Promoting Free Trade Is Like Pushing Heroin? God Damn the [UnRegulated] Pusher Class.

   (Commentary by Roger Erickson)



Yet another bad news story was recently published, this time about India, yet it included a now-familiar refrain.

"... every second child is malnourished."

Starving Children ... on "Children's Day" (uneducated too)

And India is seriously thinking of trying another war with Pakistan and/or China? No way.

That's like a half-dead man climbing into a boxing ring. No wonder a few Brits could defeat & colonize the whole country.

India can send a rocket to the moon, but can't even feed half it's people? Something is near fatally out of whack.

How did this happen?

WHY on earth is it STILL happening?

Then, reading on, a sickening phrase popped up, explaining all.

"Barriers protecting industry, manufacturing and agriculture were demolished." 

Uh, oh.

Maybe India doesn't keep up with known literature any more than our Middle Class  - or blindly treasonous economists - do. What good is ANY amount of data, accounting, or theory, if people have already endorsed a context other than the one that THEY inhabit? The entirety of orthodox economics is officially insane. It completely ignores the most simplest of questions.

How Rich [Classes] Got Rich And Why [Middle Classes] Stay Poor

The answer? The poor ones - countries or classes - misplace their faith in treasonous "leaders" and their economics pushers, who sell their fellow citizens to merchant colonists and/or merchant gangsters ... for pennies on the pound. (And then reward themselves with faux "Nobel" prizes for doing so.)

Erik Reinert is the only economist I've ever heard who seems to have a basic familiarity with truly complex systems, physiology or biology.

Of course every culture needs merchants, just like every body needs dozens of organs and hundreds of different cell types. Yet they must ALL be hemmed in, and aligned, by adequate checks & balances. Otherwise a given cell type becomes a cancer on the body. And an unregulated merchant class becomes a cancer on the very populace it purports to serve. Our Upper Looting Class is simply that, a constant cancer on society, in every country.

Free Trade? That's like me shutting down my kidneys, because a vendor offers to give me "free" dialysis ... (for awhile). Sure you get some free goods, briefly, but you are thereafter dependent, forever, and soon dead.

Promoting Free Trade Is Like Pushing Heroin? 

 
"Goddamn the [UnRegulated] FreeTrade-man"

The "Head" Is Hoarding Most Resources, And Is Threatening To Cut Off The Body?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

The Upper Looting Class thinks it doesn't need the Middle Class anymore? Is that like the adipose cells threatening to cut off the muscles and other organs? Or, are we back to cutting off the face, to spite the nose?

Declining wage shares undermine growth

Ya think? They'll do it too! We've seen 'em do it. They're crazy enough to pull the trigger! And we're dumb enough to back off and let 'em try. This plot works every which way and, for whatever reason, we insist on cycling through every possible iteration.

[You can't make this up. Do we have to go through this EVERY generation? For 3.5 BILLION years running? Apparently, the answer is "yes."* Nevertheless, the old story is that everyone learns best by putting their finger on a hot stove, NOT by their head stuffing the rest of the body into a hot oven. Something seems a bit extreme here. We're playing with fire again.]

Fine. My new business venture is novel. Flammable saddles, seat covers and even bluejeans. Get yours while they last, or I'll burn my insurance policy!! There's a fire sale going on. As usual. :(

* Capitalism. When your economy is going up in smoke ... sell matches?

Does The Middle Class In ANY Country Need Competitive "Leaders" Addicted to MICCodin?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Don't step in the leadership?

Is there a comic yet about Hoghurt, the President of Dilbert's country, and his sadistic, White House Economics Counselor Arista, who makes unions clean his catbox?

We need art like that, so naive young kids can quickly learn that all politics is local .... and incredibly venal?

The Real Target of These Attacks is Not Syria

Did the White House Help Plan the Syrian Chemical Attack?

Sounds remarkably like the same Great Game the Romans & Carthagenians played. Or the Egyptians & Hittittes.
                   blah, blah, blah

Come to think of it, was Karl Rove a history major? Was his senior thesis about fiat intrigue & virtual backstabbing?

Who plunged the lie into civil-lie-zation? And can someone please pull it out now? The pain is building up, and migrating from neck to class arse.  Worse, the MICCodin isn't helping anymore, and our Upper Looting Class is addicted to it. In fact, we're already past CLD50* dose levels.

* CLD50, level of MICC use that has a 50% chance of being lethal to the Middle Class

People Of Both WalMart and Wall Street are Immune To Self Parody?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Plus all reflections of it?

Here's the Upper Looting Class' take on things. Bankers Haven't Gone Rogue—Regulators Have

That's their story, and they're sticking YOU to it!

The response from what's left of the US Middle Class? WE’VE BEEN PUBLISHED…AGAIN!

Who knew that there were 2, collectively random paths in this race to the bottom? Each co-dependent upon the other, circling their respectively dimming lights as they sink into the mess.

It's a tag team fight to the finish. Involving the Physically Deprived and Deranged plus the Morally Repugnant and Deranged on one team. There is no other team! [At least no other statistically significant representation, barring a comeback by the Moderate Majority, e.g. those not currently participating in this carnival show.]

So, other than throwing the occasional drone into the international audience, the members of TEAM-USA have dutifully agreed to a brawl among themselves, until a suitable outside challenger shows up. However, the audience is getting restless, and they may not wait long before replacing the whole show with some other production.

If we want to at least preserve the stage, shouldn't TEAM-USA stick to team training, instead of putting on it's own show? Infighting is a lose-lose situation. Zero regulation of national self isn't a useful path. Everything in excess just falls off the rails faster. Or, as Bill Black puts it:

Zero Prosecutions of Elite Banksters is too many Prosecutions for the Wall Street Journal

Who's the producer of this show? MC Voter? Better do something quick, MC.

Policy Agility - Caught Between A Crock And A Heartless Spot?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

If we truly had a heart?

It finally dawned on me, more viscerally*, that there are of course always at least 2 phases of class warfare going on simultaneously, with repercussions for local policy agility.

1) upper vs lower classes within one region/nation
      (e.g., royalty vs serfs)
2) uneasy stipulations on allowable behavioral deviance, across Upper Looting Classes of cooperating regions (or neighboring gangs and political-parties [same thing])
   (e.g., it was complicated, but multiple nations attacked & were attacked by France post-1792, over fear the French revolution might/might-not be exported, like the Arab spring; dueling policies of containment vs expansion :) )

Other examples?

 ~1850 Mississippi, a plantation owner teaching his slaves to read & write might be threatened or killed by other plantation owners

2013 - any attempt by, say, Japan [even India?] to boost it's aggregate demand at the expense of letting it's Fx truly float ... would be met with outrage from the Upper Looting Class of other nations, who would instantly label it as a "currency war";
(what could Japan do if they were really innovative? voluntarily halt exports to any & all offended nations? :) )

Yet if we really had a heart - or brains - is that what we'd do, let Fx float & auto-balance labor/merchant tax ratios?  "Damn the Fx, Full aggregate demand ahead!" Abandon uselessly punitive FICA/Medicare taxes as well?


*(Had to do with my stomach churning while reading more Foreign Policy news this morning. These issues are old hat for some, but still entirely unexpected by the bulk of our electorate.)

Is it Lights Out for Wall St.? And their little dog High Street too?

Despite all the Flying Lobbyists?

"Banks are struggling to devise new commodity index products as once-fat returns fizzle out in a business [once] worth $140 billion [on paper], putting pressure on bank commodity businesses already hit by tighter regulations." 

And that's just the tip of the viceberg.

Aka, putting pressure on the credibility of the 1%, aka the Upper Looting Class. If all their lines of looting are revealed as liars loots ... are they all financially bankrupt, not just out of ideas again? Will the last Deficit Terrorist (DT) be the last unemployed? Can we just declare ourselves all guilty of colluding by looking the other way? Can we immediately sentence the 99% to forswear the 1% ... Cold Turkey?

Makes me break out in a cold sweat (of anticipation) just thinking about it.

ps: Is salivating a withdrawal symptom of dumping DTs cold turkey?

Consider Us Collectively Ignorant.

Bill Black: Why Are There No Famous Financial Whistleblowers in This Crisis?

Over at MMT-discuss, Jerrit writes:
"Just a wild guess, but the rank and file at most dead-end jobs feel
(maybe correctly) that they're lucky to have a job and don't want to
rock the boat.

It's not outlandish to think that that's actually part of the looting
class' strategy. Keep the working class just desperate enough for
employment that they'll be less likely to speak out against further
looting."

Exactly. That's why education and mis-education are essential strategies for both sides, the 99% ... and the (innocently/purposely) Upper Looting Class. It's a risky game to loot your own electorate. You have to keep 'em confused enough to allow the looting, yet letting situational awareness dip too low risks losing the entire system.

It's stupid of course, since there's a better way. The only way looting gets started is when net situational awareness lags enough that people get distracted into such badly divisive strategies. It's never advised to even step onto a slippery slope, let alone grease it further. Return on coordination offers so much more, and so much less risk that an electorate has to be ignorant to ever stray from the path.

Consider us collectively ignorant.

Sure, we're always dumb when it comes to adapting to constantly and unpredictably changing situations, but are we getting dumber, or smarter in terms of our Adaptive Rate?  We should be finding slopes that head up, not down.  And stop letting sociopaths slinging oil in front of everyone else.  Please?