Does Cap and Trade Signal China’s Rise as the World’s New Super Power?

For the past 40 years, China’s leadership has systematically implemented a 50-year strategy to overtake America as the world’s leading economic and political power.  In the history of the world, no country has ever accomplished this feat without a major war.  Yet China brilliantly planned to dethrone America without bloodshed by disabling America’s ability to conduct war well before our politicians would ever think to drum up a war frenzy.

China strategized that she could accomplish a first ever bloodless transition of superpowers through rapid economic growth, overbuilding industrial infrastructure, cheapening the dollar with massive American debt, building a gold backed Yuan world reserve currency, strengthening her military to protect critical trade routes, co-opting America’s elite to support China over America, and gutting America’s industrial capacity to support a sustained world war.

A critical assumption of China’s strategy was that America’s international investors and financial institutions would scurry to help her grow, given the chance. America’s elites did not disappoint China’s leadership.  With promises of riches, America’s capital investors feverishly rushed in to help China achieve most of her goals in just four short decades.

While both China’s and America’s leaders wanted China’s economy to grow dramatically, the motivations of each country’s leaders were strikingly different.  China’s leadership grew rich while building a massive economic and technological infrastructure to support her people’s future.  On the other hand, America’s leadership grew rich by stripping our citizens’ future to fuel their own personal wealth.  China simply had to offer a gold rush to America’s investors, and they in return blindly transferred America’s wealth for China to overtake the United States.

Knowing that the world could only extract a finite amount of debt from western economies to support China’s growth and that the cash flow from West to East would ultimately create an unsustainable debt bubble, China rapidly overbuilt manufacturing capacity in anticipation of slowing of investments from America and others. Now, China sits atop a mountain of physical assets while the rest of the developed world sits atop a junk pile of debt.

The West is now in the precarious position of either propping up China, or of sending the world into depression.  If the World’s debt bubble bursts, much of America’s investors’ wealth will evaporate. China will also default on her debt, but tens of thousands of new factories will remain in China.  China, will recover from an unprecedented depression with infrastructure, skills, trade relations, and gold to restart a new world economy.

Given America’s amassed debt and gutted manufacturing capacity over the past 40 years, we cannot withstand a long, deep depression. Our central bank has no alternative but to assist China in keeping the bubble afloat.  But, our citizenry must adopt a long term strategy to reverse what has left us in this dire predicament.

With a massive shift in power that the world unwittingly gave China as a backdrop to the issue of global warming, China’s President, Xi Jinping, has now come to America offering his support for pollution cap and trade.  Until now, neither America nor China has been willing to sacrifice economic growth to reduce carbon emissions.  Why then is China now willing to offer pollution cap and trade?  At this stage in the progress of her 50-year strategy, China can now manipulate cap and trade to further her bloodless revolution.

Americans believe that a small consolation of our slowed economy from tens of thousands of factories being transferred from America to China is that pollution was also transferred from America to China.  Our air and water is cleaner as a result.  Yet, in a cap and trade environment, this transfer of pollution now gives China “pollution assets” to either expand her own economy or to sell back to America.   Cap and trade would force America to either trade existing American pollution for new pollution or to buy pollution from countries like China.

Cap and trade thus could give China the ability to manipulate America’s industrial collapse even more.  With a massive worldwide debt bubble already in place, cap and trade would give China yet another powerful lever to either rise through the bubble or to send the world crashing into depression, to then rise through the ashes of world economic chaos as the world’s next superpower.  Adding pollution cap and trade to the mix would give China an untenable political and economic lever to control America’s destiny.

America’s dollar is so diminished, our central banking tools so depleted, our industries so gutted, our trade relations so reduced, our nation so indebted, that we are almost toothless to counter China’s 50-year strategy.  If we do not coalesce around a focused strategy to counter China, our Constitutional Republic could be endangered.  Xi Jinping’s visit should be a wake-up call.  America must not let Cap and Trade have a place in our economy until our economy, national security, and future is placed first in the hearts and minds of America’s investors and politicians.

Power has Corrupted of America’s Trade Deficit

Power is the drug that urges America’s elite to enslave America’s workers into borrowing $7 trillion dollars to buy foreign goods during the past decade while our robber barrons have idled our workforce. What corruption is this that is placidly accepted by our downtrodden citizens? Why do we accept the wealthy elite of our country stealing from the poor through trade deficits?

America’s trade policies have amounted to taxing the average family about $100,000 since 2000, reaching into the pockets of every American, pulling out thousands of dollars and giving them to America’s wealthy and their trading partners. That is the definition of power, raw and corrupt. Yet, through this slight of hand, our elite, including America’s federal politicians who bow to their whims, make it seem to the average American that the robbing of the middle and under class through trade deficits has been to our benefit!

Divine law starts with every man earning a living wage. Those with more talents and that can provide more to the community should earn more, yet all in America should start with a job that can feed their family, put a roof over their head, and shoes on their kids feet as they go off to school in safe neighborhoods. Instead, our robber barrons have seen fit to ensure that a third of Americans either do not work or are working poor while forcing our citizens to borrow from foreign governments while buying goods made in foreign countries by their citizens, not ours.

