Banana Republic Marxism for America, Trump Style

 

A House Constructed of Lies, Mythology and Fabrications Cannot Stand

Unfounded Conspiracy Theories Can Destroy

I rely heavily on the notions of the lessons of history, notably 19th-century philosopher George Santayana’s admonition: “Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat its mistakes.” That said, the Dekom twist on this seeming historical axiom is that the story human evolution over time – “history,” if you will – is not purely cyclical; it is recurring circular patterns within a spiral where the vector of the spiral is determined by seminal changes: from the printing press and gunpowder to space exploration and climate change.

The agents of change can be as basic as inadvertently spreading European diseases to kill off indigenous peoples in the Americas or the passionate Christian belief in noblesse oblige – a French phrase meaning the obligation of nobility to act honorably and generously – when misapplied over the centuries, allowed white Europeans to hold an air of superiority above and against dark skinned peoples (often described as “heathen”) in soon-to-be European colonies in Africa, the Americas and Asia.

The result was resource-driven exploitation that made European monarchies rich and powerful in direct proportion to their willingness to apply forced labor (mostly slavery but including other repressive forms of subjugation) to pillage the Americas of gold, silver, spices, slaves and new varieties of crops from tomatoes and any variety of peppers, corn, and later oil and materials used in basic construction. Europeans grew fat and powerful based on those cheap imports.

As much as we shudder at the use of slaves to build what would later become the United States of America, the Spanish use of slaves in the 16th and 17th centuries to rape Mexico (which included much of what would become our West and Southwest) and Peru was exponentially worse. Until so much gold and silver was extracted so as to deplete the easy access, indigenous people crushed by disease and then-modern force of arms were joined by black Africans to work mines and fields at for free or subsistence living. Many died and suffered horribly in that effort.

Soon thereafter, those who had conquered those lands, occasionally joined by local intermarried peoples of differing races, began to resist Mother Spain and seek freedom from Spain’s insistence of paying relatively negligible sums, even to their ex-pat Spaniards, for the resources that had made them rich. But it was the ability of Europeans to extract extreme value from their colonies at remarkably low cost that propelled those of white European culture and ethnicity into the mega-wealth of modernity. See any parallels in the growth of the United States, particularly post-WW2? A strong dollar versus most of the rest of the world, even including Europe, struggling to rebuild after global devastation. We bought those cheap foreign goods in huge volumes.

Sure, Marshall plan helped accelerate that recovery, but bottom line, that muscular dollar allowed the United States to import natural resources and manufactures based on cheap labor for a pittance of what replicating those efforts (if even possible) at home. Post-WW2 America was a period of massive subsidized higher learning, housing support and the growth of our own consumer-driven economy, driven by a new era of clever marketing for Americans to buy more than they needed, to “keep up with the Joneses.” “Mad Men” on steroids.

Nobody in that era screamed at those supplier nations, “You are ripping us off with your cheap products! You are killing our local jobs!” We were enjoying amping up our standard of living, migrating the bulk of our jobs out of the “dirty” world of farming and resource extraction (notably Texas crude) into the clean and massively more lucrative service economy. Migrants (quasi-slavery) proliferated in local US agriculture as technology (service-based) improved that industry such that less than 2% of our labor force worked the fields while agribusiness exported 20% of its aggregate output to massive profitability. Engineering, creative intellectual property, mastering the global financial infrastructure and academically driven innovation now generated 80% of our jobs and created the effective American hegemony over the global trading structure. With cheap imports, we simply migrated most of our new jobs into new and more profitable sectors.

The result was unavoidable: a sweeping global trend, conspiracy theory believing masses, and the autocrats who used the coattails of this populist movement to tell those masses that all that we had benefitted from was bad. Ignorant leaders, promulgating toxic fabrications, became the excellent purveyors of blame. The great mobility/productivity accelerators, the truly greatest job creators in American history, higher education and skill training were a cast as elites exploiting traditional working-class Americans, a notion that was seemingly confirmed in the increasing globalization of all levels of trade. While there was some truth in some of that assessment – we did not educate those displaced with new skills – there was the harsh reality that those who did not meld with the times would be left behind. The world is competitive. As we demean the true job creators – primarily sophisticated training and higher education – we decimate our competitive advantage. We are never going to recapture our manufacturing past… nor should we want to. Our competitors, notably China, are ramping up such training and higher education.

Why this exploration of the past? Because the Western powers got rich and powerful by exploiting foreign regions to secure economic benefits at levels that had never been seen before. Cheap goods were had by the white Western world’s exploitation of regions willing (or forced) to provide their minerals, fossil fuels, agricultural products and manufacturers to those colonial powers at unbelievably low cost. I do not recall those Western nations excoriating these nations providing such values at bargain rates as “ripping the colonial powers off.” Those “trade imbalances” provided nothing but underlying inexpensive imports that made those Western colonial powers thrive, reveling in wealth that would make even Scrooge McDuck blush.

The notion of simply examining the dollars spent on foreign goods as a toxic balance of payments deficit is colossally inaccurate. There is an offset that is missing: the value of the goods received. And when that trade deficit is only measured in the value of tangible goods, when the bulk of our international revenues (and 80% of our non-governmental jobs) are generated from our service sector, the distortion is magnified exponentially. In short, Donald Trump’s obsessive-compulsive belief in the glory of massive tariffs is one more massively big lie from the Father of Toxic Mendacity.

Trump had to dig into the ash-heap of economic outliers, based on an online search by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, for a potentially “credible author” on the subject of the benefits of major tariffs. That bizarre and somewhat random search produced Peter Navarro (pictured above), a Harvard-educated conspiracy theory spouting economist who has been the President’s basis for his own misplaced belief in tariffs. Jailed for contempt, derided by most of the primary economists in the nation, Navarro is and was Trump’s slender thread to justify that massive deployment of tariffs would produce major government revenues to reduce the deficit, fix that magical term “trade deficit” and reshore traditional levels of manufacturing to our rust belt and beyond. All lies. And still, Trump tells us that those nations providing us with inexpensive goods, which we could never manufacture here at anything near an affordable price, as “ripping us off for decades.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and as the nation’s economy unravels to a level that may never be restored, I wish we had educated people running our nation because: “Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat its mistakes.”