FRITZ SHOUTS IT FROM THE MOUNTAIN

If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress.
—Barack Obama

"Remember he is the same President that stated doctors would take out perfectly good tonsils because it would mean more money for them."
—Citizen Rain

ON OR ABOUT DECEMBER 18, 2009, former South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings released this scathing essay on why all the jobs have evaporated in America:

Who is against jobs in the United States? The big banks, Wall Street, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Business Roundtable, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Retail Federation, Corporate America, the President of the United States, Congress of the United States. Everyone is crying for jobs, but no one seems to understand why there aren't any. And the reason for those opposing jobs is money.

Beginning in 1973, big banks made most of their profit outside of the United States. Industries off-shoring, investing, banks financing the investments, transfer fees, fees and interest on the loans made for bigger profits. Long since, the big banks under the leadership of David Rockefeller have led the way to off-shore and make a bigger profit. Goldman Sachs, AIG, Citicorp and Wall Street, conspiring for a bailout and now using it for bonuses, make more money from the off-shored operations.

The Council on Foreign Relations ought to be renamed the Council on Making Money. A recent PEW poll reported fully 85% of Americans said that protecting United States jobs should be a top foreign policy priority. But only 21% of the Council on Foreign Relations agrees. Financial interests organized the Business Roundtable to continue off-shore investment and profit. The local Chamber is for Main Street America, but Tom Donahue and the United States Chamber have sold out to the financial interests and oppose jobs and producing in the United States. Thirty years ago, hundreds of thousands of Arrow shirts produced in China were a best seller in the United States. But at Christmastime, the Chinese supply ran short and the retail stores had to order the same shirt from New Jersey. They made 20% less profit on the New Jersey shirt. Retailers are all for profit from imports and against domestic production and jobs in America.

Corporate America would fight any initiative by the President, the Congress, or the government to create jobs in the United States. That is, production that faces competition offshore. In globalization, U. S. production can't make a profit, can't survive. Its competition will off-shore the same article for a lesser price, putting you out of business. Moreover, Corporate America doesn't have to bother with labor in China. The China government controls labor and you don't have to worry about a work stoppage or minimum wage. All they have is a maximum wage.

And Corporate America doesn't have to worry with clean air and clean water or the environment in China. Nor does it have to worry with OSHA and all of its safety rules. Many times the factory building is furnished and you don't have to worry with capital costs. If you make a profit, you can just reinvest it in an additional operation and not have to pay any U. S. income tax. If the operation fails, walk away with no legacy costs. Corporate America bitterly opposes its government protecting and strengthening the U. S. economy because producing again in America will put the executives back to work. They can send a Jaycee to China to watch the quality control daily and sit on the 32nd floor on Sixth Avenue with the internet, keeping check, and, leaving early for a massage and drinks. With production in China they don't have to work.

As Commander-in-Chief, the President dithered for months over the number of troops. But he can't equip the troops except for the favor of a foreign country. The War Production Act of 1950 requires the President to make sure that we can produce in- country those articles necessary for our national defense. Enforcing this law would limit the campaign contributions. Under Section 201 of the trade laws, the President is supposed to take action, like impose tariffs or quotas, when a certain production is endangered. Not only endangered, our automobile production has been bankrupted. But all the President does is give Detroit bailout welfare. The President doesn't want to limit the campaign contributions.

The same with Congress. Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota long ago tried to allocate the tax incentive for foreign jobs and production to domestic jobs and production. The Business Roundtable and the U. S. Chamber fought it like a tiger and killed it.

As the President said in his West Point talk, there is fierce competition in international trade and globalization. All countries move to protect and build their economies while the United States goes out of business. The one advantage that the U.S. has is its richest market in the world. It is fast becoming the poorest market and the U.S. is losing any clout to maintain a strong economy.

The economy is in the hands of Summers, Bernanke and Geithner. Campaign contributions are in the hands of David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel. The poor President is smart, diligent and working his head off campaigning. But he is inexperienced and not governing, and the Congress is in a Mexican standoff over an archaic filibuster rule that reveres democracy by the minority.

Of course, the media, which knows this and keeps it top secret, is owned by big business.

If I don't meet you in the breadline, my children will.

Merry Christmas!

And the always interesting James Nollet has this to add...

There seems to be an optimal size for self-government. Self-governing entities that are too large don't work well. The only way the USSR and Yugoslavia held together was by FIAT from a strong, centralized, authoritarian regime.

