There is no reason to celebrate anything this July 4th

Screw The 4th

2019-07-04 07:00 by Karl Denninger 
in Editorial , 70 references

[Comments enabled]

What America was founded on is no more.

Trump cannot "Make America Great Again" because there is nobody willing to actually do so -- including him personally.  His entire campaign on that point was and remains a fraud.

The Democrats are not only not any better, they're worse.  But even that doesn't matter.

The Constitution is a contract between a free people and a government.  It grants specific powers to the government for specific, defined reasons.  Outside of those specific, defined reasons and purposes within the Constitution no act of Congress or the Executive has validity because the federal government does not have that power.

There will be plenty of people who tell you otherwise, but that's false.  You cannot arrogate to yourself that which you do not first possess.

There's plenty of history in this nation, however, of Congress and the Executive doing exactly that, never mind predicating legislation on grounds that are false but even after being proved false said legislation is not repealed; it is instead doubled-down on and screws the people of this nation blind.

If you remember when NAFTA was sold to the American People we were explicitly told that Mexican labor rates would rise to near-parity with American ones within a decade and that the expansion of their consumer market would make the deal a win:win for everyone.  This was the predicate -- the necessary element -- that made NAFTA operational.

That was a lie.  Mexican labor rates are nowhere near parity with America today, and never rose anywhere near parity.  In fact they never rose materially at all, in real terms.  The same is true for China, Vietnam, India and the rest.  All of these so-called "free trade" deals were abject frauds that have destroyed wages for working-class people across America while grossly enriching the directors and officers of corporations, along with some shareholders.

Since the predicates; what you were sold as the reason to allow these "deals" to come into force -- was false the entire agreement is scrap, it was put in place without consent and you have every right to stop it by whatever means are necessary if the government will not throw it in the trash where it belongs, including sacking said government in its entirety.

While it is true that anyone can buy stock you can't outrun the destruction of your own finances this way; to do that you have to be an insider and running the place, which is an inherently tiny and exclusionary club.

Think this is limited to Mexico?  Wrong. Americans sit on their ass despite alleged software engineering being outsourced for civilian aircraft by Boeing to India at $9/hour!  How many $100,000+/year jobs did Boeing not hire people to do in America, by Americans, as a result?

H1bs are another example.  The current "rules" are a joke.  If it's true that H1bs are only for the "best and brightest" then slap a requirement on them that you must pay 200% of the prevailing US-based wage for someone in that job to get one approved and enforce it rigorously under criminal penalty for every single manager, officer and director of a company that violates that law.  Someone who's that good is worth the money.  The truth is that H1bs are all, statistically-speaking, used to drive down wages for Americans and impose crap working conditions because an H1b holder has zero portability since he or she has their visa tied to their employer.  They thus cannot negotiate for raises, for example, under threat of going to work for someone else!

Donald Trump, despite all his bull****, just folded again to the Chinese and continues to allow them to screw Americans out of our technological innovation while engaging in literal slavery to steal jobs.  That sob is more beholden to Xi and his beloved stock market than he is to Americans and yet fully half this nation cheers that traitorous jackass!

You, once again, as alleged "Americans", don't give a crap.  Show me one candidate among Democrats who intends to put Americans first.  There isn't one.  So who am I supposed to vote for?  Cthulhu -- again?

Never mind health care.  The entire system is a giant ****ing racket; on average it takes in 500% of what market-based prices would be, and in some cases much more.  Virtually all of the health care jobs added since 1970 never provide a single second of care to a single person at any time in their career; they're overhead and nearly all of them are unnecessary in a competitive system.  This entire section of our economy -- 20% of GDP -- is a gigantic scam, fraud and racketeering enterprise and exactly nobody in the political realm will take it on.  There are 100+ year old felony criminal laws that this segment of the economy violates daily and which can be applied now without a single act of Congress that would put a stop to all of this in a single afternoon.

Again, you sit on your ass as Americans while you're robbed of three trillion dollars a year, or approximately $25 per person, per day, every single day.

How about having your health intentionally destroyed with bad advice so as to ramp up the "need" for said "care"?

The government and "medical system" do that too.  They've lied for decades about vegetable oils and other processed foods.  In fact we just had a company go publicthat makes a "veggie burger" full of that garbage, some of which is questionable as to its safety.  Said company had its stock price scream higher by 500%!  May I remind you that "vegetable oils" were originally put forward by our government as an answer to war-time shortages of butter and other natural fats?  There was a fairly clean argument of necessity during the war but since that time it's been all about the money and damn your health to Hell.  We know, for example, that if you are Type II diabetic and stop eating carbs that in nearly every case your blood sugar will normalize and your need for medication will be greatly reduced or even eliminated.  Your pants will also fall off, a pleasant and desirable side effect.  Yet instead we pitch to you the ability to remain fat, diabetic and take meds that ultimately never actually work as they simply mask symptoms but are both expensive and allow the disease to progress, debilitate and kill you.  When you wind up needing insulin you will pay more than 10 times the price of the same drug, made in the same factory, and available over the counter in Canada.  All of this is done in the name of money and every bit of the collusion and price-fixing is a criminal felony.

Again, you sit on your ass America instead of rising and telling the government to cut that crap out or else.

The record shows that even in non-interlinked places, where global supply chains and stupidity are not in play (such as our power grid that could be crippled by as few as 1,000 uncorrelated individuals) a mere 3.5% of the population deciding it's had enough is sufficient to win.  And that's without violence of any sort -- simply take to the streets, boycott and protest on a national scale and it's over. Consider what would happen if ten million Americans descended on Washington DC and refused to leave, choking off all commerce and government activity with a throng of people that were there each and every day.  The government would have no choice but to fold; the alternative is that it literally starves.  That's the history on a global basis.

But in the US that critical mass is a much smaller number, simply because so much is interconnected.  While 3.5% is certainly enough and if non-violent trying to stop coordination of such a movement would risk a literal immediate shooting war if even 1/30th of that number as were a much larger percentage in 1776 it would also be over.  In fact I argue that it would take just 0.1% of the American population who decided on an uncoordinated basis that all of this bullcrap was going to stop now to permanently end it.  The government at both state and federal levels would have no choice.  330,000 dedicated Americans who were willing to put their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on the line would cripple the government's and private industry's ability to do anything about it.  There would be no option other than to comply with the Constitution; there is neither the manpower, will or prison space to do otherwise, nor, with the exception of a very few (like the President) are politicians and business leaders willing to live in a permanent bubble, not only for themselves but also for everyone who they care about in their direct and extended families, to provide even an illusion of so-called "security."

The fact is that America no longer deserves to exist.  That we cannot manage to muster even 3.5% of the people to engage in non-violent but forceful protest and mean it to put a stop to the wanton and outrageous admission of death into this nation by illegal invaders, the plunder of the people by the medical scam and the presentation of facially-ineligible candidates, never mind the blatant and outrageous monopolist garbage in offshoring and displacement riven through the entire tech industry and more argues that whatever drove the Founders in 1776 to devise the Great American Experiment has gone extinct.

There is no reason to celebrate anything this July 4th, and thus, there will be no flag on a pole at my home today -- or ever again -- for as long as what made this nation exceptional remains absent.

You choose.

I know what you'll choose.  It'll be a beer and some burgers.