How China Partnered with the GOP to Screw America

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Chinese rulers and the US elites partnered to enslave US workers and consumers. As a result, the US became a vassal state of China, a huge population which props up the buck so that it can sell us junk via Wal-Mart.

These deals were all worked out with China by Bush Sr et al in the years following Nixon's infamous visit to the forbidden city. In these talks, US leaders, primarily the right wing/GOP, the US consumer and laborer was sold out. The US would become a vassal state, a slave state, a consumer society whose raison d'etre was to buy Chinese junk. The big losers are US workers and consumers.

I work at Wal-Mart (I'm involved in the UFCW's effort to organize W-M). One day, right after I was hired, I went around on my lunch break and just sort of randomly looked at where a whole bunch of products were made.

I think I found a blender that had been made in Malaysia. EVERYTHING else had been made in China.

I wonder how the typical US consumer would feel about Wal-Mart if it were named, say, US Corporate Capital & Chinese Slave Labor Coooperative?
--John Carter, on Facebook

The US used to make some of the products --appliances, electronic gear et al --that are now dumped on the US via an economic blight called Wal-Mart! The US ruling elite resented the high wages paid to unionized workers in affluent America. Nixon, Reagan et al solved the US labor 'problem'!

The solution: EXPORT US JOBS TO CHINA!

China pays slave wages and dumps the resulting cheap product on a US which produces very little these days. Concurrently, there are fewer futures, fewer opportunities, declining hope, rising despair --all the result of some thirty or forty years of right wing bullshit, lies, crookery and outright fraud. The GOP, for example, is not a political party. It is a crime syndicate and a kooky cult to boot!

The tragic truth can be found in black and white at the CIA's World Fact Book which lists the US at the bottom of the list with the world's largest negative current account balance, formerly called the balance of trade deficit.

While the US was spending time, resources and personnel in running 'elections' for its corrupt clients in Afghanistan and Iraq, and participating in pointless mediations between its intransigent Israeli partner and its impotent Palestinian client, the South Korean government backed a consortium headed by the Korea Electric Power Corporation in its successful bid on the $20.4 billion dollar nuclear power deal, opening the way for other billion-dollar contracts in the region (FT - page 13).
...
In contrast, the US is a declining world power with a deteriorating society resulting from its military-driven empire building and its financial-speculative centered economy:

1. Washington pursues minor military clients in Asia; while China expands its trading and investment agreements with major economic partners - Russia, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere.Washington drains the domestic economy to finance overseas wars. China extracts minerals and energy resources to create its domestic job market in manufacturing.
2. The US invests in military technology to target local insurgents challenging US client regimes; China invests in civilian technology to create competitive exports.
3. China begins to restructure its economy toward developing the country's interior and allocates greater social spending to redress its gross imbalances and inequalities while the US rescues and reinforces the parasitical financial sector, which plundered industries (strips assets via mergers and acquisitions) and speculates on financial objectives with no impact on employment, productivity or competitiveness.
4. The US multiplies wars and troop build-ups in the Middle East, South Asia, the Horn of Africa and Caribbean; China provides investments and loans of over $25 billion dollars in building infrastructure, mineral extraction, energy production and assembly plants in Africa.
5. China signs multi-billion dollar trade and investment agreements with Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Bolivia, securing access to strategic energy, mineral and agricultural resources; Washington provides $6 billion in military aid to Colombia, secures seven military bases from President Uribe (to threaten Venezuela), backs a military coup in tiny Honduras and denounces Brazil and Bolivia for diversifying its economic ties with Iran.
6. China increases economic relations with dynamic Latin American economies, incorporating over 80% of the continent's population; the US partners with the failed state of Mexico, which has the worst economic performance in the hemisphere and where powerful drug cartels control wide regions and penetrate deep into the state apparatus. --Information Clearing House, The US and China: One Side is Losing, the Other is Winning, James Petras

The US right wing robbed the US population with "trickle down theory" and other nonsense utterly unsupported with fact or evidence:

In the late 1970s, the top one percent of the US population held 13 percent of the wealth; in 1995 it held 38 percent. [Source: Source: Levy, Frank. The New Dollars and Dreams ].

