Friday, September 16, 2016

GLOBALISM: IT SERVES THE SUPER RICH AND KEEPS MILLIONS SUPER POOR

"If you want peace, prepare for war."  Nearly seventeen hundred years ago, the historian Vegetius gave that advice to the Roman emperor.  Good advice, as true today as it was then. Time was when America's overwhelming milit...


September 16, 2016

Globalism and the Death of Defense

By Chet Richards
"If you want peace, prepare for war."  Nearly seventeen hundred years ago, the historian Vegetius gave that advice to the Roman emperor.  Good advice, as true today as it was then.
Time was when America's overwhelming military and industrial strength kept the peace.  But now deliberate American weakness is embroiling us in a multitude of rarely reported hot skirmishes around the globe.  Good soldiers are dying, but you almost never hear about them.  This, while hard earned combat victories in Iraq and Afghanistan (and earlier in Viet Nam) have evaporated through premature withdrawal. 
Current intellectual fashion has it that, rather than military strength, the international network of trade among the Great Powers will forever keep the peace.  History says otherwise.  In June 1914, Germany and Britain were each other's principal trading partners.  In September they were slaughtering each other.  Over the course of history, instant change from peaceful trading to total war has happened a multitude of times.
Globalism – an ideology that has two major strains.  On the libertarian track are those who naively believe that free trade will always bring prosperity and peace.  On the totalitarian track are those who equally naively believe that nations are obsolete and that the future belongs to those who have escaped into the coercive "one world" to come.  Epitomizing the one-world believers are the fascist bureaucrats of the European Union and their American Chamber of Commerce counterparts.
The libertarians, on the other hand, are disciples of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the theory of comparative advantage.  I suppose I have more sympathy with the libertarian faction.  But Smith and Ricardo worked in a mercantile world where nations controlled all aspects of foreign trade through government-chartered trading monopolies (sound familiar?).  They also lived in the very beginnings of the industrial age, which was to give Britain a stupendous competitive advantage in international trade and the accumulation of riches.
We no longer live in the old industrial age, and comparative advantage now belongs to technology.  Creative America is the master of new technology.  Unfortunately, we cheerfully give that advantage away to our international competitors.
I became acquainted with globalism one evening decades ago in the post-Reagan era.  In Southern California, the premier yacht club is the Balboa Bay Club.  A friend had arranged a dinner there for me to meet with a senior executive at the old Hughes Aircraft Company.  After the meal, I was just getting started with a pitch on my new technology when a friend of the executive wandered by.  My presentation was aborted.  It was a disappointment, to be sure, but in its place I got a first-class education in globalism. 
The new arrival was the president of a major electrical and electronics supplier to the defense and commercial industries.  The conversation drifted into a discussion of the company's expansion plans.  Demand was much greater than the company could currently meet.  Where to put the new factory?  Well, for sure, it was not going to be in America.  Taxes were too high and regulations were too restrictive in our homeland, was the excuse.  The excuse was probably valid, but still, America needed the increased productive capacity.  It was important for national defense.  The issue of where to put the factory came down to whether southern France or northern Spain would have the most attractive incentive package.  In that now distant era, the proto-globalists had already sufficiently infiltrated our society, and our government, so as to put America at a competitive disadvantage.
A different case history illustrates more than just veniality – it demonstrates true stupidity.  A number of years ago, the military started a program to deploy a new constellation of satellites.  These satellites were critical to national defense.  This large program depended on certain critical technologies.  One of these critical technologies was the ability to make multilayer diffraction filters with special characteristics.  While there were several companies that made multilayer filters, there was only one that could meet the required specifications. 
Now, while the theory of multilayer filters is well understood by any optical physicist, meeting exacting specifications is a "black art."  Only technical wizards who know the "secret sauce" can produce them.  This meant that, at the time, there was exactly one optical company that had the required sauce to produce the filters needed for that constellation of satellites.  Accordingly, the Pentagon drew up a sole source contract to that company.  The company declined to accept the contract.  In fact, it could not legally accept the contract. 
