The Journal

Serving the Metropolitan Area

Since 1872

September 6, 2023

THINK GLOBALLY... (re) ACT LOCALLY!

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

Syndicated by Acme Features

They held a funeral for Mikhail Gorbachev a while back… he of the stain on his forehead that got the Christers all in a lather over whether he was indeed the Beast of the Revelation (which he was, sort of, to certain Soviet apparatchiks). Many world leaders paid tribute. Vladimir Putin boycotted his funeral. So it goes.

After that last Persidential election blew up in the face of Team Trump as it did with all them anti-Socialistic Russians tweaking America’s nose falling to those Chinese as pushed their donkey over the finish line with the stolen and fraudulent vote, Grady Hannifer, county gadfly in Pipetown 'n just about the only pre-Reagan Republican thereabouts, admitted this heretical sentiment: "I miss the Communism!" After the Berlin wall fell down, he'd collapsed into the orbit of them as listen to the talk radio out of Johnson City, still believed ol' Gorbachev was still running the show out of his wheelchair (n’ George Soros pushin’), back of some Pizza Hut with Mad Vlad only a KGB ventriloquist’s dummy propped up before the cameras while the Deep State (Moscow version) pulls the strings. It's that stain, as satisfies Revelations 13:3 but, more recently, he'd been reduced to wailing "... dunno who to hate, anymore, with My President gone in the head, and Evil Vladimir endorsing Uncle Joe, aside from that baby-killing girl, down there in Florida! Queers? The French? Iran? Those Saudis with all them princes with the beards? Birds? Lion hunters? Those people?" and he strokes the side of his nose, knowsomely. Gets me to thinking as how we need our scapegoats, depend on them, in fact, like Aristotle, thinking that the sun and moon and such needed the one and other so as to remain in perfect harmony, rotating round the earth.

Hard to believe it's only been a couple of generations since World War Deuce, when Uncle Joe was a different fellow than that Hamletizing old ex-Vice ventriloquist’s dummy as murdered Charlie McCarthy and assumed control himself… and just a couple of decades since most Americans figured that either the Japanese dragons or a reunioned Germany would clean our clocks, economically, while Russia rocked and reeled beneath a parade of sclerotic or drunken apparatchiks and Maoist China was ordering its billion-some rice farmers and washerwomen to set up backyard steel mills.

That was the highwater of G-spotters - of Akio Morita saying "no"! Of the top four companies in the world in Business Week's 1988 sales lineup being Japanese; six of the top ten, not countin' Royal Dutch Shell.

Turned out Germany's absorbing its Osties was like a cornsnake swallowin' a turtle, while the Japanese had less sense than we thought... Tokyo was happy to keep selling us their Toyotas, Sonys (Sonies?), their Nintendos and Mitsubishis but had to import something in return to at least pretend to back up all those IOUs. Wouldn't let us sell them our "barbarian" rice so, instead, they opted for high Wall Street flummoxtry, low culture and bad ideas.

Really bad ideas!

Ideas like turning over gumment and economy to the termites. We sold 'em ancient Rust Belt factories as cost more then they were worth to bulldoze. We sold 'em T-bills while the dollar was deflating, real estate in Houston when gas stalled at eighty cents the gallon, stock in Hollywood once Kevin Costner turned to making his own movies and we were sellin’ our own effin' ports to Dubai!

Most insidious of all, we were opening up our law schools and sayin' to them Japanese (and other furriners): "come on down!". Sending back spores of destruction to the house of the rising sun like US cavalry officers sowing smallpox, cirrhosis and gonorrhea among them wild, wild not-from-India Indians with blankets, whiskey and flatbed pick-up trucks with the rotten brakes. We got Japan to reform its political system to something sort of like ours (with the result being that five of their last seven Prime Ministers wound up in jail or in comas attributable to stuff like suicide and murder and alcoholism), then shipwrecked 'em on the siren-shoals of litigiousity with a national debt greater than the annual GDP and worse than our own!

Back then, engineer Masaki Nishimoto could boast: "Japanese goods sell better because they are better!" Noting American manufactured goods that broke down almost immediately, he scolded: "It is sheer self-indulgence to think you can sell such poorly made products in a free market when better goods are available."

Mr. Nishimoto was right from his engineering standpoint, but terribly misinformed as a global capitalist... without goods that break down and, thus, require frequent replacement, national economies are likely to break down in their stead! Now, Japan seems to have learned its lesson. Their goods break down as often as do ours and the Europeans', so’s they pile up in toxic landfills as not bein’ worth fixing until some earthquake rumbles them loose and they float off to California. Trouble is, though, until the plague broke out, Chinese stuff lasted almost just as long, was still dirt cheap and they’re still making noise about no longer letting us pay off our IOU’s with unproductive bulldada.

Got real problems, now.

