American Slavery Forebode the Loss of Our National Sovereignty

America’s historical bias for property rights of individuals and corporations was influenced by centuries of institutional support for slavery from multiple factions. This bias has led to the gutting of our industrial base that now promises to lower the living standard of every American and, more importantly, threatens to destroy our national sovereignty.

Our 370 year struggle against slavery demonstrates the severity of misjudgment that America’s courts and legislatures have been capable of, and the extremes to which government and business leadership has denied universal freedoms in the pursuit of profits. The denial of individual freedoms over the course of American slavery is now being paralleled by the denial of individual economic freedoms resulting from corporate globalization profiteering and forebodes a loss of national sovereignty that could result from the pursuit of profiteering in the coming manipulations of carbon cap and trade.

America’s struggle against slavery pitted the property rights of individuals pursuing financial gain with the universal rights of freedom for all Americans. From the 1500s, when European governments and businesses conspired to enslave Africans as property to be transferred across international boundaries for financial gain until modern times, our courts, legislatures, and businesses have been forced by the American people to slowly progress toward a greater acknowledgement of the equality of mankind.

In a continuation of the history of slavery, seventeenth century EurAmerican governments and businesses were lured by greed to pursue international slave trade. By 1641, in the midst of multinational corporations establishing charter colonies to exploit the Americas, the Massachusetts legislature enacted the first colonial law establishing slaves as property, and Virginia courts followed suit two years later by declaring children of slaves to also be property.

By 1730, England aggressively entered the slave trade selling to thriving slave traders in New York, Massachusetts and South Carolina. Yet the corrupted idea that humans should be property of other humans was not universally accepted by all colonies. As early as 1676, enlightened Quakers prohibited slavery in western New Jersey. With their influence, in 1780, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania compromised a gradual taking of “private property” from slave owners with their understanding that all men of differing complexions have the mercy of universal civilization under the hand of the almighty, by passing the Gradual Emancipation Act which gave freedom to all Pennsylvania slaves over a seven year period. Knowing that their ability to cash in from the sale of slaves was about to end, slave owners starting crossing the border to sell their “property” in slave states. In 1788, the Pennsylvania Quakers once again stood forward in history to stop cross border selling of “slave property” by forbidding removal of blacks from the state.

The 1791 invention of the cotton gin made slavery a much greater financial temptation and aligned state governments and businesses according to slavery’s financial benefits, with states taking sides up until the Supreme Court declared in the 1857 Dred Scott decision that even free blacks could never be citizens of the United States.

Dred Scott led to the American Civil War, where 600,000 Americans gave their lives to resolve the issue as to whether America would ever consider people property again. When the war ended, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery in 1865 and the landmark Fourteenth Amendment that defined American citizenship, including former slaves and free blacks as citizens in 1868.

After the milestone of the civil war, African Americans would then endure another 100 years of deep-rooted bigotry until additional legal and legislative milestones of the 1950’s and 1960s prepared America for forty years of healing leading to the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. America demonstrated through the election of President Obama that over a period of centuries, with the participation of millions of citizens in protests and debates, organized societies and civil disobedience, sit-ins and marches, black churches and underground railroads, publications and uprisings, political activism and yes, civil war, we could affect a positive change from our courts, legislatures, and businesses toward the concept of universal individual freedoms over the rights of individuals and corporations to claim property rights for profiteering.

As the milestones for individual freedoms were accomplished in the 1960s, a paralleling long struggle for national sovereignty began. The eventual need for this movement was set in motion in 1861 by the invention of oil refining which provided the basis for the industrial revolution. Through hydrocarbon driven machinery, EurAmerica replaced the enslavement of mankind with the subjugation of energy. A gallon of gasoline that could do the work of 500 men became the new slave of the industrialized world. Certainly, western countries continued to subjugate millions in emerging countries, first through colonization and then after WWII, when Europe was forced to decolonize, through financial hegemony of IMF and World Bank loans, subjugating emerging countries to low wages and sub-value payments for commodity exports. However, hydrocarbons enslaved much more motive force than human slavery ever could.

It was in this environment, accelerating from 1978 until the world’s Great Recession of 2008, that wealthy individual and American multinational corporations claimed property rights of trillions of dollars of American financial capital and many trillions of dollars more of intellectual capital, that has yet to even be realized, and transferred them across international borders in the pursuit of personal and institutional gain. In the process, millions of American jobs were lost and American industry was gutted. Over 40,000 factories have been transferred to China in the past decade alone.

However, unlike the millions of Americans that organized in so many ways to fight for the abolishment of slavery, during the last thirty years of transferring American property across international borders for personal gain, America has stood by while our national sovereignty has been weakened. For the mere exchange of “glass trinkets”, our multinational corporations have transferred to other nations countless innovations and trade secrets that have in the process given away a decade’s long, perhaps centuries long, stream of jobs and an exponential advancement of innovation to other nations. While the proverbial horses by now have trotted far out into the foreign fields, it is still not too late to close the barn door and to begin rebuilding an American future of protected ingenuity.

The institution of slavery destroyed the lives and individual freedoms of millions of African Americans and its vestiges continue to impact suffering in the African American community. In the three centuries preceding the 1978 Great Gold Rush to China, it also forebode the economic suffering that would eventually harm all of America, affecting the African American community worst.

Slavery shaped America’s concepts of property rights, what is the property of the individual versus what is to be protected by the state. In that struggle, the ideas born by persons employed in corporations became the property of corporations to be transferred freely to other nations, with the exception of ideas that clearly pertained to national security. However, that view of property rights lobbied by America’s businesses, has allowed the historic gutting of America that has collectively created a national security risk now threatening the economic sovereignty if America.

Even as American businesses participated in the simultaneous building of China’s future industrial infrastructure while gutting America’s future, China pursued the development of hegemonic hydrocarbon contracts for her needed growth. She is developing military strength to prepare for harboring of petrol shipping lanes and implementing strategies to wrest control of diminishing oil reserves from western empires. It now appears that Americans may live through violent shifts of world economies as the East gathers control of the West’s petrol-power.

In the last three great wars in which America has participated, the deciding factor was not the size of America’s military at the start of war, but rather the capacity of America’s overwhelming industrial base that quickly transformed to support the endurance of our freshly formed military. The United States now has the greatest military footprint ever assembled but Japan showed the world that our existing strength was vulnerable to first strikes. Our ability to turn our nation’s industrial strength toward military response was our greatest threat to would be rivals. Thirty years and tens of thousands of factory transfers later, our concept of property rights has allowed America’s responsive industrial strength to wither, jeopardizing our entire nation’s freedom.

