Saturday, July 2, 2016

Americans Unite! Break the Shackles of the Bipartisan Oligarchy!




*  *  *

In Tuesday’s indictment of free trade as virtual economic treason, "The Donald" has really set the cat down among the pigeons.

(*TWO THUMBS UP*)

For, in denouncing NAFTA, the WTO, MFN for China and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, all backed by Bush I and II, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, Trump is all but calling his own party leaders dunderheads and losers.
* WHICH THEY ARE!

And he seems to be winning the argument.

* YES HE IS!

As he calls for the repudiation of “globalism” and a return to “Americanism,” a Republican Congress renders itself mute on whether it will even vote on the TPP this year.

* BUT THEY SURE AS HELL FUNDED OBAMA'S DEFICIT SPENDING AND AGREED TO THE HIGHEST DEBT LOAD IN HISTORY IN DOLLAR AMOUNT!

* FOLKS... THE REPUBLICANS ARE MAINLY SCUMBAGS. (THE DEMOCRATS ARE PRETTY MUCH ALL SCUMBAGS... BUT LET'S STICK TO THE REPUBLICAN CONGRESS FOR NOW.)

On trade, Bernie Sanders is closer to Trump.

* MEANING CLOSER TO RIGHT!

Even Hillary Clinton has begun to renounce a TPP she once called the “gold standard” of trade deals.

* SHE'S SUCH A SCUMBAG. SHE BELIEVES IN NOTHING BUT POWER. REMEMBER WHEN SHE USED TO BELIEVE MARRIAGE WAS MEANT TO BE ONLY BETWEEN A MAN AND A WOMAN? SERIOUSLY... WHAT KIND OF SAD SACK P.O.S. CAN STOMACH THIS WOMAN?

* NOTICE: I WANT TO FIRE RYAN AND MCCONNELL WHILE MILLIONS OF "LIBERALS" WANT TO MAKE HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! MY FRIENDS... SUCH PEOPLE ARE SCUM. NO OTHER WORD FOR 'EM.

Where have all the troubadours of free trade gone?

* OH... THEY'RE OUT THERE...

(*SMIRK*)

Why do economic patriots seem ascendant?

* BECAUSE WE'RE RIGHT!

Is this like the Cold War, where the other side gets up and goes home?

* PERHAPS...

* HOPEFULLY...

As Trump pointed out in Monessen in the Mon Valley of Pennsylvania, the returns from free trade are in, and the results are rotten.

Since Bush I, we have run $12 trillion in trade deficits - $4 trillion with China.

Once a Maoist dump, China has become the greatest manufacturing power on earth.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has lost 50,000 factories and a third of its manufacturing jobs.

(*PURSED LIPS*)

* YOU HAVE TO BE SERIOUSLY DELUSIONAL - STUPID - OR SIMPLY WANT TO SEE AMERICA FALL - IF YOU BELIEVE THIS IS A GOOD THING.

Trump is going to start a “trade war,” wail the critics.

* NO! WE'RE IN A TRADE WAR! AND WE'VE BEEN LOSING! TRUMP WANTS US TO START WINNING!

But the damage wreaked upon U.S. industry by free traders already rivals what Arthur “Bomber” Harris did for German industry in the Ruhr.

(*SNORT*)

In recent decades, every major U.S. trade partner — China, Japan, Canada, Mexico, EU — has run annual trade surpluses at our expense. How do 40 years of trade deficits in goods, run by a nation that rarely ran one for a century before, make us stronger or wealthier?

* THEY'LL TELL YOU WE HAVE MORE... "STUFF."

(*SNORT*)

Or is what is best for the world now more important than what is best for America?

* NOT IN MY BOOK, IT'S NOT!

And here we come to the heart of the argument.

* AMERICA FIRST!

* AMERICANS FIRST!

Washington, Hamilton, and Henry Clay, father of the “American System,” and Lincoln and every Republican president up to Eisenhower, crafted trade policies to promote manufacturing to grow the wealth of the USA.

They were patriots not globalists.

* DAMN STRAIGHT!

They knew that America’s political independence required economic independence of all other nations. They wanted to build an economy where Americans would cut their bonds to foreign lands and come to rely upon one another for the needs and necessities of their national life. They sought to make us independent, so that we could not be dragged by economic ties into the inevitable wars of the Old World.

(*NOD*)

And they succeeded magnificently.

* YEP!

Britain, which embraced free trade in the 1840s, became so reliant on imports that a few dozen German submarines almost knocked her out of World War I.

* THIS IS TRUE! (DO THEY STILL TEACH THIS IN SCHOOL?)

Protectionist America had to come pull her chestnuts out of the fire.

* YEP! (AND WE MADE A PRETTY PENNY DOING SO!)

Free trade ideology is not America-made. It is an alien faith, a cargo cult, smuggled in from the old continent, the work of men Edmund Burke called “sophisters, economists, and calculators.”

* I LIKE THAT... "SOPHISTERS."

(*WINK*)

David Ricardo, James and John Stuart Mill, Richard Cobden, all chatterers and scribblers, none of whom ever built a great nation, declared free trade to be the new New Testament, the salvation of mankind.

These men in whose souls the old faith was dying seized on a utopian belief that world government and free trade would be the salvation of mankind. The Economist magazine was founded to preach the heresy.

(*NOD*)

Before the modern era, Americans never bought into it. But now... our elites have.

(And, undeniably, there are beneficiaries to free trade...)

* FOLLOW THE MONEY!

There are first the owners, operators and shareholders of companies who, to be rid of high-wage American labor, moved production to China or Mexico or where the costs are lower and regulations near non-existent.

(*PURSED LIPS*)

Transnational companies, their K Street lobbyists, and media that survive on their advertising dollars, are the biggest boosters of free trade, as they are the biggest beneficiaries.

Consumers, too, at least initially, see more products down at the mall, selling at lower prices. Cheap consumer goods are the bribes free traders proffer to patriots to sell out their country and countrymen to capitalists who have no country.

* YEP...

(*SIGH*)

* THE SHORT-TERM CARROT...

* IN THE END IT ALWAYS LEADS TO RUIN. (FOLKS... THIS IS THE FORMULA OF THE ILLEGAL DRUG TRADE! GET 'EM HOOKED...)

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

But we are not simply consumers. We are Americans. We are fellow citizens. We are neighbors. We have duties to one another.

When a factory shuts down and a town begins to die, workers are laid off. The local tax base shrinks. Education and social services are cut. Folks go on unemployment and food stamps.

We... all... pay... for... that...!!!

Wives go to work and kids come home from school to empty houses, and families break up, and move away. Social disintegration follows.

“Creative destruction” is the anti-septic term free traders use to describe what they have done and are doing to the America we grew up in.

Southeast of the old Steel City, in the Mon Valley of Pennsylvania, where my mother and her six brothers and her sister grew up, folks describe what happened more poignantly and graphically.

* I WANT MY AMERICA BACK...!!!

* TRUMP 2016!

* AMERICA FIRST...!!!

* AMERICANS FIRST...!!!


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