UNEMPLOYMENT: NOW, THAT'S SUSTAINABLE!
by Darren Weeks
October 18, 2009
NewsWithViews.com
Every time the media reports the unemployment numbers, it reminds me of George Orwell’s book, 1984. In the legendary book, a governmental organization referred to as the “Ministry of Truth” would report through the telescreens that the price of chocolate was going down. Winston Smith, the lead character of the book, knew good and well that the price of chocolate was not going down but was actually going up. We are certainly living in Orwell’s world! The difference between ours and the fictional world of Orwell, is that we are not being propagandized about chocolate, but rather unemployment statistics. The controlled news media always attempts to “butter up” the bad numbers, by putting a positive spin on the fact that we are losing our jobs, month after month.
The truth of the matter is that America is in deep, deep trouble and all the gutless globalist lapdogs in the media can do is lie to the people, trying to convince them that we are not in a depression — it’s only a “recession” — and it will soon be over. The deception is intended to get the American people, true to the failed Keynesian economic model, to spend money they don’t have, in a hopeless attempt to apply the defibrillation paddles to the dying patient which is the American economy. They will never tell you the patient is dying. They will never tell you why the patient is dying.
Furthermore, I have to laugh when I read statements like those of Don Miller from Money Morning when he said in a recent column about the horrendous September unemployment numbers,
“The latest data suggest the odds are increasing that the economy may be suffering through its second ‘jobless recovery’ in eight years.” [1]
I have news for Don and all of people in the media and elsewhere who still have their heads in the sand about what is really going on in America. Listen up! Hear me! There isn’t going to be a recovery! You cannot have a recovery without jobs! And you are never going to see our jobs return without a reversal of the policies of globalization which put America into this economic mess.
It isn’t difficult to see the devastation that the policies which gave us the “global economy” have wrought upon America and her people. American companies cut 371,000 jobs in July.[2] [3] Not surprisingly, August wasn’t much better. Mike Larsen at Money and Markets puts it this way,
“In the week ending August 29: 570,000 Americans filed for first-time jobless benefits. The number of Americans who had previously filed and still remain on the jobless rolls was 6.234 million.
“While those numbers are down somewhat from their March highs, they’re far, far above what would be considered normal. The average reading for initial claims over the past 42 years is just under 360,000.
“Then there’s this week’s report from ADP Employer Services. It showed the economy shedding another 298,000 jobs in August. While that was down from 360,000 a month earlier, it also marked the 19th straight month we’ve lost jobs as a nation. The cumulative tally: Almost 6.9 million jobs down the drain!”
September’s numbers are not much better. Reuters news service recently reported that U.S. employers cut another 260,000 jobs last month. [4] Hence, building on Larsen’s numbers, we’ve now gone 20 straight months with a hemorrhaging U.S. job market and there’s no end in sight.
These are astronomical numbers! Add this figure to the already overwhelming number of job losses that we’ve seen since the signing of the NAFTA agreement in 1993, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or an economist, for that matter) to see the effects of globalization upon our country. Yet, do we see any sign of reversal of those same policies? Quite the contrary.
In fact, anyone arguing for a common sense rescission of WTO agreements, a return of our military to our own soil, and an end to the flood of migrant workers coming to this country, is referred to with such disdainful pejoratives as “isolationist,” “protectionist,” and even “xenophobic.”
A perfect example of the mindset of out-of-touch elitism that has permeated globalist circles can be seen in the Foreign Affairs article titled, The Outsourcing Bogeyman by Daniel Drezner, assistant political science professor at the University of Chicago. Drezner pontificated in his May 2004 article,
“Should Americans be concerned about the economic effects of outsourcing? Not particularly. … The creation of new jobs overseas will eventually lead to more jobs and higher incomes in the United States. Because the economy — and especially job growth — is sluggish at the moment, commentators are attempting to draw a connection between offshore outsourcing and high unemployment. But believing that offshore outsourcing causes unemployment is the economic equivalent of believing the sun revolves around the earth: intuitively compelling but clearly wrong.” [5]
What elitist arrogance! And what an insult to the intelligence of the average, every day American workers — who, by the hundreds of thousands, have watched their factories close and their jobs disappear to foreign countries in the post-NAFTA economy! I would like to say to Mr. Drezner that denial is not a river in Egypt. Why don’t you spend some of your millions and take a trip to Motown and tell your philosophy to the unemployed auto workers there? Why don’t you come down from your ivory tower to Main Street America where the armed guards are posted at the grocery stores and where tent cities permeate the landscape?