Power has corrupted our economy. Power has idled our workforce. Power has crippled our schools and filled our prisons. Power is the drug that deadens our elite to the plight of our citizens. Its tentacles reach throughout our institutions. Its poison weakens our communities. Its evil threatens the stability of our society. This imbalance of work, this idling of our nation is not a natural occurrence. It is a choice by our elite through the corruption of power, and it is an abomination of divine law.

Detroit and America Must Choose to Banish Catch 22

Catch 22 is a phrase in the book by the same name that has come to mean a problem that has no solution, for it contains a circular argument, like those that have plagued Detroit for the past 63 years. These problems have been blamed for the misery of millions. Are they truly Catch 22?

Problem #1

To bring more business and population to Detroit, crime must be reduced. But crime cannot be reduced unless there are jobs that pay living wages. And jobs will not be created unless there are incoming businesses, which will not come because there is too much crime.

……………………………………………Catch 22….

Problem #2

Crime will not be reduced unless would be criminals can find jobs to replace benefits of crime. To do so, those jobs must pay living wages. But a majority of the unemployed are illiterate and undereducated and do not qualify for jobs that pay living wages. Therefore, they cannot obtain jobs that will pay living wages. Without a living wage, crime will not be reduced.

……………………………………………Catch 22….

Problem #3

America’s unemployed need jobs. To employ Americans, a minimum legal wage must be paid. But the world competes to make and sell widgets, and world wages to make widgets are less than America’s minimum legal wage. Therefore widgets must be made overseas and sold to Americans. Making widgets overseas keeps Americans unemployed and without jobs.

……………………………………………Catch 22….

For the past 63 years, since the peak of employment and population, the leadership of Detroit, as well as most major cities in America, has accepted the Catch 22 paradigm that their economic problems are unsolvable and therefore, not really a burden that is theirs to carry. Accepting the Catch 22 paradigm means they condemn America to high unemployment and high crime in our inner cities. Accepting the Catch 22 paradigm means that millions of lives will go unfulfilled and wasted, that millions of children go unfed each night, and that our nation suffers as we commit the least of ours to an arduous lifelong pursuit of happiness.

Catch 22 paradigms are roadblocks that keep America’s political leadership from helping America to reach optimal output and productivity. Catch 22 paradigms are impediments that keep Americans from reaching their highest opportunity for all to pursue happiness.

Catch 22 paradigms, however, are merely paradigms that are placed in the collective consciousness of America by those that wish them to exist. America is conditioned to accept them yet they need not be accepted. Owners of capital benefit from them. Political leaders benefit from them. The rest of America does not benefit from them. If America accepts these paradigms, they continue. If America simply rejects these paradigms, they vanish.

Catch 22 paradigms support the efforts of owners of capital to create maximum wealth but cost trillions of dollars and millions of jobs in the American economy. America could force American capitalists to spend their dollars in America. But our history, principles, and laws support the freedom of owners of capital to spend their dollars in whatever part of the world provides the highest returns.

To force owners of capital to spend their dollars in America would require a change of laws that would turn on our principles of freedom for all Americans. We cannot turn our back on our heritage of freedom. Therefore, we accept that the economic engine of America, the capital of our wealthy elite will be spent in other parts of the world, costing trillions of dollars of loss and millions of jobs in our economy.

…………………………………………………Catch 22

Solutions do exist to Catch 22. American owners of capital can make profits in America to employ our workforce without forcing them to spend dollars here if political compromise is made to allow equivalent profit. Jobs can be created that include a living wage, if political compromise allows for living wages. Crime can then be reduced and the pursuit of happiness can be lifted to a higher plane. And believe it or not, all of this can be accomplished without spending more tax dollars, which is the ultimate cry of those shouting Catch 22.

These real and viable solutions, however, require political compromise. America’s economic problems have arisen from deep seated differences of vision that drive conservative and liberal parties alike to pursue their own visions without compromise, producing the political vacuum that must exist for Catch 22 paradigms to live.

In Detroit, one vision is for all that have made it through the gauntlet and that have risen at least to the middle class to escape to the suburbs, and to make Downtown a playground fortress against the poverty of the inner city, while giving up the rest of Detroit’s citizens to Catch 22. The other vision is to form a grass roots effort to fight the plight caused by Catch 22 to all of Detroit’s citizens, yet without attacking Catch 22 as a mere paradigm. They therefore accept its paradigm that economic suffering must continue. Detroit’s two opposing visions have fought compromise since the riots of 1967 brought their opposing views into the political light.

Problems that such a lack of compromise creates in Detroit then cause the city to fester without solution. Polarized city political leaderships acquiesce to the meager capital investments left for their cities as they pursue their opposing political visions. Polarized state political leadership compete with other states for limited capital investments by promising owners of capital that they will not have to share the tax burdens of the state. And polarized federal political leaders pass legislation to allow for owners of capital to make maximum profits overseas at the expense of jobs at home.

Political leaders become convinced that their political interests lie closer to the owners of capital than to those of the rest of their constituency. Without having to compromise across the aisle, they pass Catch 22 legislation that make it easier for owners of capital to invest dollars overseas while escaping the uncompromising political fighting that continues at home. Political leaders’ efforts on behalf of America’s elite become an easier route to remaining in political power than having to bend in political compromise on behalf of America.

Detroit’s solution rests in ending Catch 22. America’s solution rests in ending Catch 22. The solution to ending Catch 22 rests in political compromise that puts Detroit’s future, America’s future ahead of political expediency. Viable solutions exist. Jobs can be created. Owners of capital can be rewarded in America. Much suffering can be banished. The American economy can return to prosperity.

No Catch 22….

US economy is as simple as US CH IOU.

Person U buys trinket H from Person C and gives a U IOU. Person C doesn’t want trinket S and instead saves U IOU from person U. With no demand for trinket S, person U is laid off. But he still wants another trinket H so he gives person C another U IOU, which Person C saves again.

After a few years, person C has more demand for trinket H and uses U IOUs to buy a factory from Person K, who then uses U IOUs that travel throughout the region but never go back to purchase trinket S from Person U. Meanwhile Person U continues to purchase more trinkets S with more IOUs.

U debt grows. U unemployment grows. U trade deficit grows. U economists suggest that to put person U back to work, government U will put other Persons U to work, pay them more IOUs that they can then give to Person U for trinket S and that then he can go back to work. So now to “fix” the problem, people are put to work in government instead of making trinket S, so that they can buy trinket S, yet the debt still grows.

Economist U says this is a perfect solution for Person U can now buy trinkets from Person C, Government person U can buy trinkets from Person U and the only thing that seems odd is that the U IOUs continue to grow. But IOUs represent work that must be done eventually to compensate those holding the IOUs. And if Person U holds more IOUs than he can possibly repay in his lifetime, person C eventually becomes concerned.

Eventually, Person C figures out that Person U can no longer repay the IOUs with the amount of labor available to Person U. Person C then decides that the IOUs circulating are not worth the amount of repayment labor originally intended. Person C then tells Person U in order to buy trinket H, Person U must give Person C two IOUs.

In this way, person C begins to make person U repay his debt. Person U must now labor twice as long to obtain trinket H. Person U becomes “poorer” due to now having to labor harder to repay decades of IOUs paid to Person C. This perfect solution touted by Economist U as a way to fix unemployment is not so perfect after all.

Person C has profited from not buying trinket S over the years. Person C has grown employment, bought factories, grown GDP, and increased real assets at home. Yet, Person C has paid a price in choosing eventually to not accept U IOUs at the same face value as before. For now, while choosing to make person U give two IOUs for trinket H, person C also accepts that all the IOUs he holds are only worth half of what they were a moment before.

Person C’s economy is now robust but his wealth is a little less now than before. Person U’s economy is now fragile and hollow. Person U must labor twice as hard now to buy trinket H. Even though his labor is worth less buying trinket H, he will still labor the same number of hours to repay his debt. Yet a pyrrhic victory is won for now other countries holding IOUs will buy his labor that is worth less.

In summary, for decades Person U bought trinket H thinking it was inexpensive but in reality it really bought him unemployment and borrowing to pay for trinket H. Then later, to repay his debt, Person U became poorer and sold trinket S cheaply into the market to repay Person C for the trinket H that he borrowed U IOUs to pay for earlier. Going forward, Person U has less GDP and less factories for decades as he attempts to catch up.

Are Corporate States Alien Life Forms Here to Destroy or to Help the Human Race

For forty years, lobbyists have multiplied, as has their power to write and financially support changing laws of our country for their benefit. Sensing lobbyists growing power, politicians have enacted laws to limit corporate impact, but at every turn, other laws are passed that pat corporations on their backs for their ardent support of political clients.

For forty years, corporations have been nurtured in the womb of America’s heartland as inhuman zygotes preparing for eventual world competition. Yet, even as these multinational corporations grew stronger suckling on our country’s teat, their MBA mantra of short-term gains began to separate these new life forms from their motherland.

Citizens United was a celebration of the birth of the anational corporate state, corporations large enough to exist on their own outside of the reach of any one nation. Yet having broken free of inconvenient national bindings, corporate states could not just remain stagnant babies in our world. They must now evolve and commune together for their species’ survival.

Just as mankind grew from hunters and gatherers to city-states and finally nation states; just as nation states developed from mercantilist competitors to a league of earth’s cohabitants; corporate states must also now evolve. It is natural for these corporate states to want their own legislative bodies to form compromises in the shaping of bills that minimize intercorporate conflicts and that allow each to flourish like weeds in the gardens of their host nation-states.

ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is one such advance in their evolution. It continues their path of lobbyist democracy that has defined America for the past 40 years, yet it takes corporations to their next stage of evolution of feasting on nation state’s legislative bodies for corporate gains. Unless citizens of nation states learn that their conduit of representation has been usurped, and unless we finally agree to co-opt our corporate citizens into recognizing human citizens as stakeholders in corporate successes, America will ultimately become fodder in the new world order.

As a pragmatic nationalist, I favor learning to live amongst this new life form, the anational corporate state, and to harness it, even to domesticate it as we would a farm animal if possible for the betterment of mankind.