• The top ten percent of the US population owns 81.8 percent of the real estate, 81.2 percent of the stock, and 88 percent of the bonds. [Source: Federal Reserve Bank data in Left Business Observer, No. 72, Apr. 3, 1996, p. 5].
• One percent of the US population owns sixty percent of the stock and forty percent of the total wealth. [Source: Hawken, Paul, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability. New York: Harper Business, 1993].
• The top fifth of households saw their income rise 43 percent between 1977 and 1999, while the bottom fifth saw their income fall 9 percent....
• Since 1973, every group in society except the top 20 percent has seen its share of the national income decline, with the bottom 20 percent losing the most. They have just 3.6 percent of national income, down from 4.4 percent a quarter century ago.
• Indeed, the top fifth now makes more than the rest of the nation combined...Rebecca Blank, who recently left the President's Council of Economic Advisors, pointed out, ‘We've gone back to levels of income and wealth inequality that this country hasn't seen since the teens and 1920s.’" [Source: Merrill Goozner, Crash of '99?, Salon.com, Oct. 1, 1999; addendum: since 1999, the date the source was published, the situation is much, much worse. Today --just ONE PERCENT own more than 95 percent of the rest of us combined. GOP incompetence and criminality moves so fast these days, it's hard to keep up!].

The top one percent of Americans receive more income than the bottom 40 percent. [Source: Korten, David. When Corporations Rule the World, p. 108].
Federal Reserve median family net worth by percentile for 1992, 1995, 1998, 2001 (Federal Reserve Bulletin January 2003, pp. 1-36). Note the small gains for the bottom 75% of the population and larger gains for the upper 25% and that the 1998 to 2001 gains were largest. 

--US Wealth Distributions 1989-2001

Republicans bought the scam because it made them feel good about being greedy, shallow bastards. The appeal is obvious: trickle down rationalized greed but only after the fact; it made one feel good about one's worst impulses, motives, and elitist bigotry.

The Inevitable Collapse of the Dollar

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Americans live beyond their means, Asia finances it and China props up the buck so that the US can buy Chinese made stuff at Wal-Mart. Eventually the Asians/Europeans will stop financing the USA, China will pull the plug on the buck and the bubble will burst.

The CIA's World Fact Book lists the US at the very bottom of a list with the world's largest negative Current Account Balance. China, which pegs the Yuan to the dollar, is at the top with the world's largest positive Current Account Balance.

If the GOP had been correct, US exports should have risen! The 'balance of trade deficit' i.e, the NEGATIVE Current Account Balance would have been reduced! If the GOP had been correct, the US could have paid off huge amounts of national debt run up in incompetent and dishonest GOP regimes. The US might have survived decades of conservative budgets which forced the US to borrow from other countries. But --not surprisingly --things have not worked out as the GOP would have you believe.

Many economists, myself included, believe that China’s asset-buying spree helped inflate the housing bubble, setting the stage for the global financial crisis. But China’s insistence on keeping the yuan/dollar rate fixed, even when the dollar declines, may be doing even more harm now.

Although there has been a lot of doomsaying about the falling dollar, that decline is actually both natural and desirable. America needs a weaker dollar to help reduce its trade deficit, and it’s getting that weaker dollar as nervous investors, who flocked into the presumed safety of U.S. debt at the peak of the crisis, have started putting their money to work elsewhere. But China has been keeping its currency pegged to the dollar — which means that a country with a huge trade surplus and a rapidly recovering economy, a country whose currency should be rising in value, is in effect engineering a large devaluation instead. --Palin vs Krugman On The Dollar -- Who Is Right?

It was hoped that by taking the dollar off the gold standard, US products would enjoy greater sales abroad. But like 'trickle down theory', it just has not worked out as planned. The CIA's World Fact Book proves it.

The enormous scale of foreign borrowing and money creation necessary to finance Washington’s wars are sending the dollar to historic lows. The dollar has even experienced large declines relative to currencies of third world countries such as Botswana and Brazil. The decline in the dollar’s value reduces the purchasing power of Americans’ already declining incomes.

Despite the lowest level of housing starts in 64 years, the US housing market is flooded with unsold homes, and financial institutions have a huge and rising inventory of foreclosed homes not yet on the market.

Industrial production has collapsed to the level of 1999, wiping out a decade of growth in industrial output.

--Paul Craig Roberts, The US as Failed State

If the US is a 'failed state', it is because it has been impoverished by at least two trends: 1) the transfer of US wealth upward to just one percent of the US population which now owns more than 95 percent of the rest of the nation combined; 2) the decline of the U.S. dollar, a trend begun when Richard Nixon eschewed the Bretton-Woods agreement.

Reducing the chances that we will weather this crisis are US wars of aggression which benefit only the defense contractors. Wars, in fact, reduce the GDP, destroy jobs, reduce productivity, and increase the trade deficit! If wars are so 'bad' for the economy, then how are they sold so easily? Why are they 'sold' at all? The quick response: they are sold with focus group tested bullshit!

