Tag: Make America Great Again

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.

My Favorite People Are Americans

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I have known people from around the world.  In my life I have met refugees from China, Russia, Vietnam, Lebanon, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine and Turkey.  And many of them were interesting, intelligent and friendly human beings.  But by leaps and bounds my favorite people are Americans.  Not because they are so much smarter or nicer but because I am an American.  We are members of the same club.  We wear the same club pin.  We know the secret handshake.  We pay dues to the same organization and we grew up together.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t Americans who stink.  Even ones who aren’t traitors, ones who truly belong to our side of the fence can be stupid or evil or both.  Every family has its black sheep.  But family is still family.  The only ones I disown are the ones who’ve disowned me.  The white guilt, white privilege, equity/diversity/inclusion, unconscious bias crowd.  Those I disown.  They are not Americans.  They are former Americans who have betrayed their country to a global conspiracy against America.

But real Americans are some of the nicest, kindest, most competent people on the face of the Earth.  Houston, Texas.  Sacramento, California.  Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Lawrence, Kansas.  Tomahawk, Wisconsin.  Toledo, Ohio.  Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.  Dalton, Georgia.  Springfield, Missouri.  I’ve been to all these places for work.  I was there to get some project completed, either designing process equipment with a manufacturer or on site at a customer’s plant troubleshooting a problem.  And in every one of these places, I met people who surprised me by their friendliness.

So what’s my point?  Just this.  If I could go to all of these random places in this enormous country and meet good people, people who would see past my strange northeastern accent and brusque manner, and even when in an adversarial position impress me with their decency and good nature, then I find it extremely hard to believe that this is an evil place where people deserve to be punished by their own government and deprived of their rights because they were born white.

In fact, I refuse to believe it.  These are my people.  They believe what I believe.  They love what I love.  Their people came here to flourish as free men.  They don’t have to leave.  They don’t have to disappear.  We will have re-organize.  We will need to work around the cancer that is afflicting us.  Hopefully someday we’ll be able to surgically remove it.  But until then we’ll need to redirect resources to organizations and efforts that help us.  And until some true organization begins to happen, we’ll have to do this resource management at the micro level.  We have to finance our families and our communities to support the people and activities that represent us.

And before you support anyone or anything test it to see if it supports the people and organizations that hate us.  See what stands behind it.  If a charity flies the rainbow flag or displays the BLM symbol, walk away.  Anyone who embraces any anti-white talking points, reject.  Any activity that disparages the American flag or substitutes some other flag or anthem, abandon.  Now that the enemies of America have become so open in their hatred it’s much easier to instruct your children and grandchildren in who their enemies are.  We need to raise awareness of who are our enemies and who are our friends.

We are a great and good people.  We deserve to flourish and we will.  All we have to do is get re-organized.

Enough is Enough

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If living through this nightmare does only one good thing, it’s this.  It will give President Trump a mandate to end globalism once and for all.  Once we’re finally released from our cells, we’re going to want him to take whatever steps he can to make sure this doesn’t happen again.  And that’s quite a laundry list of things.  First off, it’s time to close not only the borders but the airline routes too.  Apparently Chinese New Year is the occasion for sending millions of Chinese back and forth from there to here just chock full of whatever pathogens have shown up in the wild game markets of China.  That must stop.  If China refuses to adhere to modern food hygiene then they should be treated like a plague city and kept at arm’s length.  Instituting a quarantine for travelers from China and similar places at the border for say, two weeks would go a long way to preventing another horrific outbreak like the one we’re suffering under now.  And because there’s no way of telling at the Mexican border where anyone comes from, we’ve got to end all the illegal immigration.  Not just sorta/kinda, but for real.  Use the state of emergency to shut down the border and if a judge says no then declare martial law and do it anyway.  The people will approve it.  And while we’re at it, suspend legal immigration for the time being.  It doesn’t make sense to be bringing people into the country during a catastrophe.

The next thing is to get Congress to declare all sorts of industries critical to Homeland Security and use a carrot and a stick to bring them back on shore.  And make it a very heavy stick.  Having our pharmaceuticals manufactured in China turns out to be a bad idea.  And manufacturing everything else there hasn’t helped either.  The President should do himself and us a favor and repatriate pharmaceuticals, automobiles, electronics, chemicals, metals, building supplies and just about everything else.  As far as I can tell we’ll need the jobs badly when this is over and the tens of millions of unemployed people are going to want growth in the economy and plenty of it.  And one good way to jump start something like that is to rebuild all the infrastructure that has virtually rotted away over the last fifty years of neglect.  Infrastructure projects have often in the past been boondoggles but compared to tossing trillions away to keep people sitting in their homes I doubt you could do worse.