Humans evolved from living in caves to the nation states we see today. Along the way, we formed governments. Then these governments formed alliances and finally several world bodies. It was an evolution interspersed with several revolutions.

Corporations are another life form, incorrectly identified by our supreme court as people. That is why our supreme court is a legal entity, not one paid to do biological work. But as any life form, corporations too will evolve and, similarly to people, will most likely be involved in revolutions as well along the way.

They first appeared hundreds of years ago, well before the founding of America. At first, nation states thought they could be domesticated, even house broken, like little pot-bellied pigs. Over the years, America nurtured our cute little corporations and we wrote rules for their existence, which they seemed to follow for the most part. Sure, during the big wars, they exhibited wild like tendencies, often seeming to harm their nation state keepers in the process but we thought we had a handle on how to keep them tame.

But in reality, they were learning how to tame us. They were aliens, living in our world, like little terrorists cells do today, learning our ways. Somehow, they grew big enough to control the nerve centers of nation states, our political structures. They grew powerful enough to send nation states to wars on their behalf and to enforce and install puppet governments in other nation states. And when they became too large to exist within one nation state under its monopoly regulations, they finally learned how to split cells and to pass from one body to the next just as parasites leave their hosts.

As these new life forms continued to evolve, they mutated, each learning to live as one being with cells in multiple nation state bodies, hearts in one nation state, brains in another, still more organs and muscles in others. And they thrived and grew into corporate states, not tied to any nation, anational if you will. Yet at this stage, their existence was similar to the human stage of evolution perhaps in the feudal period.
It was merely another stage of their evolution however to want to commune together eventually. Certainly, corporate states have fought each other as well as worked together complementary. Yet they have had to find their ways individually and to seek each other out as they grew and developed needs. Communing together in associations helped to identify one to another more easily. And ALEC was a natural step in their evolution. With ALEC, they could form a modest “Governmental Function” of working together to identify how nation-state laws could best be constructed to mutually help this burgeoning society of corporate states.

Now if corporate states coexisted symbiotically with humans, say as trees providing us oxygen and wood without too much harm, they would be no cause for concern. But they do not. They have learned to mutate and grow within our systems and to cause harm. One needs to merely draw a timeline out into the future a few decades to understand that the trajectory does not bode well for nation states. Therefore, obviously something must be done for the human race to coexist harmoniously with the corporate state.

Anationals are amorphous beings and that even as laws are passed to contain them, they simply shapeshift to skirt the flimflam. Of course, I do not support the silliness of such flimsy cover for obvious lobbying that creates loopholes as large as trucks to drive home democracy splintering corporatism. This needs to be uncovered and bureaucratically defended even as they shapeshift to a new attack on our Republic.

Yet they are a life form that will not be snuffed out and they will grow as a cancer to consume the lifeblood of America unless we can co-opt them in some symbiotic fashion. So rather than beat my head against the wall that has been built between anational corporate states and our access to our own politicians, my intellectual effort will be to understand how we might harness their emerging strengths for the good of America.

America Faces a Worldwide Economic Revolution

In the midst of America’s great economic crisis, factions from every point in the political spectrum have raised issues as causes for America’s demise. Yet most of America’s problems, when examined in the light of day, are simply symptoms of our greater issues or even just political noise, offering no real hope in deducing the core of our dilemma. America will ultimately begin a path toward our thriving future. Yet, to do so, we must first clarify the true essence of our core problems before we can agree on viable solutions.

To that end, let’s peel back the political onion to examine what some say are our core issues, and then continue to peel until we briefly reach and peer into the collective complexity of our true core. Fret not however. An onion can make one cry because of its many stinky layers, but America’s solution knives, even those identified within these bindings, can cut through all of them.

Over the past three decades, we Americans spent our way to a debt mountain and a housing bubble that will take years to correct. Factions such as the Tea Party have risen up to chastise our government and to slow its ballooning debt even as record Federal deficits are predicted to continue for at least the next decade. Theirs is a worthy cause for what seems a politically irresolvable dilemma. But even if America comes together to solve our debt issues, reducing our debt will only remove a symptom of our nation’s core problem.

If we are to reduce America’s debt without defaulting on our worldwide financial obligations, we must once again employ all able Americans in productive, well paying jobs. Yet in the midst of our bursting housing bubble, we discovered that for three decades America had also created a false employment bubble, which burst as our economy faltered. As a result of our jobs deficit, America is now in danger of lingering in a severely dampened economy for many years to come, certainly another critical symptom.

America has fallen into a monetary contraction resulting from a combination of our housing debt overhang, our poor credit and a lack of jobs. A viable turnaround solution to this monetary implosion should be immediately implemented to begin America’s journey toward our thriving path, and Congress and the President must support it. Yet, while our slowly eroding jobs base, diminished credit and housing debt overhang must be simultaneously corrected if we are to have any hope of more than a token recovery, our monetary implosion, however frightening, is still at the edge of America’s core problem.

Faced with such dismal prospects for debt reduction and job creation, America is now forced to choose between two competing constituencies. Our very concept of freedom almost demands that we support free enterprise, for it has helped America’s multinational corporations compete in the world’s rapidly transforming marketplace. Yet, the immense worldwide scale of free enterprise is now tearing apart our middle class, assaulting the American worker, and we seem powerless to even slow its destructive path. This choice between competing alternatives of either 1) supporting American businesses in their quest to rise above world competition or of 2) supporting the American worker, who is being diminished by those same corporations’ conquests, begins to converge toward the core of America’s problems. Over the past thirty years, emerging nations have conducted mercantilist attacks on America’s gross national product. Yet, our government has resisted creating the economic weapons required to defend our nation against modern hybrids of global competition.

America is already thirty years behind the curve of economic revolution. We are seemingly only observers to a world in which free enterprise is a both a bulwark of defense used by nations against those that would employ mercantilist offenses against them, and also an offensive siege weapon used by emerging corporate-states to destroy the classical defenses of nations that would attempt to resist their growing invasive economic powers.

During these thirty “standstill” years of observing the world’s economic revolution, America’s baby boomer generation rose to positions of power in business and government. In the comfort of our former world prestige, our baby boomers enjoyed the luxury of basking in decades of societal actualization. We focused our attention on America’s internal problems at the expense of creating a competitive manufacturing base. Our political struggles over competing societal goals of social justice and military superiority blinded us to our emerging jobs crisis. Yet, the hungry world fiercely competed for and took from us our very own consumers and employers.

America’s consumers naively embraced the world’s competition for our dollar. We enjoyed the low priced fruits of a desperate world’s labor, not understanding the impact that our purchases would have in the destruction of American jobs, the explosion of our debt, and the diminishment of future opportunities for America’s growth. For awhile, the savings we enjoyed from globalization offset our slowly diminishing purchasing power. Yet, over three decades, our purchases raised the world’s productivity, brought an onslaught of global competition to our shores, and ultimately replaced the American worker with an army of overseas laborers.

Eastern nations adopted hybrid economies of neo-mercantilism to rise above the fray of neo-colonialism and to position Asia for a century of prosperity. Unchecked by any natural defenses against them, neo-mercantilist nations joined forces with international banks and emerging corporate giants to concentrate the world’s economic power for China’s 21st century rise toward hegemony. In the process of this world economic shift, America’s future competitors, the corporate-states, were born.

Fierce, global competition required American businesses to employ all manners of competitive measures including intercontinental scale efficiencies. As the world would soon come to realize, the international skills multinational corporations learned to survive included those necessary to pit nations against each other and to overcome the regulatory frameworks nations imposed in vain attempts to restrict corporations’ intrusions into domestic markets.

In the process, these commercial behemoths of corporatism trampled on America’s two hundred year foundation of classical free enterprise. Within the context of our government’s regulatory framework for fair competition, America’s version of free enterprise envisioned all nations playing by our rules of engagement. In the past thirty years of economic revolution, America instead became Redcoats in the global economic war. Our structured business legal system was a bright red target easily slaughtered by guerrilla warfare of nations and corporate-states intent on pillaging America’s capital and intellectual property.

As defined by our anti-trust laws, America’s isolationist views of perfect competition required that our industries limit any one competitor’s size to well under what could be called a monopoly within our borders. Our legislated size limits were smaller than the mega-factory direct foreign investments required to compete globally. As a result, even if not the root cause of business flight, America nonetheless needlessly influenced American businesses offshore in their bid for massive customer markets such as India’s and China’s.

Some of American corporations’ resulting worldwide operations have grown into virtual states. In their unquenched quest for profit, they have created international offensive siege weapons to easily circumvent the purposes of such antiquated American concepts contained within the Sherman Antitrust Act. Many of our historically American-centric enterprises have since blurred their connections with America. Consequently, the Sherman Act has become increasingly challenged by free market advocates as an albatross of regulation. Alternately, it has been condemned by those charged with protecting the rights of consumers and domestic small businesses in America as a weak, antiquated tool of defense.

Globalization has brought competing American interests to the brink yet we dare not allow political dysfunction to keep America on the sideline of global competition any longer. We somehow must now collaborate to support America’s multinational industries’ quests while simultaneously protecting our own competitive domestic market. We must provide a pro-business environment that places America’s businesses on par with those of other countries while stopping international corporations from employing siege weapons of free enterprise against our citizens. We must provide competitive yields for capital in America to ensure America’s posterity by reversing the tide of capital outflows from our country. And we must ensure that our loose federation of American businesses can compete globally against neo-mercantilist countries. America must define the post neo-mercantilist era.

We will soon be living in a land full of global corporate giants that employ modern offensive economic weapons to consume nations. Yet unlike the neo-mercantilist countries that have attempted to create hybrid, state run industries immersed in private capitalism to compete with these futuristic monstrosities, America has not yet even begun to create its weaponry against neo-mercantilists such as China, and certainly has no viable plans against emerging corporate-states.

As America faces the prospects of diminished power in this 21st century economic revolution, we must adapt to the corporate power realities that all nations will face. Our future thriving path strategies will inevitably merge the goals of our giant, American born, corporate-states with those of our nation and its citizens. Yet our government must go beyond such surface strategies to create America’s post neo-mercantilist framework to harness the power of corporate-states for the betterment of our citizens and for all nations.

If we are to create a thriving outcome from the 21st century economic revolution for all on our finite planet, America must seek out the core of our problems and create a model for other nations to follow. Our thriving path forward begins here.

It is Time for The U.S. Government to Grow Up

America faces a major dilemma. We support free enterprise principles that help America’s multinational corporations compete in the world’s rapidly transitioning competitive market. Yet when faced with the immense worldwide scale of free enterprise, we are adamant about protecting the American consumer and worker from the assault of big business.

During the baby boomer generation’s rise to positions of power in business and in government, the world transformed to a global stage. While the post-war generation struggled to an impasse regarding competition for taxes to fund both warfare and welfare, we hesitantly overlooked the world’s competition for the American consumer. The true definition of a trust supersized past its concept as captured in the Sherman Anti-trust Act, crossing international boundaries in the process.

To compete on a global scale, corporations necessarily have had to increase size and scope to capture world market share. As sizes of the world’s largest corporations increased exponentially, their scale efficiencies and cost shifting capabilities offered significant trust opportunities at home. As a result, in the U.S. domestic market, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 became increasingly challenged as an albatross of regulation from proponents of free enterprise and as a weak, antiquated tool of defense among those charged with protecting the rights of consumers and domestic small businesses in America.

So now we have competing interests. On the one hand, Americans want to support our industries as they compete with those from other countries to secure a growing world market share. On the other hand, the free enterprise principles required to compete globally create scale that flies in the face of the very laws and regulations deemed necessary to protect our domestic competitive market. The resulting tension of this dilemma is easily witnessed in protected markets such as U.S. drug companies that charge U.S. customers ten times what they charge international customers for the same product. It is less easily seen in growing oligarchies like airlines and banks but the effects on the American public are just as onerous.

Once again, we have another growing immaturity on the part of our Federal government as it stares into the abyss, unable to ferret out sustainable solutions in a rapidly transitioning world. Of course, American businesses must be allowed to grow to compete on the global stage. However, if the ultimate size of a corporation needed to compete globally requires that it surpass the size limits that fit America’s definition of a competitive domestic market, then this dilemma must be resolved by the application of sensible historical principles.

What may be necessary to allow businesses to grow beyond a healthy limit for our domestic competitive market is that we allow businesses to cross boundaries of competitive size, but in exchange, we compensate with more regulation in the home market. This principle is alive and well in America in such industries as power and gas.

In banking, however, we did just the opposite. We cut banking regulations at the very time that we allowed big banks to consolidate the U.S. market. The result of such government immaturity regarding our understanding of the nature of trusts was that the world financial market is now imploding. It is time for our government to grow up.

Are We to Rest by the Side of the Road as China Pedals Away on the Surrey Bike?

Imagine China right now is a surrey bike built for four people, with China as the driver and other Asian countries of the region filling the three remaining seats, all pedaling together to make the bike go. Imagine that at first the path forward is a bit steep and that the surrey bike needs some help pushing it up hill. So China bargains with Uncle Sam, “If you will push the surrey bike from behind, I will feed you corn for free as you push.” Uncle Sam thinks it a great deal and begins to thrust China and the other Asian countries forward as they pedal in front together on that surrey bike.

After a while, the bike begins to pick up speed and Uncle Sam has to push a little faster, almost jogging a bit to keep up with the surrey. Uncle Sam clamors for a bit more corn because the exercise of keeping up with the accelerating surrey is a chore. As China shoves more and more corn into his chubby little mouth, Uncle Sam begins to puff under the weight of his effort, and tire from the speed at which the surrey bike is now travelling. Finally, Uncle Sam gives out from the strain, having given all he had to helping that surrey bike begin its journey.

As China and the others speed away pedaling in unison down the path to the future in their region’s surrey bike, Uncle Sam falls over along the side of the road from exhaustion for he is no longer needed. He forlornly looks at the distant spoons that no longer will point his way but will only feed those that are on the bike together. On the back of the bike is a bag filled to overflowing with words stenciled on the back, “U.S. Seed Corn.”

President Obama has his Modern Day Rasputin in Timothy Geithner

The year was 1917. Embroiled in WWI, Russia was now facing food, fuel, and housing shortages as well as inflation as sons of the middle class were lost on the battle field. Money had lost most of its value. The wealthy had begun to hoard food supplies. Class struggle emerged between the wealthy and the working classes. Strikes and public protests including violent encounters between protesters and authorities increased.

On February 23rd, the women of the city of Petrograd staged a demonstration for bread and peace. The next day, their husbands joined them as a spontaneous demonstration turned violent when the police were no longer able to control the crowds of several hundred thousand protesters.

Russia’s leader, Tsar Nicholas, ordered his troops to quell the crowd but as bullets fired, the troops disbanded and 80,000 crossed lines to join the protesters. As the weeks progressed, a weak provisional government was formed by the banking class, industrialists, land owners, and capitalists who promised democracy and an end to the war. When they did not deliver on their promises in the few months of restless anticipation, Lenin returned to Russia promising bread, land, and a withdrawal of troops, took control of the Bolsheviks and organized a revolutionary coup that swept the Bolsheviks to power.

How could Tsar Nicholas have let Russia that had been ruled by imperialist tsars for the past 300 years, erupt into protest and civil war in 1917 to end forever the rule of Tsars? The answer seemed to foreshadow the edge of the abyss on which America finds itself today. Toward the end of WWI, The ruling capitalist class was intent on continuing its hold of wealth, autocracy, and land ownership. Yet the war strained the imperialist system’s ability to provide the working class a way to feed themselves or to provide fuel to heat their homes. Soldiers meanwhile were kept in battle without provisions to sustain them. Wanting land ownership as a solution, workers struck.

In 1915, two years prior to the collapse of the ruling elite, Tsar Nicholas was influenced by his counsel, Gregory Rasputin, to leave governance to his wife, Tsarina Alexandra, and to go to the war front to take command of his troops. Tsarina Alexandra, Nicholas’s wife, was a strong believer in autocracy and had resisted reform in the years leading up to the war. She now kept at her side, a sinister advisor, Gregory Rasputin, who had acquired through his mystical and hypnotic prowess, complete control of the hysterical Empress.

Through his influence in appointments of ministers, and meetings with hundreds of political patrons on a daily basis, Rasputin kept the tsarist system intact while the middle class suffered immensely. At the height of his influence, the middle class even believed that Rasputin was conspiring with foreign powers to bring down Russia during the war. Rasputin did manage to embezzle massive government funds and divert money to elite of Russia. His influence led to a bitter divide within all classes of the Russian society. The communist opposition led by Lenin claimed that Rasputin turned the Russian Tsar into a wimp.

Ultimately, but too late, the elites of Russia recognized that as a public figure, Rasputin was a detriment to their continued power and they conspired to murder Rasputin to try to stop the tide of middle class resentment. In the end, after Rasputin was murdered, the middle class was spurred to join the communist revolution, and the Tsar’s family was assassinated.

In 2007, the Obama Administration has its own Rasputin in the public figure of Timothy Geithner. His influence over the President has allowed Mr. Geithner to pander to America’s banking class in trade for trashing President Obama’s financial credibility with the American middle class. Yet somehow, President Obama seems hypnotized by this man who refuses to wield his power to save the American economy.

At the pinnacle of the banking class elites’ concentration of wealth in 2007, Mr. Geithner was the President and Chief Executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. As the credit crisis erupted, Mr. Geithner influenced Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, to save Bear Stearns, American International Group and Citigroup. Interestingly, as part of the deal, he gave Goldman Sachs, of which treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had just been CEO, a $30 billion interest free loan.

At his confirmation hearing, it was revealed that Geithner allegedly accidently evaded $34 thousand in taxes when his tax software misinterpreted his income. Similarly to Rasputin, Mr. Geithner entered the court of the Obama administration with illicit interpretations of his character.

After taking office in 2009, like Rasputin, Geithner became a trusted advisor to the Obama administration and its chief architect in stabilizing the banking system. Under his influence, Citigroup and the Bank of America were salvaged with billions in no strings attached aid. Mr. Geithner fought David Axelrod who had wanted tougher conditions imposed on Geithner’s former comrade banking institutions.

In March 2009, Geithner announced his rescue plan to buy toxic assets and to provide banks with capital, which eventually became widely unpopular, although it was credited with stopping a banking panic that could have created widespread banking defaults. Some claim that Geithner disparaged the administration when AIG paid out $165 million in bonuses to its employees. Wall Street responded to Geithner’s vague plan by plummeting five percent upon its announcement.

Meanwhile, Suskind’s book, “Confidence Men”, indicates that Geithner stalled when President Obama asked him to prepare a plan to wind down Citibank, similarly to how banks were dismantled in the 1930s. If allegations are true, it would seem that Geithner undermined the President’s authority and protected “too big to fail” bank comrades as an overriding strategy.
As the banking elites returned to financial stability, Mr. Geithner became one of President Obama’s most trusted advisors. Similarly to Rasputin, Geithner’s influence grew as other senior advisors with whom he had clashed left the administration.

In 2010, Geithner argued briefly for the elimination of the tax cut for the rich, only to settle for an extension of benefits for the long term unemployed, results which neither increased employment nor improved the deficit, both of which would have supported the middle class. In the same time period, he lauded over a $2 trillion stimulus and quantitative easing plan that attempted to fix the investments of America’s elite even as the world’s credit imploded to ten times the amount of QE and swallowed it whole.

In January 2011, Mr. Geithner asked the Chinese government to stop doing what it had successfully done for thirty years that is to stop managing its economy through currency controls and tariffs. Knowing that China would not bend is will to his words, he also asked China to do what was in its best interest and that of America’s elite, to raise the value of its currency.

Doing so ultimately would harm the American middle class further. Certainly, it would make some American goods more competitive but those goods would be more than offset by the loss of America’s purchasing power. China’s internal demand for commodities and their own finished goods would increase the cost of goods to the American middle class without a material increase in American jobs. However, the move would stabilize investments made by the banking class in China’s factories. Interestingly, Geithner’s father was on the board of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.

