Mexican Truckers Still Allowed Into US

January 6, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Free trade isn't free. It isn't Santa Claus flying over us and dropping cheap trade goods on our heads. It isn't a flood of containers or Mexican truck drivers bringing in cheap stuff despite the dying dollar. The New York Times runs its daily article in praise of 'free trade' and as usual, it is full of Santa Claus dreams, outright lies and ridiculous statistics that ignore reality. Also, I must attack Brad DeLong again. He and I used to debate until he told me to go off and start my own news service and leave him alone. He is utterly fixated on the yuan and ignores all the other things going on. But then, ignoring all those other things is how most economics people survive. Wrapping one's brain around all the facts all the time is hard work. I hope my repetitions of basic facts don't bore regular readers: I do this because my opponents NEVER pay attention to these simple facts. Never.

Mexican trucks allowed into U.S. despite new law to stop them

The Bush administration is going ahead with a controversial pilot program giving Mexican trucks greater access to U.S. highways despite a new law by Congress against it.

The decision to proceed with the four-month-old program, which allows participating Mexican trucking companies to send loads throughout the United States, comes despite language in the recently signed catchall spending bill aimed at blocking it.

But the Department of Transportation is taking advantage of a loophole in the new law, which prohibits the government from spending any money to "establish" the program. The government says the new rules don't apply to the current program since it was started in September.

"The U.S. Department of Transportation will not establish any new demonstration programs with Mexico," said Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration spokeswoman Melissa Mazzella DeLaney. "The current cross-border trucking demonstration project - established in September - will continue to operate in a manner that puts safety first."

We have 'elections'. In these Soviet-style marches to polls, we vote. If the votes don't go the way the media or the Real Rulers want, they simply stop counting the votes and order the designated loser to 'unite' Americans by resigning and letting the media/real ruler puppet take over. In the last 8 years, this creature has been Herr Überaffe [I made up this German word, it means 'super monkey'] Bush. He has happily thrown open both the Portals to the Outer Darkness and the doors to America to terrorists, foreign powers, floods of funny money from pirate coves and Japan as well as an absolute tsunami of one-way trade with both 'allies' and supposed feared 'enemies.' Namely, anyone and everyone interested in bankrupting us or killing us.

In turn, the US populace has been told repeatedly that this monkey king will save us from danger coming from abroad. Of course, this is all fake. The people destroying America don't care about us and they don't care if we all die tomorrow or next week.

They want to get rich and make their own home bases more powerful. Many of these bases are off shore or overseas. One of our present contenders for top monkey is a man who is using his own funds from such an offshore account. This is treason and I want Mitt Romney arrested only he and his fellow pirates who took over the US long ago, made his sort of treason perfectly legal even as it destroys our nation. The media seldom if ever mentions his way of making magic money and his tax evasions. It should be topic #1 in this election. Because of him, our nation is going bankrupt.

A lot of people were and are very angry about this latest attempt at 'saving money' [i.e. increasing the profits of corporations] by letting Mexicans move all our goods around the US. The Chinese are building huge ports in Mexico for this purpose and the schools in Panama are now requiring students learn some Chinese due to this push to take advantage of cheaper labor to move goods into the US. All the big retailers desperately need this as inflation due to the dying dollar which is dying due to unbalanced trade, rises. They need to cost-cut and this is easily accomplished by throwing all US truck drivers out of work and dropping the wages of their replacements while flooding the US with foreign labor via Mexican truck drivers.

The Democrats, supposedly [hahaha] supporting workers, passed a gutless law with some gutless GOP who fear their own voter's wrath, to pass this law that supposedly stopped Bush from betraying our workers. But of course, Bush ignores these laws because he is a criminal and a traitor.

Why should traitors pay any attention to legalese? After all, the Constitution has been shredded along with our economy! The Supreme Court can ignore us forever due to no one impeaching them. And no one is impeaching Bush or Romney or anyone who thinks it is OK to destroy our nation. One reason Ross Perot was destroyed by our media that made him out to be some sort of deranged person, was due to his famous words, 'Giant sucking sound' of jobs vanishing. The jobs sucked down and vanished and so has he.

We now have yet another Texan, Ron Paul, talking about that giant noise machine and the US media noise machine has decided to make him vanish, too, like those jobs. It amazes me to see his poll numbers rise despite his non-personhood in the media! Amazing. Many of his supporters are not happy about him not winning right off the bat.

This is an EPIC STRUGGLE. Think, 'Battle of Stalingrad'. The Nazis took 90% of the city and the Russians fought them room by room, building by building, in the sewers, the streets and the stores. Everything was totally ruined, the entire city turned to rubble. But the Russians won! They never gave up. Even when starving, they crawled in the dust and ice to snipe at the Germans. We must realize that even when we think things are impossible, we must remember the people who did the impossible. Americans have been trained to ignore the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the greatest in military history. But now is the time to look at it and learn.

Truck drivers must fight back. People wanting cheap foreign goods must be ignored and the pain of dealing with globalism should be accepted and then turned back on the globalists who are destroying us. I noted last month how much of Europe was paralyzed by rolling strikes in the transportation industries. These have stopped but only because the governments betraying their people have made some concessions. These will be violated but the workers have figured out that they still have some powers. If there is a global recession and there will be one, this will rise out of the ashes of our present Stalingrad. Sewer by sewer, room by room, the struggle will be engaged. And the top 1% of the earth's population fears this greatly.

Now, time to visit the disgusting traitors who run the New York Times. As always, like clockwork, they seek out members of the ruling elites to pen love poems to globalization. Here is today's example:

Stop the World (and Avoid Reality)

By ALAN S. BLINDER
Published: January 6, 2008

Opinion polls show that Americans are both weary with and wary of the rest of the world. It’s as if they wish it would all just go away. Naturally, this sentiment is reflected in the current presidential campaign. Among Democrats, it may manifest itself in attitudes toward international trade that range from lukewarm support to outright hostility. Among Republicans, it shows up in attitudes toward immigration — and most things foreign — that border on xenophobia.

Protecting America is 'xenophobia' to these traitors. Many of them don't care if they sell us down the river. Like the slave owners who founded our nation, they don't care if we become slaves. Nay, they need slaves. Slaves make them richer and amuse them, sexually as well as emotionally. There are a number of black Americans who carry my family name of 'Steele'. They were our slaves and are most likely very much genetically related to me. But they were 'property'. And were not allowed to inherit our estates or enjoy our freedoms and our privileges. They had to work for us.

The US saved the rotted UK empire during WWI. In return, at the end of the war, Europe and this empire of England tried to flood the US with manufactured goods and other materials. The US defended itself and the economic condition of the world deteriorated. But during this, the British and French empires, both quite bankrupt, EXPANDED. They believed they had the right to do this AND flood the US markets. So 'xenophobia' grew in the US. When all the old empires went bankrupt together in 1932, the US struggled to protect itself from that mess via 'xenophobia.' We could have saved those empires if we didn't do this but then, we would have been enslaved by them! Isn't that charming?

This sort of speculation is left out of most economic histories that favor globalization and the present economic consequences we see so very clearly now. Japan today is about as xenophobic as in 1933. The NYT doesn't talk about this nor do any of the 'anti-xenophopes' who utterly dominate the media. Even as these same clowns negotiate trade agreements with Japan that are totally ignored by the Japanese xenophobes, this isn't discussed in any of the stories penned by globalists! Today's article, for example, doesn't contain the word 'Japan' in it anywhere at all. It simply chastises us for trying to resist foreign domination!

The minute I see any article using the word 'xenophobe' and not the word, 'Japan', I assume the writer is treasonous. And in the case of the NYT, this is very likely. They love globalism because they want Israel to continue it giant [per capita] trade surplus with the US. If we look at the Chinese trade surplus, per capita, it is much, much smaller than the Israeli trade surplus. This week, we saw online but not at the New York Times, the story that the Iowa vote counting will be done by an Israeli company that is run by Mossad agents, it operates out of Florida, ground zero for vote fraud, and the money goes to Israel.

