The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
November 20th
@begin
FAIR
TRADE a'fore FREE TRADE!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
Parnells
been gathered in one or another of those as are called the border states (besides
Kentucky, that would include West Virginia and Missouri) for six generations
but my pa, the Senator, counted himself among Southern Democrats, which
course I faithfully followed... at the beginning. Not that I ever thought myself
a liberal... after Wet Willie and his missus, China Gore and Ketchup Johnny's
57 varieties of failed campaignin' and negotiatin’ and, then, the false springs of ’08 and twelve
and the ersatz people’s revolution of 2016, even neoliberalism tastes like a
hair in the stew, now... but, by the time I skidaddled
out of DeeCee, I think I'd become what might be
called a "ring" politician – gone radical in some ways, reactionary
in others as the doughnut roun' that mushy dark hole
of moderation within. Radical as in getting to the root of matters. Reactionary as not only standin'
up against malignant progress... which is why I hoot at cunning PeeCeister liberals, as restyle themselves "progressives"
when they ain't fit to shine Fightin'
Bob LaFollette's shoes or them alt-righter
“populists” whom Huey Long would have ordered shot first, then hanged... but workin' to keep the
science and civil rights improvements stuff while, otherwise, turning the clock
back to simpler, rosier-colored good ol' days, where politically
inappropriate stuff as jobs and values still occurred and unwanted animals like
robocalls and craptocurrencies were shunned..
Most avoid either
categorization like a plague; radical being associated with the Bernie Sanders
crowd, reaction interpreted as tinfoil hat militias being against the civil
rights and bringing back seventy-hour workweeks and child labor. I might point
out we need more civil responsibilities, and already have
seventy, eighty, even upwards of hundred-hour weeks... just split up among man
and wife, each holding down two or three jobs so as to be screwed out'n the healthcare and overtime and the neglecting of
their younger generation. And speaking of them and the child labor... all's the
same to me, whether in Houston, El Salvador or Indonesia… wouldn’t you rather
have your high school age kids apprenticed to useful trades instead of hanging
out on the corner, chewing kat n’ polishing their assault weapons, or sitting
passively in public schools… getting an earful of liberal mush as to how
winning at football or acing a geometry test is “bullying” the “differently
abled” (whilst, of course, waiting for another active shooter to manifest)… or,
alternatively, them private madrassas as teach the world is flat, began in
4,000 BC and… hey!... let’s kill those Jews and Methodists, too? So, to get to the point, where I'm in favor of
radicalism is in the realm of populism minus the racism, while reaction is in
bringing back those parts of the good old days as when Americans learned those
fundamentals as would help them make stuff, get paid fairly for
it and use the money to buy other stuff from other Americans, as the
Constitution allows.
Seeing as how equitability
requires mention of our dear Former and would-be Future President Djonald Unchained and his pretensions of populism, think of
Mister Trump as the mold on the hole in
the donut… a black hole mold of chaotic irresponsibility of which it may be said
that things would probably be going worse if those folks were sincere. And a lot worse if they were competent. (To be sure, those trials agin’
him are witch hunts.)
Ross Perot, batdada as Ralph Nader between them big bat-ears of his'n, said: "In the
Wall Street Joural columnist Froma Harrop didn’t.
“The left’s success in denying President Obama fast-track authority to
negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership is ugly to behold,” she fulminated a
few years back. “The case put forth by a showboating Sen. Elizabeth Warren —
that Obama cannot be trusted to make a deal in the interests of American
workers — is almost worse than wrong. It is irrelevant.” Like working Americans since the nine-eleven…
irrelevant. Until the plague introduces
itself and you need a ventilator – or even some rubber gloves.
"And what about free trade?" I hear the
chirruping of termites, waving their antennae frumiously;
wings glistening with a lacy patina of subsidy-swag, forelegs rubbing against
one another like the praying hands of motel-'vangelists
as just heard their wife a-knockin' at the door.