On June 22nd, 2011, Treasury Secretary Geithner told the House Small Business Committee that the Obama administration believed taxes on small business must increase so the administration would not have to “shrink the overall size of government programs.” In a government that borrows 43 cents for every dollar that it spends and that has been growing at seven percent per year without fail, that spends more on our military than all other governments on earth combined, and that spends twice that of any other nation on healthcare per person, whose social net is borrowed, and whose retirement programs are quickly facing insolvency, Mr. Geithner’s solution was to tax the middle class small businesses so that they have even less to hire the 30 million underemployed in our country.

On January 6th, 2011, Mr. Geithner began the spectacle of the debt ceiling with a letter to Congress. As the politics played out in front of the world, Mr. Geithner made the announcement that the government would shut down on August 2nd, 2011, leading to the now infamous brinkmanship politics over the debt ceiling. Without a cogent solution going forward proposed by the administration or agreed to by Congress, Geithner watched America suffer its first credit rating downgrade ever on August 5th.

Now we hear that Mr.Geithner intends to spend more of the Middle Class’s money to prop up the banks of Europe in conjunction with the IMF and the European Central Bank. Geithner allegedly envisions that U.S. financial commitment will be open ended. The EU plan is similar to that used by the U.S. during the financial meltdown of 2008, unlimited lending to prevent the sovereign default of insolvent EU Banks. Mr. Geithner returned from Europe stating that he “scared the crap” out of the EU’s leaders. Understandably, expanding the EU’s lending with support from the U.S. would protect more of the West’s bankers at the expense of the American middle class. However, where does the patience of America’s middle class end?

The middle class of Russia’s patience ended when they could not find employment. Their patience ended as their soldiers were left unattended on the battlefield. Their patience ended when the heating oil for their homes was no longer available. Their patience ended when they no longer could buy bread as their money hyper-inflated. How much more money printing will be required for America’s money to hyper-inflate?

Rasputin controlled Russia’s domestic economy as the Tsar and Tsarina bent to his will to keep extreme capitalism in place even as it collapsed Russia’s middle class. Rasputin was expended too late to save Russia’s capitalists. Mr. Geithner seems bent on filling Rasputin’s modern day shoes.

Could Boycotting GE Embolden America Against Globalization?

After having written extensively about the soulless, profit seeking nature of corporations that house their headquarters and claim “citizenship” within the borders of the United States, you will find no arguments here about the nationality of multinational corporations. Even though the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that corporations which spend $150 to file as “citizens” of the United States are indeed citizens, I would not be so naive as to believe its politically subjective error.

Even though America expects immigrants wishing to become citizens of the United States to exhibit patriotism for our beloved country, you will find no argument from me that corporations, attributed by our Supreme Court as “citizens”, should exhibit patriotism for our country. Patriotism, a devotion to one’s country, implies that “citizens” experience the love for and focus their attention on the needs of one’s country. For a corporation to be patriotic, it would put the needs of our country on par with the profit desires of its shareholders. Globalization has long since drowned the concept of shared stakeholders, save for one driving force, international shareholder profits.

My motivation for boycotting General Electric is not to punish GE for acting out its nature as a multinational corporation to create profits for its shareholders even when it harms the United States. My motivation for boycotting GE isn’t even to punish Jeffrey Immelt, who accepted President Obama’s appointment to work for American jobs while at the same time directing his corporation to drive jobs out of America. Corporations and their extravagantly paid CEOs act as one instinctual great white shark spreading throughout the world’s oceans, feasting on the most profitable of opportunities. No American boycott could lessen that profit motive, and no boycott could cause GE to have an epiphany of guilt, driving it to express an unnatural corporate patriotism.

My motivation for having America boycott GE is to have America wake up to the true nature of our modern multinational corporations. GE was the quintessential “American Corporation”, the darling of American business during the 1980s and 1990s, presiding over the silent gutting of America as 40,000 factories left our shores for the East. Now that the curtain has been lifted from the Wizard of Oz, we see Jack Welch’s progeny exposed in a lurid, multibillion dollar, one night stand with China, agreeing to a joint venture that not only takes jobs from America, but that competes directly with other American businesses and that gives American intellectual property of direct import to our national security to the Chinese.

By boycotting GE, I would hope that Americans could gain the understanding that corporations are not “citizens” of America and that they have singular profit motivations that do not necessarily align with the security and welfare of our nation. By boycotting GE, I would hope that Americans would challenge those politicians that dare to continue to provide cover for “free trade” and globalization through passage of lobbyist led anti-American legislation. By boycotting GE, I would hope to awaken our regulators to finally act on behalf of our country over the objections of great white sharks of profit that have found America such an easy victim over the past 30 years.

Once America is awakened, we can finally embolden our political leadership to act in the interest of all Americans, to create incentives for these profit motivated monoliths to reinvest in our country, to create a business environment that will help align their interests with those of the United States, and to disincentivize corporations from mindlessly making decisions on behalf of shareholders without cautiously considering America as an important stakeholder in their risk adjusted, profit motive decisions. Boycotting GE is America’s future displayed in effigy.