalistic imperialism, have been integral parts of this historical process. Ultimately, overtly destructive war has been the only viable answer and solution to industrial overproduction. Massive amounts of human production must literally be blown up and destroyed. And that holds as true today as at any time in human history. We still have not managed to get things right, simply because the wrong people are always in charge -- those who worship at the altar of Mammon.

Lacking balance and sustainability, which could only be made possible by enlightened planning in the industrial world, only war can "set things right again" for brief periods.

War is easy to come by. Who would have thought a hundred years ago that all the wars of the twentieth century would have come about in a world of plenty with all the requisites for peace and happiness in the human community? Who would have thought 60 years ago that half the world would still be hungry in the year 2005? Who would have thought that a rag-tag hand-full of Islamic malcontents could embarrass the United States, blacken our Eagle's eye, and plunge it and the world into an open-ended global crusade against a phantom enemy abstractly called "terrorism" -- the very epitome of "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace"?  Who would have thought that American men and women would be fighting and dying today (for freedom and democracy), in Iraq? Freedom and democracy in Iraq!!!???

The de-industrialization of America, through globalization and international economic interdependence, has undoubtedly solved a little of the over-production problem in the United States. But it hasn't yet come close to solving the problem of America's dependence on, and appetite for, over-consumption and mega-waste. Thus, the over-production continues and expands elsewhere. The only difference is that now we have to buy almost everything we consume from the foreign competition, where once we made everything we needed ourselves.

And when we made everything that we needed, and ran in the black, we were actually able to help others; through providing an example to other nations; mutually beneficial trade with other nations; and through genuine charitable generosity. Though we never really managed to get it all right, at least we became a great, powerful, and prosperous nation (with a genuinely broad-based prosperity).

Our leaders would have us think that with China supplying the American consumer market, that the time will soon come when we can get back into the the industrial production game by supplying the Chinese market (and Mexico's, and Central America's, etc.) with all the consumer goods it is now sending to us. But this is totally crazy on the face of it. China will provide for its own people. And we had better re-learn how to provide for our own too. But we aren't even close to any such idea.

The recently passed CAFTA deal is evidence that we are determined to remain on the fast-track toward an impossibly flawed dream. Those Central American countries covered by the agreement may not realize it, but they are much better off today than they will be after ten years of CAFTA. American corporations will flood into their countries and their governments will loose control of their economies, and the ability to look to the welfare of their own peoples. Cheap American grain will destroy their agricultural base, and before long their own farmers will be totally undermined. And the production that will result from American investments will be diverted to others, elsewhere, along with the profits. NAFTA apparently didn't teach anybody anything.

Thanks to NAFTA, Mexico is in a worse mess today than it was thirty years ago, and the best hope of most Mexicans appears to be to get out of their country and into the United States where there are still some economic opportunities and public economic parachutes for the ragged and hungry. The economic opportunities are still here for Mexicans and other immigrants because the former "working under-class" has been on paid vacation, or incarcerated, for decades -- and most of the last of the productive generation are comfortably retired. And if a job doesn't provide paid health care and retirement benefits (as is the case with most of the new jobs being created in the United States), most native born Americans are afraid to commit to it, leaving ample opportunity for new generations of immigrants.

This situation isn't about to be fixed soon, of course. We're still barreling down the the wrong track and into wrong tunnel, striving to make it to the light our leaders tell us is just ahead. 

Monday, August 1, 2005

DO WE OFFER THE WORLD FREEDOM OR BONDAGE?

While we flex our military muscle and expend American lives along with much treasure, spinning our wheels in Iraq and Afghanistan (and have troops deployed in about a 150 other nations), the freedom and democracy we are promising the people of those far-off alien lands, slips away by carefully calculated degrees back home in what was once the land of the free and home of the brave.

Oh, we still fancy that we are the freest people in the world, but the federal government maintains a firm financial tether to each and every gainfully employed American, most of whom labor almost four months out of every year to satisfy the insatiable Internal Revenue Service. This still isn't enough, by any stretch of the imagination. So the federal government additionally plunges every man, woman, and child into deeper and deeper debt, effectively mortgaging their nation and their future.

In addition to this indirect wage and debt slavery, Americans are regulated to death, at the federal, state, and local level. Americans, in spite of their supposed traditions of liberty, are perhaps the most highly regulated people on the planet. Practically everything we do is against some law -- unless we get the appropriate licenses or permits.

For example, take a simple "right" that we all take for granted -- the right to travel and be mobile. Industrial "modernity" has dictated that the automobile has become a literal necessity of life for most Americans (except, perhaps, in the few remaining urban areas with good public transportation facilities). And Americans love their cars. Without them they would be crippled.

The whole national infrastructure has been rearranged for the convenience of motorists. The automobile spells freedom, but it is freedom with multiple tethers. Without a motor vehicle, most people couldn't get to the store, to friends' houses, to restaurants, to work, or out to the park. This brand of freedom comes with a high price tag. Both automobiles and drivers must be licensed by the state, or travel (the only kind of travel available to most people), is illegal. Most states mandate automobile liability insurance in order to operate a motor vehicle legally too, and this is a major expense. These things all cost money -- and these things constitute some of the costs of being "free" to travel. The additional taxes associated with operating a motor vehicle on the nation's highways are also costs of that freedom. Every gallon of gas purchased is highly taxed at the federal and state level.

And there are more costs that are not directly denominated in money terms. There is a regulatory regimen associated with with driving and travel on the public highways that keep everybody locked into a tightening noose, subject to police control and an enforced "culture of compliance." Most of us accept these things as both the necessary and unavoidable costs of our "freedom" to get into our car and go anywhere we want.

The Amish are about the only ones who have had sense enough to avoid this coercion to a significant degree. But their freedom from a significant percentage of taxation and regulation comes at its own cost -- a cost most Americans couldn't imagine bearing, i.e., the cost of being self-reliant, and tied to home, family, and "place."

Most people simply don't see the costs of compliance to a growing regimen of regulatory restrains as creeping state tyranny -- but it most certainly is. Like the poor frog in the warming pan of water, the people have become used to it. They even rationalize the income tax as being a "necessary" cost of freedom. At the present stage, the warmth hasn't become too disconcerting. In fact, to many, it still feels good. So why shouldn't we be out trying to make the rest of the world just as warm and happy as we are?

Try opening a simple business. Say you want to use your car and be a one man taxi company. Forget it! Got hold of an old bus or nice van, and want to make a little extra money hauling friends and neighbors around? Legally? Forget it. It takes big bucks, in addition to great determination, to overcome the regulatory hurdles. You have to comply with the handicapped access laws, among many other things. Free enterprise for the common man? It's gone (except in the underground economy, of course, which is illegal by definition). Freedom in America today is mainly engineered for corporations with access to credit on a large scale, not people.