I hold that America has lost its capacity for responsible self-government. Electing Obama Osama is merely the latest in a long series of proofs of this contention.

Democracy in America was always an EXPERIMENT.

The experiment has run its course. The only thing that can now save the United States is an American Napoleon.

LET'S ROLL OUT A MISSILE NWO-STYLE

Washington Times opinion writer Wesley Pruden takes on the Obama cult in an article, titled," Reality bites Obama's 'West Wing.'" A good article no doubt about matinee idols and their sycophants, and in particular, one matinee idol and his merry band of worshippers who made up the majority electorate last November. But it's Pruden's third paragraph which struck me.

"Nasty surprises abound across the real world. Iran completes a third round of testing of Shahab-3 and Sajjil medium-range missiles capable of hitting not only Israel, Eastern Europe and several Middle Eastern countries but, if all that were not sobering enough, several U.S military bases as well. Venezuela boasts that it's working with Russia and Iran in finding sources of uranium, the key ingredient of nuclear weapons technology. China says it will display new "upgraded missiles" in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of Red China. India announces that it can now make nuclear weapons up to a strength of 200 kilotons, four times over the line that the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty pledges signing nations not to cross."

Now what I read is this. We are in a shrinking global existence, monetarily and militarily, at least according to or even thanks to the several recent as well as the current occupiers at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. While we continue under this present administration to exhibit cultural weakness and across the board apologetics, what we truly should be doing is marginalizing the weak Left, and joining in with our new peers, and blast off a few rockets and unveil a few more death machines in big parades and national celebrations. Then perhaps, once again, we Americans might again feel like we fit into the world as we know it, and how do we know it?

We watch our neighbors. We mimic our enemies who seem to have no shame in calling for our deaths. They know who they are, even if our leadership looks the other way or forgives them seven times seventy and more in what seems to be an impossible struggle to win hearts and minds. We show them our strength as they show us their strength. As the dollar continues to fail, and the bankers conspire, and we give away billions of these dollars to our enemies in a vain attempt to buy friendship even as these foreign governments funnel our US tax monies right back into the coffers of those who seek to kill us, perhaps we should stop this wasted appeasement long enough to ask what comes next when all this bribery and corruption fails to bear fruit. Look at Pakistan. Look at Egypt. Look at Turkey. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan. Look at the immigrants from those countries into the United States and Europe.

We cannot win there. We can only return these haters to their countries of origin, or isolate them in their own countries before they get here, bound by the ummah struggling for a caliphate. That one way. It worked with Isabella in 1492. Tried for treason under penalty of death, or hard expulsion can work again.

Or we can get right with ourselves and expose those of the order of Mohammed to the very best firepower we've got. I prefer the former, but if that fails to stop this drip drip dripping flood of madness we call the New World Order, I suppose the latter will do.

When in Rome...

Unless each American prefers to live in slavery and fear, we cannot long deny nor surely long escape this crisis. Therefore, as responsible and free citizens standing upon this soil beneath this flag with concerted and quiet enjoyment of the United States Constitution and its favor, we must prepare ourselves. I say, let the games begin!

PEELING AWAY THE WESTERN VENEER

Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, is author of The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Power to the East. He recently spoke with NPQ editor Nathan Gardels.

NPQ: One aspect of post-globalization, of the world growing more diverse after the playing field has been flattened, is non-Western modernization. Do you see this in Asia?

Kishore Mahbubani: Yes. I try to distinguish between modernization and Westernization.

They are not the same thing at all. The paradox that the West hasn't grasped yet is that you have modernization and de-Westernization taking place at the same time. That is something that doesn't fit the Western mindset. For them, modernization can only be Westernization.

Modernization means that you want to have a comfortable, middle-class existence with all the amenities and attributes that go along with it—clean water, indoor plumbing, electricity, telecommunications, infrastructure, personal safety, rule of law, stable politics and a good education system.

As these societies modernize and become more confident, they are rejecting the Western frame of mind and cultural perspectives they have accepted, or been forced to accept, for the past 200 years.

You have to go inside the Asian mind to understand this new thinking. In prospering Asia today, there is a sense of pride and liberation. There is a sense that "I've had this Western veneer covering my mind, now I can peel it off. Now I can be myself. I may speak English fluently, but I have a different soul."

Just as the Italian Renaissance reconnected Europeans back to the greatness of Greek and Roman times, so too, in Asia today, a kind of renaissance is taking place as we rediscover our cultural roots.