Some will be worried that shifting production here could cause a worldwide depression.  I find that unconvincing.  The East Asian economies have their own domestic demand that is quite mature at this point and not having ten percent growth won’t kill them.  As for the rest of the developing world, if it’s not corona virus from China, it’s dengue fever from Guatemala or Ebola from the Congo.  We don’t need any more lessons in epidemiology.  We can see that plagues don’t mix well with a modern western democracy.  It’s time to roll up the welcome mat and tell everyone out there to stay home and fix their own damn problems.  And if it’s not too much to ask how about stop eating bats for a start.  Try chicken, it tastes the same.

 

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Cutting Through Idealism and Realism to Enact Change

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During my Thanksgiving holiday I got into a discussion with one of my guests about the nature of American government.  The discussion arose out of a comment I made about a book I was reading.  I mentioned that the author believed that several modern conservative scholars were unbeknownst to themselves espousing moral relativism when opining about the Founding Fathers’ intent when they wrote the Declaration of Independence.  The discussion could have gotten into a relatively complicated discussion of the evidence of the Founders’ intent but was short circuited by a statement by my guest that all of these political theories were completely irrelevant because in the real world, government had nothing to do with principles or even the law but was rather a jungle of machine politicians handing out patronage to minions and enforcing the will of the powers that be.  I tried to make the point that even if human nature inevitably injects corruption into the real world having an ideal version of government as a map of what government is supposed to be is a means by which we can continuously correct the deviations that build up in our government.  Eventually the discussion broke down due to irreconcilable differences in point of view.  But it got me thinking about what is the correct way to handle practical problems in today’s political system.

After thinking about the obstacles to change it occurred to me that both honest and dishonest government presented both obstacles and opportunities for influencing government policy.  For instance, in Democrat run states, the politicians are often cynical crooks who have nevertheless learned to parrot the multicultural narrative to control the vote.  But these patchwork coalitions they represent are far from a united front.  Most of the constituencies have little in common and some are actually hostile toward each other.  This reality opens up opportunities to divide and conquer the “narrative” by appealing to the self-interests of some component of the gorgeous mosaic.  This worked clearly when a SuperPAC was able to get a Proposition to block Gay Marriage on the California ballot and minority voters provided the margin needed to pass it.

In places where Republicans are at least nominally in charge, holding these leaders’ feet to the fire is the way to go.  Never let them use fairness or kindness to allow some kind of insanity to take hold.  Where the Right has the advantage, it should maintain a stranglehold by any means necessary.  The ranks of elected officials should be scrupulously monitored for heresy and violators should be branded with an L for Leftist and cast out into the outer darkness never to return.  And it’s not only the right of the people in this area to let their leaders know what is going wrong.  It’s their duty and their best chance of keeping their environment sane.

But as far as the nuts and bolts of political life, I’ll admit that patronage and log-rolling are probably not things that can be eliminated.  Politics is a lucrative environment to swim in and honesty is even scarcer in political circles than it is in the business world.  That reality is never going to be permanently altered.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t push the politicians and judges to write their laws and decisions to serve our needs.  A crooked politician can push through a good law if he thinks his job depends on it.

And so, this brings me back to my original point.  Just because government is full of crooks it doesn’t mean we have to let them neglect the functions of government that can restrain Leftist insanity.  They can continue stealing their part from the Treasury if they will at least protect us from the people who want to steal our children’s lives and souls.

But in order to make that happen we have to be both realistic about what the people in government are really like and be idealistic in what we want our communities to be like.  Just because our mayor happens to be a degenerate doesn’t mean we will let him legalize depravity in our midst.  And equally just because a man is honest doesn’t mean he is safe as a mayor or president.  If he’s too idealistic and fears being called mean or a bigot then he can be convinced to do any horrible thing for the sake of being “fair.”  And the same goes for ourselves.  We have to be tough-minded enough to withstand the hysteria and venom that the Leftists and their allies in the Media will throw at us whenever they want to victimize us with some new social justice abomination.  But we can’t allow ourselves to become so cynical about government corruption that we give up on making government do its job.

So, is this realistic idealism or idealistic realism?  Either way works for me, as long as they can keep the perverts away from the kids.