Thursday, September 23, 2010

Globalism or Nationalism?

Perhaps the most bizarre and harmful voting process in the nation’s history occurred with the election of Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency in 2008. Largely fueled by the late-teenage and twenty-something crowd gullible enough to be mesmerized by a campaign based on cosmetics and sleight-of-hand, his election has resulted in the delivery of just what he said he would bring to the nation and which older heads could see through as if the entire effort were couched in vapors…an attempt to completely replace the capitalist system with socialism.

The magic word in Washington today is GLOBAL. Whereas this nation was founded on principles designed to create in the United States a compatibility of governance with capitalism – NATIONALISM, in other words – the current establishment would trade that system for everything global, another way of saying primarily socialistic, even to the point of complete disintegration of the system that has made this nation successful beyond comprehension and in spite of gargantuan disruptions such as the Civil War and its consequences, as well as armed conflicts virtually a world away, not to mention a population so diverse as to practically scream for self-destructive class-conflict.

Just a small indication of the global approach was the recent announcement by State Secretary Clinton at something called the Global Initiative conference founded by her husband that the U.S. government is contributing $50 million to something called the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. Cookstoves? Okay…these stoves are supposed to help save the planet from global warming, which the best U.S. climatologists have already indicated is simply in a normal cycle, nothing else.

The president, meanwhile, speaks constantly of a “global economy” while the U.S. economy is going down in flames. He has surrounded himself with “czars,” entities most people call “regulators” of everything from how we drive to what we eat, with an emphasis on acting globally. While my wife looked for an item of clothing recently (I rarely attend these torture sessions) I checked the labels on women’s blouses…made in China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, Philippines and Jordan. That was in just one small department.

The next day (again, a rare exercise for me), I looked while she shopped for an iron, not a shooting-iron but a pressing-iron. I was very interested in one made in Germany. She chose the one made in China. She, as does Obama apparently by design, contributed to the global economy. Admittedly, the globalization of American industry with regard to actual manufacturing has been taking place for decades on the backs of governments headed by both democrats and republicans, but the obsession with actually bowing to so-called global concerns is overwhelmingly pronounced currently.

Shoes are made in China, electronics in Taiwan or South Korea, cars in Japan or Europe. The consequence is that the U.S. economy is basically service-oriented. Even at that, other nations take technology developed in this country and turn it to their own advantage. Being good global citizens, Americans just go along with this, notwithstanding that many young people in this country are not college material and need jobs that feature manual labor of some sort.

The stock answer as to why this is the case is that in order for other countries to buy U.S. products, as few as they are, the U.S. must buy theirs, never mind that this country’s trade deficit is of enormous proportions and has been for decades. U.S. manufacturers follow the money and relocate their enterprises to places like China, where a worker might make $1.50 a day while his counterpart in this country might make ten times that much or more.

The logical thing to do would be for the Washington crowd, especially the administration, to get management and labor together and iron out some compromises so that U.S. workers can make a livable wage while actually competing with nations that feature barely survivable wages and child-labor, thus bringing jobs back to this country. This would mean some sacrifice on all sides but it would mean long-term benefits. In other words, the time has come for an UN-GLOBAL approach. A good place to start would be the go-ahead on oil-well-drilling, the better to un-globalize the nation’s dependence on often hostile, unpredictable nations for the crude.

The nation is surviving very well, thank you (okay…just temporarily until nearing the financial abyss), on the current work-force reduced by some 8 million jobs, which means that probably millions of those lost jobs are not coming back online, especially anytime soon or at a time when the administration seems hell-bent on running the small-business man off the plantation by taxing/regulating him to death.

This isn’t likely to happen, just as it didn’t happen with Clinton or the Bushes or other presidents. With Obama, the globalist, it would seem to have no chance. The answer is at the ballot box.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

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