Through the morass of 300 years of biased property rights legal precedence, America asked our courts and Congress to ensure that the historic temptation of businesses to transfer massive values of property to China and other developing nations would not interfere with the rights of all Americans to the fruits of American ingenuity, innovation and prosperity, paid for with the blood of our forefathers in the wars and struggles for human freedom and universal rights. We came up short.

America has but a limited view of sovereign protections regarding property rights. We are now debating the premise of saving the planet by trading to other nations our rights to consume hydrocarbons through a carbon cap and trade program. Make no mistake, oil is the modern slave of all mankind and will be consumed until it is fully depleted by one country or another without regard for our planet. Cap and trade will allow those who have polluted in the past to claim property rights to future pollution and transfer those property rights to other nations. In so doing, cap and trade will take remaining economic sovereignty away from the people of the United States and give it to a few businesses to trade our ability to enslave remaining decades of hydrocarbons to other nations in exchange for a few more glass trinkets.

As America enters into our coming economic crisis, remember we can strengthen our barn and rebuild. We can protect against further gutting of business through comprehensive property rights reform. We certainly can protect America’s sovereignty by protecting our abilities to responsibly consume hydrocarbons. The struggle against slavery shows that what is entailed in reversing America’s plight is epic. However, our coming economic struggle will be cause for such epic proportions.

American Predator and Prey Must Rise together Against The Cattlemen

June is the month when the plains of the Serengeti face drought and massive herds of wildebeest begin their migration to sustaining grazing areas. 1.5 million strong, their great migration is followed by predators that feed off the weak, young, and elderly of the herd. Yet the wildebeests produce a swarm intelligence, defending the herd as one against the onslaught of those that would attempt to separate the weak from the rest. This herd instinct protected the wildebeest through thousands of years of predatory balance with lions, hyenas, cheetahs, leopards and crocodiles, yet the wildebeests were not prepared for man and his fences. Between 1950 and 1984, the species lost 94 % of its numbers in South Africa, when fences blocked its migratory paths.

We continue to hear about the dwindling American middle class, our great herd migrating through the political seasons. The Great Middle of America continues to be the food stock of political predators, yet it faces a much greater danger of shrinking from foreign fencing placed by international banking and multinational corporations. If our Great American Middle is to survive, we must now use our swarm intelligence not only to protect from our common political predators, but to rise above the fate of the wildebeest and overcome the greater threat to our ecosystem.

Just as lions run through a herd of wildebeest to separate out the weakest prey, our political extremists seek to divide the herd through stereotypical “Willie Horton” attacks and to prey on the weakest of us. It is the nature of the American two-party political wilderness. For any extremist to succeed, they must find the balance within the Great Middle and tip it through distortions and spin through herd mentality to their view if they ever expect to feast on wildebeest.

Charging headlong into the herd, they slander race and religion to divide and conquer. Education, color of collar, age, sexual orientation, status, income, even patriotism has come under verbal attack to effectively divide. These are the ideological tactics to scatter the herd of Great Middle to the edges so that predators of extreme ideology may tear apart the flesh of the weakest for sustenance. As the Great Middle scatters, it diminishes.

Stampeding wildebeest confuse their predators by their sheer numbers. As we migrate through the political seasons, the Great Middle’s swarm intelligence must overcome political extremists’ use of herd mentality to separate. Stampede the herd! Test extremists as to their proximity to the constitution, and the furtherance of our country, by their neglect of our downtrodden and of the voiceless in America, and by their common defense against fencing.

The great migration of wildebeest and predators is an ecosystem threatened by fences built to deny its very existence. Cattlemen wanting to protect graze lands for financially motivated cattle herds foreign to the Great Plains, erected fencing for their narrow self interests. As the health of the wildebeest herd diminishes, so too does the health of predators. Lions are endangered with numbers dwindling below thirty thousand.

The American ecosystem, with its Great Middle and extremists must now also be protected. We sense endangerment, yet distracted from the predation of extremists, we do not yet have the tools to protect America from foreign fencing put up to disrupt our political migration. With international banking and MNCs redirecting markets, production, financing and wealth away from America, both extremists and middle America must rise above instinctual predator and prey responses to defend our country against foreign invasion and financial treason or our Great Middle migration will end and the American ecosystem will fail.

Will EurAmerica Enter a Cold Financial Winter? (Revised)

When China announced to the world that it would open its doors to foreign investment, multinational corporations from both Europe and America rushed to stake a claim to a unique gold rush opportunity of historic proportions. China offered EurAmerican MNCs that agreed to share trade secrets and intellectual capital, that had capital to expand China’s manufacturing infrastructure, and that could open their own countries to China’s goods, the opportunity to participate in China’s newly opened special economic zones, with the hope of marketing to their 1.3 billion people.

Requiring massive investment to capitalize on the opportunity, MNCs sought the support of international investment banks and lobbied home governments to provide looser, deregulated capital markets as well as to submit to opening home markets to “free trade”. MNCs then began a three decade long extraction of wealth, factories, and jobs from EurAmerica to build China’s manufacturing infrastructure and GDP.

At the beginning of China’s historic rise, American politicians freed capital for China investment by reducing taxes of the investment class of Americans; through a reduction of the top tax income rate from 70% to 50%, through reduction of capital gains tax from 28% to 20 %, and through tripling of estate tax exemptions. As more and more capital was needed, America’s baby boomer retirement investments were developed for ease of use in China. In America, 401Ks, started in 1980, and IRAs, made available to all citizens in 1981, siloed middle class investments into the stock market that directed a majority of retirement funds toward China.

Later in China’s growth cycle, EurAmerican banks devised ways to extract even more capital through debt instruments from their citizens. EurAmerican interest rates were set low, creating the credit to extract maximum capital to fund the growth of China’s manufacturing infrastructure through home equity and business development loans. Yet, to meet China’s capital needs in the exponentially growing latter stages of growth, extreme capital extraction through maximum borrowing of a majority of private citizens and public entities was required.

Investment banks created a method of extracting maximum capital from EurAmericans’ main investments, their homes. To accomplish this, Investment banks restructured the banking industry. They first created methods of incentivizing consumers to take as many and as large of loans as possible through risky, low interest, no income verification loans and other, more predatory loans. They also rid commercial banks of their traditional, credit restricting roles by incentivizing them to make as many loans as possible, with minimal risk because they could simply resell the mortgages to the investment banks for a profit. Finally, they developed complex, (and unfortunately faulty) derivatives to buy mortgages from commercial banks and repackage them for profits.