There's a 'living' in killing, we are told! It's a lie -- snake oil for idiots and rank and file GOP. That wars are good for the economy is just a bald-faced lie cooked up by the defense lobby for whom killing IS a living but only for the shrinking one percent who benefit: the Military/Industrial complex.
Fact is war is most often disastrous for the economy.

In fact, most models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment. In this way, military spending is comparable in most models to any other form of government spending, such as spending on public goods or improving the environment.

This paper shows the projections of the impact of an increase in annual military spending equal to 1 percent of GDP (approximately the actual increase in spending compared with the pre-war budget) of the Global Insight macroeconomic model (see Appendix). The Global Insight model was selected for this analysis because it is a commonly used and widely respected model.1 Other models will show somewhat different projections, but it is unlikely that the direction of the long-term impact on any of the key variables will be different. In fact, because of the structure of the Global Insights model, it likely understates the negative impact of military spending relative to other models.

--The Economic Impact of the Iraq War and Higher Military Spending;

At the link (a PDF file) look for Table 1 which shows the key differences in projections, at five year intervals, between the baseline model and the simulation assuming higher levels of defense spending.

The decline in GDP projected for the twentieth year in the high military spending scenario is $42.1 billion. This corresponds to a projected loss of 668,100 jobs. Inflation is projected to be 0.7 percentage points higher in the high military spending scenario, with the interest rate on the 10-year Treasury note 1.1 percentage points higher than in the baseline scenario. The higher interest rate is associated with a reduction in industrial production of 1.8 percent compared with the baseline scenario. Car and truck sales are projected to be 731,400 in the high military spending scenario compared to the baseline scenario. Residential investment is projected to be 3.5 percent lower, which corresponds to 38,500 fewer housing starts and a reduction of 286,500 in the number of existing homes sold.

--The Economic Impact of the Iraq War and Higher Military Spending>

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The Rising Cost of Idiocy

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The dumbing down of America began with Ronald Reagan who made idiots feel good about being idiots. Reagan proved that not only was intelligence not required to be President, it might even be a handicap.

Reagan proved that any politician ignoring the 'idiot' voting block [the GOP] imperils his/her political future. Thus, Sarah Palin, who became an expert on Russia by observing its coast line from across the Bering Strait, is assured a growing constituency: the legion of idiots! She is the poster bimbo of idiocy! Its champion!

'Dumbing down' implies that the US still has a way to go before bottoming out! But that observation smacks of intelligence and may safely be ignored. The real idiot i.e, a GOP idiot, does not know where the f_ck we are or how we got there and is not smart enough to care! The word 'idiot' summons up images of Ronald Reagan and, more recently, George W. Bush. Unlike Bush, Reagan had essential Presidential skills. He could read cue cards. Bush could not or did not read! Reagan taught the GOP that how you say something is much more important than what is said. Bush, by contrast, was challenged to speak. 

Reagan spouted racist crap about a welfare 'grandma' who drove a Cadillac. There was no such person. It was Reagan's kindly, grandfatherly head nod that sold it. Bush, by contrast, said: "Who cares what you think?"Had a smart person told that story, he would have been pilloried as a bald-faced liar. The story was untrue but Reagan's telling of it was not only tolerated by most of us but embraced by the increasingly stupid and psychotic GOP.  

Because of that and numerous other whoppers, the GOP was thus set free to roll out their every whopper. Reagan had taken the GOP into new and unexplored territory. Think of it: there was no whopper so outrageous, no lie so egregious, no bullshit theory so incredible that it could not be sold with help from a focus group, a head nod and a smarmy, 'grandfatherly' smile.  

Reagan's idiocy became an insurmountable political advantage, an advantage that would --one day --give us George W. Bush. Reagan was not evil, they said; he was just senile! Give him a break! With this bit of GOP-logic, we should all be thankful. We are --after all --still alive. The US survived eight years in a which a senile idiot might have plunged us into nuclear war. When he thought his microphone was off, he 'reported' that he had just ordered a nuclear strike on Russia. 

The US was as close to nuclear armageddon as during the Cuban missile crisis or the little publicized incident in which the Soviet Union mistook a research launch for a MIRV heading their way. Someone had forgotten to notify them. The hero was Yeltsin who wisely waited for confirmation before launching a counter-strike that would have obliterated the US. Indeed, there is a price to be paid for idiocy, and one day we will pay it.

Others have noticed what has been called the 'dumbing down' of America. Bill Maher decried the trend; blogger Tom Degan responded: 

"We weren't always like this. Inert. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law and 11 months later seniors were receiving benefits. During World War II, virtually overnight FDR had auto companies making tanks and planes only. In one eight year period, America went from JFK's ridiculous dream of landing a man on the moon, to actually landing a man on the moon."While I admire Bill Maher a great deal, I am forced to take issue here.

This pitiful America of which he speaks is very real - of that there can be little doubt to anyone who has bothered to pay attention. But like a lot of people on the Left (I am sorry to say) he totally ignores - whether by accident or design - the undeniable advantages of living in the America of the first decade of the twenty-first century.For example:I never finished High School. In fact I dropped out at the very beginning of my Junior year. In spite of this unfortunate fact, the I.Q. of my country has dropped to such a horrifying degree in the last thirty years, whenever I arrive at a gathering of, say, two or three-hundred people, I am reasonably confident that I am the smartest person in the room.Do you have any idea how utterly cool that is? Lighten up, Bill.

--Tom Degan, the Rant

The mass media must accept responsibility for often making idiocy cute, quaint, cool, or funny. Idiocy is none of those things. Idiocy is a clear and present danger. Idiots will impoverish us all if an idiot has not plunged us into a nuclear holocaust in the meantime.

Karl Marx applied Hegel's dialectic to economics and concluded that 'capitalism' would die of its own inconsistencies i.e, idiocies! Lately, it is only dyed-in-the-wool wingnuts who are blind to the inherent 'contradictions' that have now brought the world to the brink of yet another great depression.

Karl Marx was absolutely correct with regard to the class struggle which he believed followed inexorably from the division of the world into 'capital' vs 'labor'. Bush's America is the LAB study that proves Marx to have been absolutely correct on this point. Never has the the US been so divided. Just one percent of the US population owns more than about 95 percent of us combined. I have REAMS of official stats from the US Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Commerce Dept-BEA, and various think tanks and University Studies which PROVE --beyond any refutation --that following EVERY GOP tax cut, this increasingly tiny elite was enriched. If the trend continues, the ruling 1 percent will become just one half of one percent owning more than about 99 percent of the rest of the population. No nation can sustain that kind of inequality unless by the application of coercion and dictatorship incomprehensible to Americans.

Tax cuts for the wealthy --we are told --will stimulate investment and thus jobs. The official stats prove that that has never, EVER happened. Rather, windfall tax cuts wind up in offshore tax havens and other 'shelters' which HAVE NEVER INCREASED US jobs nor have they helped, in any way whatsoever, to diversify the US economy. 'Tax havens' --available only to the very, very privileged --are just one reason supply side or 'trickle down theory' has never worked and will never work. It was all a PR campaign, a focus group approved strategem --not a legitimate or valid economic theory. There is a name given the outflow of monies from an economy: contraction. Contraction of the money supply is not merely the cause of 'depression', it is the very definition of it.

The GOP rank and file told us that while US industries had all but vanished during the Reagan nightmare years, HI TECH and US expertise would save us. It didn't! IT is done in India and China. Steel is produced in Japan. Cars, it seems, are produced everywhere BUT in the US. The US boasts the world's largest NEGATIVE Current Account Balance; China --the world's largest POSITIVE Current Account Balance. Being at the bottom of that list tells me that if the US produces anything at all these days, the rest of the world does not buy it.  

China  literally 'owns' us. It is China primarily that props up the buck so that the impoverished US can buy Chinese made stuff at Wal-Mart. How smart is that? Was it intelligence that got us into this mess --or was it GOP idiocy? Don't answer; that is a rhetorical device!

Clearly, the Reaganite goppers --idiots to a person --lied to us and got away with it because we had become the bigger idiots for their cut backs in education, their domination of the mind-numbing media, the assaults made on logic and common sense. We are idiots for getting stuck with the tab run up by the idiots in power. Bottom line: idiocy is no longer an option. Get Smart!

Intrepid writer, communications expert and guest columnist Doug Drenkow observes:

As I read the -- surprised and surprising -- reactions to Pres. Obama's receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, I am reminded of something that happened ten years or so ago, when my father was still alive. I was complaining about one thing or another that then-Pres. Clinton had done. Dad, who had first voted for FDR and had years later become very embittered by Pres. Nixon -- in other words, he had seen and lived through the best and worst that our nation had to offer -- told me something I'll never forget: "A leader can't control everything. He has to work with what he's got. So he can't make everything right overnight. And he'll make some mistakes, too; he's only human. But the thing to watch is the direction he's taking us. It might be slower than you'd like, but are things generally headed the right way or not? That's how you judge a leader."