That's why most start-up business fail within a year or two. "Under-capitalization" is usually the cause given -- the level of debt required for startup is usually out of all proportion to the potential profits during the critical first years. Starting on a shoe-string, is possible in many businesses, but filing and regulatory requirements are sufficiently discouraging to most people to prevent success.

CAFTA PASSED!

It's incredible, after our continuing experience with NAFTA, that our trusty legislators have passed the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Our NAFTA experience should have been sobering even to our men in high places, but they obviously couldn't care less about the people they supposedly represent. It just goes to show that Pridger's reference to that distinguished group as "mis-representatives" still holds true, though the vote was close. The body itself does not represent the American people.

We have been further betrayed on behalf of capital interests who profit from American job losses and the exploitation of Third World labor. These capitalists position themselves to profit from every free trade transaction. It matters not who looses, they still gain. And though the path they are leading us down is certain to lead to more pain and suffering of large populations, they fully intend to be positioned to profit from that too.

The New World Order means corporate citizenship and servitude for everybody in the world, and total demise of any working form of national or local self-reliance and independence.

Our corporately controlled grain production will now destroy the lives and occupations of Central American farmers. The Central American countries involved will be "forced" to purchase American grain. Why forced? Because it will be priced under local market value, and the law of free markets will step in and step on the little farmers who have heretofore been able to feed themselves and provide for the local markets.

Isn't this better? Well, it's better for the international free traders that profit from every trade transaction whether either American farmers or Central American farmers are able to make a living. It isn't better for the farmers, and in the end, although grains might be at least marginally cheaper in the local marketplace, the wherewithal for a viable economy has been destroyed, and whole nations (both north and south), become dependencies of international capital interests and forever subject to corporate manipulation of their lives -- both national and individual.

As for the bonanza of new factories and new jobs that will inevitably be forthcoming in the effected Central American nations, their production, and the the lion's share of the wealth they produce will be for others, elsewhere. This is the real story of the New World Order. It isn't about empowering the local population and producing more economically independent nations in Central America. It's about making them dependent on large transnational corporations. Ultimately, it's about making everybody in the world beholden to and an employee-serf to corporate masters.

Sure, more money will probably show up on Wall Street and GDP may appear to be enhanced (even as the national debt and trade deficits soar), and the owners of corporate stocks will be happy, but there are so many associated costs that do not show up on Wall Street, or GDP that the net result is broad-based impoverishment of whole peoples -- not the least of which are the American people themselves. That is, the working class of peoples. Those who make their living or fortunes on the backs of others, here and elsewhere, will be happy. And it is those "fortunate few" that benefit from free trade and globalization.

American labor is still being told that all it has to do is to get busy and sell more to others elsewhere, as others elsewhere sell to us. (If they can do it, so can we!) But we are still handicapped by our relatively high living standards and expectations for the good life. Once we get past those hangups, perhaps we can compete in the new global market our mis-representatives are facilitating, along with the the less fortunate of the world. Competing doesn't mean upgrading, however, it means the opposite.

Impoverished markets are now being forced to produce for what is still a relatively "high" American market. And the "high" American market (or the labor force in that market), is being told that it's only salvation is to gain the ability to sell its waning production into the lower markets of the world. This is to ignore basic economic law. It simply can't, and won't, work that way. The whole system is self-destructive, and nobody in the halls of political power seems to care as long as international capital interests are promised perpetual profits.

The fact is, America presently has absolutely nothing to offer those lower markets. The only things that we are producing efficiently today (from an international market standpoint), are agricultural commodities, scrape, and waste that others, elsewhere, can still recycle and make into something of value. We are able to compete in agricultural commodities because the American farmer, as a numerically viable class, has already been dealt out of the equation, and corporate scale farming, which is literally mining, poisoning, and exporting our top-soil, can produce cheap commodities due strictly to the so-called economies of scale. The prices are manipulated to destroy local farmers and local economies.

But our corporate agribusiness combine is part and parcel of a larger international conspiracy to bring all of the world's agricultural production under the corporate control of the major capitalist interests. The American farmer was intentionally destroyed by low "global commodity prices," designed to sell into an impoverished world -- and all the other farmers of the world are now to be destroyed by the dumping of American agricultural products abroad. Soon, even the seeds and the genetic make-up of the cash crop plants themselves will be the exclusive "intellectual property" of an exclusive few agribusiness combines.

Agricultural exports have always been held out as the "salvation of the American farmer" by the Pied Pipers of the nation. And the few farmers left, that aren't on corporate payrolls, are obliged to hope and pray for more free trade agreements to pull them out of the hole. But free trade has been the farmers' death. Whenever American agricultural commodity prices turn up a little, and give farmers hope, they are brought down again by the self-same traders that have wooed them into near extinction. All the traders do is import more from abroad to bring prices down again. After all, this is the global economy, and the traders have gained control of every major field of production everywhere.     

Friday, July 29, 2005

FIRST THE WTO, NOW WCO!

First the World Trade Organization (WTO), and now the World Customs Organization (WCO)! Who says world government isn't on the way? In fact, it's already here, though as yet unannounced. Naturally, if you have a World government, you've got to have a World custom service.

Globalism, i.e., the New World Order (with the United Nations riding herd as the official regulatory authority), dictates that all nations "shall subvert their sovereign right" to trade strictly according to the interests of their respective peoples. No, there's no World Dictator, and no international or national official who will admit that world government is the goal, it is being made to happen through what Pridger calls "tyranny creep" in the guise of the new international economic order, free global markets, and free trade.

In the end we have one large global organism that is just as political as it is commercial -- which must be regulated and policed as a single being. There is no "consent of the governed," no public accountability, no effective opposition, no checks and balances, and the "official international leadership" and "national representation" at the head of the UN do not comprise the real leadership. The WTO, for example, is merely the arbitration society that sets and enforces the rules according to the "free trade" dictates of invisible, behind the scenes, international plutocrats. The visible machinery of international governance do not decide trade, or any other, policy issues. The visible governance merely debates issues put before it, and smooths our regulatory policy issues. The actual issues and goals are worked out and set in motion two or three levels behind the scenes. These are formulated behind closed doors in utmost secrecy, and in the private board rooms of multi-national corporations, as they mold and fashion policy and global markets to best serve their bottom lines. 

Pridger seldom bothers with the perplexities of the machinery that now rules the world -- the international "One World Government" conspiracy. Keeping up on the subject is far too depressing for those of us who insist on keeping a positive outlook and healthy life style. So Pridger wasn't even aware that there was a WCO. But, of course, he's not surprised. First word of it came Pridger's way through the July, 2005 issue of Marine Log magazine, in an article entitled "Bigger box ships: Bigger security challenges?":

...Last month, United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Robert C. Bonner submitted the United States' "Declaration of Intent" to adopt the World Customs Organization (WCO) "Framework of Standards to Secure and Facilitate Global Trade." The United States was among the first nations to join the WCO's newly adopted strategy to secure global trade.