The Nalanda project is a good example of what I'm talking about. From the 5th through the 12th century, Nalanda was the biggest university in the world, where scholars from China, India, Japan and Korea connected Asia until the Turkish invaders destroyed it without a trace. It was a center of learning and innovation. Now, after the Western interlude, we are rediscovering these old connections of the past and rebuilding a new civilization on its foundations.

This shift in the Eastern mind seems to have been largely missed by the West. Indeed it has taken on real momentum in the years since 9/11 when the West has been preoccupied with terrorism and Islamic radicalism.

NPQ: How are these values different from the West's? Are you talking about Confucian, socially conservative values versus the more libertarian West? Is it anti-West?

Mahbubani: For the moment, parents in Asia still want to send their kids to American universities, at least until more Asian universities, improving ever more in quality, reach world standards. We are not about to give up the modern world of science, technology and economics. What we are rediscovering are new perspectives on the cultural and moral side.

Yet, even with respect to Confucian values, we don't want to go back to the old days. But we do want to modernize those values in light of our own experience, not just adapt some liberal outlook on freedoms of the individual because that is what the West had done.

I grew up in a household not of Confucian but of Hindu values. As a child, I was supposed to touch my father's feet as a demonstration of respect. I always hated that. I rebelled against it. Today, of course, the notion of respecting elders remains, but not the extreme oppressive form of it from the old era. It is leavened more by the concept of equality, the Western gift to the world. So, we have a mix.

I have spent my whole adult life listening to Western music. But now it is the old Hindi songs of my childhood that get me going. This shows in my thoughts somewhere, I am returning to my roots. What do the rich Chinese buy? Chinese antiques so they can connect to their past.

NPQ: What is the difference here between what you are describing and the globalized hybrid culture everyone shares today with the crosspollination that comes from a more open global society?

Mahbubani: There is a kind of new cosmopolitan global personality emerging, it's true. That is one phenomenon we see. I'm intrigued to see how popular culture mixes with traditions the world over. I went to a Chinese function in Singapore recently in which Punjabi Bhangra music was being played. That is part of the cosmopolitanism that is coming.

But one particularity of what is happening in Asia is a rediscovery of the once-lost past, in China, in India. One good example is what is happening in TV shows. As a child growing up, I only saw American TV shows like I Love Lucy, My Three Sons and so on. Today, increasingly the Chinese TV is about some legendary hero from the Qing dynasty.

Now this is the way the future SHOULD evolve. Bravo! A wonderful interview. Read it all.

STOKING FIRES OF CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT

By Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch

This endorsement of Giuliani is premature. He has not shown, has shown signs in fact of the opposite, of being sufficiently clear-minded about Islam, and sufficiently unsentimental (none of that business of Bush's "ordinary moms and dads" or his latest business about not "abandoning" the Iraqis to their islamically generated fate) to view "victory" in Iraq to be achievable not through remaining and tamping down internal sectarian and ethnic fissures, but in welcoming them, just the way the Muslims in Europe have welcomed, and cleverly exploited, the two mental pathologies of antisemitism and anti-Americanism to drive a wedge, in policies related to Muslims and the Islamic countries, between America and Western Europe).

Until Giuliani gives signs that he is no longer a Bush loyalist, or listening to them, he will not be satisfactory. We can't tolerate more years in Iraq; the Amerian army can't, taxpayers cannot. The Americans must get out of Iraq not because Islam is not a world-wide threat, but because it most definitely is.

Unless and until Giuliani, Thompson, someone on that side, begins to get this, and clearly distiniguishes himself, unsticks himself from Bush, adducing the right reasons for so doing, then Bush, who is for the Republicans a Tarbaby as Iraq is a Tarbaby for the whole country, will bring down that Republican candidate, whoever he is.

And meanwhile, while everyone focusses on Iraq, trivial Iraq, and because of Iraq continues to be inveigled into thinking that the main weapon of Jihad at present is "terrorism" and thereby overlooks Da'wa and demographic conquest and the Money Weapon that furthers both, other things are also happening but being overlooked.

