The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
May 22nd
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 and do a
little slicing and dicing of food stamps (particularly as applicable to the junk
calories as noted in this week’s 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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