Why China Owns US

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The U.S. used to make things and export them. Some said that the U.S. fed the world from a mid-western 'bread-basket'. At the same time, the U.S. had a viable labor movement which seems to have simply withered away with the decline of American industries and productivity. After all, a nation cannot limp along on one leg. It was the Reagan regime which cut off the labor leg. Amputated, we have not gone far but backward, at best, in circles.

That the U.S. trails the world is proven by the CIA's own 'World Fact Book' which lists the U.S. on bottom with the World's Largest Negative Current Account Balance. Our benefactor/owner, China, is on top with the World's Largest Positive Current Account Balance. Simply that is because the China makes things and thus employs its population. China sells those things to us (the U.S.) but only because it props up the U.S. dollar in order to get it back via sales. It's a scheme that will eventually collapse.

The U.S., I seem to recall, once led the world in steel manufacturing, and, I believe automotive manufacturing as well. The US boasted a viable electronics industry but that is now found in Japan and elsewhere and throughout Asia. We lead in NONE of those areas today. China even sends IT pros to America where they took those jobs from Americans. The collapse of U.S. industry must be traced to Nixon's visit to China. I spoke with Bush Sr but could never pin the bastard down. I still want to know: what DEALS were cut and why?

The Chinese outsmarted both Bush and Nixon. The big factor is 'oil'. The U.S. used to produce it but reached a point at which 'secondary recovery' was no longer profitable. The vast oil fields of Texas are but a memory. The Chinese, by contrast, planned ahead.

The invasion of Iraq was never about Saddam's moribund or completely non-existent WMD program and less about fighting "International terrorism", a strawman! It was about gaining strategic control of Iraq's oil reserves for the purpose of propping up the dollar as the currency of choice in the critical international oil market.

If you doubt this, I suggest you consider the reasons Dick Cheney convened and conspired with his so-called 'Energy Task Force', a 'task force' which literally carved up the oil fields of Iraq between them. A war followed! A 'coincidence' if you are uniformed and/or naive, a 'conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodities' if you happen to be a realist and are likewise informed about the oil industry.

"I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth."

- Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia

Why have U.S. officials allowed our nation to become a mere vassal state of China? I cannot think of an 'innocent' or productive reason Nixon by way of his surrogates (including Bush Sr) would want to 'export' our industries to China. Of the many FX of those deals was that the traditional 'Democratic' base --LABOR --was essentially put out of business, made irrelevant. I have called it The GOP 'Scorched Earth' Policy. Even I have trouble believing that Nixon/Bush/Reagan could be so unimaginably evil. But the facts, the record says they were.

Now --why does China own us? The trend began with overtures to China by Nixon, Bush. I spoke with both Bush Sr and Milton Friedman about this back in the late 70s. Neither man was coherent. The CIA'S World Fact Book confirms my fears though neither Bush nor Friedman wanted to talk about it. I was right. Friedman denied that the US was exporting jobs but the record proves that that is precisely the effect. In the meantime, China supports the dollar only because if it does so we may buy the 'product' that they produce.

In the meantime, US productivity vis a vis the rest of the world has 'tanked' as evidenced by our prominent position on the very bottom of the CIA's World Fact Book. Last time I checked just one percent of the population owned more than some 90 percent of the rest of us combined. It is significant that as this result was coming about, US labor declined concurrently with US productivity. See the CIA'S World Fact Book which lists the US having the world's largest NEGATIVE Current Acct Balance.

The Wal-Mart effect targets US workers and manufacturing. Its most pernicious effects are seen in clothing --low-cost goods with a hidden higher price: lower wages, lost jobs. Underlying every sector, however, are US trade deficits benefiting American consumers but only so long as they have jobs themselves.

As has been the trend at least since the regime of Ronald Reagan, manufacturing suffers most as Wal-Mart grows more intrusive, exploiting the trade deficit with its own undervalued currency. In effect, American consumers have under-written China's economic boom. What have we earned in return? Simply, the utter contempt shown us by China --it's government and its people.

By 2007, some 133,000 manufacturing jobs had been lost in the US; sixty-eight percent were the direct result of Wal-Mart's "partnership" with China. The effect continues to devastate US workers, the US economy overall.

The US-China trade deficits amounted to more than $1 trillion in US Treasury bills some three years ago. To be honest, I dare not look at what that figure may be today. Thus, China has rehabilitated its own economy on US backs.

It should come as no surprise that American jobs are exported during GOP regimes. The official record proves that it has been going on for awhile now.

Job Growth Per Year Under Most Recent Presidents

Johnson 3.8%
Carter 3.1
Clinton 2.4
Kennedy 2.3
Nixon 2.3
Reagan 2.1
Bush 0.6

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics Survey

I could forgive a lapse here and there, a random failure, an 'Act of God', bad luck or misfortune, perhaps, a witches curse in which only one party fucks up so consistently. But, alas, the more rational explanation is not to be found in our stars, witches brews, Tarot Cards or random incompetence. None of those are to be blamed. We screwed up.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

Cassius, Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

Moreover, it is not China's fault that Richard Nixon, George Bush Sr, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan were either stupid or venal or both! It is not China's fault that these crooks and/or liars were willing to sell out the soul of our nation. It is the fault of a system of our creation, in which the GOP, most prominently, made a Faustian bargain with a war machine that has reduced the U.S. to the status of an impotent, bloated empire. We are, like Rome, whose currency was worthless and whose teeming masses could not be fed anything better than bread thrown them at a 'circus nor find jobs but that of Legionaire. It was not glory but plunder that defined the fall of Rome. It is not glory but bankruptcy and vassal state status that defines the fall of the Great American Empire!

Budget Deficits: The GOP Owns Them

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The GOP 'Scorched Earth' Policy

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The American Democratic party, the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, was a force to be reckoned with. Most often allied with labor, Democrats --not Republicans --presided over the hard-won triumph over the Great Depression. It was Democrats, not Republicans, who later presided over a thriving economy, an egalitarian economy in the late 40s and much of the 50s. It was the Democratic regimes of FDR and Harry Truman that were the most egalitarian in U.S. History.

This prosperity continued through the JFK years. Not even Nixon could undo the good that had been done. That job was left to Ronald Reagan whose infamous, inequitable tax cut of 1982 breached the wall. Only the upper quintile benefited from Reaganomics of which the infamous tax cut of 1982 was the centerpiece. Only the upper 1 percent have benefited from subsequent GOP largesse.

Over the same period of time, American manufacturing --steel, automotive, appliances et al --declined. Labor was denied a base upon which to build a movement or even an effective opposition. Out of work and out of money, labor was neutered. As a result, steel is produced in Japan and imported. Appliances are increasingly made in China and imported, denying jobs to US workers. Once a center of world automobile production, downtown Detroit is but a shadow of its former glory. Various suburbs like Flint have deteriorated.

The antipathy shown labor by the American right wing has a long history. In 1911, L.A.Times owner/publisher Gen. Harrison Grey Otis exploited the bombing of the L.A. Times building to win a landmark propaganda war against labor. Two brothers, labor leaders, were accused of this act of 'domestic terrorism' around which Otis rallied opposition to labor despite the fact that the trial ended with a plea bargain. Arguably, the more lasting fallout was the subsequent trial of Clarence Darrow who was accused of bribing prospective jurors.

The GOP has not won the debate with its 'scorched earth' methods and politics. It has merely hollowed out the soul of a nation for the benefit of just 20 percent in the 80s and only 1 percent recently. The GOP did not defeat labor or its ideals. Rather, it exported their jobs and shut them up. It's the GOP way.

Not just labor, the nation as a whole has paid dearly for this cynical strategy. Confirmation and results can be found at the CIA's own World Fact Book where you will find the U.S. at the bottom of the list with the world's largest NEGATIVE CURRENT ACCT BALANCE; China, with whom GOP Presidents Nixon, Reagan, Bush cut sweetheart deals, is on top. China prospers. America is near collapse and will eventually be reduced to third world status if it is not there already.

It was all by design. The GOP willingly amputated a nation's leg and arm to save the increasingly stupid head, a ruling one percent which has done little or nothing to deserve is role as the nation's ruling plutocracy! In the meantime, the Democratic party is robbed of its traditional, base --labor. Thus, was forced upon Bill Clinton the odious 'triangulation' of the increasingly moribund 'center', a strategy for which he was roundly criticized and rightly on principle. In fact, however, it was all that was left him in the wake of the GOP's scorched earth policy.

The U.S. is now a limping, one-legged man where everyone fancies himself an aristocrat but, in fact, everyone but the top one percent are getting poorer. It's a slow boil but coming to a head very quickly now. Interestingly, those benefiting from Reagan's policies were but about 20 percent of the total population. More recently, those benefiting are reduced to just one percent of the population. At what point will the fabulously wealthy one percent become one-half of one percent, eventually, one half or just one quarter of that amount? This curve can be plotted on a graph. A rate of decline can be pinpointed. All it takes is a bit of first semester calculus to plot the very rate at which the GOP impoverishes all of us.

The transfer of wealth upward is deliberate. It's how the the 'pay-offs' are laundered. Clinton reversed the trend but briefly. That he dared get a blow job was much more important than saving a nation from a disastrous fate. In fact, it was all the GOP could pin on him, though he was under a sweeping investigation seemingly from the get go. An investigation in search of real crimes and, finding none, invented the 'felony blow job'.

‎Someone said that Satan's biggest 'trick' was convincing the world that he did not exist. The GOP's biggest trick is convincing the American people that they are a political party. They are, in fact, a crime syndicate with characteristics of a kooky cult. Stanford University studies have proven that GOP-types have more night terrors and horrible nightmares than do normal people. This is understandable. Certainly, the GOP rank and file are insecure, in fact, frightened if not terrified. Nightmares are but dream manifestations of fears and anxieties. Likewise, GOP policy. In short, we, the people have paid and continue to pay for GOP fears and neurotic hang ups. I would think that like me, you are fed up with doing so!

Edward R. Murrow: Wires and Lights in a Box

Note: The Existentialist Cowboy is currently bombarded by spam from lunatic name callers of the right wing ilk! Therefore, comments are moderated; threats are deleted and, when possible prosecuted! Ads are outta here! And I am not interested in whatever stupid name idiots apply to smarter people these days. Intelligent comments are, as always, very welcome! Ad hominem attacks, spam, advertising and psychotic drivel is not! Psychos should get help but not here! Eventually, the offending party will be committed to an asylum and we adults can once again engage in intelligent, articulate dialogue. Thanks for understanding.

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