In the process, a majority of consumers that could afford it were lured through ease of access and Ponzified greed into their debt web. Greed played its part with commercial banks as well, as most became willing accomplices of the role that investment banks created in transforming them into maximum credit authorizing, debt creating factories to feed the raw commodities of capital that China needed for her later growth stages. As beneficiary of EurAmerica’s capital, China became a strategic partner to the process by supporting low EurAmerican inflation and interest rates through:

• Accepting free flow of manufacturing infrastructure into her economic development zones
• Funding infrastructure debt payments through sales of low costs goods back to EurAmerica
• Mitigating international demands to revalue the Yuan higher by maintaining historic trade imbalances with EurAmerica and reinvesting Yuan back into EurAmerica
• Keeping internal inflation low through internally enforced savings of wage controls and removing excess Yuan from circulation through funding trading countries deficits
• Managing external commodity inflation through aggressive development of international Greenfield commodity projects to supplement absorption of long term international commodity contracts and relationships that were left unattended by EurAmerica.
• Reinvesting surplus capital into EurAmerica, keeping world interest rates low to extract last vestiges of EurAmerican capital through historic levels of corporate and private debt

When this historic, debt driven, extraction of two great empires’ wealth reached its zenith, like all financial bubbles finally do, public, private and corporate debt had stretched beyond its ability to pay, exceeding $50 trillion dollars in America alone. The financial herd had stretched so thin that it simply required a few debt ridden gazelle to nervously default to start the whole herd stampeding frenzily toward the bank runs that inevitably follow peak excess. This time in history, it was the unraveling of the predatory American home loans that toppled EurAmerica’s financial house of cards. Nonetheless, if not for this gazelle, another would have jumped to take its place, for no exuberant and irrational credit binge ever stands in the longer term.

When this Rube-Goldberg loan scheme supporting the massive capital transfer from EurAmerica to China finally collapsed, investment banks were pushed to the precipice of default. Acting independently of government mandated goals, central banks, with the Federal Reserve out front, stepped in to protect the banking industry by providing liquidity to those investment banks most at risk. They did so claiming that not providing liquidity would have caused domestic businesses and private citizens to default through massive foreclosures, bankruptcies, layoffs, financial and operational restructuring.

Unlike previous historical investment bubbles, in which many investment banks failed, EurAmerican central banks temporarily saved the vast majority of investment banks through simultaneous, massive expansion of the money supply, staving off a rapid disintegration of public, private and corporate debt, recorded as assets on their balance sheets. Recognizing further monetary support was required, the Federal Reserve attempted to mount another widespread EurAmerican expansion of money supply but Europe, intent on preserving its courtship of unification and now dealing with the crisis of PIIGS deficits, did not concur. Without palatable alternatives, the Fed embarked on a Romanesque fait accompli of reserve currency monetary expansion, attempting to reverse the entire world’s contraction of money supply through what they termed Quantitative Easing.

It appears that temporarily at least the Fed’s Quantitative Easing policy have strengthened EurAmerican banks’ balance sheets, transferring some toxic assets to sovereignties, and have girded them to endure the coming double dip recession. However, it failed to accomplish their stated long term debt stabilizing goals. Unemployment is once again increasing, housing prices have reversed and are falling, and while some European countries have begun to institute austerity programs, America is projecting trillion dollar deficits for the remainder of the decade.

Unfortunately, the Fed does not have the magic bullet to repair the only ways to truly provide long term stabilization of massive EurAmerican debt supporting their balance sheets. To do that, EurAmerica must stabilize the underlying ability and desire of their debt holders to make debt payments. This can only be accomplished by:
• Maintaining and growing EurAmerican economies
• Reducing real EurAmerican unemployment
• Increasing the nominal values of EurAmerican Housing or restructuring housing debt
• Eliminating public deficits
• Reducing non-value generating debt
• Maintaining minimum interest on existing debt while incentivizing its reduction and saving

Without immediate and urgent prescriptive measures to meet the above objectives and to mitigate the impact of EurAmerica’s retreat from previous financial investment and consumption patterns, a cold, worldwide economic winter most likely ensue. American direct foreign investment has already begun its inevitable descent. Europe’s protectionism has kept available resources flowing to China but EU will soon follow with fewer investments in China as well. China will react with less support for EurAmerican deficits, severely restricting EurAmerica’s monetary managment options.

If we do not act soon, our political systems will be forced into severe austerity measures. The world will enter a deep and disruptive recessionary cycle from which countries and entire regions will eventually emerge in an entirely new trading pattern; one that is China centric, developed around its newfound industries that were funded by EurAmerica at the turn of the 21st century. China will emerge first, building on its excess modern manufacturing capacity and hegemonic commodities relationships. When at last EurAmerica exits from the long winter of debt riddled recession, it will follow the path to the Asian economies.

Prescriptions to follow…

Is the China Gold Rush Ending?

In 1849, a rancher named John Sutter sent men to the American River to build a saw mill. Instead, they found gold, starting a rush that brought over 300,000 ‘49ers from across the world to eventually prospect another $12 billion in gold from surrounding hills. The discovery created an enormous expansion in America’s money supply, some by the very gold found in nearby streams. However, much more money was created by debt instruments that funded the Gold Rush. Banks funded the passage of thousands prospectors to buy passage to California, to purchase goods to pan for gold, and later to fund companies that organized for that purpose. By 1850, banks from St. Louis, Boston, New York, London and Paris spurred the growth that created the State of California.

The growth of population in California and Oregon fueled railroad expansion to the West. The completion of the Transpacific Railroad in 1869 started a great railroad speculation, funded both by American banks and European investors. In four short years, investment of track doubled to 35,000 miles. America’s investment in rail and encouragement of immigration spurred a revolution of competitive wheat production and American export of low priced wheat to Europe. Europe now found that the capital it had supplied to build America’s railroads, gathered from its previous decade of speculative housing construction, was the very capital that fueled its demise into a depression which lasted from 1871 through 1893.

With the shortfall of hoped for European funding, American banks became overextended as speculation continued unabated. Jay Cooke and Company, the Goldman Sachs of the time that had funded the North during the Civil War and that had funded the successful Transpacific Railroad, tried and failed to corner the gold market to fund its investment in the Northern Pacific Railroad. Instead, it was forced to file bankruptcy in 1873, triggering America’s Long Depression, collapsing major banks, bankrupting 89 of 364 railroad companies, and an additional 18,000 businesses. The extreme speculation and overbuilding in the one industry of railroads triggered a great depression. This massive over speculation was not seen again until the even greater housing industry speculation in America that ended in 2008.

Similar to California, China has become the land of gold rush for EurAmericans. In 1978, China embraced its four modernizations and opened its doors to the West, creating a gold field of capitalist opportunity. Gradually at first and then in a frenzy, tens of thousands of businesses rushed into China, over ten thousand U.S. businesses in the last decade alone. Similarly to America’s gold rush, U.S. and international banking interests made a fortune supplying MNCs with the capital required for their prospecting.

To feed this frenzied opportunity, American banking interests tapped into the immense financial wherewithal of the American people. Through a Great Ponzi Trifecta, banks accumulated debt derived capital from the Savings and Loan Ponzi, the Dot.Com Ponzi, and finally the greatest Ponzi ever known, the EurAmerican housing bubble. Hordes of EurAmericans were convinced to leverage their future earning ability to create debt that could be flipped through derivatives to fund China’s gold rush.

A dollar multiplicative frenzy sped much of America’s future wealth creating potential into China prior to the Ponzi’s ultimate collapse. As housing prices, and subsequently commercial real estate prices, soared beyond the ability of the American economy to cover the underlying debt, the purveyors of this debt mountain continued to assure investors that a new economy had emerged that supported such imbalances. Yet American wages did not keep up with the rise in housing and counterbalancing forces such as a lost industrial base and historic government deficits finally stripped the Ponzi of its legs, and America’s Great Middle Class funding of China’s gold rush subsided.

Just as Europe lost its wherewithal to fund America’s railroads after America undercut European commodity prices in the 1860’s, America lost its ability to fund China’s growth as MNCs gave China the ability to undercut American industry. However, unlike 1873, America’s Federal Reserve softened the impact of international banking excesses, mitigating the collapse of Bear Stearns, protecting the securitization of AIG, and supporting world banks through massive expansion of its money supply. However, the implosion of the securitization market left China with a weakened EurAmerican engine of direct foreign investment.

June, 2011, marks the supposed end of debt driven EurAmerican speculation helping to fuel China’s growth with the pre-announced ending of Quantitative Easing. If Bernanke follows through on his promise, America’s money supply will begin to contract similarly to America’s contractionary policy following the Civil War leading up to our Long Depression of 1873. Our Congress is also debating contracting governmental spending simultaneous to the Feds potential contraction of money.

Recent reports may have quietly forebode America’s double dip recession with the downward reversal of home prices and downward reversal of job creation. Has China enough momentum to continue its meteoric expansion without historical capital infusion from the West and with a contracting EurAmerican market for its goods? Or, will China face the disruptive consequences of the world’s most recent speculative bubble?

Are Tariffs a Strategy for World Peace?

War with China may be inevitable. When EurAmerican multinational corporations (MNCs) were allowed by our governments to trade trade secrets in exchange for opening of Asian markets, they may have sealed the world’s fate. China’s output will soon surpass America’s and her rate of growth continues to far outpace ours. She is implementing strategies that promise to replace America as the World’s empire during the next 15 years.

Every transition in history from one empire to another has been accented by great wars. The transition of the last empire was no exception. Great Britain did not acquiesce to America’s century until after the throws of WWI and WWII. Now the rapid ascent of globalization, made possible by the transfer of capital from international bankers to MNCs, has driven the world to the edge of another conflict in our lifetimes.

During the last transition, Germany, racked with debt from WWI, experienced hyperinflation with an impotent republic led by political extremists. While the rest of the world recovered, Germany’s inability to deal with its financial obligations led to a vacuum that was filled by the Nazis. Without immediate government action, America’s debt will also become unsustainable, crowding out vital services and creating societal instability similar to Weimar Germany. Given that America has the most powerful military the world has known, will America be an exception to 6,000 years of recorded history, or will our society fall prey to the severities that initiated the last world war?

The answer rests with our MNCs. They have historically persuaded our government to use America’s military to meet business objectives. And now for the first time in history, MNCs have the power to determine the path of our “empire’s” transition. If our corporations are unable to mitigate country risks by growing beyond the regulation of most countries (many are not far from that now) they will continue to rely on the might of our military. If our MNCs position themselves to succeed even as America fails, they will decide war is not in their best interests.

If enough MNCs make the leap to disavow an American connection and choose to forego the protection of our military’s gunboat diplomacy, our MNCs will support the gradual dismembering of our military, reducing its capability to strike. Given America’s inability to continue funding our military as our businesses depart, some Americans may choose to rise up similarly to Japan or Germany during the 20th century. How do we mitigate such a potential? A tariff or subsidy program could achieve full employment at sustenance wages, and could deter or delay war.

When citizens of our nation are unemployed, they have several options. For 26 weeks, they have unemployment at a rate much lower than full wages. During this Great Recession, our government extended unemployment to 99 weeks. After 99 weeks, the unemployed join the ranks of the 99ers, who are given few comforts from the American system if they are not disabled or do not have children. Instead, those without family members to rely upon or without black market skills or goods to eke out an alternative living, must join the world of the unseen, those citizens who blend into our peripheral vision not to be looked upon for fear that we too will be drawn to their fate. Our country’s lack of a comprehensive strategy to transition to globalization has condemned millions of vital Americans to this murky existence.

Rather than relegate 99ers to the dark crevices of our society, America must offer a better path. We must choose to overcome partisan maneuvering and compete with the world as best we can. Rather than continue down this political path that will lead ultimately to class warfare and further disintegration of American culture, capabilities, and competitiveness, we must recreate a consortium of capitalists and workers that benefits all Americans.

A cornerstone of that consortium is that both businesses and workers must succeed. Tariffs on foreign goods that cost the American society more than the savings they provide to the American consumer are a method for producing mutual success. Tariffs provide American factories price controls to allow domestic jobs at rates that can replace extended unemployment. During periods of innovative growth and peak business cycles when higher wages are available, those businesses least able to compete will be lost to international competition but during periods of lower innovation or business troughs, Americans will keep jobs and foreign companies providing goods to America will be the first to lose employment.

Some say that tariffs gouge the American consumer, but that does not evaluate our citizens holistically. A consumer is also a tax payer, a worker, a provider, a parent, a partaker of the environment, and a member of a community. If the net holistic benefits to the American citizen are positive for a particular product or service, then that particular product or service should escape protectionism. However, we should determine how to redistribute the gross benefits and costs within our country to equitably share the benefits and social costs.