The Israelis not only export a lot of food and other goods to the US, manufactured goods, etc, they run many corporations that get money from our government and get lots of sweet heart contracts from our government as well as the lion's share of our foreign aid and note how our media hates Ron Paul for talking about ending this? HAHAHA. No surprise. So the NYT, in order to keep the Jewish gravy train rolling, must support ONLY globalization and to resort to calling patriots 'xenophobes' when they struggle to save the good old U.S.A. from utter destruction.

Alas, this feeds anti-semitism to talk about all this but the appalling mess we face is forcing us to look long and hard at who benefits from free trade and off shoring and all the other things that are hammering our financial fundamental base and the fact that the New York Times never talks about the unequal trade with either Israel or other entities the owners of the NYT get money from or wish to support, I call this treason.

Unfortunately, history shows that totally innocent people get destroyed when only 1% of their group indulges in treason. For example, Jews: all will be attacked by anti-semites due to being a minority. This disgusting possibility worries me a great deal. The Christians like the Bushes will NOT be persecuted, they will turn on their allies in Israel and America and blame the Jews for the messes these ruling elites who are not Jewish at all, caused. The Jews will be the whipping dogs for enraged masses. And this is what I want to stop.

And the New York Times has to realize, the first step for protecting Jews in America is to tell the truth and to discuss the dangers of running a foreign nation as an ethnic enclave where they can use it as a tool to pry money and power out of the hands of Americans here in the USA. Israel is a danger to patriotic and honest Jews in the US, alas.

One very old reason is that the jobs destroyed by international trade are far more salient than those it creates. And with our huge trade deficit, imports do seem — as a matter of arithmetic — to be destroying more jobs than exports are creating.

But think about that simple arithmetic for a moment. We do not yet have full data for 2007, but in 2006 imports exceeded exports by a whopping 5.5 percent of real gross domestic product. Because jobs are roughly proportional to real G.D.P., it is tempting to conclude that trade “destroyed” 5.5 percent of all American jobs. Yet the unemployment rate in 2006 averaged 4.6 percent. Are we to believe that, if trade had been balanced, the unemployment rate would have been 5.5 percentage points lower — making it minus 0.9 percent?

Aren't traitors cute? This guy pulls numbers out of his Robin Hood's hat to convince us that deindustrializing the US and destroying HIGH PAYING JOBS doesn't exist because the raw unemployment numbers are not in the double digits? Globalization has destroyed most unionized jobs and note how the Teamster's Union that supported the Republicans because of reactionary politics, are being betrayed by their new masters as well as their old ones, the Democrats. If the Democrats impeached Bush, he wouldn't be able to disregard Congress over this trucking issue, could he? But Bush supports the starvation of Palestinians in the ghettos erected by Jews in the Middle East so they support his Presidency.

It irritates me to have to tie things into what is going on in the Middle East but we must do this. The feeling of disgust is due to the knowledge that anti-semites as well as pro-Israelis will both misuse my words or refuse to understand what I am saying. But we must look at where things go no matter what for this is all part of the Apocalypse business which is my #1 worry. I worry about WWIII and xenophobia is real and can cause wars but we must not let it be used in the fashion that the NYT is using it today. Protecting our borders from invasions as well as protecting our economy from domination by foreign powers is not xenophobia at all. It is sanity.

Due to outsourcing of a tremendous variety of jobs in the white collar field, wages there have either stagnated or fallen. This destruction has been do bad, fewer and fewer Americans get degrees in the computer fields, for example. When I ran a computer fabrication research lab at a major American technical university, 99% of our students were foreign. So we still have schools here but US participation has collapsed nearly totally.

This infects everything. Yesterday, I ran the news about the new compressed air motor cars. I noted that none of the investors in micro cars or this are American. We have given up on our creativity and the pursuit of new systems, we live in the past. But globalization isn't expanding our horizons, it is directly responsible for this collapse in interest and reasonable thinking about the future. We have been put under a spell and put to sleep like Sleeping Beauty.

Americans who want to stop the world fear that the nation either already is or is destined to become a victim of globalization. Such pessimism seems downright un-American. It is also fundamentally illogical. After all, much of globalization amounts to Americanization — as numerous foreign critics have ruefully observed. The United States has long been the biggest, most open, most market-oriented and most competitive economy on earth. Globalization is now spreading these practices to the rest of the world, creating a huge, open, competitive global marketplace. But Americans are past masters of this game. How can we lose if the rest of the world decides to play on our field?

We were NOT the 'openest' of markets. We were always a closed market. Until after WWII. This was a historic happenstance that meant, all other competitors were pretty much lying in smoldering ruins! There was little competition! And half of the world, from Russia to China, Eastern Europe, was totally closed to trade! There was no 'free trade' and the US was the powerhouse because no one touched us except for a few minutes in 1942, during that entire, vast war! US industry flourished thanks to this. And the US dollar became the world currency because we won the war. We didn't have to close our borders like in 1920 because Europe could NOT flood us with goods. Nor could Japan. They had to rebuild, first.

The US is not the most competitive economy on earth at all. Anyone who looks at our trade statistics can see, we are not even slightly competitive. Most nations out-compete us at home without raising a sweat. How can anyone say we are great just because everyone is 'Americanizing'. They may love our last bits of cultural dominance and they may enjoy tracking the travails of our goofy Idols like Spears but this isn't something to be proud of. So, we are the world's entertainers and clowns? And that makes us powerful?

NO ONE is imitating our trade policies. Europe has 'free trade' but only within the context of Europe itself. It devised this system in order to lock the US out of their markets, not encourage us! They did this after we forced Germany and others to revalue their currencies after WWII when they were all pounding us in the export markets back in 1972!

And since 1972, even with the dollar being heavily devalued by 50% in the case of Germany, our trade deficit has grown every year since then. The very few times it shrank at all, it never went into the green again. It has always been in the red. Anyone doing trade negotiations or financial negotiations since 1972 have been irresponsible and totally unprofessional. The writer of this pro-globalization missive is very much one of these foolish, nasty people! He was one of the parties involved in destroying America! No wonder he trumpets his treason as a good thing!

The proof is always in the pudding and the pudding in this case, has not been an American souffle but rather, a flat pancake. A total failure.

the next president faces a huge challenge. Briefly put, she or he will need to find ways to make Americans more comfortable with globalization.

One part of the task involves using the presidential bully pulpit — not to bully, but to explain why globalization is both (a) inevitable and (b) more an opportunity than a threat. She or he must find the right language to explain, first, that the world will not stop to let us off and, second, why we should not want to disembark anyway.

This certainly is a bully pulpit. Or rather, a bully pitbull! They will bark at us that globalization is INEVITABLE and we better jolly well live with it and be happy with our cardboard boxes made in China. And note the opportunities here! We can have Mexican truckers bring in Chinese or Japanese goods and then we can sell them on street corners! I think we will all become millionaires this way if the dollar collapses totally.

This wish list is not pie-in-the-sky. It is an agenda that can be accomplished in a single presidential term. Even if it were all enacted, some Americans — sad to say — would still lose their jobs to competition from trade, and for many other reasons. But job loss would lose some of its current vicious sting, the global economy would not look quite so frightening, and maybe some of that good old American optimism would come back.

Alan S. Blinder is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. He has advised many Democratic politicians.

The last paragraphs in this treasonous editorial are all about how taxpayers who are being ravaged by Romney and his offshore pirate buddies, will magically have the funds to pay for national health care, new jobs for all the millions of Americans put out of work by inevitable globalization and we can all be welfare mothers, fathers, sons and daughters and consume mass quantities while not doing anything at all. In other words, Santa Claus will dump foreign goods on us and we won't worry about it. This goofy desire to keep going in the wrong, wrong direction and then fix it by living even more beyond our means is pure insanity. I grind my teeth, thinking about how this foolish and I think, evil little gnome has been allowed to run our finances in the past! No wonder all our systems have run in the red most of my life!

Now onto Brad DeLong's case. He and I argued for years until he basically said I was too dumb. Well, I may be a sort of blonde in real life but my hair seems to not have affected the brain cells in a negative way! So here is another editorial that irritates me, as always:

By Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at U.C. Berkeley

In the last days of the Bretton Woods system of international monetary arrangements nearly four decades ago, John Connally--then U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President Richard Nixon--told his European counterparts that while the dollar was "our currency," its misalignment and the global imbalances of that day thereby created were "their problem." Back then it was strong U.S. demand for imports driven by domestic inflation that transmitted unwelcome inflation to Germany and its peers. And Connally was clear that the U.S. was not back then going to take action to correct these global imbalances because it did not see itself as being at significant risk from them.

HAHAHA. I lived in Germany right before the Bretton Woods II Accords! My father dropped me off in Europe in 1968 with $6,000. I was a teenage millionaire! I went to the opera, rode the last Orient Express trains in first class, went to many things, first class while going to school. Then, a short while later, if I was still in Europe, I would have been a pauper! In one mad day, the dollar fell by 1/2. I was real lucky to get to Europe while the dollar was stronger. Of course, the Germans could have made the mark stronger any time they wanted. But the GOVERNMENT of Germany loved the weak mark! I lived with the President of Schott Glasswerks in the Ruhr for a few weeks and toured the factories there and they were ROARING! Business was great.

And much of it went to the US. I knew this due to knowing the contracts he was signing at the time! And when I came to New York, in 1972, I visited the President of Corning Glass. And he was HOPPING MAD at Schott! They were KILLING HIM. This is why Nixon had to FORCE the Germans to stop! And the Japanese! I know that Kodak was desperate to stop the Japanese who artlessly kept the yen at over 400 to the dollar! They were forced, kicking and screaming, to revalue the yen.

And how do I know this? Through my dad! Seeing Brad talk about this history in such a bizarre way reminds me why academics who don't actually see and do real things, are hopeless when it comes to history or finances. I remember those years brutally clearly. When the dollar suddenly collapsed, my parents had severe problems for it happened while they were stationed overseas.

I had to help them out with the banking problems this caused and got them into Credit Suisse. Changing money was a real headache for a year, too. Suddenly, I could no longer flit off to Europe at the drop of a hat, for example. New York City was suddenly flooded with foreigners coming here to buy things that they IMPORTED HERE just a year earlier! For it was suddenly a 50% sale on their OWN manufactured items! It didn't increase US manufacturing which continued to collapse, it simply displaced commerce. Their own commerce.

Barring a sharp crash of the dollar, and barring the subsequent discovery that U.S. banks were not hedged against such foreign exchange risks, the current dollar cycle is simply not a large problem for the U.S. economy.

Yes, the US might see a small recession – the odds are roughly 75-25. But the possibility of a truly hard landing – that global investors wake up one morning, suddenly recognize the US current account’s cannot be sustained, dump dollars, and bring about a crash of the American financial system and thus of the American economy – is becoming less likely with each passing day.

I see us running in the red. More and more. Every hour of every day that we run in the red and in finances, we have been running in the red on all fronts, since 1972, we are dying. The future crash and burn of our economy is not less and less but more and more. And Brad knows this, he argued with me about this for long enough to see the obvious. He, above all, cannot claim simple ignorance, only stupidity. I told him, I know for a FACT that the ultimate Chinese plan is for us to go bankrupt...to China! And this plan is on track and going perfectly well and is easy to track.

Only there is a second plan: the Japanese plan to put us under their thumb. This has been ongoing since the end of WWII and their surrender. They switched gears and now are moving on their own Plan B for world domination and the only flaw in this plan is China. China is moving very rapidly along an identical path that is disturbing to the Japanese so they do NOT want the US to be weak, simply dominated. But their domination is weakening the US too rapidly and too much so they will 'float' us via giving us as many debts as they can so we can still spend and thing we are strong.

Only this is bankrupting us which is the Chinese plan. Note how the carry trade has expanded debts here tremendously and we are far, far, far deeper in debt, all of it at ridiculously low rates that are sub-inflation levels, this is causing our inflation plus it is bankrupting us because there is no way in hell we can repay infinite debt if we can't even pay 1% interest on infinite debt and we are at a debt ceiling now which is being dealt with by having Japan give us more free money which we will owe to Japan in the long run and they have a giant trade surplus with us and globally, are tearing us apart in trade with other nations!

