LEST WE FORGET: A WARNING TO REMEMBER

Unless something goes terribly askew, Tea Party Republicans and their pretenders will probably secure the majority in both the House and the Senate with the election to be held in November.  That will just about make Obama a lame-duck president his last two years in office, which would be a good thing, considering all the damage he's done in his first two.  But I am already beginning to see and hear the Bush-type NeoCons rubbing their hands in gleeful anticipation, and this time we'd better have learned our lesson and keep them at arms length, or we will see the same mistakes made all over again.

 

The most harmful act ever perpetrated on the American people in the last twenty years was not the hijacking of four airliners by nineteen terrorists who used them to topple the Twin Towers, ram the Pentagon and kill 3,000 American citizens on September 11, 2001.  That event wasn't even close.  No, the most harmful act ever perpetrated on the American people in the entire history of the United States took place in 1993-94, when President Bill Clinton defied his own Democratic Party and signed Republican-sponsored bills committing the United States to global free trade agreements.  That insidious act, in and of itself, did far more harm to our nation than any Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Stalin or Mao could have ever hoped for or envisioned.

 

In the meantime, nobody is talking about it -- at all!  It seems everyone is so sidelined with silly emotion over a proposed Mosque two New York blocks from Ground Zero that they have literally lost their collective minds, and that is inexcusable.

 

NeoCon Republicans under Bush did nothing for small businesses that once provided the bulk of employment in this nation.  Every act committed and every bill signed by President Bush was specifically honed to benefit large, multi-national corporations, firms that have absolutely no loyalty to America or its citizens, but they do have lots of money to spend on elections.  Those massive firms wanted nothing more than to make money and make a few people fabulously wealthy, and presidents Clinton and Bush were their perfect, amoral patsies to get it done.

 

As a result of those free trade agreements, the United States is no longer a strong and respected super-power, and this was done to us from within.

 

It all happened very slowly and incrementally.  Here and there, American manufacturing companies layed off their work force, closed factories and moved their manufacturing operations to emerging nations like Communist China, Communist Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Mexico and anywhere else low labor costs, low taxes and non-existent environmental regulations attracted them.

 

And why would they want to stay here?  With the signing of the free trade agreements, If they didn't close up shop and move, it was obvious their competition would, so the American jobs would have been lost either way.  If the manufacturers moved overseas to low-labor ports, they could continue to produce products at much lower operating costs while still using the same high technology to produce goods as excellent as were made in the USA, but the corporate profits would be substantially greater.  With few or no trade restrictions, those corporate manufacturers began exporting their goods to the United States to sell them for just a few dollars less than an American-based manufacturer could, and faced with the choice between American-made and foreign-made products of the same quality, American consumers invariably opted for the less expensive, but equal, foreign products.  As a result, the few hold-out manufacturers remaining in the U.S. eventually could not compete and went out of business too.  The net result was the loss of tens of millions of family-wage-paying American jobs, and unless those free trade agreements are reversed and we once again become the manufacturing giant we once were, those family-wage-paying jobs will never return. 

 

Ever so slowly, the effects settled in.  Like a slow-growing, malignant tumor, most Americans hardly felt a twinge of discomfort at first.  A few jobs lost here, and a few jobs lost there, a plant closing here and there, and in the meantime the Stock Market inexplicably soared.  Government regulations were relaxed to the point the guy washing dishes at Denny's could buy a $300,000.00 home with creative financing -- financing that would make the same sucker homeless in a few years, but hey, people were making money!  As the housing bubble neared its inevitable ebb, even the newly unemployed could still make money by refinancing the equity out of their homes, and if all else failed, they could always rely on their credit cards.  Hardly anyone questioned the historic resilience of the U.S. economy, as if it were impregnable.  "The jobs will come back", many said, "but we are embarking on a new and 'better' American economy, one that does not rely on manufacturing, but more on service".

 

The environmentalists were more than giddy.  No longer would American manufacturers pollute our ground, air and water.  They were overjoyed to see all those steel mills and automobile manufacturing plants close up, and they didn't mind at all the fact that Americans with thirty years in manufacturing would now have to completely re-orient their lives by replacing one family-wage-paying job with two or three lower-paying jobs and no benefits.  After all, nationalized health care would remedy the latter, and those displaced folks needed to go back to school to learn a nice, clean, "green" trade anyway.  The environmentalist freaks thought it was all a splendid idea -- so long as it didn't affect them.

 

Almost all Americans now live in cities and suburban neighborhoods dotted with signs advertising foreclosed homes.  Downtown businesses all over the U.S. are closing down, with Main Street store front windows covered by cheap plywood.  Hardly anyone can find a job that payed as well as the one they lost, so they either collect unemployment benefits or they accept the lower-paying jobs when those benefits run out.  The standard of living most Americans enjoyed until 2005 or so is eroding downward, and it will continue to erode downward until American wages and benefits reach parity with the rising standard of living of the emerging nations who now do all the manufacturing we once did.  What we are witnessing is the destruction of a once great and powerful nation from within, and no Muslim did this to us.

 

The powers that be want as many Americans as possible distracted by that proposed mosque and all those evil Muslims.  So long as our attention is on anything other than the actual cause of our misery, the real perpetrators stay out of our cross hairs.  That is why they are printing money they don't have on extended unemployment benefits because they know this nation's social order will begin to implode rapidly if they don't.  People who cannot feed their children will do some very shameful things they normally wouldn't do, and what our government fears most is that the general population will finally wake-up to what they did and turn on them in numbers they cannot control or defend against.

 

Just look at the incidence of murder-suicides of entire families being reported all over the nation right now.  People in extreme financial despair are killing themselves and those they loved, but it won't be long before enough of those people get together and decide that if they might die anyway, they might as well get together and die trying to kill those reponsible for what has happened to them.  That next logical progression is fomenting as I write this little rant, and the feds know it.

 

The people who did this to us are not Muslim mosque-builders.  The one person most responsible for this high-treason is a man who is still highly regarded by many Americans who don't realize exactly what he did to them and this nation, and his name is William Jefferson Clinton.  That man planted the malignant seed of free trade agreements in 1993-94 that has now grown into a painful and probably fatal cancer, but he did it with the encouragement and approval of corporation-elected Republican whores doing the bidding of their masters.

 

That is why I have been encouraging as many people as possible to elect small business Tea Party Republicans, and not those like Mit Romney, whose business background is a corporate one.  Large, multi-national corporations have no soul and they have no national loyalty.  The corporate god is money, and by written law, a corporation's sole duty is to provide the highest possible return to their investors no matter who gets hurt, so long as the corporation operates within the law.  That is why the multi-national corporations pushed for the free trade agreements.  Pre-free trade laws included protective tariffs and trade restrictions that made it unprofitable for a manufacturer to produce goods in low-labor nations and export them to America, so the multi-national corporations virtually pooled their election money to buy politicians who would sell free trade to America, and that is what led to the dire economic conditions we have in the United States today.

 

But again, nobody running for office or holding an elected office, is talking about it.  They don't even want you to think about it, which is why they've got Hannity, Limbaugh and all the rest directing your attention to a proposed mosque and the evil Muslims behind it.  I can't believe how many stupid people there are that fell for it.

 

No voter in his/her right mind should want to be represented by a corporate, bought & paid-for politician, but the fact is that most Republicans are corporate whores, and those Republicans with the biggest war chests at election time are almost entirely bought & paid-for, so when election time comes in November, try to remember this warning:  If you elect the same kind of people as you did before, you will get the same results.

 

Carl F. Worden

August 25, 2010