Mr. Drezner concludes,
“Until robust job growth returns, the debate over outsourcing will not go away — the political temptation to scapegoat foreigners is simply too great.
“The refrain of ‘this time, it’s different’ is not new in the debate over free trade. In the 1980’s, the Japanese variety of capitalism — with its omniscient industrial policy and high nontariff barriers — was supposed to supplant the U.S. system. Fifteen years later, that prediction sounds absurd. During the 1990’s, the passage of NAFTA and the Uruguay Round of trade talks were supposed to create a ‘giant sucking sound’ as jobs left the United States. Contrary to such fears, tens of millions of new jobs were created. Once the economy improves, the political hysteria over outsourcing will also disappear.” [6]
Tens of millions of new jobs were created since NAFTA? Where are they, Mr. Drezner? Perhaps in government think tanks and academic egg heads who’ve never gotten their carefully-manicured hands dirty because they’ve never done a real day’s work in their entire lives?
Let’s talk for a moment about that “giant sucking sound” that Ross Perot predicted and that globalist/elitist Drezner likes to discount. Several months ago, your writer personally pulled the official NAFTA trade deficit numbers directly off the U.S. Census Bureau web site. These are the official numbers, according to the governments own statisticians.
In the years preceding the signing of the NAFTA agreement, the U.S. trade deficit hovered around even with Mexico give or take a billion or two. In 1991, the U.S. enjoyed a $2.1 billion trade surplus, meaning we exported more dollars worth of goods to Mexico than we imported. In 1992, that number was over $5.3 billion. In 1993, the year NAFTA was signed, American workers enjoyed a $1.6 billion trade surplus. The following year, the effects of NAFTA hadn’t yet hit the American economy. The U.S. still experienced a $1.3 billion surplus. However, that was the last year for any surplus.
By 1995, just two years after the passage of NAFTA, the U.S. economy began feeling the effects in a major way. We went from having a $1.3 billion trade surplus in 1994, to having a $15.8 billion trade deficit the following year, and the figure has climbed almost without exception every year. By 2007, the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico was a staggering $74.6 billion. It’s important to note that NAFTA is only one trade agreement. There are several such agreements that our government has made with impoverished countries, including the Central American Free Trade Agreement, passed by the U.S. Senate on June 30, 2005 and signed by George W. Bush on August 2nd of the same year.
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As I pointed out in my May 9, 2005 blog entry, CAFTA: Opening foreign markets? What markets?, nearly every one of the countries covered by the CAFTA-DR agreement are highly impoverished, according to the CIA World Fact Book. Here’s the brief rundown:
• Guatemala — Over 75% of the population lives below the poverty line
• Honduras — “one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere”
• El Salvador — “GDP per capita is roughly half that of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile... With the adoption of the US dollar as its currency, El Salvador has lost control over monetary policy and must concentrate on maintaining a disciplined fiscal policy.”
• Nicaragua — “Nicaragua, one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries, faces low per capita income, massive unemployment, and huge external debt... Nicaragua qualified in early 2004 for some $4 billion in foreign debt reduction under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative.” Half the population lives beneath the poverty line.
• Costa Rica — Fairs better than the rest, the wealthiest of these countries. The only Central American country where citizens are not leaving in search of opportunities.
• Dominican Republic — 1 out of every 4 live in poverty.
As I asked back in 2005, I again press for an answer: Given the dire condition of these nations’ economies, how could “President” George W. Bush make the case that having a free trade agreement with these impoverished Central American countries be in the best interest of American citizens and workers? How could American exporters — what’s left of them — expect to gain from a market where the people are too impoverished to buy? The truth of the matter is that haven’t, and they won’t.
Mr. Drezner’s chief problem, along with other Establishment elitists like him, is that he has selective statistics. Those he would call “protectionists” also have statistics. The real difference is that while the statistics produced by Drezner’s ilk is produced in the academic meat grinder to be vomited out in globalist publications, ours is backed by indisputable reality — knowing that the average American doesn’t need academic, media, or government statisticians telling them how good they have it. The numbers the American people look at are their bank accounts, their credit scores, their mortgage payments, their heating and grocery bills, and the price of gas. Increasingly, despite Mr. Drezner’s high rhetoric, Americans have been looking at the digits on their unemployment checks.
The only logical conclusion is that international trade agreements are not designed to benefit the United States, its people, its workers, or its future. They are designed to benefit the poorest countries, at the expense of the American people, leveling the “playing field”, lowering the American standard of living down to the “sustainable” level of third-world status. In other words, unemployment in America, the loss of our jobs, the shrinking of the American way of life, the eradication of our freedom to travel, the elimination of the middle class is socially and environmentally “sustainable.” The wealth of the American people is to be redistributed to the poorest nations, in accordance with chapter 3 of Agenda 21. Our consumption patterns have to be changed in accordance with chapter 4 of Agenda 21. We’ve been sold out by globalist scum, and nothing is ever going to change unless the people understand that this is a part of a deliberate agenda. It isn’t incompetence on the part of our “elected” officials. It isn’t a recession. It isn’t a bad economic downturn. It’s the effects of globalism. Period! We are reaping the natural results of policies that are designed to bankrupt our country.
I hear people say, all of the time, regarding the economy, “it will come back.” Sorry to burst your bubble, but no it won’t! It will never come back until the WTO trade agreements which put us into this mess are rescinded. That won’t happen until the appropriate pressure is applied to Washington by the people and by our state lawmakers who must be pressured to go to Washington and demand the changes.
And if you people who call yourselves “Democrats,” think your buddy Obama is any better than Bush was, then I ask why hasn’t he rescinded these treaties which have obviously been so detrimental to our country? Why haven’t the unions — which have seen their memberships and dues decline — demanded a revoking of the international trade agreements that have brought America to its knees? Keep in mind, it was the unions which helped put Clinton in office, who then stabbed the American worker in the back by promoting NAFTA after promising to oppose it. It was Bill Clinton who established the President’s Council on Sustainable Development to kick start Agenda 21 implementation in the United States after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Agenda 21 implementation mandates the redistribution of wealth from developed to developing countries. It is the reason why your jobs have left. It is Bill’s wife, Hillary Clinton, who currently serves as head of the U.S. State Department, which is the chief agency of the United States government that implements the UN agenda of “sustainability” in America.
When will the American people ever realize that there is no difference between parties? We are not red states, blue states, conservatives, liberals, Republicans, or Democrats. We are Americans. It is about time we dispelled with the labels that the social engineers have developed to divide us — and that we’ve so freely embraced for ourselves — and began to act like true countrymen.
An ancient Roman philosopher named Cicero once said, “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.”
As I write these words, Ireland has just voted for a second time on the Lisbon Treaty, the Constitution of the European Union. Unlike the first time where they voted it down last year, they just approved it by a margin of 67 to 33 percent. Their government’s fear campaign of economic doom and gloom was the chief reason for the voters who favored it at the polls, according to exit polls. In other words, they were willing to hand the sovereignty of their country over to a regional governing body on the promise of economic prosperity.
They bought the same globalist lie for which America fell when we accepted GATT, NAFTA, CAFTA and many other foreign trade entanglements. If Poland and the Czech Republic follow Ireland — and they are expected to do so — we can look forward to a new European presidency and Secretary of State to be formed. Ireland will eventually cease to exist, as the sovereignty of all of the 27 member countries of the EU will be gradually chipped away, until there is nothing left.
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As Americans tail gate, drink beer, and watch their football games, they don’t have time to worry about the fate of the Irish, the Poles, or the Czechs. But they would be do well to learn the lessons of Europe. As the globalist thieves have taken Ireland, so too they come for the west.
Footnotes:
1
- Unemployment
Figures Increase Odds of Jobless Recovery, Money Morning, October
5, 2009
2 - U.S.
jobs, services data raise recovery worries, Reuters, August 5,
2009
3 - US
companies axe 371,000 jobs in July, Times Online, August 5, 2009
4 - U.S.
Sept non-farm payrolls plunge 263,000, Reuters, October 2, 2009
5 - The
Outsourcing Bogeyman, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004
6 - Ibid
� 2009 - Darren Weeks - All Rights Reserved
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Darren Weeks is a husband, a father, and a lover of America. A graduate of the Specs Howard School of Broadcast Arts in Southfield, Michigan, he has worked professionally with television news operations for over 16 years.
It was at his job, when flipping through satellite channels that he discovered patriot broadcasting, and his subsequent awakening ensued.
Weeks hosts Govern America every Saturday morning from 8 AM to 11 AM Eastern Time on the Republic Broadcasting Network.
E-Mail: darren@darrenweeks.net
Web site: www.governamerica.com