Now trade itself is a fine thing… I
have something you want, you have something I want – let’s trade. But Herbert Schiller, a mass communications expert from my father's day, called free trade the mechanism by which
powerful states "penetrate and dominate" (meaning feminize or, call
it what it is, rape) the smaller ones;
snatching what natural or human resources they may possess while imposing their
lifestyles and value systems on an often resentful world. We succeeded in doing
this so well that Baghdad had that Hard Rock Cafe, as had already went broke in
Hollywood, another dive for the Shiites to blow up. Now, Indonesia and Egypt
and Guatemala are selling us back cheap, frequently defective
American cultural junk... Mickety Mosk
sweatshirts and Spligermann action figures... we go
to China for the chips as program our Pontiacs and missile defenses (Mister
President was neither soft nor wrong when he recoiled from the possibility of
those ZTE folks going out of business over there) and Korea for the steel that
(sort of) armours our humvees
in Damascus, San Jose and Jogjakarta! It’s where the O-man and Robert (the Second) Reich,
in them books of theirs’n as Sleepy Joe reads passages
from, now and again, missed the point that tariffs won’t necessarily succor the
steel industry… the issue is whether we allow our own productive capacity to
expire and trust that the nuclear nutball camped sixty-nine
kilometers north of Seoul will pass up the opportunity to reduce the American
enemy to makin’ its armaments from tin, spit, cabbage
slurry and that newfangled duck tape as seems half as cheap, but only ‘bout a
quarter as strong as the old!)
Those the components
of the uber-trendy “green steel”? Maybe.
Meanwhile,
pipsqueak, tinpot dictatorships as snatched voting control of the 121-nation
GATT vote as a bloc to let French socialists quota-quash American films (fair
payback to all those Saddam-loving Hollywood boneheads dragged behind the dimmycratic bandwagon, bleedin'
ketchup out their backsides) and let the “good” Koreans restore their
anti-American prohibitions against food importing by arresting any damnyankee fool as even thinks of trading a bowl of rice
for a wingnut on his Kia.
The sunshine patriots
pranced when that maid-raping IMB boss got Hollandaise elected President of
France but, in my opinion… since confirmed… he was just another Sartre,
floating away on his iceberg, red sails in the sunset and plotting more wars
that Americans will have to finish for him. Hot girlfriend, though… now the French have got
a hot boy toy as still hasn’t made it clear what he stands for (although the
media claims Macron will be the new, younger face of Europe, taking over from a
tired, retired Angela Merkl, her successor otherwise
distracted by the neo-Nazis as have gained so many seats in the German
legislature).
“This is not a partisan issue,” Warren insisted after
Republican trolls shot down her bid to become Queen of the Federal Reserve.
Yes, in a twisted way, the hard left’s fixation over big corporations has
joined the right’s determination to undermine America at every pass and then to
alternately scold and defend their boy and bring him back to 1600. Neither understands (or does, but won’t
admit) that we perceive the age of ideologies in our rear view mirror... the
issue of the twenty first century is corruption.
Sony's Akio Morita used
to boast that
But fickle Fortune followed
fellow Fallows' flawed fallacy with a fatal fall. Japan started to graduate
more lawyers, send its own manufacturing elsewhere… meaning Taiwan (which
really means their subcontractors in “Communist” Vietnam)… and invest in American
real estate (which outcome may dissuade the People's Red Army rolling over
their snakehead lucre to buy up bubble-flated Main Streets
from Boston to Austin!) and collectible jazz and rockabilly vinyl from the
fifties. As one teen Tokyo manga-trepreneur remarked:
"We're just like ants. We all teem around a biscuit and carry it off. That's
the only way we succeed." And the American biscuit Japan bit into was
seeded with Entropy's mutagens.
(Were I spiteful, I might
just say: "let's bring our troops in Poland, waitin’
on the inevitable inevitability of Putin’s war to spread somewhere NATO-y, like
disease, or Moldova and the Far East home... or redeploy them to Iraq or Costa Rica...
let North Korea overrun the South, causing Japan to get into a nukin' war with China, taking out Taiwan, the nut in the Philippines
and, of course, them Vietnamesians besides while Mr.
Putin marches into Poland. A few jobs might come home, then, like surplus
Ph.D.'s to couches in their parents' basements." But that, as Mr. Nixon is
said to have said, would be wrong.)