Gads! And Brad NEVER mentions this! Never. In this article, he mentions only China but that is painfully obvious, if we ignore all the others, in particular, the big industrial power, Japan, we can't see what is going on.

But this doesn’t mean that global imbalances are not a problem. Today, the misalignment of the dollar – and the euro – against the renminbi and other Asian currencies is more Asia’s problem.

My god. He is off the cliff, big time. Maybe I should visit his blog again. But it is a waste of my time. How can someone this clueless learn anything? All the world's currencies are 'misaligned' because monetarism is the new tool for DESTROYING OTHER NATION'S INDUSTRIAL POWERS! It is a weapon! And everyone, even the Europeans, have finally figured out the obvious: if you build up huge FOREX reserves, you can manipulate your currency to make it weaker against all others! The yen has been rising in value at the same time Japan has been quite artlessly open about their desire for a weaker yen and this is due to China forcing up the yen in retaliation for Japan using the G7 to join in attacks on China's yuan being too weak. Japan and China are forcing each other's currencies to rise in value and this is why Japan has had a series of secret meetings with the Bank of China over all this.

The dollar is NEVER someone else's problem, it is always OUR problem and the history of currency negotiations make it crystal clear that the US is the party demanding these meetings to rejigger currency values and every time we do this, our competitors, Germany and Japan, suffer after a brief bubble and both end up dropping the value of their currencies vis a vis the dollar. With the euro, it dropped again, very low and Europe was HAPPY, at least the exporters in Europe. But since 2004, the euro has been forced upwards and the Europeans are very UNHAPPY about this, very. Shoppers and vacationers in Europe love the strong euro but MANUFACTURERS and traders HATE IT. With a passion. This is why the last G7 meeting, they demanded the US strengthen the dollar.

But we have a huge trade deficit with Europe even with a weak dollar so we made it even weaker. And so it goes: this deadly game will continue. But why lie about it? Americans need to understand this, not fool ourselves. We must think about 10 things at once when thinking globally. Actually, thinking about 100 things at the same time is highly recommended here.

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Comments

[Al]

Elaine,
I used to read Delong, as well as Setser who both are big Boost The Yuan guys. I read a Mike Whitney column which featured you talking about the undervalued yen being the real issue, and I couldn't understand why you weren't on board with those other guys so I started investigating to see what was up. Started reading your site and appreciate the way you build your case and it has been a great learning experience. Sometimes people don't want to go against conventional wisdom, which is likely the case with Delong and Setser. Of course they're educated, but it does make them look stupid to those who look at things objectively. Their loss, to not listen to you.

[CK]

So ironic that you should mention Mitt's firm Bain Capitol
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/05/AR2008010502608.html?nav=rss_world
Short form: Huawei Technologies joins with Bain Capitol in a $2.2 Billion takeover bid of 3Com. Huawei would own 21.5% but of course would have No Operational Input.
An oldie but a goodie
http://www.forbes.com/global/2006/0619/034.html

Of course there is no NAU, no Trans-Texas Corridor ( AKA NAFTA SUPERHIGHWAY ) corridor, no SPP, http://www.stopspp.com/stopspp/
no discussion of a fiat AMERO to replace the dwindling dollar.
No Hutchinson Whampoa, no attempt to bypass the Unionized port of Long Beach, no plan to make Kansas City the international port of choice for Chinese goods shipped to non-union ports in Mexico and trucked and railed up that trans texas corridor by non-teamster mexican truckers for disbursement and break bulking in non union centers in KC. Out of the mainstream indeed.
As for Bradford DeLong, he is another in a long line of economists who look at static snapshots and pretend that they understand the dynamics of Human Action. Not worth your while to dialogue with him, or Krugman either both are just well paid shills for the status quo.

[Frank]

Protecting America is 'xenophobia' to these traitors. Many of them don't care if they sell us down the river.

Elaine, have you seen Bichler and Nitzan's analysis of the Israeli economy? If they are right, is sounds like the Israeli traitors are even further along in betraying their own country than are our American traitors. Their work is here.

[2012MIHOP]

The 'official' unemployment numbers cited by the NYT writer are as cooked as any books that Enron ever kept. Actual unemployment numbers in the US are closer to the 8-10%. This range is oddly similar to unemployment levels in Europe, and the US has no shortage of criticism for the likely more accurate European statistics...I mean...European 'failing'.

[shargash]

Are they hiring Epsilon Semi-morons to work at the NYT?

No matter. Globalization is a dead man walking. It is dead because it is a failure. China and Russia will be the model anti-globalist states (which is why TPTB and the NYT hate them so much). The globalist states, first world or third, will falter under the burdens of debt & greed.

The final nail in the coffin will be peak oil. Lead-painted toys from China aren't going to be cheap when oil is $250/bbl (or 500 or 700). Conflicts over resources are going to be the end of so-called "free trade".

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

[Chris]

In a severe recession unemployment may well reach 20 %, or above. The US is a very energetic society and such high unemployment numbers will cause a lot of stresses domestically. There is already a lot of negative feelings towards illegal immigrants. They are tolerated when times are good, but it looks like they will be hounded out when times go bad (as they will). Some of them are nothing but modern day slaves as it is, living in shacks (sometimes even chained and locked up) and earning less than the minimum wage for their back breaking work. Remove illegals from agriculture and US food prices would increase drastically from the added labour cost.

I recall talk early on that the Bush administration was looking to roll back the New Deal. And isn't that where this thing is heading? A major depression, only this time there won't be a Roosevelt with a New Deal. Unemployed workers squeezed by facing starvation will accept whatever scraps comes their way out of pure desperation (and do the work illegals do today for the same wages, if that). Protests and civil unrest will be met with government guns and internation camps. And looking for salvation through the vote is a no go. The political system has circled the wagons.

[D.F. Facti]

Did you see George McGovern's op ed in the Washington Post today? How Junior and Darth must be given the heave-ho?

It's reprinted on Common Dreams.

[Elaine Supkis]

I loved McGovern. War hero, anti-war candidate. Arrest Bush! Arrest Cheney! Haul them into the world court and give them chainsaws: two men in, one man out.

Or in this case, one borg, one monkey in, no men out at all. Since none are in.

[JSmith]

"I hope my repetitions of basic facts don't bore regular readers..."

That's OK... this regular reader mostly skims.

"People wanting cheap foreign goods must be ignored..."

That would be... everybody. Except for you and maybe three other people.

"Actually, thinking about 100 things at the same time is highly recommended here."

Therefore, each thing gets 1/100 of the mental resources. (The effects of that show up clearly in your writings.)

[James in Wisconsin]

Elaine,

You are on FIRE.

Stalingrad...I've lived in the UP for most of my youth. I cannot immagine fighting war in "white out" conditions. Not for days or weeks, but, for months on end. We are always shown old German Army accounts of how "bravely" the Army fought; the cold, lack of personal protective clothing, faith in victory, etc... Never the fact that the defending Soviets were also in the same environment...and were resolved to stop the aggresor. One man at a time.

You're dead-on when you say we in the US are not to examine too deeply the human motive of "fight-or-flight. I've read several very good historical accounts of that battle and it seems to me it came down to this: We make a stand here. Not another inch to the enemy. Not another consession or fall-back. We will not let others fight our battle.

I fear we in the US are headed for our own, collective, Stalingrad. I call it our Stalingrad Moment.

The big FOOL puts us in a position where some one on the other side says: " We make a stand here".

190,000 men in the German 6th Army went into Stalingrad. Only 6000 returned to Germany after the war. Not immediately after, but, after years of hard labor in very bad conditions.

6000.

I fear we are heading for our "Stalingrad Moment".

James in Wisconsin.

[Elaine Supkis]

In Germany, I knew a Panzer tank officer who survived the Russian prison camps. He inspired me to learn about the great siege. He only gave small hints about what happened to him there and afterwards.

[avan]

nobody want's the mexicans just what mexicans has to offer, like gold back then when america was tottally mexican and now the oil, water some food and slaves, as long as the go back home as long as the stick on the side of the wall

[Sholomanarchy]

The Jewish blogging world's most reviled rabbi has looked into the allegation that Ron Paul hates Jews, but has not yet issued a Halachic ruling on the matter.