It seems that the optical company was very busy supplying filters to industry – and making lots of money in the process.  The military part of their business was not small potatoes, but a major distraction.  A rational, but unpatriotic, business decision was made to sell off the defense portion of the business.  A European company snapped it up – together with all rights to the designs, design process, and manufacturing process.
Big problem.  The specific requirements for the needed filters were highly classified.  The European company was not cleared to even know about the project.  OK, said the Pentagon; there are lots of multilayer filter vendors who have the necessary clearances.  We will simply open the bidding.  Unfortunately, there were no shows.  No one else could meet the exacting specifications for the filters.
Panic.  The Pentagon had to let out R&D contracts so that various companies could fumble their way into discovering the secret sauce.  Eventually they did, sothat problem was solved.  But in the meantime, years went by.  The satellite development was put on hold.  Armies of skilled workers sat around twiddling their thumbs while billions of dollars were expended just keeping that trained cadre from disappearing onto other projects.  Shame on the Pentagon, shame on the State Department, and shame on the Commerce Department for permitting that critical defense technology to be sold overseas.  Pure stupidity.  And billions-of-dollars costly, too.
The lesson here is that national defense depends on a great deal more than having a large, and competent, army.  The real muscle in our defense is industrial and technological and has been almost from our beginnings.  On Sunday, December 7, 1941, our Army and Air Corps were fourth-rate.  Our Navy was second-rate.  And our defense industry was just beginning to gear up for war.  Our defense industry, at the time, was nothing like as big as those of Britain, Germany, Russia, and Japan.  Three and a half years later, our Army, Navy, and now Air Force bestrode the world.  The real secret of our immense military power was the adaptability of our industry.
(By the way, anyone who says we can't build a wall is an idiot.  The proposed wall is trivial compared to what we can accomplish if we really want to.  Witness the Second World War.)
The real military muscle is industrial.  But industrial might is much more than plants and equipment.  "Know-how" and "can-do" are the heart and soul of industry.  But these old virtues are the consequence of "hands-on."  One does not learn these things from textbooks.  One learns them from on-the-job experience.  And that experience is confined to very few Americans when we set up factories in foreign lands.  Cheap overseas labor may be attractive to the penny-pushers who run most of our large businesses, but it promises to be ruinous to our nation in an emergency.
Consider the following scenario: the dictator of North Korea one day has indigestion.  He now has enough nuclear-tipped missiles to do real mischief.  Rather than simply executing a couple more generals, he decides it is time to teach the Japanese and South Koreans a lesson.  Up his missiles go, and down they come – into nuclear war.  Our treaty allies being at war, the U.S. is also now at war.  The problem is that China, North Korea's only ally, is also at war – with us.  We get many of our military critical supplies from China and its trading partners.  But no longer will that be the case.  Most international trade is shut down for the duration – too dangerous for our trading partners with China staring at them.
What to do?  High technology factories take years to build.  Manufacturing specialists take years, and even decades, to train.  We are not, in this scenario, happy campers!
Obviously, there is something wrong with theories about globalism.  Globalism is dangerous to national security.  Of course, if you believe that nations are obsolescent, then so what?  However, I am not in that camp.  So my question is, how do we preserve our security and still flourish economically in a global environment?
This is the realm of policy.  What policies provide simultaneous security and economic benefits?  My acquaintance at the Balboa Bay Club complained about taxes and regulations.  Some may call me an extremist, but that is where I would take a machete.  If, today, the U.S. has the world's highest business taxes, chop them down to the world's lowest.  More than that, if you really want to attract manufacturing back into this country, how about zero taxes on all revenues from manufacturing?  After all, businesses don't really pay business taxes; consumers do. 
Regulations have proliferated in recent decades primarily because hostile globalist greens have taken over many regulatory agencies.  Time to prune back the regulatory jungle.  More than that, I advocate a constitutional amendment that puts the responsibility for passing regulations back in Congress.  Agencies may propose, but Congress must pass – preferably with two thirds of both Houses affirming.
OK, so call me an extremist.  But I am with Vegetius.  "If you want peace, prepare for war."