Excellence-dude Tom Peters
collected lots of cash mocking that "forlorn, 53-year-old male" laid
off from his soft, unionized assembly line job along with "his roughly
99,999 peers". Instead, Tommy Boy invites us to identify with "a 26-year-old
woman... part of a team designing
just-in-time inventory management systems for a giant manufacturer... a bundle
of up-to-date skills in her head and modern tools at her fingertips." Hey,
who wouldn't identify with the babe fondling the tools... though it's more than
likely that, if she warn't born rich or lucked out in
the scholarship lottery, it was the lifetime savings of some forlorn, grumpy
old workingman as enabled her to afford an education to acquire those
up-to-date skills! (That and, of course,
the mountain of debt which will remain long after her just-in-time training’s
in the rear-view mirror and she’s ringing up purchases at the Wal-Mart!)
His
remedy for worker dislocation is "...sweeping, big-ticket worker
retraining programs and bold increases to government adjustment
assistance" (emphases added)... a paid-on-credit welfare-pork bowl, in
other words, as would tantalize the white-hooded palate of even my father’s old
bud, Senator Byrd.
Sets
me to ask, as once did former Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin and
Treasury Undersecretary Robert Roosa, in a ‘Merica long, long
ago and far away: "Is it too much to expect the richest society the world
has ever known to get its income and expenses into line - in one way or the
other - so that it isn't perennially passing IOUs in lieu of paying its
bills?"
I do understand that
there was a plague as still pokes its head out’n the
cave every season or so, a plague which required large outlays of cash for
keeping folks and cities alive – money which could not be obtained otherwise
than by borrowing and importuning inflation. But now that balloon has floated back to
Earth, the Eagle has landed and it’s time to tote up the tab, and do so out of
pocket.
Read my lips. If elected, I will repeal Obamacare, Trumpcare
and whatever eventually boils over on President Biden’s back burner. I will cut entitlement spending… even and especially
as regards sacred beef as social security, Medicare and Medicaid… and
I will raise taxes. I will raise taxes on
the rich. I will raise taxes on the middle
class. And I will raise taxes on the
poor and do a little slicing and dicing of food stamps (particularly as applicable
to the junk calories as noted in a recent DJI)... income taxes, death taxes, energy taxes (once the oily
roller-coaster starts coasting down again as a consequence of the Saudis and Iraniacs goin’ back to bankruptin’ each other) and either honest Federal sales
taxes or sneaky, Europy VATs if the Senate finds them
more preferable... everything’s on the table, including a tax on internet and
cellphone usage as will probably put most spammers and robocallers
out of business. And, come to think
about it, a tax on robots. And then I
will charge a surtax on the tax increases on incomes as derive from moving
money round instead of makin’ stuff, until we get our
deficit down to around twenty percent of GNP, give or take. Fifty percent? I will not raise the debt limit and, if Congress
disagrees, I’ll shut the government down, declare martial law and turn over the
basic tasks of day to day management to local volunteers (who might or might
not be associated with the CNC).
And then, instead of
programs as merely succor the Washington bureaucrats and local poverty pimps, I’ll
actually create jobs, like those infrastructure
jobs Mr. Trump talked about for awhile until he had to choose between them and
his tax cuts for the billionaires. Boring stuff, like the science fiction writer
Kurt Vonnegut derided as “reeks and wrecks” – stuff like roads and bridges and
recycling, construction and reconstruction at a rate of pay as will allow most
to put a roof over their heads (except in some parts of California and New
York) and food on the table, but not so high as to keep them from finding
better opportunities in the private sector, when and if those present
themselves.
"I sincerely believe
that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies," Tom
Jefferson contended, once upon a time, long before we elected a populist who
filled his cabinet with hacks from Goldman-Sachs, "and that the principle
of spending money to be paid for by posterity, under the name of funding, is
but swindling on a large scale."
Not to say I’d shut all the banks down, but I might well slap
a tax on them as do not hire more human beings to answer phones instead of outsourcing
consumer services to English-deficient peons or, worse, machines.
"Those who are out
of work or in lower paying jobs," observed Orlando financial writer Dick
Marlow, a decade back, "will still be around and in need of food, shelter,
health care and other necessities of life - including dignity."
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CLICK the CATFISH to go to
PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |