Posts Tagged → Wall Street
Trump’s America-First Economy Throws Beautiful Curveball to Wall Street
Trade wars were supposed to be a thing of the past, as America had settled into a long, slow decline and eventual death at the hands of our erstwhile trading “partners,” who had been sucking at the USA teat for fifty years. America underwrote the settlement of World War II for Europe and Japan, and suffered as a result. But we thought we were too big to fail, and so we persisted.
And for those of more modern thoughts and memories, recall that for eight years Obama had placed both of his hands on the foreign side of the trade scale in an attempt to accelerate this decline. That eight year stagnant situation, combined with explosive growth in government power and conversely diminished citizen power, while shipping our factories abroad with new rust belt towns popping up all over America was the “new normal.”
And why not end America’s supremacy like this? Under both major political parties America’s trade imbalances were so egregiously bad, so bad for American citizens, for so long, because everyone else was gaining. Officially buoyed up by post-WWII economic theory and political economy theory that placed great value on some vague, never-defined world-wide “stability,” all underwritten by Americans. In funding that stability through sacrifice of our national interest, the theory went, the world was a safer, better place. America was sharing its wealth, buying peace, by keeping everyone else busy making money. Well, let’s be honest here: America’s workers were shifting their wealth to China, and Mexico, and India, and Europe, and Canada, while Wall Street made money no matter what. Wall Street hedge funds betting on and therefore for the failure of American businesses, against American interests, for the misspending of our tax dollars, are the classic example of this bizarre arrangement.
And around this asymmetrical arrangement developed asymmetrical ways of analyzing, tracking, predicting, and valuing economic activity. Like the DOW and other Wall Street measures of economic health. They have been tracking signs of a stable American decline, a drip drip drip bloodletting, not true growth, but rather how much tax money can be wrung or coerced from The People and conveyed to big businesses, not measuring actual value created from investment in our people and their jobs, but rather value on paper or digital.
And then along comes President Trump and his America-first economy, which at its core is the valuation and promotion of you, me and every other American citizen.
By demanding that America simply have equal trade with everyone else, and that it cease bleeding for the world’s benefit, and that we get as much coming in as we have going out or some approximation of that natural policy, President Trump has up-ended 75 years of screwy policy and screwy measures of success. It is that simple, and yet it is such a beautiful curve ball thrown to Wall Street.
Just look at how the tariffs on China have rattled Wall Street’s skewed measures of success, and stability. By America suddenly succeeding in the simplest way, and you and I having more opportunity, more money, Wall Street actually says our economy is down. Well, no, Wall Street, we the people are doing better, even if you are not. And isn’t it interesting that Wall Street was doing fantastic when Americans were degraded and doing poorly…
There’s an old saying that you’ll never beat the Irish, and in turn, you know you can’t beat Yankee ingenuity or will power, either. Americans will never be defeated, unless we decide to defeat ourselves. We came close, oh yes, we almost committed national suicide. But President Trump has shown us a better way, a way of national life.
It is a new day in America, and new beginning, Wall Street be damned.
Top Fake-Out of 2011
Looking back, 2011 was a year full of fake-outs. Political, sporting, and cultural fake-outs.
All of these failures to deliver left disillusioned people in their wakes. Some, like the Jerry Sandusky\Penn State sex abuse scandal, left a lot of hurt and disillusioned people in its wake, not to mention the abused boys who welcomed the miserable company into their sad world.
The top political fake-out has to be the Occupy Wall Street “movement.”
OWS is not really a movement in the sense that lots and lots of citizens belong to it and it is representative of some larger but still-quiet change coursing its way through the body politic. Heck, there might be a thousand people per state who actually participated in OWS-themed activities across America. Maybe not even a thousand people per state. Busing in professional activists and workers from across the country to protest sites is well documented. So maybe it’s 500 people per state?
We are talking about at most twelve thousand people out of a nation of 350 million, and maybe only six thousand people.
But you’d never know it from the media reporting on it. OWS and its clones in California, Ohio, Harrisburg, PA, and elsewhere had maybe a handful of people at any site except the actual Wall Street site of Zuccotti Park and the ever-ready-to-protest San Francisco. But the media treated these few people as though they were the harbingers of great change. Their violence, filthy living conditions, rapes, drug use, vandalism, incoherent rants, circular discussions, and racism were routinely ignored in reports by mainstream media outlets (on the other hand, new news outlets are sprouting up right and left, like infowars.com, as POV videoed interviews of OWS kids are posted to YouTube and other sites).
But despite the actual sparse numbers of actual participants, the once-vaunted Columbia University is now actually teaching a course called…”Occupy Wall Street.”
That’s right. Both an undergraduate and graduate level course on OWS will be taught at what was at one time one of the nation’s premier centers of higher education. No one at Columbia is really sure what will be taught in these courses, but I am willing to bet that the filth, drugs, rapes, violence, vandalism, racism, incoherence, sedition, treason, and slovenly behavior at OWS sites will not be part of the syllabus. Columbia University, like all other “Ivy League” schools, has now just dropped another notch in the estimation of middle class families looking for a good return on their investment in Little Jane and Johnny’s education.
But OWS will also live on as a “movement” to be studied, emulated, promoted.
Never mind that two years ago a pro-Second Amendment rally on the steps of Pennsylvania’s state capital that attracted 1,500 supporters from across the nation received zero mention in the local newspaper, the Patriot News, while mini protests of two to five people waving placards against the Iraq War (where have they been the past three years, one wonders) were routinely covered as though they actually represented some sizeable part of the population.
OWS does not represent many people in America. Maybe five percent, or ten percent in a really bad economy like we have now. But their friends in the mainstream media make sure that their voices and position in the news are amplified far beyond their actual numbers and importance to American political discourse and electoral outcomes.
OWS should be studied, as the biggest fake-out of 2011. And maybe one of the biggest fake-outs in American history.