THE DEMOCRAT PARTY DIGS AMERICA’S GRAVE!
*
DID THE DEMOCRAT PARTY FINISH OFF AMERICA?

*



“Throughout this period, the trade unions transitioned from their alliance with the Democratic Party on the basis of ferocious anti-communism into outright instruments of the corporations and the state. They have and continue to collaborate in the “orderly shutdown” of factories and mines, after pushing through wage and benefit cuts on the bogus pretext of “saving jobs.”

AMERICA’S FINAL DAYS: The Global Looting of Bill & Hillary Clinton – unconvicted.
When asked to compare Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump, D'Souza said no contest.  "She is basically Obama plus gangsterism.  The Clintons are like Bonnie and Clyde.  Their goal is to steal America. 
In Hillary's America, D'Souza documents how Democrats transitioned from pro-slavery to pro-enslavement; the longstanding Democratic political war against women; how Hillary Clinton's political mentor was, literally, a cold-blooded gangster, Saul Alinsky; how the Clintons and other Democrats see foreign policy not in terms of national interest, but in terms of personal profit; and how Democratic-controlled cities have turned into hotbeds of crime and corruption.  American Thinker interviewed him about his latest projects

HILLARY CLINTON: Closet Republican and Openly a LA RAZA SUPREMACIST agent for Mexico!
"The same period has seen a massive growth of social inequality, with income and wealth concentrated at the very top of American society to an extent not seen since the 1920s."

THE DEMOCRAT PARTY DIGS AMERICA’S GRAVE!
*
DID THE DEMOCRAT PARTY FINISH OFF AMERICA?

*


“Throughout this period, the trade unions transitioned from their alliance with the Democratic Party on the basis of ferocious anti-communism into outright instruments of the corporations and the state. They have and continue to collaborate in the “orderly shutdown” of factories and mines, after pushing through wage and benefit cuts on the bogus pretext of “saving jobs.”

"On Saturday, WikiLeaks published the 

transcripts of three lavishly paid speeches 

given by Clinton at gatherings held by 

Goldman Sachs, dating from June 4, October 

24 and October 29, 2013. All three feature a 

mix of groveling before the financial 

malefactors who hired her to speak and 

gloating over her own wealth."


OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS TO SERVE THE SUPER RICH: 
The slow and painful death of America that dominates American society."

http://hillaryclinton-whitecollarcriminal.blogspot.com/2016/08/hillary-clintons-america-obama-poverty.html

In secret Goldman Sachs speeches, Clinton explains why the rich should rule
In secret Goldman Sachs speeches, Clinton explains why the rich should rule
By Tom Carter 
17 October 2016
In one question-and-answer session on October 24, 2013 at Goldman Sachs, with CEO Lloyd Blankfein in attendance, an audience member asked the current Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton the following question: “And Mike Bloomberg had 30 billion other reasons than to take office. Do we need a wholesale change in Washington that has more to do with people that don’t need the job than have the job?”
Clinton’s answer was revealing. “That’s a really interesting question,” she said. “You know, I would like to see more successful business people run for office. I really would like to see that because I do think, you know, you don’t have to have 30 billion, but you have a certain level of freedom. And there’s that memorable phrase from a former member of the Senate: You can be maybe rented, but never bought. And I think it’s important to have people with those experiences.”
Clinton’s response is an open defense of the aristocratic principle: the rich should rule. By virtue of being very wealthy, the rich have the leisure time to pursue a political career. Moreover, they supposedly have immunity from being bribed, since they are already so wealthy. Finally, they have the “experience in business” necessary to preside over a social system that benefits the social layer which appropriates all the profits from business and finance. These are sentiments that any 18th or 19th century aristocrat would recognize and embrace.
Clinton merely echoes, in a more crude form, the patrician arrogance of Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903), whose views were summed up by historian Barbara Tuchman:
He did not believe in political equality. There was the multitude, he said, and there were the “natural” leaders. “Always wealth, in some countries birth, and in all countries intellectual power and culture mark out the man to whom, in a healthy state of feeling, a community looks to undertake its government.” These men had the leisure for it and the fortune, “so that the struggles for ambition are not defiled by the taint of sordid greed… They are the aristocracy of a country in the original and best sense of the word… The important point is that the rulers of a country should be taken from among them,” and as a class they should retain that “political preponderance to which they have every right that superior fitness can confer.”
Clinton’s argument that her own wealth entitles her to govern America is an argument also made repeatedly by Donald Trump, who touts his own billions as a reason he will remain immune to “special interests.”
The “former member of the Senate” to whom Clinton was apparently referring was John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat who held office from 1987 to 2005. Considered one of the most conservative Democrats ever to take office, Clinton’s role model went on to pursue a lucrative lobbying career at the firm Squire Patton Boggs. His name is synonymous with Washington’s corrupt “revolving door.”
"On Saturday, WikiLeaks published the 