The Framework represents the WCO's effort to secure supply chains through the world, while allowing trade to move faster, smoother, and more predictably. An important element is the use of approaches such as the U.S. C-TPAT (Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism), which essentially trade streamlined handling of cargo in exchange for cooperation and provision of required information.

"The adoption by the WCO of the Framework of Standards represents a global response to the threat of terrorism. The Framework makes safer, worldwide trade a reality," Bonner stated. "Its implementation by customs authorities around the world will revolutionize the security of trade, dealing a blow to international terrorists."

Bonner joined the Customs Director Generals of the European Union, Japan, Australia, and Canada in announcing their commitment to provide aid to developing nations that exhibit the political will to implement the security Framework bu that require assistance to do so. Bonner also announced the creation of the Capacity Building Division with the CBP Office of International Affairs to help developing nations implement the WCO Framework.

In dealing another blow to international terrorists, all nations must suffer another blow to their national sovereignty, and the developed nations must shoulder even higher trade costs of international free trade.

The "Framework of Standards" is another far-reaching response to international terrorism with what is certain to be a huge price tag and likely, in the end, to be effective against terrorism. Terrorists have not yet put a big bomb in a shipping containers, but naturally they've been thinking about it, since everybody is running scared over the possibility.

This, in itself, is another major victory for international terrorism! When one thinks that the world of "legitimate" national governments, is being forced to live in perpetual paranoia, what else could it be considered. We are being forced to jump through myriads of regulatory and security hoops, at great and increasing cost, at the behest of what started out as a little rag-tag group of angry Islamic extremists unhappy with American Middle-East policy. Considering, as Pridger does, the fact that U.S. Middle East policy was both of long genesis and unjust on the face of it to begin with, and that the terrorist leaders themselves were initially armed and trained by our own government, the ironies become as clear as they are heartbreaking.  

As for the global economy, there isn't going to be any such thing as "securing of international trade" from the standpoint of terrorism -- and the streamlining of the "handling of cargo in exchange for cooperation and provision of required information" is, or ought to be, an international security joke. But nobody is laughing, and this business must be taken very seriously.

Let's just look at the ships that are now carrying about 95% of America's share its foreign trade -- a trade that has literally been encouraged and allowed to become America's "critical" economic life line (Not through necessity, mind you, but as a matter of national economic policy!).

Each of the new generation of container ships that are calling at our major seaports are the seagoing equivalent of one of the ITC Twin Towers. Only an idiot would consider that a 110 story office building in the heart of a city, filled daily with ten thousand workers, was a good idea. A ship so large that "security is a literal impossibility" is not a good thing to have steaming into the docks of our major port cities from all over a terrorist infested world! But that's where we're at, and it isn't going to change. When you get too many of your eggs in too few baskets (though there nonetheless, are too many of those big baskets), you have to go to extraordinary lengths to protect those baskets -- even if it is futile in the final analysis.

Like the the Twin Towers, each and every one of the mammoth container ships now calling regularly at the world's major ports, is a pristine example of human folly, and the arrogance of "modernity's" penchant for outdoing itself -- simply because it can be done, and generates abundant profits for an exclusive few. Like their tanker counterparts, each big container ship is a major maritime disaster waiting to happen, with or without the assistance of terrorists. With the terrorist threat weighted into the potential for disaster, you have a cost-benefit ratio that ought to lead to a radical rethinking and change in basic trade policy goals. But that won't happen because we have too much invested in that policy to consider rational alternatives.

Todays largest container ships are upwards of a thousand foot long, with a capacity of 8,750 TEUs (container units). China is about to have four new ones with a 9,600 TEU capacity, and China has four ships with a 10,000 TEU capacity on order for 2008 delivery.  A 12,000 TEU containership is on the drawing board at Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries shipyards.

A 8,750 standard container ship can be described as being "the size of three American football fields."  As for security, imagine that if the containers from one such vessel were lined up end to end, they would stretch for 33 miles!

...Now think about that as a 33 mile line of containers awaiting security inspection, and you get some idea of the enormity of the security challenge posed by containerized cargoes...

The challenge isn't going to be met in anything like a comprehensive and meaningful way. And thinking in terms of a nuclear terrorist threat alone, "...the radiation portal monitors being deployed at ports by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will likely be unable to detect kilogram quantities of highly enriched uranium (HEU), described... as 'the radioactive material that could be used most easily by terrorists to construct a homemade nuclear weapon capable of killing tens of thousands of Americans.'" And, whether or not this is true, "...about all that is undisputed is that current detection systems generate a huge number of false alarms triggered by innocent shipments of such things as ceramic tiles..." How many false alarms are needed before alarms begin to be ignored in the real, rush, rush, move-that-cargo! workaday world at a modern container terminal?

So the WCO and United States Customs and Border Protection Commission's Framework of Standards to Secure and Facilitate Global Trade envision "streamlined handling of cargo in exchange for cooperation and provision of required information." In other words, rather that seriously expecting real inspections of containers (which would quickly un-streamline cargo operations), the process will be expedited by taking the word of foreign customs authorities who are members of the WCO and FSSFGT (figure out that acronym). Some security solution!

Those ten thousand boxes were loaded all over the countryside in China, Korea, Japan and who knows where else, all over the world -- including terrorist infested nations? (And that's just a single ship load!) Customs agents are supposed to oversee all of that? And how many can tell a terrorist with a custom's uniform on from a real customs officer?

Uniformed officials, including Customs, Immigration, and Coast Guard, are far too important and arrogant to submit to port or ship security ID checks and searches when they arrive on the scene. United States Customs and Coast Guard officials, in their new role as anti-terrorist Homeland Security police, routinely come aboard ship like Gangbusters, black-clad and armed to the teeth -- themselves appearing as menacing as terrorists. Who's going to protest when a group of terrorists don Customs and Coast Guard black and charge aboard -- or come around loading terminals to "inspect" and certify cargo containers?

In Pridger's opinion, the terrorists can get explosives into a box, somewhere, some time, no matter how secure we think we've made a totally unmanageable marine transportation system.

Each giant ship, by the way, is likely to be manned by a crew of only about 20 men and women. So, on board security is an absolute impossibility, even if it were possible to look into any of the containers -- most of which are totally inaccessible once loaded aboard. Shipboard security is, and will continue to be, largely a paper affair, supplemented by the installation locks on ever access and crew escape door on the ship, making them potential death traps for the crew.

The WCO is of interest for another reason. When our nation was still a nation of relatively "limited" government, it was the Customs Service that collected government revenues, not the Internal Revenue Service. In that former era international trade was a profitable business, not only for the merchants and traders, but the nation itself, and for the government. Tariffs and Customs duties (taxes on imports), paid almost 100% of the costs of the federal government. The people were free. That is, they were constitutionally free from direct taxation by the federal government.

National Customs Services are historically major tax collectors for their respective governments. Under global free trade policies and WTO guidelines, however, tariffs and duties are supposed to become an anachronism as a means of procuring revenue -- the tariff is considered protectionist and thus anti-free market. But how long will it be before the World Customs Organization becomes the taxing and revenue raising authority of the United Nations? The costs of policing global trade are becoming an extraordinarily large "unplanned?" factor of globalism. The WCO would be the natural means of collecting the necessary revenue, and taxing authority for the UN has been repeatedly proposed and has been on the table for discussion for a long time already. It's inevitable, and the War on Terror is going to be the thing that makes it seem not only necessary, but "desirable."

Free global trade isn't free -- it's extraordinarily costly. 

Thursday, July 28, 2005

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ORGANIZED LABOR?

The problems facing organized labor today can be traced directly to federal trade policy, and the government's bald-faced abandonment of American industrial and economic independence, and the American industrial worker, in favor of the foreign competition. Free trade policy, and globalism, was the death knell of organized labor as a "productive" force.

Organized labor had its rightful genesis in the mines, factories, mills, and construction sites where real, tangible, wealth was produced. It was the labor that mined the iron ore and coal, smelted the steel, built the automobiles, ships, trains and rails, and sky scrapers, and almost everything else the nation once produced in great profusion -- these were the heart and soul of organized labor -- production on a large scale.

The great industrialists who organized the grand enterprises of the modern industrial state, and the capitalists behind them, had great visions of unbounded wealth creation. But their vision was of wealth for the few owners of capital, and financiers behind their endeavors, rather than for the labor that actually accomplished the production.

Once organized labor was fully divorced from earlier communist-socialist models (whose aims were the destruction of the capitalist system rather than the welfare of workers), an uneasy, and sometimes contentious, balance developed between capital and labor, whereby both experienced the unprecedented prosperity of the mid twentieth century and beyond.

The industrial service sector was also part of this wealth creation machinery, and the transportation industries that became the foundation of the Teamsters, maritime unions, etc., were necessary to distribute the products to make the wealth broadly available business and to the broader public.

It was the mission of organized labor to insure that the rewards embodied in these vast wealth creation processes -- this awesome industrial machine that America once was -- was shared with the workers who labored to produce it. And organized labor did the job admirably well, producing, in America, the most broad-based prosperity the world had ever known.

Living standards nation-wide rose on the tails of organized labor. "Union scale" became the benchmark of the industrial wage, and unionism was a tide that lifted all boats. Union scale was a factor that had to be considered in hiring labor in every shop and in every industry in the nation, whether unionized or not, including service industries and the public sector. When unions were strong, every non-union employer of every nature had to compete by offering employees at least a near approximation of the pay and benefits that union employees received.

Many companies paid their workers well, and gave good fringe benefits to keep the unions out. But the employees of these companies owed a lot to organized labor without realizing it.

Organized labor was not a drain on the profits of the nation's industries, they helped make the profits possible, simply by producing or otherwise delivering the goods that were the very basis of national wealth.

The system wasn't perfect, of course, but it worked. Unions balked at automation, and attempted to maintain redundant jobs by featherbedding. This, however, was perfectly natural. To the capitalist, the perfect production process would eliminate human labor entirely, so the profits would go strictly to the owners of capital. The purpose of organized labor was to keep as many workers employed as possible, and at decent wages with commensurate fringe benefits. Common sense says the ideal situation would provide all men the opportunity for well paid, constructive, employment, and that the purpose of industrial production in the first place ought to be to make life better for the largest number of people possible -- not just an exclusive few. Somewhere there is an elusive, ever-shifting, balance that should be maintained, but capital is not about to find that balance on its own. The coercion of organized labor is required to balance the scale.

Today, however, productive labor is being dealt out of the economic equation in America -- abandoned by the government which is supposed to be "of the people, by the people, and for the people."

Because capital has been "deregulated," and given official license to flee the national flag, organized labor is in precipitous disarray and decline. As a result, now the primary hope of organized labor is in organizing service industries, civil service, and other public sector employees. While there's certainly nothing wrong with organized labor working to improve the lot of service and public sector workers, the heart and soul of organized labor was in "production" -- that is, the kind of labor that was responsible for actually producing the wealth that fueled the national economy and provided real wealth income of the nation.

The various service industries and public sector, while both necessary and beneficial, unfortunately do not produce a dime's worth of real wealth. They consume wealth and produce none. They churn money, but do not make the wealth that money represents. So organized labor in this realm, while beneficial to the membership, actually provides no real service to the national economy. As we know, the millions who work in the public sector are paid by the taxpayer, thus their wages and benefits depend strictly on the abilities of workers, including themselves, to pay the freight.

Service industries, high technology capabilities, and civil servant employment do not provide a viable basis for a national economy. And such an economy is doomed to failure, as ours is failing (as evidenced in accumulating public and private debt, and obscene and growing trade deficits). A booming Wall Street, and big GDP figures are false indications of prosperity. Money is being churned, but wealth is not being created. A nation cannot be a net consumer and survive for long. It must produce what it consumes.

The de-industrialization of America was not a very good idea, in spite of the short-term environmental benefits. The lion's share of what passes for national wealth is still produced by industrial labor, but that industrial labor is increasingly elsewhere, working for pennies on the dollar in terms of the "traditional" (but now declining, if not disappearing), American industrial wage.

There has been no real benefit to this export of industry to the Third World, and we have lost much. The only benefactors have been the capital interests that continue to claim an ever larger slice of the profits. As for the environmental end of the deal, the problem has merely been shifted to other areas, along with the jobs and factories, but it will ultimately come back to bite us, and impact us in way we never imagined, like the loss of jobs and domestic industries is biting us already.

Environmentalists believe we have cleaned up our environment by getting rid of "dirty industries," but we have merely shifted the problem onto the backs of others elsewhere. Our job was not to rid ourselves of industries, but to clean those industries up. American ingenuity could have done this, at a cost that would have provided a lot more jobs for American industrial workers, but we took the easy way out by sending the problem to Mexico, China, and many other countries -- and those problems will grow and fester in those places.

The truth remains that America belongs to producers. Unfortunately we are going to learn the hard way that our government should have favored American producers and kept its production at home, rather than selling them out and mortgaging the nation to the foreign competition. And the "foreign competition" includes the big American multinational corporations. Capital has no country, is completely devoid of conscience, and knows no national loyalty. It has one purpose, and that is to maximize the bottom line on behalf of stockholders.

There is no solution for organized labor unless it is willing to get tough -- as it often did back in the early years of organization. It has to get tough with with the government that is intentionally selling American labor down the river, and has been doing so for a generation or more. It's a frightening prospect -- taking on the task of forcing major economic policy change -- and thus organized labor is unlikely to take the steps necessary to meet the challenge. Our government has carried us so far down the wrong road, that any meaningful correction would upset the entire national economic apple cart, and that is something that scares the hell out of everybody. Everybody would suffer, as it would call all the chickens home to roost.

The apple cart will be upset of its own weight one of these days. But if all goes according to plan, it won't come in a catastrophic onslaught. The upset will be slow and measured, as Americans by degrees begin to taste the fruits of having abandoned national economic independence, or any semblance of local self-reliance. The time may come when to be Amish will be considered salvation -- and this whether the chickens continue to come home by two or threes, or by the car load.

American organized labor cannot have a meaningful renewal without the re-industrialization of America, so it must put pressure on our representatives to facilitate that. Our representatives in Washington have helped China industrialize, even though that wasn't their job. They have facilitated a huge industrial capability in Mexico, even though that wasn't their job. Their job was to represent Americans -- producers as well as consumers. Man cannot live by consumption alone -- he must also produce what he consumes. Depending on the other fellow to to it for him is dangerous. He must produce for himself, or become like a helpless child!

Our representatives now have a clear-cut task ahead of them, making America the independent nation it once was, and the American people the producers they once were. Organized labor can be the key to opening their eyes. But this won't happen until organized labor learns to pull together and get focused on the larger picture. It isn't just a labor issue, it's a national industrial policy issue -- a national economic policy issue.

Organized labor can help open government's eyes to its national duty. They can't do that by acting like the only thing wrong with free trade and globalism is that labor "over" or "down there" isn't properly compensated, or that environmental regulations are being violated in Mexico or China. It has to focus on returning American production to American workers. Let the Mexicans and Chinese use their new productive capabilities to produce primarily for their own markets, and reap the same benefits from it that we have done in the past.

They have to be brave enough to come right out and say the words "trade protectionism is necessary to national survival and renewal!"

A PROTECTIONIST WALL?

The anti-protectionist, free trade, globalists (which includes almost everybody who is anybody in our government today), are fond of warning of the dangers of "building a protectionist wall around the nation." They are fond of warning that we cannot staunch the flow of goods and services, technology, and the universe of ideas in the world -- that to do so would be dangerous, if not suicidal.

These are merely fear tactics to perpetuate wrong, short-sighted, policy whose real purpose is to protect and perpetuate the prerogatives, and "license" of international capital interests to maximize profits through the unhampered global exploitation of labor and natural resources. It is sold to us as the only possible long-term cure for want and war for the world. But this should by now be recognized as pure smoke.

The free flow or knowledge and ideas is not about to be fenced in by anybody, unless it is those very plutocratic interests that intend to have their way in the world.

America was a protectionist nation for most of its history, and that, in part, is what made it into the greatest industrial dynamo the world had ever known. Yet that didn't mean we didn't trade when it was to our advantage to do so. America has always been a robust trading nation. America was also an isolationist nation for most of its history. That isolationism didn't cut us off from the rest of the world in any significant way. It did prevent us from going out and warring elsewhere for much of our history.

We're a nation of immigrants, and immigration has always been as American as apple pie. A lot of people wanted to immigrate to the U.S., because of what it was, and the opportunity that it offered its citizens. But once the nation was fully settled, it made abundant good sense to at least "control" the flow of immigration, and even be a little selective about who was allowed in. Even now our government is at least paying lip service to the desire to keep terrorists out.

Protectionism and isolationism, to the extent they actually existed, was about minding our own national business and not messing in the affairs of other nations. These policies served the nation well. It's only to the extent that these policies have been abandoned that our national fortunes have begun a serious reversal. It never meant that we did not learn from others, nor that others could not learn from our successes. It never meant that Americans couldn't buy foreign made goods. It meant that our national system favored American made goods, American industry, and the American people. And that's what our government was supposed to be all about in the first place -- protecting the borders for the benefit of the people within, and nurturing the conditions conductive to the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." And protectionism is nothing more than "minding the national store" -- an owner-operated concern.

Literally all governments are instituted for the purpose of "protection." The question is whether they protect the interests of the people or merely protect the government from the people. Is government meant to facilitate good administration or to become a protection racket? Often the distinction is rather blurred. The whole idea of our armed forces is to "protect the nation" from foreign coercion or invasion. This is military "protectionism." Trade protectionism protects the nation from unwanted import invasion. This is not to deprive the people of the full array of choices in the local marketplace, but to insure that we can support ourselves as a nation, and not be beholden to others for our welfare and very national survival. A person who lives by consuming fish, should know how to fish, not just how to buy or beg fish.

We are becoming a nation of consumers, hooked on conspicuous consumption, with gluttonous appetites, and while our government is encouraging and facilitating that gluttony, it is making us incapable of producing the objects of our gluttonous passions.

The free market system, within our own broad and extraordinarily fruitful land, made protectionist, isolationist, America the political and economic envy of the world. We had both personal freedom and a free market economy that proved the wonder of the world. But it was a free market, free trade system "within our national boundaries."

Drop those boundaries, and you have the same situation a farmer would have if he went out and cut all his fences. Pretty soon all his livestock would be gone, and the neighbors' livestock would be trampling and eating all the crops. He'd have to buy everything he needed -- things he used to produce for himself -- from elsewhere. And pretty soon squatters would be building shacks on the margins of his land. In time, he'd have to mortgage the farm to feed himself, and soon the farm would belong to others, and he'd have to pay rent if he were even allowed to remain on what had been his land. 

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

MICRO-ECONOMICS

In recent years the term "micro-economics" has come up with regard to a "revolutionary idea" to help impoverished people in Third World countries start small businesses of their own and become economically independent. As a very elementary example, a woman may apply for and receive a small loan (from, say, an agency connected to the World Bank or an International Relief Fund), for the purchase of a sewing machine, thread, and fabric. She then sets up shop out in the street or in her house, and uses the sewing machine to make a living and repay the loan, which was extended at very modest interest.

This would sort of be the Third World equivalent of our Small Business Association loan program in this country, but for one thing. The last time Pridger checked, "small business" was defined as a business having less than a million dollars in annual revenue. The SBA isn't very interested in loaning money to individuals who just want a few tools to set up a one man proprietorship in order to make a living. Such a man, they seem to say, would be best advised to think a little bigger, or go out and find a job working for somebody who does.

Small proprietorships, and family owned businesses, and the man with the hoe, have sort of gone out of style in the United States -- pushed out, in many cases, by the boys who think really big, like Sam Walton.

In spite of this, it's still very possible to think and start small and do well in America. In fact, that is the "real hope" for the future of American labor as we move into our post industrial era. Trouble is, most Americans don't have the will to do it, and a high percentage of those who are doing it have recently immigrated from Latin America, Africa, Asia, or the Middle East. They came with little, thus had little to loose and almost nowhere to go but up. They worked hard, got welfare, food stamps, and other assistance, and saved until they opened their own business and most eventually prosper.

Recent minority immigrants have some advantages that native born Anglo-Americans are reluctant (or are not "brave" enough), to attempt to utilize; (1) many federal and state programs set up specifically to help minorities through the red tape of going into business; (2) other programs specifically set up to assist them with financing, and; (3) the "luxury" of completely ignoring almost all regulations and the troublesome red. These latter often "get legit" only after they have become successful.

It isn't unusual for extended immigrant families to work together for the common good. Sometimes only those actually visually engaged in the business go off the welfare and public assistance rolls, and public assistance often inadvertently helps fund many successful businesses. Few ever get caught, and the system seems to be pretty forgiving in cases of immigrant minorities who do, as long as the abuse has not been too flagrant.

Of course, there is a huge underground economy that includes a healthy demographic cross section of society, in both licit and illicit businesses, from prostitution to construction. And in all practicality, the underground economy probably provides the broadest spectrum of micro-business opportunity. As New World Order free trade policy forges on and increases, destroying more and more traditional opportunities for "good legitimate employment," this sector is bound to grow.

But to the average law abiding American who was born and raised here, starting a business is a scary challenge. Most would rather work at a good job that provides health care insurance and a retirement plan. Those were the traditional keys to the American dream -- the dream that had come true for the great American industrial middle class for so long. But for the last thirty years, those wonderful industrial jobs have been disappearing -- exported to Asia or south of the border, or otherwise outsourced to distant lands.

The great majority who benefited from that industrial era are now retired or soon to be retired. But there is a whole new generation needing good jobs that are no longer available. They are are the ones who have not gone to college to become doctors, lawyers, architects, teachers, politicians or upper level bureaucrats.

Many would love to go into business, but are afraid to take the plunge. In the retail trades, the competition of K-Mart and WalMart, etc., is enough prevent many mom and pop stores from making a reappearance on the American scene.

There are three great monsters that scare "responsible, law abiding" people off. (1) The costs of health care and health insurance; (2) liability concerns; and (3) In spite of "deregulation" (that benefited most large business entities), there is a vast taxing and regulatory maze of federal, state, and local, red tape that most individuals  find both discouraging and intimidating.

Indeed, for some time (and maybe ongoing), there was an active IRS attack (that is, increased probability of audit and assessment), upon proprietorships because they are inherently able to hide cash income from the tax man.  Fortunately, since the great Internet technological revolution of the last decade, there has been such a huge increase in computer oriented "micro-businesses" that the IRS is undoubtedly hopelessly overwhelmed.

Ironically, this boom in micro-businesses, has been partly fueled and greatly encouraged by the semi-official government line that "Americans are to become knowledge workers" rather than factory workers. The IRS, of course, would much rather all Americans remain on corporate payrolls that withhold income taxes on behalf of their employees and the IRS.

The main trouble with the "knowledge worker" idea is the fact that there is a natural majority of people, irregardless of ambition, intelligence, and talent, who simply are not of the entrepreneurial spirit. That's why the world's population has always been divided up into ruling, mercantile, and laboring classes with the vast majority in the latter group. Circa 1960, the United States of America was the only nation in the history of the world that had developed a huge, relatively affluent, industrial working class. Western Europe was still playing catch up at that time, and Japan was too.

Most American still pine for those good jobs our industrial economy once produced in great numbers. But they are no longer there in the numbers they once were, and those remaining are declining in terms of wages and benefits. But native born Anglo-Americans shy away from starting businesses of their own. Almost all would tell you they'd love to make a living doing something they like to do, working for themselves.

The small family farm and the mom and pop retail establishment were two of the major natural businesses tailor made a great number of such people. The "original" American dream was to settle on a piece of ground, and carve a productive farm from it -- one that would provide a decent living -- or open a store or some other business on Main Street.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

PROTECTIONIST - A SMEAR WORD

Lou Dobbs' nightly CNN TV news show is about the only such program that persistently asks the right tough questions with regard to trade, immigration, and job loss. But not even Lou Dobbs dares to openly advocate a return to protectionism. In a recent interview he was conducting, Pridger noticed how carefully (and Pridger believes, somewhat hypocritically), declining the title of being a "protectionist."

Today, being called a protectionist is like being smeared as a McCarthyite, a communist, an anti-Semite, or Nazi. "Protectionism," like isolationism, is Free Trade heresy, and totally hostile to our officially promoted policy of a global free market. Protectionism and isolationism have entered into our growing national lexicon of "hate words." Yet, protectionist national trade policy, in addition to our many national assets, is what caused the American goose to lay the golden eggs. Now we spurn such things as little more than a Mother Goose story.

The conventional wisdom (carefully molded by the mass media at the behest of free traders), is that, not only is free trade good, but protection is extraordinarily bad -- "If trade doesn't cross borders, armies will." In other words protectionism has been tarred with the brush of being the cause of aggressive wars, and thus must be avoided like the plague.

The view that protectionism causes war is just as fallacious as the debt apologists' oft repeated declaration that "debt is good" or "never mind the debt, we owe it to ourselves." Don't let the national debt worry you -- we owe it to ourselves! (Yea, and someday, we'll all be able to live off of the interest!)

This business about protective barriers causing war is nothing more than intentionally caused confusion between an effect being attributed to the wrong cause. Aggressive wars are caused by strong nations preying on the weak. And trade related wars are about bullies prying open reluctant markets for commercial reasons, having absolutely nothing to do with the welfare of either the American people.

The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), isn't about a free and fair exchange of goods between the U.S. and Central America (or improving the lives of Central Americans), it's about making "their market" another playground for American capital. What is it that Central America has that American corporations covet? What do the American people need from Central America? We already get all the bananas we need. American capital has dominated most Latin American export industries (bananas, coffee, etc.), for over a century. What more could American companies want? Total, unfettered, access to cheap labor, of course!

And, we want Central Americans to be forced to buy what little we have to offer them in return -- such as cheap grains which will totally destroy their own traditional agricultural economies, and make them dependent on our "advanced" agricultural machine.

Protectionism never caused a war, unless there was a big bully determined to break a protectionist barrier. Trade related aggression has always been caused by two things, (1) Coveting what somebody else has, and (2) Attempting to force others to purchase excess production that they don't want. Protectionist policy has never caused either. Like isolationism, protectionism, is most often manifest in a national policy that says, "Leave us alone, we can handle our own business, thank you."

Protectionism is what government is supposed to be about. If our government no longer protects our borders and our (formerly) owner-operated national marketplace (from foreign import and immigration invasion, as well as military invasion -- and the predatory practices of international capital), then government has betrayed its primary duty to the people. Protectionism is nothing more than "minding the national store." And if we don't mind our own store, we awaken to the reality that we work as day laborers in somebody else's store.

America grew great by the judicious use of protectionist trade policy. Yet we always carried on a robust trade with the rest of the world -- trade carried on on as it should be, to the mutual benefit of the trading partners. The protective tariff literally paid the expenses of government until the Federal Reserve was established and the income tax amendment passed. At that point the government began transforming itself from limited republican government, "by consent of the governed", to an unlimited government in the service of Mammon. In one century, our government has managed to totally overturn and repudiate literally everything the nation once stood for -- with the greatest changes during the last thirty years and ongoing.

It did this by slow and steady degrees, calculated to fool the people. The people, like the hapless frog in a pan of water being slowly heated, have failed to realize what was going on, until it is too late.

Today, the Declaration of Independence and American Constitution are hollow documents, merely monuments to "original intent" and "what might have been." Government has gone from being protectionist on behalf of the people, to being the global champion of international mercantilism and predatory capital.

Ironically, as our government prepares to ramrod CAFTA down our throats, it is becoming more and more apparent that the gurus of international free trade have grossly miscalculated. China is beginning to turn the tables on us, and is using our own free trade rhetoric as an argument to refute our increasingly desperate "demands" to "Revalue your currency! Quit selling us so much! Quit taking advantage of us!"

China merely says, "Don't blame us for the problems you have brought on yourself! You're the one buying. And, by the way, we'll buy whatever we want to buy too! Thank you very much! After all, this global free market was your idea. We buy your soybeans and scrap metal, why not IBM Personal Computers and Unocal? What's the big deal?"

China, of course, has some pretty impressive natural advantages over us that apparently our brain trust in Washington overlooked. (1) A command economy, in which the government can do whatever it thinks best for China and the Chinese people; (2) An intelligent, energetic, and increasingly well educated population that outnumbers us more than four to one; (3, and undoubtedly the most worrisome) The apparent total lack of anything approaching a nation death wish.

We, in spite our our impressive superpower status, obviously have a national death wish. It is manifest in almost everything our government does. We've sold out to the highest bidder, and given away the store, in the belief that "those who matter" will turn enough profit to make it all worth while. Anyone who would protect our national assets, and reserve them to "We the people," is smeared as being a "protectionist!"

Those who promote free trade and the global free market still don't seem to get it. They admit that American workers still have a long, long, way to go before they can hope to become competitive in the global labor marketplace. They acknowledge that Americans still have no idea how tough times are going to get in the years ahead. But they say it's all for the good, that the end (a universally egalitarian world with equal economic opportunity for everybody), justifies the means.

What is there to get? (1) It isn't going to work out as planned, and even if it did, it would mean universal peonage to corporate oligarchs; (2) When things go bad, they could go really bad, with effects that would be globally devastating economically; (3) Long before the end is attained, some sort of major revolution is inevitable. All of this, in spite of the fact that it is unlikely that the American people remain capable of either waking up or revolution.

The present terrorist threat is merely a taste of what is fomenting in the world beneath the surface of what is the New World Order. So far, it has proven only small fly in the soup, but the soup nourishes a much larger fly population.

Our job, as individuals, families, communities, states, and nations, is to work at perfecting ourselves. There is no point in trying to remake the world in our own image before we've managed to get things right at home. If there was still a great, politically and economically independent United States of America, governed by a just system, and not entangled in making the world safe for predatory capital interests, there would yet be hope for a much better world.

One small example. A generation ago, during the first oil embargo, we began to awaken to the stark reality of our growing dependence on imported oil. Had our national leaders chosen to perfect the nation, rather than further enmesh it in the Middle East and elsewhere, we would undoubtedly be energy independent by now with clean, renewable energy sources, and the whole world would have been much better off for it. It's difficult to perfect one's self by meddling in everybody else's business, or giving free reign to the agents of avarice.

The more one reads of the writings of our various founding fathers, the more amazing they become. They started something great and knew it, but had a firm understanding of the dangers that the nation would face as it developed. For several generations now, our leaders have spurned their advice and committed every folly the founders warned against.

The seat of civilization seems to move slowly westward. The twentieth century has aptly been called the American century. But, like all great nations and empires before us, we fumbled the ball and have over-reached. In spite of the potential for lasting greatness and sustainable progress, we have tried to grasp the world rather. Now the center appears to be moving toward China once again. Perhaps China will be more successful on the second time around.

Friday, July 15, 2005

GETTING COMPETITIVE AGAIN

Pridger hears on the news that some Congressmen are beginning to notice that for some odd reason America doesn't seem to command the broad spectrum of international respect it once did. It isn't just the war in Iraq, it's the economic "state of the nation." Supposedly they haven't got a clue as to why America is no longer the economic envy of the world. They are holding meetings somewhere in Washington, scratching their heads over the trade deficit and trying to figure out why we're not doing so well in the globalized free market economy they and the experts think we should.

Once again (or still), they are mis-diagnosing a very simple and fundamental economic problem. They think the problem is that America is failing to sell enough of its production to the rest of the world. They actually claim to believe (and some of them may actually do believe), that all we have to get right is to export more American products. This is the only way they see that we can eliminate, or at least significantly reduce, the growing trade deficit. Once again we are hearing that same old saw that somehow we have to make American labor more competitive so American products can be sold at more attractive prices abroad.

When are they going to wake up to the fact that the real problem is their own stupid trade policy and the basic concept of globalism. The problem is not that we aren't selling enough American made products abroad. The problem is that we aren't selling enough American made products in America. We're no longer making them. Some time ago our trusty leaders got fixated on the world, and the dangerous notion that global free market "forces" should rule the American marketplace. And they ceased to represent the American people -- the owner-operators of the American marketplace. They forgot that the free market system that made America great was the domestic marketplace, essentially confined to its own borders.

They have forgotten that it was protectionist policy, not free trade, that made America into the great and prosperous industrial nation that was once the envy of the world. They forget that it was protectionist policy that allowed American industry and American labor to compete in the American market at American prices and wage levels. They forget that America, under its protectionist policies, was a great trading nation that always had a favorable balance of trade. In other words, before "free trade," our international commerce always returned a profit to the national economy rather than a deficit and indebtedness as it now does.

Most importantly, our trusty mis-representatives in Washington have forgotten that economic independence and national self-reliance are the key to, and very bed rock of, national independence itself. Without it, we are a dependent nation, and an extraordinarily strategically vulnerable nation.

Even now, after thirty years of "globalism," our so-called representatives fail to see that the only way for American Industry and American labor to become more competitive in the global market-place is to continue to cut the legs out from under American labor -- and they have been doing that for at least that long.

The only way for American companies to become more competitive is to cut workers' wages and benefits back to pre-industrial levels, and to cut as many workers as is possible. President Bush did his part by cutting as much overtime as possible. (Imagine this American prince, born with a golden spoon in his mouth, actually going out of his way to cut the wages of American workers on behalf of his corporate friends!) Another way to become more competitive is to automate production more, to eliminate workers as completely as possible (and, of course, purchase all the necessary plant equipment and tools needed from wherever they might be had the most cheaply, such as China).

Our primary exports are our agricultural production, factories, and money. Great volumes of all three. Our agricultural commodities have been sold at fire sale prices for so long that the American family farm has all but passed into history, in favor of huge agribusiness concerns positioned to profit from trade no matter how cheaply domestic produce is marketed. As for the money exported, it ends up in the hands of our international competitors, allowing them to buy up our assets and further solidify their own competitive positions and advantages.

Most of America's farmers are gone. They were told long ago to get big and "efficient" or get out. And most got out, whether they wanted to or not, because farm prices were too low to cover costs and provide a living wage. Most of America's old airlines are gone, and so are almost all of the old shipping companies. Millions of America's best industrial jobs have followed, as factories have moved production offshore. As if that were not enough, American companies are beginning to "outsource" more and more "knowledge worker" jobs -- the ones that were supposed to save us.

More and more foreign corporations are "investing" in America, of course, buying up American assets and the remaining productive industries, as American corporations do likewise elsewhere. Around Pridger's neck of the woods the fluorspar industry used to be a major employer, once dominated by Alcoa Aluminum (fluorspar is a mineral used in the production of aluminum). The small town of Rosiclare, Illinois was known as the fluorspar capital of the world. The industry was heavily unionized and provided many of the area's "good" jobs. No more. The last remaining mining corporation was purchased by a French corporation, which quickly shut down the mines, and today our fluorspar is mined by Mexicans in Mexico.

Fortunately, most of the unionized miners who had earned their retirement managed to get their pensions and are now comfortably retired. The rest got their 26 weeks of unemployment insurance. Meanwhile, there is still plenty of fluorspar in the ground, to be mined at a future date when the unions are history and American labor is able to compete with Mexican labor.

Almost all of America's few remaining shipping companies are foreign owned, and one of our largest remaining shipyards -- one of the great last hopes of a once great ship building industry (Kvaerner, of Philadelphia) -- is under majority foreign ownership. Almost all American owned ships are under foreign, flag of convenience registry, while almost all of our remaining "American flag" vessels are foreign owned. And, of course, the big container cranes that are installed in our major ports are increasingly produced in China and shipped to this country in foreign ships.

The Japanese "captured" the American TV, VCR, radio, and electronics industries less than a generation after we celebrated the first "Victory over Japan Day". They also "captured" a significant percentage of the American automobile market. And now Japanese cars are even "Made in America" in Japanese owned plants. Meanwhile, the big three U.S. automakers are moving more and more production offshore and shutting down American plants.

Catapillar and other major heavy industries moved a significant percentage of their production elsewhere a long time ago. Domestic plants no longer produce the lion's share of the equipment used in our still vast domestic agricultural industry. If you buy a new tractor today, likely it was made in Europe or Asia.

Yet all our representatives can figure out is that we need more of the same medicine that has been killing us, and the race to the floor is still the only race they see available.

This economic fratricide has been going on for thirty years and more. This willful and ongoing act of killing the goose that once laid the golden egg is having the very results that might have been expected. Anybody with half a brain knew what to expect. An obscene and growing trade deficit, certain to continue to climb, and an utter hopelessness of ever getting the nation's fiscal house in order. And American labor, in spite of thirty years of downsizing, wage and benefit cuts or stagnation, isn't even close to being competitive in the global marketplace. It won't be for some time yet.

One of the greatest benefactors of our trade policy today, of course, is Red China. Thanks to us, China is in line and well on track to becoming the greatest economic dynamo the world has ever known, not to mention the next great military superpower. This one-time sworn enemy, is now in a unique position of economic power, and we have become more economically dependent on China than the thirteen American Colonies were dependent on the mother country before the Revolution. Is this the result of brilliant economic and strategic planning or what?

It will be more difficult for us to free ourselves from our growing economic dependence on China than it was to free ourselves from English rule and dependence on Europe for manufactured goods. Unlike England, China has us outnumbered at least four to one, has a vast and rich nation of its own, and the latest technology at its disposal -- not the least of which are weapons of mass destruction and the ability to deliver them to our shores. It owns its own modern and growing merchant marine, and is developing a navy that will soon be able to challenge our West Pacific fleet. What's more, it has alternative markets for the manufactured goods upon which we now so desperately depend -- its own vast market, for starters (the one our economic and trade gurus, and American capitalists, have been eyeing with great covetousness).

Even our intellectually challenged leaders in Washington should by now be able to see that NAFTA has been a disaster for both the United States and Mexico. But what's the hot trade initiative now? More of the same, of course! CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Let's wreck the economies of those central American countries too. Let's give their peasants the opportunity to sweat in American owned factories, making the things increasingly poor American consumers can afford. Let's dump our cheap corn and grain on them so their farmers will end up homeless and head for our southern border too, like the Mexicans.

Our mis-representatives are in the service of Mammon rather than the American people. The New World Order is about insuring that every life-sustaining morsel of nourishment, and every domestic necessity required for survival and the good life, shall be purchased through and from major corporations, and the absolute destruction of local, regional, or national economic independence.

Economys of scale (bigness), speed, and efficiency in all things -- these are the supporting deities that surround the altar of Mammon. And, of course, profits for owners of capital are the end that justifies all means. That's what globalism is really all about.

All the high sounding rhetoric about globalism and the Global Village is pure smoke, calculated to deceive and ensnare -- as we are ensnared now, in our present dependence on China and cheap imports at WalMart. Our leaders in Washington have sold us down the river -- and luckily for them, the great mass of the American public has bought the package, hook, line, and sinker. Most of the rest of the world has bought it too, but few had as much to lose as we did. In fact, many had a lot to gain, for it is American wealth, generously augmented with tons of debt, has both paid and paved the way.