"Free Trade" Is a Pure Corporate Con-job!

Stripped of lofty-sounding abstractions such as comparative advantage, trade boils down to four Darwinian goals:

1. Find foreign markets to absorb excess production, i.e. where excess production can be dumped.

2. Extract foreign resources at low prices.

3. Deny geopolitical rivals access to these resources.

4. Open foreign markets to domestic capital and credit so domestic capital can buy up all the productive assets and resources, a dynamic I explained last week in Forget “Free Trade”–It’s All About Capital Flows.

All the blather about “free trade” is window dressing and propaganda. Nobody believes in risking completely free trade; to do so would be to open the doors to foreign domination of key resources, assets and markets.

Trade is all about securing advantages in a Darwinian struggle to achieve or maintain dominance. As I pointed out back in 2005, the savings accrued by consumers due to opening trade with China were estimated at $100 billion over 27 years (1978 to 2005), while corporate profits expanded by trillions of dollars.

China Trade Surplus: Gusher Profits for U.S. Corporations (August 13, 2005)

In other words, consumers got a nickel of savings while corporations banked a dollar of pure profit as sticker prices barely budged while input costs plummeted. Corporations pocketed the difference, not consumers.

As longtime correspondent Chad D. noted in response to my essay on capital flows, restricting trade may be one of the few ways smaller nations have to avoid their resources and assets being swallowed up by mobile capital flowing out of nations with virtually unlimited credit (the US, the EU, China and Japan).

 After this I read more of “A Brief History of Time”.   I started in chapter four where I left off and I mused over the material.  Einstein thinks like me in that “God doesn’t play dice”.  God doesn’t leave things to chance.  Actually the main thing behind the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is that electrons are just too small for us to correctly measure them.  Chapter five was where the reading really got tough.  They began talking about quarks and “Up” and “Down” and “Spin”.  I still don’t understand “Spin”.  They spoke of quarks as coming in colors when they are too small to register color.  Chapter Six was “Black Holes” and I’m going to have to go more in depth there. 

I had Norman Goldman on today.  This is Monday March 12, 2018 after dinner.  Norman talked about voluntary contract rescission.  This is where both parties could agree not to go ahead with a contract.  Stormy Daniels wants to rescind her contract with Donald Trump and his attornies so is endeavoring to give back the hush money she paid to that guy, and then would be free to tell her story on Sixty Minutes.  Sixty Minutes has already taped the interview and apparently were going to show it last Sunday but didn’t.  Instead they had a thing on immigration and the border patrol.  It was a revealing look at how much mistreatment occurs with people being shipped in hot trucks to this country often forced to conceal drugs in their body cavities.  The drug cartels are apparently never stronger and no matter how many checkpoints they set up north of the border to stop them, they can only stop a small handful of the convoys.  Then they had a thing on the woman head of the department of Education.  She is against all of the basic functions of the Dept of Education and rationalizes why poor school districts should be denied government funding.  She didn’t say so but it appears to be a case of survival of the fittest.

Some people go out of their way to emphasize the Jewishness of Jesus.  For instance he was named and circumcised on the eighth day like a Jew.  He was “redeemed” as the first born with two turtle doves as the Law prescribes.  Jesus said “I came not to abolish but to fulfill the Law”.   Disciples and other teachers called him “Rabi” and some say “the hem of his garment” refers to a special robe that Jewish rabbis wore.   They go so far as to quote the scripture ‘He keeps all of his bones” in the chapter in John when it refers to his crucifixion because his legs weren’t broken like the other two thieves.  He was buried on the same day as his death as the Jewish law prescribes.  He attended the Jewish feasts.   Some say that he was a Nazarite, which meant that he drank no wine, didn’t cut his hair or his beard, only ate fish and not other meats, and also couldn’t touch a dead body.  As such he wasn’t that “Revolutionary” at all.  He also seemed to follow Romans 13 meaning he thought the Roman powers were appointed by God.  And as such he paid them all due deference.  

I watched Days of our Lives.  Eve called off the marriage with Brady because Victor tipped her off the marriage was only so Brady could get control of her money.  Victor loves to make a fool out of Brady every chance he gets.  Clearly Sonny is going to remain CEO of Titan.  Rather than grovel to Eve, which he should have known would do absolutely no good.  You can’t con a con like Eve.  Instead I would have engaged in blame shifting and blamed Victor even though he wasn’t there.  It’s like Victor was setting me up only to make a fool of me.

 I watched the thing on OJ Simpson on FOX.  This is 24 year old news.  It was a disgusting thing to watch.  I guess it could be summed up as “You only kill the ones you love”.  Nicole had the misfortune to be loved more than any of the other women OJ dated including Paula Barbiari.  In 1992 Nicole got a divorce from OJ but that didn’t stop his stalking.  For a period of eight or nine months they didn’t even see each other.  But then at Nicole’s instigation they got back together.  They talked at length of the Newyears Eve bashing of 1989.  They talked of OJ hitting Nicole’s car with a baseball bat in 1986, basically just to show her who was boss.  OJ seemed to be able to dissotiate his anger from his other human interactions.  He was thus able to say “Oh that was no big thing” as though normal people murdered their ex wives and lovers every day.