Others say that tariffs and subsidy protections would cause American businesses to become complacent and to lose their incentive to compete with the rest of the world. We continue to use this reasoning even as our structural unemployment continues to grow. However, for the 40,000 factories that have left our shores, American ingenuity has been unable to keep pace with even no complacency. American businesses will always have an incentive to improve productivity if they wish to compete in world markets regardless of subsidies or tariffs.

Still others say that tariffs perpetuate poor quality and operating practices. America did pass through a moment in time prior to globalization when we did not envision a world of emerging countries competing through quality and innovation. However, we will never return to that moment, except for the nostalgic pining of our elders remembering “better days”. Nonetheless, offsetting wage and regulation cost differentials with tariffs will not protect American businesses from foreign quality and innovative competition. We will forever more be compelled to compete.

Mitigating wage and regulation cost differentials will only slow the rapid drain of jobs, manufacturing, and national security protection of America. Those goods which are most able to provide win-win benefits to both America and her trading partners will be available in our markets at lower costs, others at similar costs. Net benefits to America will be much greater than this wholesale gutting of American value, jobs, and self worth. During times when accelerated American innovation thrusts Americans into higher wage jobs, more foreign products will be available at lower prices.

Tariffs are only one piece of a comprehensive strategy to protect America from a plunge into obscurity. However, given the realities of our politicians’ impotence in dealing with the onslaught of multinational corporations and international bankers, it is a critical first step that should be implemented immediately if we are to provide America time to catch up with China’s immense and effectively operationalized strategies. America’s current path is not healthy for America and ultimately will not be for our economic adversaries either. If war is an inevitable part of transition, then any actions taken to delay or deter war are critical. I deem strategic tariffs a support for jobs, a net benefit to America’s finances, and a mitigation to war.

Why Do Democrats and Republicans Play Childhood Games with America’s Future?

As young boys, growing up in Ohio, we spent many summer days playing “Smear the Queer”. We didn’t know the inappropriateness of the name of the game as young boys. We only knew it meant coming together in fields behind our suburban homes to blow off summer energy and to demonstrate each other’s bravado. The game consisted of one boy holding onto the football as long as possible by running to escape the others. Each boy would run with abandon in his chosen direction until the rest of the pack would catch up and dog pile him into the ground. Another kid would then capture the ball and run headlong in the opposite direction knowing that the crowd would soon pound him into the ground as well.

In this childhood game, there were no winners, no advancement of the ball to score for the team. There was only chest pounding, boyhood energy, and bull headed bravado. Because we were oblivious to the bigoted implication of the game’s name, we perhaps could have been forgiven in our 1960’s innocence of youth. However, America’s two political parties, claiming to be learned elite, continue this politically incorrect game with reckless abandon in the year 2011!

In the midst of an historic crisis that left 24% of our able workers sidelined from our economy, a crisis that may eliminate America as the leader of the free world and sentence us to a diminished future, our two parties have refused to be either a beacon of hope or a forum of reason. Instead, as each party has been given the opportunity to gain the support of all Americans, they have foolhardily run with abandon in the direction of self interest. Easily discerning their veiled motives that disregard most of America, our electorate has voted to quickly dogpile each party.

In 2008, after elections signaled America sought “change”, the country experienced a monetary crisis that impacted us all. Instead of rapidly revising agenda to lead us out of crisis, the Democrats lunged forward with wealth redistribution and universal healthcare, worthy goals for their party, but lacking acknowledgement of our country’s need to wage war.

Punishing blind loyalty to party, the Great Middle dogpiled the Democrats in 2010 and elected leaders who promised to get the country back on track. Instead, when the Republicans gained firm hold of the football, they giddily sprinted for the other side of the field toward their ideals of wealth protection, union destruction, defunding of Planned Parenthood and NPR, and cutting of entitlements.

The New York special election that gave a majority to Democrat Kathy Hochul in a Republican stronghold once again signaled the Great Middle piling on a party that irresponsibly misconstrued its mandate. Instead of advancing the Great Society in the absence of real economic growth, and instead reverting to trickle-down economics after having shipped 40,000 factories to China in the last decade, America wants critical leadership.

The Democrats are now beating their chest because they succeeded in mongering fear to protect Medicare from the likes of Paul Ryan. In the absence of leadership that calls for sacrifice from all Americans but that promises to not leave any of our brethren behind, this election signals that Democrats will likely get their turn to run like silly school children toward their camp in 2012.

But America cries out, “Where is our great leader?” Who will blaze a path forward that all can follow? Ask us to sacrifice for we must. Reduce our entitlements but put all able Americans back to work. Reduce government spending but divert it now into the private sector and transfer government jobs immediately into private domestic endeavors that can rebuild our future together. Call on multinational corporations to sacrifice for America’s future productivity. Divert dollars that continue to keep insolvent international investment banks afloat to keep America afloat. Put aside your silly boyhood games and lead.

A Politician, a Banker, and a Multinational Corporate CEO Walk into a Bar

We have a weird set of bedfellows running America. Without contemplating each other’s impact, our politicians, bankers, and multinational corporations (MNCs) nonetheless combine their efforts to make a mess of our country.

[ A politician, a banker, and a multinational corporate CEO walk into a bar. The politician closes down the bar for regulation violations and sends the crowd packing. On their way out the door, the patrons hand their wallets to the politician who gives them to the banker who lends them to the CEO who uses them to buy the bar and send it over to China. ]

Our politicians attempt to make our world brighter by passing regulations that add social costs of production to the cost of our local businesses’ products. Yet, they turn a blind eye to other nations’ lack of regulation that similarly pollutes the world while providing their industries a regulatory subsidy against American competition. MNCs then arbitrage lower foreign regulatory and labor costs to bring lower priced finished goods back to America for sale.

Rather than construct level playing fields, our politicians pander their votes to bankers and MNCs, providing one sided regulations and free trade legislation that subsequently reduces demand for American workers. Not deterred by America’s rising level of structural unemployment, they then pass extended unemployment benefits to pacify the electorate, refuse to raise taxes to cover the consequential damages, and instead ask the Fed to print money.

Our Federal Reserve has dutifully printed money for our politicians for decades knowing that one day it might have to print money for itself. That day came and the Fed helped itself to a whopping 2 trillion dollars of self help money creation. The Fed now stodgily claims that two trillion in quantitative easing will not affect the value of the dollar. Armed with economists to defend its actions, the Fed claims that the economy will grow as the result of QE 1 and 2, requiring more money for more transactions, that the Fed has means to reduce the growth in spending and tools to offset an expansionary increase if necessary, that because of heightened instability in the world market, QE 1 and 2 are being held abroad as reserve assets and thus will not impact price levels, and that it can easily remove any excess supply of money if its QE efforts have overshot.

[ In that same bar sat an Indian, a Chinese National and a West African sipping economic Coca Colas, as was their usual custom. To keep their economy colas cooled from unexpectedly overheating every time the Fed ran into the bar with a teapot of steaming hot water and forced them to take a shot of inflationary devaluation, they kept a few ice cubes of reserve currency on hand. This day, however, was different.

The Fed drove up to the bar in a dump truck filled with steaming hot quantitative easing, forced the three countrymen to place their colas at the rear of the truck, quickly lifted its bed with its sloshing steamy payload directly above the little glasses, opened up the back gate and drowned the colas with a two trillion ton tsunami of worldwide, commodity buying, inflationary steamy hot dollars. The Fed’s two remaining economists who, up to now, were willing to sit publicly in the bar looked sheepishly at each other before quietly removing themselves out the back exit.

An American businessman sat in the bar cheering on the Fed’s hubbub as he chatted with a local barber and a Tunisian barber. He shouted to the two barbers, “Now America will bring back our factories and compete with the world.” He hoped the Fed’s action would devalue the dollar enough that America’s businesses could afford to add value through American labor to globally priced commodities and resell the finished products competitively on the world market.

The Tunisian barber leaned over and quipped to the American barber, “Yes, now you too can come home from cutting hair all day, tend to your chickens and till your garden into the night to feed your family.” Overhearing the Tunisian’s comment, the American businessman wondered if the dollar value actually decreased enough to make American factories competitive, that it perhaps might not be such a good thing for American barber he had just befriended.

The American barber smiled to the businessman and the Tunisian, got up and left the bar in his automobile filled with metals, plastics, rare earth, and oil derivatives, drove to his home beaming with wood, copper, metal appliances, and internet streamed CRTs, cooled by combusted hydrocarbons, reached into his refrigerator and pulled out a relative feast of supermarket distributed, oil grown food commodities for his snack. All the while he was unaware of the coming “QE 1,2,3..n” commodities inflation that would level his playing field down to that of his Tunisian bar buddy. ]

Is America Prepared for Kamikaze Finance?

Brett Arends, in his April 25th Marketwatch article entitled “IMF Bombshell: Age of America Nears End”  reports that the IMF has predicted 2016 as the year when China’s economy overtakes that of the United States.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/imf-bombshell-age-of-america-about-to-end-2011-04-25

Perhaps the word bombshell is the right allusion.  What comes to mind is America’s shock and disbelief in 1941 that the Japanese could fly formations of attack aircraft for so long under the radar right above sea level to destroy Pearl Harbor.  Just as Americans were unprepared to foresee the stealth attack of Japan even after years of her militaristic advances, Americans have stood helplessly by as the armaments of American financial defense sit helplessly in Congressional harbors of polarized politics.

Two concepts of financial attack seem reasonable afterthoughts.  First is that exponential financial expansion is hidden from radar until the last few years of growth.  American appeasers failed to recognize that as China expanded it’s economy 10 percent per year for 30 years, the law of exponential growth meant China’s economy would grow 800 percent in thirty years, but that the  greatest 400% would occur in the last seven years.  

The second even more ingenious stealth move unforeseen by America but creating an even more shocking surprise attack is that by holding the exchange rate low for so many years, the Chinese were able to fly even lower to the ocean swells and build a purchase power parity empire undetected by conventional financial defenses.

In preparation for this two pronged financial assault,  China has been building the hegemonic relationships that thwarted Japan’s  military attempt to over take the United States just 6 decades ago.   China also was successful in its hegemonic strategy to preemptively gut American factories through the “treasonous”  collaboration of multinational corporations and international banks residing  in financial cells right here in America.  

Our American factories, that were so successful in mounting a war of attrition against the Japanese in WWII, now lay dormant in the rust belt as 24 percent of our capable American workers line the “soup kitchens” of the American social welfare system and charitable organization’s generosity.  This time around, without the physical and financial capabilities to defend ourselves from within, it may be Americans who are forced to display patriotism through financial kamikaze during the end stages of the American empire.

How Could America Have Squandered the Gold of Ancient Egypt and the Incas?

Gold has been the store of human endeavor since ancient times. While each ounce of gold can hold only a finite amount of labor, perhaps 1,000 hours in non-industrialized nations, some of the gold locked in Fort Knox has touched millions of hours of labor from civilizations untold. For gold’s greatest benefit, as with all money, is not its storage of value but its lasting ability to temporarily hold value in the exchange of non-coincidental barters.

For millenniums, money was the interchange commodity for simple trades as between farmers and herders. The farmer gave the herder a coin in winter for meat, and the herder returned the coin at harvest time for a bushel of vegetables. Farmers and herders relied on the value of gold because precious metals took effort to mine and purify, were tested for weight and purity, and could be stamped, coined and carried. With such a universal appeal, precious metals became synonymous with storage of value and dominated the world’s choice for money.

At one point, America held within its coffers 70% of all the gold that has ever been purified from ancient Egypt and the Incas through modern times. But it was our misjudgment as to the true value of gold that robbed our forts of ingots and brought America to the precipice of ruin. As history’s greatest superpower, why did America not learn from ancient empires that tumbled down the path to insignificance, and why did we allow our government to amass more debt than has ever been owed by every other soul that has ever lived?

1964 marked an accelerating turning point in America’s misfortunes. In 1964, President Johnson was elected to enact Great Society reforms just as America was increasing her involvement in Viet Nam. Baby boomers were entering the work force just as multinational corporations were beginning an upsurge of direct foreign investment and the transfer of jobs to overseas markets. America’s use of oil was peaking just as political undercurrents were coalescing around oil as a geopolitical force.

Six simultaneous assaults on the American dollar joined to fuel the American financial malaise; a lack of fiscal adherence to a gold standard, military excursions in support of American interests, funding of the great society, a lack of will to respond to oil cartels, multinational corporate indifference to the plight of the American worker, and a financial industry gone wild.

America did not Steward Its Gold

Even though, for 600 decades of recorded history, gold was the stable base of transactions, the world has temporarily abandoned this gold standard for the last 5 decades. Our abandonment was not because of the world’s enlightenment that gold is an unnecessary physical impediment to the electronic age of finance. It is because, with no viable alternative, the world has clung to the hollowed out American dollar that inflated beyond the discipline of the gold standard.

In the 20th century, industrialized nations twice attempted to redistribute wealth through great wars that left all of Europe bankrupt. Afterward, America held 70 percent of the world’s processed gold, and became through Bretton Woods the gold-backed, paper money guarantor of the free world. During the next 15 years, America squandered her gold to cover currency imbalances, until by 1960 the dollar lost its legitimacy. Interestingly, it took Spain over a hundred years to squander its 20,000 tons of Inca gold.

From 1971 until now, America and the rest of the world have had little choice but to allow our currencies to float, giving up the imperfect discipline imposed by a gold standard. As a result of America’s freewheeling monetary policies, it is now encumbered by a spend drunk Congress and an obliging central bank that have conspired to reduce the value of America’s 1971 fiat dollar to a mere 17 cents today.

Scholars suggest that the reason for the dollar’s fall was the inevitable Triffin dilemma which requires America to carry a current account deficit to provide the world with reserve currency. Yet debt financed trade imbalances are not required to provide reserves. Reserves could just as well have been sold to other countries as given to them through trade shortfalls. No, America’s post war monetary policies quickly gambled away the historical hegemony that was bestowed on us at the end of two world wars.

This five decade hiatus from a gold standard will prove only temporary. Gold’s appeal as the engine of financial growth has not been lost on China. At the end of World War II, U.S. gold reserve was over 18,000 tons but has since reduced to 8,000 tons. China is executing a strategy of purchasing approximately 250 tons per year and, as the world’s largest producer of gold, producing 320 tons per year, and now has surpassed all but the U.S. as the second largest holder of gold with 2,000 tons.

Military Excursions Drained America’s Coffers

Without the ability to borrow vast moneys, earlier civilizations relied on warring, exploration and conquest to quickly expand their stores of gold. This strategy was not without consequences. To fund war, Rome engaged in coin clipping and smelting with lesser metals to reduce size and value of denarius in attempts to pay soldiers with coins of veiled value. After 200 years, the Roman denarius reduced from 100 percent silver to only 5 percent just prior its army leaving Rome unprotected from invasions and fall. Interestingly, it has taken less than 100 years for America’s dollar value to plunge that amount.

As all empires have before, America found that its wars must be financed with inflation. The Fed supported an excessive expansion of the money supply (dollar clipping), creating debt to fund each of America’s wars. The Civil War added 2.8 billion. WWI added another 21 billion. WWII created another $216 billion. The Korean War was financed with taxes. Viet Nam increased the debt $146 billion. Cold war expenditures cost 1.6 trillion. The first Gulf War cost a mere $7 billion. In contrast, Iraq cost $786 billion and Afghanistan cost $397 billion. Not including the 700 foreign soil U.S. military bases that contribute greatly to America’s balance of payments deficit, her major wars added a total of $3.4 trillion dollars of carried debt.

The Great Society Became the Broke Society

President Johnson outlined The Great Society in his State of the Union Speech on January 4, 1965, saying “The great society asks not how much, but how good; not only how to create wealth but how to use it.” Notwithstanding the good that was done by these programs, they drained America’s future potential GDP growth and the money that would fuel her economic engine.

46 years later, Great Society initiatives touched education, health, urban renewal, transportation, arts and culture, Medicare and Medicaid, the Food Stamp program, Project Head Start, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and federal aid to public education for a total expenditure of $9.5 trillion dollars.

America’s Addiction to Oil Made Us Slaves to the Oil Cartel

Oil enabled powerful nations to create a world order that flowed money from agrarian nations to those that controlled hydrocarbon powered machines. Oil was the catalyst that propelled the 20th century’s world leaders into fortune and thrust the world into war. Oil is a finite fuel, controlled by a few nations that are barely separated geopolitically and have common ancient civilizations and modern goals.

Already struggling from Viet Nam and Great Society debts, America found herself the object of a politically motivated oil embargo in 1973. Fuel prices soared and supplies tightened to cause the 70’s stagflation in America. From then until now, America has not found the political will through fluctuating fuel prices to organize an intervention away from oil dependence.

Since the embargo, America has consumed 250 billion barrels of oil at a total cost of $11 trillion dollars. This debit line in our national budget has only one trade, oil for dollars. Had America given our energy war a smidgeon of the effort of placing a man on the moon, we could have easily reduced energy consumption by 20 percent for the same productive output, transportation, and environmental comfort, and saved 2.2 trillion dollars. Surely, the costs to achieve such a modest conservation would have to be netted from the gross, but those costs could have been internally generated and added to America’s GDP.

America’s Multinational Corporations (MNC) were Indifferent Citizens

While America fought the war on poverty, her political leaders surrendered to the war on American jobs. Certainly, with the relative world peace supported by America’s military, globalization was bound to occur. With the risk of direct foreign investments reduced, the last five decades have unleashed an acceleration of money flow and intellectual capital from America to other countries.

While over 4 trillion dollars have been invested overseas by American uberwealthy, America has also been a receiver of investment, so that the net outflow has only been 0.7 trillion. However, the loss of America’s wealth and jobs has been much greater, contributing to a stagnant workforce where one in four able Americans has been idled. MNC direct foreign investment has indirectly added $4 trillion dollars to America’s debt.

The Fed Financed MNCs and Saved Banks but Failed to Keep America Employed

During most of the 17th century, Europe embroiled itself in wars that killed 30% of its population. Some of the world’s largest banking houses failed as royal debtors defaulted, including England in1672. Finally, in 1694, the king agreed to give the Bank of England authority to print all of England’s bank notes in exchange for bank loans to support his war with France. The newly created Central bank, having transferred its risk of loss to British subjects, profited simply by printing money for the monarchy. However, this excess printing did not stop the emptying of England’s coffers.

After America revolted to escape the monetary control of the Bank of England, Hamilton, the United States’ Secretary of the treasury, proposed a charter to a create a similar central bank for America. Against Thomas Jefferson’s insistence, the First Bank of the United States became the precursor to America’s Federal Reserve. Some say major banks manufactured a bank run in 1907 to destabilize the Treasury and instigate support for the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 establishing the Fed, a quasi-agency, private enterprise with a quasi-public board.

From the establishment of the Fed until today, many have argued that major Fed decisions have enriched banks at the expense of the American People. An example is the erroneous decision the Fed made to keep interest rates high for an extensive period of time as America and the World clearly were entering the Great Depression. Also of heated debate was the decision to bail out the banking industry at the start of the Great Recession.

