US Suckers
"C'est vrai mais il ne faut pas croire!"
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GLOBAL TRENDS
The Ides of March Revisited: U.S. Dollar's Slide Wreaks Havoc Around the World, Brings Few Benefits Home
US SUCKERS:
The Worst of Both Worlds
China - The Big Winner as U.S. Trade Deficits Soar
PHOENIX, Mar 12 2005 -
Hu is the president of China? Yes, Hu is. Ostensibly. But W ought to be. Why? Because
W's economic policies are helping China while hurting America (also see
"Hu's on First?").
And who is the president of America? W is. Ostensibly. But Hu ought to be. Why? Because Hu is using China's dollar reserves to help America's ailing dollar (so we can keep buying Chinese-made goods).
Helping adversaries used to be considered treason. Not anymore. Not in the globalist-run world. America's president is helping China, while China's president is helping America. Wouldn't George Orwell marvel at this turn of events?
Nothing new there. Check out "America's Sellout" (Oct 2004), "China Follies Revisited" (Mar 2004), "China Now Bigger Than the U.S." (Jan 2004) and “China: The Real Cold War Winner” (Mar 2002) - for some of our prior warnings about this dangerous trend. Lenovo's acquisition of the IBM PC business is but a drop in the bucket in this new trend.
W's foreign and economic policies are giving us the worst of both worlds. The weak U.S. dollar isn't helping America's exports, but it is increasing the cost of our imports. The result is a soaring trade deficit and more job losses as domestic exporters are forced to retrench (an international English term for layoffs). The big winners are China and
the American companies that use China's cheap labor in their factories.
As you can see from the above charts
(see charts at
Annex Research
)
, the U.S. trade deficit is widening as the U.S. dollar is dropping against the major currencies. That certainly runs against common economic theories and the optimistic comments of the Bush administration officials. But it is a sad reality.
"The United States trade deficit hit $58.3 billion, its second-highest level on record in January, defying predictions that a weakened dollar and lower oil prices would improve the American trade picture," the New York Times noted in a front page story on March 11.
But the weak U.S. dollar isn't causing hardships only at home. It is wreaking havoc and unleashing suffering around the world.
In dirt-poor Lesotho, for example, a tiny southern Africa country, six of the nation's 50 textile factories have shut down in the last three months, unable to match the prices of foreign competitors and still make a profit. That has eliminated 5,800 of the 50,000 garment-making jobs here. Layoffs have claimed at least 6,000 more, the New York Times reported today.
Nor is Lesotho alone in its misery. Across southern Africa, industries that depend on American customers or compete with American producers are feeling the effects of the dollar's fall, the Times reported. South Africa, which surrounds Lesotho, has lost an estimated 30,000 textile jobs since 2002. In neighboring Swaziland, nearly three in four textile factories say they have no firm orders beyond March.
South Africa's fabled gold-mining industry lost 11,000 jobs from January 2003 to June 2004, in part because income from its dollar-denominated exports fell sharply. Botswana's budget tipped from a surplus to a $325 million deficit last year as its dollar income from diamond sales was diluted by a 10 percent rise in its currency.
"One man's loss is another man's gain," they say. Once again, the Chinese are the main beneficiaries. "In January, China's powerful apparel industry was freed from the so-called multifiber arrangement, which for decades set nation-by-nation quotas and capped its garment exports to the developed world," the Times said. "Now China, which keeps its currency tightly pegged to the dollar, has begun to pursue the American market much more avidly."
So forget the American military imperialism. Forget the American Emperor W telling other countries what they "must do." The fall of the American dollar that Emperor W has orchestrated is causing far greater carnage across far wider swaths of the world than the U.S. military is able to produce.
Together, however, they are a potent force. Never before in the history of the world have the two tentacles of the American Empire caused more people to hate one country with so much passion and so little compassion. And not just in the Muslim world, and not just since 9/11.
Here's, for example, what we wrote about Argentina over seven years ago:
"Deceitful chameleons that the globalists are, at the Wal-Mart in Buenos Aires, an Argentine flag flutters in the store there is a sign reading, 'Proudly in Argentina'," the New York Times reported. "Families stroll down the wide, bright aisles, past displays of Paul Newman's salad dressing. What is clear is that it is changing the Argentine way of life: families buy their bicycles here, sometimes using dollars; the corner bicycle store is no more."
(from "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina!", Feb 1998).
And things have only gotten worse in Argentina since 1998 (see "Global Investments Plummet," Jan 2003).
But the world's anger is aimed at the wrong person and the wrong country. Emperor W is nothing but a puppet of global banks and multinational companies (see "Stitching Together the NWO Flag," Nov 1999). Main Street America is as much a loser in Emperor W's schemes as is Main Street Lesotho or Main Street Argentina.
America's Heartland is also suffering a massive heartache from which it may not recover. This writer's car journey through some Midwestern towns last summer was nothing short of heartbreaking. Once prosperous communities lay in ruins (literally!) while Wal-Mart's and shopping malls prospered and proliferated in the suburbs. A whole way of life is being exterminated, giving way to crass materialism and self-indulgence. It is a scene being repeated all over America and all over the world.
Gone is also the corner hardware store in Quincy, Illinois. And this old gas station, too...
This dilapidated site in Quincy, Illinois, was evidently once a gas station. Now it is being used as a weed-encrusted newsstand in front of a rusty store.
"O tempora! O mores!" ("What times! What ways!" - Cicero). Or putting it a little more positively, "Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis" ("Times change, and we change with them" - Ovid).
But are we changing for the better, Ovid? Here's what we concluded a year ago, in our "China Follies Revisited" piece:
"If the Chinese or the Indians are willing to work for wages 10 times lower than the Americans without either government's intervention, more power to them. But there is plenty wrong with duping the population of the world's once most prosperous country into becoming the global bankers' stooges. And that's what successive Washington administrations and the acquiescent Congress have been doing (honorable exceptions noted).
After all, aren't national leaders supposed to defend national interests? Evidently not anymore; not in this country, anyway; not in a plutocracy. With the increasing concentration of power in the hands of an ever smaller number of people, one cannot help but recall another lesson to be learned from history."
"Ancient Rome's Juvenal (a.d. 60-130) wondered about a similar situation some 20 centuries ago: "Quis custodiet ipses custodes?" ("Who will guard the guards?"). And that's our 2004 "beware of the Ides of March"-message."
(from "China Follies Revisited," Mar 2004)
We're once again approaching the Ides of March[1], a time to be weary of empty promises and heed such warnings. But when the skies are dark and prospects gloomy, that's also the best time to look for silver linings. And levity makes the best silver lining.
So we'll let James Sherman's "Hu's on First?" be our last word on this Ides of March Eve 2005.
Happy bargain hunting!
Bob Djurdjevic
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[1] Everybody who's been touched by classical education also knows about the "beware the Ides of March"-warning that Julius Caesar had reportedly received (the Ides can fall either on the 13th of the 15th of the month, according to the Roman calendar). The word the Roman emperor got was that betrayal was brewing in the Senate.
Bob Djurdjevic
brilliant editor of
Truth in Media
fervently opposed Bubba Bill for NATO War Crimes unleashed in the unprovoked attack on Yugoslavia. Bob may not have coined the expression
"Only a coward could be so brutal," but that theme ran through
Bob's prodigious
writings. More recently,
Bob generously allowed use of the National Poster (The Lilly)
and Fir/Men in the
March Edition of FP. Both photos belong to
Bob's travelogue in Eire reprinted with permission of
Truth in Media
in
FP - St Pats 2004 (North)
and
FP - St Pats 2003 (South).
Only recently in popular US circles has China been seen as the threat Bob so accurately
foresaw when long ago Bob declared China the winner of the Cold War.
Bob reminds us
"Sometimes it is a curse being able to see too far ahead of your time. Strike `sometimes.'"
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From:
Bob Djurdjevic