transcripts of three lavishly paid speeches 

given by Clinton at gatherings held by 

Goldman Sachs, dating from June 4, October 

24 and October 29, 2013. All three feature a 

mix of groveling before the financial 

malefactors who hired her to speak and 

gloating over her own wealth."
In one of her secret Wall Street speeches, Clinton frankly admitted that she has a “public position” and a “private position.” The private position is expressed in “backroom discussions,” while the “public position” consists of the lies she tells to the rest of the population.
The fact that Clinton addressed the notorious 

investment bank in the first place highlights the 

extent to which the American corporate, financial 

and political establishment is drenched in 

corruption and criminality. In April 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report entitled “Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse.” This report exhaustively documented that the financial crash of 2008 and the recession that followed were the product of fraud and illegality on the part of mortgage lenders and banks such as Goldman Sachs, with government regulatory bodies as well as credit rating agencies serving as accessories.
Forty percent of the 639-page report, or some 240 pages, 

were devoted to the fraudulent and deceptive practices of 

Goldman Sachs. The report presented documents, emails, 

internal communications and other evidence showing that 

the largest US investment bank had sold billions of dollars in 

subprime mortgage-backed securities to investors, vouching 

for their value, even as it was betting that the investments 

would fail. Goldman made billions and CEO Blankfein and 

other top executives pocketed millions in bonuses by 

accelerating the collapse of the financial system.
Michigan Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate subcommittee, famously described how the investigation had uncovered “a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.”
“Using their own words in documents subpoenaed by the subcommittee,” Levin said, “the report discloses how financial firms deliberately took advantage of their clients and investors, how credit rating agencies assigned AAA ratings to high-risk securities, and how regulators sat on their hands instead of reining in the unsafe and unsound practices all around them. Rampant conflicts of interest are the threads that run through every chapter of this sordid story.”
So when Clinton was hobnobbing with 

Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein in 2013, while 

investigations of wrongdoing by Goldman 

and the other Wall Street banks were still 

ongoing, she was consorting with a man who 

belonged in prison. In 2011, Levin had recommended that the Justice Department criminally prosecute Blankfein for his fraudulent and deceptive conduct, and the Senate subcommittee charged that he had perjured himself in testimony in 2010 regarding his bank’s role in the financial crash. Nevertheless, no charges were brought, and in 2013 Clinton was accepting upwards of $225,000 per speech from Blankfein’s firm.
Hillary and Bill Clinton have accumulated a total of $153 million in speaking fees since Bill Clinton left the White House. Only the very naive could believe that these vast sums were paid for the speeches themselves. They were payment for services rendered to the American financial aristocracy over a protracted period.
Clinton’s Wall Street speeches deserve to be widely read. They provide an invaluable first-hand education in the sheer cynicism of the American ruling class. While the Obama administration publicly insisted that the Dodd-Frank reforms of 2010 were “strict regulations” that would ensure that the 2008 crash would “never happen again,” Clinton privately told her Goldman audience not to worry, that these cosmetic reforms had to be passed for “political reasons,” to provide the appearance that the government did not “sit idly by and do nothing” as people lost their jobs, homes and life savings.
When Blankfein snidely asked Clinton how, should he decide to run for president, he should conduct his campaign, Clinton responded with her own cynical joke. “I think you would leave Goldman Sachs and start running a soup kitchen somewhere,” Clinton replied, to the merriment of the assembled guests.
The response to the publication of these 

speeches by so-called “socialist” Bernie 

Sanders exposes the utterly fraudulent 

character of his entire presidential bid. While 

he postured during the Democratic Party 

primaries as a proponent of a “political 

revolution” against the “billionaire class,” 

Sanders now functions shamelessly as a 

sideshow for the Clinton campaign, 

browbeating his (now much smaller) 

audiences with admonitions to vote for the 

preferred candidate of the “billionaire class” 

he claimed to oppose.
During his run for the Democratic nomination, Sanders repeatedly called on Clinton to release the transcripts of her Wall Street speeches, which she refused to do. He charged that the speeches would show her subservience to the bankers. Now, transcripts have been leaked to the public, completely substantiating his accusations. His silence only underscores the depth of his political treachery and dishonesty.
Meanwhile, emails published by WikiLeaks to and from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, reveal the consummate cynicism with which Hillary Clinton sought to portray herself as a champion of “everyday Americans,” small businesses, unionized workers, minorities and women. Having no connection whatsoever to any popular movement or any policies that have benefited the bottom 90 percent of American society, Clinton relies on a network of “community leaders,” union bureaucrats, academics, celebrities and media “surrogates,” who use empty demagogy and identity politics to market her brand to voters.
In one particularly Machiavellian email, one of Clinton’s aides discussed adding a “riff” of demagogic statements against Wall Street in a speech to Deutsche Bank in 2015, “precisely for the purpose of having something we could show people if ever asked what she was saying behind closed doors for two years to all those fat cats.”
“I wrote her a long riff about economic fairness and how the financial industry has lost its way,” the aide wrote. “Perhaps at some point there will be value in sharing this with a reporter and getting a story written. Upside would be that when people say she’s too close to Wall Street and has taken too much money from bankers, we can point to evidence that she wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power.”
In another email, Podesta frankly noted that Clinton hated the phrase “everyday Americans,” but Podesta urged her to use it anyway. “I know she has begun to hate everyday Americans, but I think we should use it once the first time she says I’m running for president because you and everyday Americans need a champion,” Podesta wrote.
The cynicism of Clinton’s campaign knows no bounds. Her staff actually worked to help Donald Trump secure the Republican nomination, believing that Clinton would have a better chance of defeating Trump in the election than a more conventional Republican candidate. The media was encouraged to “take him seriously,” and Clinton was urged to single Trump out for criticism in order to “help him cement his front runner status” among the Republican primary candidates.
Around 11,000 out of 50,000 emails obtained by WikiLeaks have been published. The Clinton campaign’s response to these exposures has been to blame Russia, in line with the Obama administration’s campaign of saber-rattling against the Putin administration. In an interview last weekend on Fox News, Podesta suggested that the emails were not authentic, while simultaneously (and inconsistently) arguing that the emails were acquired by “the Russians,” who are supposedly attempting to deliver the election to Donald Trump.
On Friday, Podesta taunted WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange with a picture of a number of uniformed chefs preparing a luxurious private dinner for the Hillary Victory Fund. “I bet the lobster risotto is better than the food at the Ecuadorian Embassy,” Podesta wrote as the caption to the photograph on Twitter, referring to the fact that Assange has been a de facto prisoner at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since he sought asylum there in June 2012. Assange immediately replied, “Yes, we get it. The elite eat better than the peasants they abuse.”

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