Nonetheless, Fed decisions combined with lobbied efforts to reduce financial regulations, allowed Wall Street to orchestrate multiple financial bubbles that consecutively destroyed value in American portfolios. It cost taxpayers $88 billion to bail out the S&L crisis. The boiling and bursting of the dot.com bubble evaporated $5 trillion dollars. Notwithstanding that the credit default bubble lost the world $30 trillion in value, it has thus far cost America $51 billion in bank bailouts, $787 billion in stimulus, $1.5 trillion in quantitative easing, $5 trillion in lost property values, and with over 5 million bankruptcies and 5 million foreclosures, ruined trillions of dollars worth of wealth generating credit.

In Conclusion

Adding up the numbers versus our $15 trillion dollar debt, it is amazing that the resiliency of the American economy is thus far holding ground:

10,000 tons of gold: $0.5 trillion
Wars: $3.4 trillion
Great Society: $9.5 trillion
Lack of Energy Policy $2.2 trillion
MNC DFI: $4.0 trillion
Banking Debacles: $12.4 trillion +
Total $32.0 trillion

The idea of currencies unsupported by gold reserves is not in itself troublesome. Whether Crowley shells, tally sticks, or paper money, if the market has trust in its role as a place holder for non-incidental barter, any money will do. However without the external discipline imposed by a gold standard, America must instead substitute gold’s imposition for a President strong enough to stand for American sovereignty, a Fed subjugated to defend a stable currency, a Congress selfless enough to impose its own financial discipline, and a willingness of American businesses to defend American jobs. Otherwise, America’s five decade reign over this short lived worldwide fiat money dollar system will come to an end.

The Periodic War Between Carbon and Silicon has Begun

What an abundant element this carbon is and yet what trouble it presents the world. So many deaths have occurred trying to control it. Prior to the industrial era, kings compiled great armies, sometimes exceeding a million men, who thrust swords and spears supported by thousands of slaves and serfs drawing up carbon from the earth in foodstuffs to supply these fighting masses with the energy needed to control the earth’s wealth.

With the industrial revolution, the ready supply of liquid carbon could easily be transformed by machines to produce goods that used to require the energy of thousands of men. Industrialists could now produce great wealth without logistical and political control of millions of people. Carbon concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a few “robber barons” who lacked political structure but who learned how to harness this plentiful element. They used their newfound wealth to transform and influence the new politics of the 20th century.

The greatest multinational corporations of the early 20th century, the oil conglomerates, were the first and only to be tried for treason against the United States directly after WWII. When it was found that the American federal government was complicit in their treason, the trials ended quietly, forever establishing carbon’s place as the greatest influencer of industrialized national politics throughout the 20th and early 21st century.

Now, the world is attempting to stand up against carbon’s combustion consequences as scientists finalize their debate of its cataclysmic environmental destruction effects. Thankfully prior to the industrial age, the earth was able to recapture the carbon used by man faster than he could combust it. However, since the early 1900′s, industries and transportation have accelerated combustion, and disasters have been escalating both in size and number in direct correlation to carbon’s excess formation in our upper atmosphere.

While governments continue to debate its impact on our environment, their concerns will be of little consequence to its continued use. Because great concentration of wealth requires great emission of CO2, and because consolidation of the world’s wealth is still in its infancy, the political and business powerful will continue to accelerate carbon combustion to amass wealth, even exacerbating environmental consequences by transferring production assets miles and oceans away from the ultimate consumers through globalization.

The acceleration of carbon emissions into our atmosphere has not only rapidly transformed world politics, a majority of scientists claim it has rapidly transformed the environment, leaving the world little time to compensate, e.g. melting polar ice caps. I suggest that it has deteriorated the earth’s living organisms just as rapidly because Darwinism cannot compete with its detrimental effects.

The human body consumes carbon to live and the brain has a set point that tells us to exhale when carbon reaches its upper limits in our blood stream. However, since the tobacco industry’s escalation of carbon into the lungs quarter of the world’s population, now a quarter of all deaths in the world occur as our body’s carbon exhaling mechanism fails because of smoking and we slowly suffocate to death through the ravages of COPD brought on through years of inhaling carbon.

We know that man’s internal set point for carbon in the bloodstream has been constant for millions of years but so has his lower set point. On a macro level it appears that higher atmospheric CO2 is causing global melting. On a micro level, since environmental CO2 has edged to a slightly higher concentration in the air we breathe, how are our Darwinian body systems compensating?

Whether or not carbon combustion is destroying our ecosystem or our biological compensation, this element carbon in its liquid form will be the engine of mass transfers of wealth and world destabilization for years to come. The international banking system will continue to support capital flow in pursuit of carbon transfers. And America’s quantitative easing II has only helped to clear a temporary but sizable log jam in the carbon transfer system, while destabilizing America’s future.

The common man, unorganized against the concentrated power of carbon, lost his voice. Governments have been transformed to a carbon base. While impossible for the masses to fight fire element with fire element, another element on the periodic table has risen up in defense. As seen in recent North African demonstrations and less recently in the American Tea Party movement, the common man has begun to rally around the element, silicon.

Only second in prevalence to oxygen, silicon is the 21st century answer to carbon, connecting a diverse human race in a social network, more energy rich than its carbon based industrialized political nemesis. From the garages of Silicon Valley, the silicon chip has risen on an accelerated path of discovery and development to harness the ideas of man and to create libraries of digital thought that each year promises to double our collective recorded knowledge. Based upon this sea of infinite intellectual capacity, the common man has learned to communicate through fiber highways in such a way as to connect the very synapses of millions, nay billions of individual brains into a virtual organic computer focused on the survival of mankind.

In fact, the word computer has become obsolete, as silicon has enabled this virtual organic mass to connect through the internet’s social gateways to become an analyzer, a discerner, a communicator, a wisdom generator, an emotional synthesizer, a political organizer, a voice harmonizer, unifier and amplifier. The word computer has, in fact, only been a fuzzifying place holder as mankind is only now rallying the true potential of this siliconic instrument.

The common man has now emerged as a metamorphosed political force that can no longer be contained by traditional carbon party constraints. Individual social media democrats have slid around conventional party politics like sand through a sieve to rally through non-party power dynamics like the American tea “party” and mass North African freedom rallies to demand and garner political change. Not to be outdone, carbon is racing to concentrate further through MNC networks to cement its worldwide dominance on the periodical table. The race between carbon and silicon is being played out as we speak, and individuals around the planet are taking sides in this great battle. My bet is for silicon to edge out carbon in years to come.