The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
November 19th
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.
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..
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… 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
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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PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |