Let’s Pray for Their Success

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What to write about tonight?  Well, how about thinking about, “How did we get here?”

I know all about the deep dives where everything traces back to the Enlightenment and the loss of faith.  Or there’s the Abolitionists and the Civil War enshrining social justice in our government.  But I don’t want to go back that far.  I’ll settle for Woodrow Wilson and FDR as the source of the runaway bureaucracy that Washington DC has become.  Sure, in between, there were others but I think Wilson set the stage with the WW I expansion and FDR metastasized the problem with the New Deal and the WW II expansions.

Now, I’m not denying that by creating the Leviathan FDR assured the defeat of Hitler and Japan.  He did.  And by funding the Manhattan Project he created the American Empire and eventually destroyed the Soviet Union.  But at what cost?  As one of his successors (Eisenhower) warned, the melding of the US war machine with corporate interests fueled by almost limitless investment from the Federal Reserve has swallowed up our democracy.  And with it, has enveloped us in a police state that dictates to us in a way that is in line with what the Stasi did in East Germany and what China does with its people today.

The final nail in the coffin was 9/11/2001.  The reaction to that attack assured that the Patriot Act and the FISA Courts could treat American citizens like Stalin’s victims that we read about in the Gulag Archipelago.  You can be arrested, convicted, sentenced and buried in the gulag for annoying the bureaucrats or just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Freedom of speech, unreasonable search and seizure and the right to an open and fair trial are all stripped away with the wave of a magic wand when the FISA Court and the Patriot Act declare that national security is threatened.  And all kinds of other atrocities are possible when the intelligence agencies can convince banks, airlines and social media companies that you are a dangerous person because you don’t agree with the bureaucracy’s priorities.

And all of this is because a bunch of rag tag Islamic extremists hijacked four airliners.  Well, as I’ve confessed innumerable times, I was one of the fools who agreed to this nonsense back in 2001.  I allowed myself to be swayed by anger to allow George W Bush and his geniuses to put in place the very laws that would plague Americans ever since.  All of us who agreed with these measures put on our chains voluntarily.  More the fool me.

Well now it’s time to start undoing all of this.  And I mean all of it.  First to go must be the FISA Courts and the Patriot Act.  Ending the ability of the CIA and FBI to target American citizens and sweep away their constitutional rights is the primary goal.  That must go.

But after that, the military industrial complex must be examined and the practices that allow it to bribe elected officials and collude with contractors to bleed the American taxpayers must be changed.  Sure, we need up to date weapons to assure the security of this country.  But we’re not even getting that anymore.  We have bloated weapons programs that produce expensive but unimpressive results.  Our state-of-the-art Abrams tanks are being decimated on the battlefields of Ukraine by $500 drones.  Our next-up super-fighter jet is a vaporware project that is so poorly defined that despite a price tag rumored to be close to a trillion dollars we don’t know why we should build it, other than it will enrich the contractors beyond their wildest dreams.

Getting this done will be a battle royale.  Both Democrats and Republicans will defend the military industrial complex with every fiber of their beings.  People like Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell have amassed huge fortunes and incredible influence by serving the interests of the defense contractors in everything they do in the Congress.  It’s not too much to say that Donald Trump and his cabinet appointees in the Department of Defense will be risking their lives when they defy the vested interests there.  There is probably no limit to what they might do to prevent reform of the present situation.

Let’s pray for their success.  Nothing less than the freedom and prosperity of our children hangs in the balance over the next few years.

A Modest Moratorium

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So tonight, Camera Girl was unleashed on the baking supplies she’s been assembling for the last week or so.  Tomorrow our daughters and our granddaughter will be showing up at noon or so for the tradition grandma-cookie baking ritual.  Grandma cookies are Camera Girl’s mom’s recipe for what some people in the family call white cookies.  These are lethally addictive.  With a large mug of coffee (or milk for the kids) it’s almost impossible not to binge on every cookie that’s left in harm’s way.  It’s hard to believe that the ingredients are only things like flour, eggs, butter, sugar and vanilla extract.  There must be some cocaine or opium in them somewhere.

Well, anyway, tonight she baked alone.  She baked all the other cookies for the holiday.  She made oatmeal, chocolate chip, M&M and sugar cookies.  And then just to make sure I won’t survive the year she made a big pan of baklava.  Oh, man.  Even Zorba the Greek after dancing for a week straight wouldn’t be able to finish off the portion she made.  Between the butter, honey and walnuts I can see myself in the local emergency room receiving last rites as the intern on duty calls for the crash cart and the body bag.

Tomorrow I’ll be on a road trip to northern New England; to Vermont.  I’m riding shotgun just as company.  It should be fun.  Meanwhile the womenfolk will be bonding in the kitchen and indoctrinating Princess Sack of Potatoes in the mysteries of family tradition of the female variety.  All very sacred proceedings.  So, the holidays are progressing satisfactorily.

But it’s not as if all is normal.  After her latest shopping trip for the holiday supplies, Camera Girl was horrified at the increase in the prices of such staples as eggs, butter, flour and coffee.  I felt very sad for her so I tried to cheer her up by saying that after the holidays the prices would come back down based on supply and demand.  I think she could tell I was making it up but she forced a smile and we moved on.

Trump will have his hands full trying to fix the economy and deporting ten million illegals.  Just doing those things would be hard enough but he’ll have to do it in the face of not only a hostile Deep State but also the Congress.  The House has a razor thin Republican majority and the Senate is packed with RINOs who want to please their corporate paymasters and don’t give a damn about making America great.  Yes, he’ll have his hands full.

But despite all this resistance, I am surprisingly optimistic.  I was very pleasantly surprised by his victory.  And because of it, I no longer assume that the Left will have everything its own way.  Trump has seen a lot of the worst that the powers that be can do against him.  If he’s half as smart as I hope he is, he’s going to eliminate a very large number of his enemies from the ranks of many of the the agencies that he controls, basically the whole executive branch of government.  Unless he’s crazy he knows he has to eliminate large chunks of the management of the FBI and the Justice Department.  Once that’s done, I expect he’ll have an easier time dictating terms to the rest of the departments.  And in fact, after he has loyalists in charge of the FBI I wouldn’t be surprised if the various RINO senators suddenly become much more cooperative.  All of these people must have files that are kept for just such an eventuality.

Now maybe my optimism is foolish.  But the holiday is upon us and I think optimism is better for my digestion during this season of overeating.  January is the time for resolutions and facing facts.  So, unless a planet killing asteroid is discovered approaching Earth or I see the incoming ICBMs over Dunwich between now and Christmas I’m declaring a moratorium on gloom and doom.

I’m going to eat way too many cookies and much too much roast beast and spoil my grandkids and watch way too many old movies.  I think that’s a plan.

Tom’s World – 14DEC2024 – Capital vs Labor vs Deep State

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TomD

Stalin (I think) made the statement that capitalists would sell him the rope that he would use to hang them.

Before manufacturing can return en masse to the US, somebody(s) is going to have to go through the 1.75 x 10^9th onerous regulations and delete most. It’s too expensive to manufacture here and because of the lawyers and bureaucrats, too risky too.
How many landmines are there in the mass of employment laws? Family leave, wrongful termination lawsuits, handicap regs, discrimination lawsuits, DEI, Unions, dockworkers perfectly willing and happy to paralyze the nation or to destroy their employer.

There’s a radio station that I listen to down here that has ads for HR services providers. The ad starts with a (supposed) business owner moaning, “I’ve got an employee who never shows up when he is supposed to, What can I do” I almost jump into the radio yelling, “Fire the SOB, you idiot!” But apparently these days, things are so warped by the lawyers and legal environment that the obvious answer isn’t the correct answer any more. And, in that environment, US employment will be restricted.

Bring Back Our Jobs

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In the 1990’s America began off-shoring almost our entire industrial footprint.  I saw some of that migration first hand.  China hired American engineering companies with the technology and experience to build petrochemical synthesis plants.  And they built them in pieces, shipped them to remote sites in China and then assembled and even started them up for the Chinese.  On their own it would have taken the Chinese generations to learn all the particular technologies and avoid all the hazards in running plants that produce all the myriads of organic materials that the US chemical engineering companies like Dupont pioneered in the early twentieth century.

And we did it on purpose.

Now multiply that by the number of other products that we used to make in America and you have an inkling of the betrayal that Wall Street has wreaked on us.  And the result is the wreckage that we call the Rust Belt.  But it’s not just the Midwest.  Every area of the country has been hollowed out.  Even the most cutting-edge manufacturing, the most valuable computer chips are made in Taiwan.  And it’s even worse than that.  Even our food is now imported from Asia and South America.  That is how much American businesses hate us.  So, if I want to sum the whole thing up, the boardrooms of American business eliminated the American middle class to globalize their operations and minimize their labor costs.

And reversing this project is what I think is the highest priority of anyone who loves this country and the people who call themselves Americans.  It really doesn’t matter to me if the people who work to fix this call themselves Republicans or Democrats.  Populist might be the closest thing to a label for the project.  Obviously, anyone who is getting most of his income from Wall Street lobbyists and insider trading tips is not on this team.  It’s not Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi or the Bushes.  Maybe it’s Donald Trump.  He sounds like he understands some of what’s going on.  He talks about tariffs and that’s part of what needs to be looked at.  But where I see the tariffs helping is putting them on American companies who try to sell cars and other products made in Mexico and Cananda and elsewhere as if they were “Made in America.”

We’re missing about a hundred million good manufacturing jobs in this country.  That’s about what it would take to restore the middle class in this country.  Of course that will do a lot of damage to China, India, Southeast Asia and parts of Latin America.  Well, that’s too bad.  Charity begins at home.

On-shoring American manufacturing will take decades.  Of course it will.  It took forty years to off-shore it.  But every step the government takes to worsen the economics of off-shore manufacturing will work to improve the job prospects for our grandchildren.  And now is the time for legislation.  The Republicans have (slim) majorities in both houses of Congress and a sympathetic president.  All that is needed is for Trump to co-opt a few Democrat votes.  Who knows, he might even get someone like Bernie Sanders to sign on for some of the votes.

But the important thing is to prevent this country from turning into a feudal system with the super-rich lording it over a peasant class hanging on by the skin of their teeth.  There is still a chance to turn this around.  Come on Mr. Trump, to make America great again, you have to resurrect the middle class.  Bring back our jobs.