By the way, that was part of my dad giving his approval of Pres. Clinton's actions, in general and in particular for his achieving the first growth in real (inflation-adjusted) wages for American working people in a great many years. In awarding the Peace Prize, the Nobel Committee cited Pres. Obama's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

Against the background noise of insane but persistent cries from the "birthers," Pres. Obama fulfilled his campaign pledge and spoke to the world's billion Muslims shortly after attaining office, to reassure them that -- despite what the bin Ladens (and some of the "crusaders" in our nation) say -- Americans want peace in the world, including with Islamic peoples. That was indeed "extraordinary." (Can one image Pres. Obama's predecessor making the same speech or impact?)

And yes, Pres. Obama has inherited wars in the heart of the Islamic world. But I believe he is doing everything humanly possible to not fight a "dumb war" -- as he said in his famous speech opposing intervention in Iraq -- while securing the safety of Americans, and others, in uniform and at home. He is drawing down our forces in Iraq, and even somewhat faster than had originally been thought possible, while trying to retain some sense of stability in the "Pottery Barn" we broke.

The strategy he is formulating for Afghanistan is admirably being based first and foremost upon helping everyday Afghan people stabilize their own economic and political situation (despite the apparent corruption of their leaders), which unavoidably requires security -- by our forces for now and by Afghan forces being trained -- as to protect otherwise defenseless humanitarian assistance. At the same time, American drones, special ops, and other forces are as surgically as possible disrupting and destroying al Qaeda command and control centers, leaders, and networks, now based primarily in Pakistan, which of course poses dicey problems and limitations of its own. There is no easy fix.

Whether or not we agree with his decisions, I think all of us should appreciate that Pres. Obama and his national security team, including Secretary of State Clinton, are doing their very best to be responsible, for all concerned. Remember, our allowing al Qaeda to have a safe haven previously cost us dearly, and led to the situations we are in now. Preventing further disaster prevents further war. Pres. Obama's efforts to curb nuclear proliferation are also being cited for his receiving the Peace Prize.

Every day the catastrophic potential of this threat becomes more real, as nuclear materials and technology are being disseminated and developed at an increasing rate, by nations and groups that openly and clandestinely threaten us and our allies. Pres. Obama's working with all parties -- including making agreements already with Russian Pres. Medvedev and holding the first (tentatively promising) talks between our nation and Iran in decades -- is a mark of good faith on the part of the American people in the world, after years of our -- disastrously -- "going it alone."

Pres. Obama is trying to regain -- re-earn -- for America the international good will that the previous administration squandered in the wake of 9/11. Pres. Obama has dispatched George Mitchell, who helped make the peace in Northern Ireland, to help make the peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, another conflict that has persisted stubbornly for decades, and that inflames and complicates all the other issues in the Middle and Near East. Like Al Gore (and unlike the previous administration), Pres. Obama has taken leadership and agreed to cooperation in alleviating global climate change, another problem too big for one nation to solve alone.

And finally, remember that Pres. Obama's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen ... cooperation between peoples" does not just apply to international efforts. Like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Pres. Obama I believe has won the Peace Prize for his leadership in helping make peace between people of different races -- and every other description -- here in our country, where such differences have long divided us and thus weakened us, socially, economically, and morally. America is more at peace with itself because of Pres. Obama's leadership -- and really, for what he represents to so many of us. The Peace Prize often helps give impetus to international movements that are gaining momentum, such as the fight against Global Warming. As Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said of Pres. Obama's award: "He got the prize because he has been able to change the international climate. ... Some people say, and I understand it, isn't it premature? Too early? Well, I'd say then that it could be too late to respond three years from now. It is now that we have the opportunity to respond -- all of us."

It is obvious that Pres. Obama represents a new face, ethnically and figuratively, of America -- the most powerful nation -- to the world: a vision of hope through working together with, not against, one another. And that indeed is the only road that leads to peace. Pres. Obama says he is "humbled" by the Prize; I am proud of the honor he has brought to America. And I'm sure my dad is smiling down on us all.

--Doug Drenkow, Communications Consultant, Columnist

In another time, before we were 'dumbed down', someone winning the Nobel Prize would be lauded for his/her achievement. Not so, today! Since 1980, the US has entered a world on the other side of the looking glass. Idiocy is preferred over intelligence; screw ups are 'cool' and real achievement just means you're a nerd.

We used to hear a lot about 'values' from the party that now flouts every 'value' worth having,  affirming or  nourishing. If the media --Fox and CNN particularly --seem shallow, obnoxious, stupid, it's because they are but mirrors held up to this cowardly retreat from excellence.

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Economic Tsunami: A Perfect Storm Threatens US Economy

Highly leveraged US expansion, growth and empire are about to be swept away like a bamboo hut. As China leads the world in dumping dollars, the US appears to have exhausted the means by which it can continue to leverage or finance expansion and imperialism.

Bush could not have picked a worse time to ratchet up his anti-Iran rhetoric. China's disenchantment with US dollars is a reaction to Bush's bellicose rhetoric. Iran's strategic position was recognized by Alexander the Great, significantly the last "conqueror" to have successfully invaded from the west.

As this blog reported recently, Bush promised that the US would join an Israeli nuclear strike on Iran. It is impossible to tell if the US rhetoric is in response to Iranian threats to dump dollars or Iran's response to Bush's promise to join an Israeli nuclear strike on Iran. The GOP seems unconcerned as Bush's big mouth continues to make the rest of world jittery.

Bush believes that a nuclear war can be won! A nuclear war of any size will most certainly trigger a wave of cascading chaos that respects no borders. Already, Russia has warned that an attack on Iran will be considered an attack on Russia and a Chinese sub recently popped up undetected in the midst of the US Fifth Fleet. As this blog reported several months ago, China has the ability to put a nuclear sub off the US east coast undetected!

We were warned. In 2005, Treasury Secretary John Snow acknowledged economic growth was limited to a small percentage of Americans. Bush's base? Some things never change. Only a tiny elite experienced what they alone have dubbed the Reagan prosperity. A "prosperity" so limited is not prosperity; it is merely a redistribution of dwindling wealth. If poorer folk lost ground, to whom did wealth trickle? The GOP knows that what it says about economics is wrong. They will say whatever they think they can get you to believe.

A statutory debt limit of $8.184 trillion was reached in mid-February of 2005. The total collapse of the US economy was averted but only because no other country wished to be sucked into the US black hole. The dollar actually retained some value amid fears of a worldwide economic catastrophe.

China had been propping up the dollar so that US consumers could continue buying cheap Chinese crap, primarily via WalMart and other monstrous legacies of Globalization. At the time, US debt was some $8.162 trillion dollars and has only gotten bigger. US credit abroad is strained to breaking or broke. The US credit crisis trickles down to bond markets world wide. No country is too small to remain unaffected. Investors in New Zealand, for example, have this month complained that their interest payments have been suspended, the result of fall-out from the US credit crisis. It would appear that there is no where to run, no where to hide.

Moody's reports that "spending" threatens US ratings. Nevermind --Bush will simply balance the books upon the backs of those who can least afford it. Social Security recipients! The issue points up the endemic, perhaps genetic inability of GOP-types to think clearly. GOP profligacy will most certainly break Social Security but the GOP, as are their wont, will blame Social Security. The real culprit is, of course, the Pentagon, a fatted cow regularly milked by the sycophantic defense contractors who fight to suckle the Pentagon teat!

There is nothing wrong with Social Security, but the GOP can be depended upon to break it. Social Security is, in fact, government's only success. It turns a profit, called by critics a "liability". Of course it's a liability by definition because it is money owed to those who paid into it! Elementary accounting! Leave it to a gopper to turn a plus into a negative. Leave it to a gopper to demonize the government's only success story.

As evidence of an imminent collapse, FEMA can be counted on to activate a vast web of concentration camps complete with armed military personnel to keep the "vast unwashed" non-GOP throng in line. These concentration camps look quite a lot like Gitmo or the corporate prisons in Bush's Texas. They are intended to "manage" the population of US citizens in the event of a "terrorist" attack which the GOP can be counted on to manufacture and exploit. That such plans exist is a verifiable fact. Check out: Operation Northwoods , the Pentagon's seditious, treasonous plan to blow up a ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame a civilian uprising, large-scale dissent, or an insurrection against the government.

Meanwhile, The Patriot Act has made a terrorist of anyone who dares to disagree with Bush's imperious and illogical definitions of everything. The US Senate has conspired with the criminal Bush to ban habeas corpus, a move necessary to populate a gulag of Bushco concentration camps. The congress gave Bush sole authority to declare martial law and suspend habeas corpus. This heinous, venal and illegitimate administration will simply ignore the Posse Comitatus Act to enforce its decrees with military force.

In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law (1). It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President's ability to deploy troops within the United States.

The Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C.331 -335) has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C.1385), helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush is seeking to undo those prohibitions.

Public Law 109-364, or the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" (H.R.5122) (2), which was signed by the commander in chief on October 17th, 2006, in a private Oval Office ceremony, allows the President to declare a "public emergency" and station troops anywhere in America and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to "suppress public disorder."

President Bush seized this unprecedented power on the very same day that he signed the equally odious Military Commissions Act of 2006. In a sense, the two laws complement one another. One allows for torture and detention abroad, while the other seeks to enforce acquiescence at home, preparing to order the military onto the streets of America. Remember, the term for putting an area under military law enforcement control is precise; the term is "martial law."

-- Bush Moves Toward Martial Law, Frank Morales, Information Liberation

The US economy is broken and faces imminent and total collapse. The US is bankrupt --morally and financially. Given the eventual and horrible outcomes, it is hard not to conclude that Bush and his co-conspirators deliberately embarked upon a program of profligate spending and wars of naked aggression in order to bring about this result.

Since the New Deal, Republicans have been on the wrong side of every issue of concern to ordinary Americans; Social Security, the war in Vietnam, equal rights, civil liberties, church- state separation, consumer issues, public education, reproductive freedom, national health care, labor issues, gun policy, ampaign-finance reform, the environment and tax fairness. No political party could remain so consistently wrong by accident. The only rational conclusion is that, despite their cynical "family values" propaganda, the Republican Party is a criminal conspiracy to betray the interests of the American people in favor of plutocratic and corporate interests, and absolutist religious groups.

--GOP Evil Bastards

Well, perhaps I was not the first to call the GOP what it is. For years, I have warned that the GOP is not a political party; it is a criminal conspiracy, a crime syndicate, for which there is probable cause to imprison its entire leadership.

I am reminded of New Orleans. Normal people looked at New Orleans and saw a humanitarian disaster about which this government did not give a shit! Bush and the GOP, however, looked at the flood waters covering venerable old neighborhoods and saw a new Disneyland which would rise up above the waves! God Bless the Child that's got his own, but may God damn the gopper who exploits a tragedy for personal and party gain! How many, I wonder, have felt betrayed by the country they loved?

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It's Time to Flog Our "Government"

The fall of the dollar means that Americans will pay more for almost everything. The "correction" had been overdue since the US became a debtor nation, a process completed under Ronald Reagan. It was on September 16, 1985, that the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation and it was on that day that the American Empire died. Since that date, the GOP has been content to let consumers suck up the trade deficit with fewer real jobs. The GOP got away with it as long as China propped up the buck in order to fill the shelves at Walmart. An emerging stronger Euro changed everything.

The collapse of the dollar might not have mattered as much if the US had not over many years of incompetent GOP missrule and corruption become a net debtor nation. US consumers are utterly dependent upon "cheap" merchandise from abroad; a falling dollar is catastrophic.

So far, CNN and the US media seem to be treating this like a novelty story, a "kicker" at the end of the real news. Like the Democrats who thought they could "play" Bush's game and win, they just don't get it. The average American may not "get it" but he will most surely pay for it.

Like almost every stupid thing that has happened to the US since World War II, the GOP is mostly to blame. But Democrats should be flogged for letting them get away with it.

Iraq changed everything by pressing the point and Bush is to blame for bankupting the US with his vainglorious adventure in Iraq. The American people will pay dearly for Bush's on-going act of mass murder in Iraq.

Though Democrats were, at one time, villified as "big spending liberals", it is the GOP that has run up the highest debts and deficits. Just as terrorism is always worse under GOP regimes, debts and deficits are, likewise, greater during periods of GOP missrule.

The world might have tolerated our many follies as long as they could pass along bucks received for the goods sold the US. But, alas, the chain is broken. A growing number of people and nations now refuse the dollar. It was all, literally, a "confidence" game, in which all the world has lost confidence.

War is a racket fought by the masses for privileged elites, big corporations, and venal politicians like Bush. Bush's quagmire is fought for the benefit of no-bid contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater. The war is financed by America's working poor and middle classes who pay for the war —with their lives abroad and with their jobs, their retirement prospects, and their access to health care at home.

Bush's base —the nation's elite, his corporate sponsors, and the so-called defense industry —have paid nothing, risked nothing! Rather —they feed at the trough. The upper one percent of the population has gotten several tax cuts while the big oil companies report record profits rising concurrently with higher prices at the pump.

Just two days after 9/11, I learned from Congressional staffers that Republicans on Capitol Hill were already exploiting the atrocity, trying to use it to push through tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. ... We now know that from the very beginning, the Bush administration and its allies in Congress saw the terrorist threat not as a problem to be solved, but as a political opportunity to be exploited. The story of the latest terror plot makes the administration’s fecklessness and cynicism on terrorism clearer than ever.

—Hoping for Fear, by Paul Krugman, Using Fear Commentary, NY Times

There are big profits in the death business. Go to Texas and consult the CEO of Murder, Inc. , otherwise known as DynCorp.

The war in Iraq has boosted DynCorp's revenues, responsible for about $400 million of the company's nearly $2 billion in sales. And while the company didn't specify how much the effort has added to profits, there has certainly been an upside, Lagana said, although he added that profit margins are lower than in other private industry -- often below 10 percent.

For government contractors and other US-based businesses that are doing work in Iraq, the war there has continued to provide opportunity and benefits, although experts and companies alike say they are difficult to quantify. To be sure, security businesses, oil producers and defense contractors are among the biggest winners. Those who manufacture key products, from bulletproof vests to bullets themselves, and, more recently, those involved in reconstruction, have reaped the benefits, too.

--Businesses find benefits, costs in war work

Money is not the soiled and over-designed scraps of paper that we carry around and pass off in exchange for "things". Money is, at last, mere faith. China, especially, had "faith" that their confidence in the almighty buck would be repaid by US willingness to buy all sorts of cheap Chinese crap at Wal-Mart and other blights on the American urban landscape. The Chinese would get it all back as long as the rest of the world was willing to wink and nod.

The result is that Shanghai and other cities have out-Americaed, America. They have taller and uglier buildings and worse traffic amid the worst air pollution on the planet. Houston and LA look green by comparison. China is a ecological blight on the planet. The lesson one hopes China has learned is that there is price to be paid for having partnered with Satan.

Wal-Mart makes a killing putting people out of work, depressing local economies, and lowering wages but it is globalization --an unholy alliance with GOP "trickle down" policies --that spawned Wal-Mart and sounded a death knell for the futures of American workers. Most recently, Wal-Mart's Chinese imports have displaced nearly 200,000 US jobs

China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) was supposed to improve the US trade deficit with China and create good jobs in the United States. But those promises have gone unfulfilled: the total US trade deficit with China reached $235 billion in 2006. Between 2001 and 2006, this growing deficit eliminated 1.8 million US jobs (Scott 2007). The world’s biggest retailer, US-based Wal-Mart was responsible for $27 billion in US imports from China in 2006 and 11% of the growth of the total US trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2006. Wal-Mart’s trade deficit with China alone eliminated nearly 200,000 US jobs in this period.

Robert E. Scott, The Wal-Mart effect

The Wal-Mart effect on US workers and manufacturing is typified by the effects seen in clothing --low-cost goods with a hidden higher price: lower wages, lost jobs. Underlying every sector, however, are unsupportable US trade deficits which benefit 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 financed China's economic boom.

Of some 133,000 manufacturing jobs lost in the US, sixty-eight percent were the direct result of Wal-Mart's "partnership" with China. The effect is devastating to US workers and the US economy overall. Manufacturing jobs, after all, have generally paid higher wages and provided better benefits.

The US-China trade deficits amount to more than $1 trillion in US Treasury bills and growing. It is fair to say that China has done this deliberately to rehabilitate its own economy on US backs. It has had the effect of lowering the cost of its exports to the United States and other countries.

The relationship between the dollar and the yen has been affected primarily by the adverse trade balance that we have with Japan. At the last summit meeting in London, for instance, we discussed the very high positive trade balance that Japan enjoyed then. The goal established by your own leaders was that this trade balance would be reduced. Instead, it's continued to go up.

I think, as the economic market leaders have recognized, the high export of Japanese goods and the relatively low imports into Japan of other goods, the yen has strengthened in comparison to other currencies, including, of course, the American dollar.

- President Jimmy Carter, Interview with Western European and Japanese Reporters, July 11th, 1978

What a foolhardy game of brinkmanship this has become! It is tempting to write that China has more to lose by a collapsing buck than does the US. Certainly Bush concluded thus as he parked the US Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf, where it is tracked undetected by Chinese subs.

Money is whatever people will accept as payment for goods and services. As long as the rest of the world was confident that they could pass along their bucks or exchange them equitably, the US was not overly concerned about "fundamentals".

I am now told in Europe that the strength of the dollar abroad is inexorably linked to Bush's credibility abroad. We are, therefore, screwed. Bush has no credibility. And most Americans don't have the luxury of demanding that they be paid in some other currency.

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