We see the former Soviet Union devolved (Grady’s radio people’s contention of a Deep Commie State to the contrary) into an Imperial Russia still halfway between an eighteenth-century Sicilian "mafia state" and a "Twin Peaks"-watching nineteenth-century engine of "primitive capital coalescing"… as the e-con-mists swirl it. (The part those radio people do have down is as how most of the KGB transited seamlessly to a crony capitalist regime floated on a cloud of natural gas and regulated by the GRU.) They conquered Ukraine, then sort of stalled out like conquerors tend to do in Afghanistan again and Moldova (but at least they’re still ruling the roost in Cernobyl). Add in several nuclear-fortified Islamic castoffs sliding backwards into superstitious anti-Semitism (a curious and lethal phenomenon for Central Asia’s Boratistans, never actually hotbeds of Jewish subversion or Jewish anything) into the mix. Former Warsaw-pacters are clamouring for absorption into Germany to protect them from Putin, though Belarus is red, again, as is Hungary - its five-dollar-a-day workers having been priced out of the global market and taxed up the wazoo to pay for the goulash doled out to Mideast refugees likely associated with Iran (on the left hand) or ISIS (on the other left hand). Budapest, like Warsaw, seeks revanche with neo-fascist Austria. North Korea as seemed to have fallen out of love with Djonald Unchained, and gone back to blowing itself up testing defective, dirty bombs so as to make President Biden or… gee!... anybody pay attention to them. That li’l Castro brother keeps making speeches, totally incoherent now (but still making more sense than the Venezuelans) and beaming sonic death-waves onto the European embassies, now that ours’n got closed again. Meanwhile, those Chinese and Indian mutants... politically despotic, economically libertarian... seem little changed from them domains of mandarins and maharajas Tommy Malthus so admired, in that revenues acquired by labor exploitation was used up by importing so many luxuries for the top chow-dogs, rather than bettering the diet (hence the populations) of the poor, until their stock markets collapsed, leaving ours’n still high, though not necessarily dry.

We're even making commercial overtures to Vietnam, courtesy of our Chief Executive cosseting the anti-Beijing Chinese in Taiwan. That hurts! For many years, I found the surest way to shut up any windbag... especially those as were well over military age saying we should go back and invade, or maybe just restore our lost animal honor by dropping a couple of nukes over Hue... by responding: "Unlike Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, I don't know of any American jobs lost by companies moving off to Vietnam." I mean… the NoKos paid the family of that Indonesian girl ninety dollars American… nine zero, ninety!... to take out Kim Un’s brother and get hanged for the doing, and she probably thought it was a bargain.

Ain't strictly true anymore. Your highly flammable American flag supposedly made in Taiwan is more likely sewn in Ho Chi Minh City, or else Cambodia… which is meeting its own limited fiscal obligations by hosting tour groups for pedophiles. By allowing child labor into the wage/price equation long before Kathie Lee, Adam Smith sought to depress the price of labor to "that proper rate which circumstances of society require." For every skein of worsted these poor children spin, Danny DeFoe had replied, almost a century before Adam Smith, "there must be a skein the less spun by some poor family that spun it before."

Jeremy Rifkin, chronic scold and font of more failed legislation than Bernie Sanders, has said, of the future of a globalized labor force: "With each new indignity, their confidence and self-esteem suffer another blow. They become expendable, then irrelevant, and finally invisible in the new high tech world of global commerce and trade."

Or, as Jefferson Airplane used to sing, a'fore turning into the Starship and pimpin’ out their rock an’ roll for the Yankee dollar: "first, I was iridescent... then, I became transparent... finally, I was absent." The world's become a mirror into which we glare, sigh, squeeze such pimples as afflict us and congratulate ourselves over the doing, but the pus still runs deep, and toxic.

Now, for those of you as don't remember my reinvestment bill, as was walled up in committee like Mr. Poe's casket of armadillos, I propose ending years of sequesteration and paying down the Dubyama-deficit by slapping a re-import surcharge on corporate runaways, with a third paid to the third-world workers in Yankee-owned sweatshops direct, in scrip, for purchase of imported American goods. Plus, of course, going back to that old-school practice of spending no more than you take in, but… in what now seems the most dangerous of times since the Cuban Missile Crisis, keeping up a military force that is both capable of dealing with Mr. Putin in his manic phases, rebuilding America’s infrastructure while he sleeps. (See this here nine-year-old Don Jones Index for more.)

And wonder of all wonders… that plague as shut the Chinese down more or less completely a’fore it lumbered on into our own turf has us scrabbling through our landfills to find old phones, calculators and computers and dig out the rare eaths as have suddenly gotten a whole lot rarer.

"Chemistry grew out of alchemy, astronomy out of astrology, medicine out of witchcraft. What," inquires the sociologist Peter Berger, "do you suppose will grow out of economics?"

Ol' Grady Hannifer’s doing the funky chicken now that a capitalist but still Satanic Russia’s took over a third of Ukraine, half of Moldova and slice of Slovakia and, in the process, depositing Karl Marx in a woodchipper... he was right!  RIP Gorby!

CLICK the CATFISH to go to PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS

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