Not only the matter of Islam. There is the economic warfare being conducted by China. Everywhere you go now in sub-Saharan Africa you will find colonies of Chinese, busily engaged in locking in the vast natural resources, for the Chinese are not inhibited in any way in their attempt to ruthlessly dominate in the new "Race for Africa" which, unlike the late-19th century vresion, now has only one entrant—China. And go to remote places (Belize, say) or go to un-remote places (Italy, say) and you will find economic colonies of Chinese who have managed to beat the locals, and forced them go give up. The silk manufacturers of ties and other clothing in Como now have yielded to Chinese suppliers; the small manufacturers of pots and pans in Italy have done likewise. And it is the same everywhere that the God of Globalization has been worshipped, unthinkingly, and the lowest-price competitor wins, as Ricardo's comparative advantage takes the place of any considerations of patriotism, or a sense that local manufactures, for not only economic but for social and political reasons, may well be worth protecting, even if they may cost more.

And what else is not being attended to as we tie ourselves in idiotic knots over Iraq, aside from the real menace, and real instruments, of Jihad? And aside from China's economic march through the globe? Well, there is anthropogenic climate change, and the problem is not so much the end-state (with Boston having a climate like Savannah) but all the things that will happen because of the astounding unprecedented speed of the change, the rate of the change. The flooding of all of Lower Manhattan, Shanghai, all of Bangladesh, and of a great many islands are part of it, but only a part.

What is causing calendrical confusion in bird migrations? What has caused the CCD—colony collapse disorder—with bees? What is causing strange mutations in the amphibia of Costa Rica? What may be causing the disappearance, within a century or two, of 90% of the world's species? Who is minding the global-warming store, while the richest, most powerful country on earth, with the largest scientific establishment, seems preoccupied with keeping Iraq, and its assorted Muslims, in a unified state?

This misguided war, which it is now clear was based on ignorance of Islam, has been colossaly exensive. It is war that was, and is being commanded, by those who demonstrate repeatedly an ignorance of the full menace of Islam and the varied instruments of Jihad, and who never considered, never thought of considering, the ways in which, for our purposes, we might welcome rather than deplore, exploit rather than attempt to remedy, the pre-existing fissures within the Camp of Islam, not by doing something but by leaving the place alone, once the American forces had scoured the country and assured themselves that the regime had not had, or was not close to developing, nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction.

This war, Tarbaby Iraq, has now cost in past, present and committed future costs, $880 billion. That is more than the total cost of all the wars, save World War II, ever fought by the United States. If the Administration were to achieve its stated goals in Iraq—a unified Iraq, with a "democratic" government and a populace in which various local lions lie down with various other local lions—then nothing whatever will have been done to weaken the Camp of Islam, or to diminish the menace of the Money Weapon, of Da'wa, and of demographic conquest. Those ignorant of Islam think or claim to think that the example of "democratic" Iraq will do something.

What? What will it do? Will Sunni regimes take pleasure in an Iraq, and in Baghdaad, madinat al-islam, the fabled capital for four hundred years of the Abbasid Caliphate and hence the most important city, after Mecca and Medina, in the history of Arab Islam, and dear to the history-haunted and myth-making Arabs, especially those Sunni Arabs who rule in every state except Iraq (even where, as in Bahrain, the Shi'a may outnumber the Sunnis, or as in Yemen, where they come close)? Will they be impressed by the transfer of power from Sunnis to Shi'a in the Land of the Two Rivers? What madman could think so. Answer: the madmen, or dopes, who have conceived of this policy and who cling to it, and all those who, not having thought things through but determined to show those "cut-and-runners" especially if they happen to be Democrats, stick loyally with Bush on the assumption that any criticism of the war must come from appeasers. As visitors to Mihad Watch know perfectly, the must unanswerable, withering, and therefore dangerous (to Bush loyalists, to those who support Tarbaby Iraq) criticism can be found at this website.

But it is not only thaat $880 billion that has been largely squandered, nor the problem of norale in the services, where many of the best young officers leave the service, and few of those whom one would like to have join, will now think of joining (well aware, as they are, of how peremptorily and unfairly the Pentagon has misused and abused their predecessors, assuming they could simply push them around, interrupt without end their regular careers and lives, all because the Pentagon itself miscalculated completely the size of the regular army, and the specialties that would be needed, but that have been permanently farmed out, it appears, to those citizen-soldiers who, one suspects, will not be re-enlisting in large numbers).

No, it is also the Opportunity Costs. What hasn't been handled. The growing Muslim presence and threat in Western Europe. The economic warfare of China. Anthropogenic climate change that may be unstoppable—it may be too late, and time now only to plan to mitigate, to build those seawalls in, say, Lower Manhattan to protect it.

Meanwhile, Tarbaby Iraq holds us fast.