Tag Archives: empire

What Would Truly Make America Great Again?

Donald Trump ran three presidential campaigns under the banner Make America Great Again (MAGA). He also promised to put “America First,” a reference to the 20^th century interwar movement that opposed further involvement in foreign wars. Instead, its adherents then and a large portion of Trump’s supporters now believe the wars America has fought have not served the interests of Americans and that the federal government should address those instead of “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

But therein lies the rub. Whether or not MAGA and America First are compatible largely depends upon how one defines “great.” And based upon the president’s actions thus far during his second term, his definition does not jibe with that of his America First supporters nor their 20^th century predecessors.

Trump’s supporters are sometimes criticized for romanticizing the 1950s, a period of relative peace and domestic prosperity. From the early 50s through the mid-1960s, life most approached what they consider the American ideal. Jobs were plentiful, including high paying manufacturing jobs, and most American households could live comfortably on one income.

They believe economic “globalization” ruined this idyllic lifestyle. Specifically, “free” trade agreements like NAFTA and allowing China to enter the WTO resulted in U.S. manufacturing being outsourced to cheaper labor markets abroad. This, they contend, has resulted in a dearth of high-paying jobs and the necessity for at least two people in the average household to work just to scrape by.

Thus, Trump’s first inaugural promised to reverse this “American carnage,” bring high paying manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., and restore the idyllic lifestyle Americans once enjoyed as their birthright.

It’s a compelling story and has certainly created a vast political movement. It’s also demonstrably false on every point.

First, American manufacturing has not been “hollowed out.” Manufacturing output is currently at an all-time high and any honest analysis of its virtually uninterrupted ascent over the past 100 years would conclude that the only interruptions to this success story have been the two financial crises – and accompanying monetary inflation – in 2008 and 2020. More on that later.

It is true that manufacturing jobs have declined precipitously, but that just means that the U.S. manufacturing sector is becoming more efficient, able to produce more output with fewer workers. The same thing has happened in farming over the past 100 years. In any case, the trend has nothing to do with NAFTA or China entering the WTO, as this chart clearly demonstrates:

If one were to take away the years at the bottom of that chart, no one claiming NAFTA or China entering the WTO were the driving factors in the decline of manufacturing jobs would be able to find those trade agreements on the chart. In fact, if one were to pull the timeframe out to include pre-WWII periods, it would show that WWII and the years immediately afterward were the highwater mark in terms of manufacturing jobs as a percentage of all jobs.

In other words, for most of American history, including most of the 1950s, 70% or more of American workers had non-manufacturing jobs. And somehow they were able to live middle class lifestyles.

It isn’t even true that increasing the number of manufacturing jobs would make the average American wealthier today. The median annual wage or salary for all full-time jobs in the U.S. economy is about $62,400. The median for full-time manufacturing jobs is about $45,960. Americans leaving the average job for a manufacturing job would not live a higher lifestyle. Quite the contrary.

Nevertheless, there does seem to be an “affordability” problem for average Americans. And the U.S. has been running large net trade deficits for decades, with no foreseeable end in sight. If Trump’s story doesn’t explain these problems, what does?

That brings us back to the definition of “greatness.”

Read the rest on Tom’s Substack…

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and host of the Tom Mullen Talks Freedom podcast.

Where will a U.S. defeat in Iran leave the world?

Leave a reply

Monday April 6 will mark the end of President Trump’s 10-day extension of the 5-day extension of his March 21 48-hour ultimatum to Iran to either agree to a peace deal or face destruction of its energy infrastructure. Trump claims productive “talks” are occurring between the adversaries; Iran denies them. It is increasingly clear that what Trump is calling “talks” are in reality his administration’s attempts to contact the Iranian government through intermediaries, primarily Pakistan.

The peace deal Trump is insisting on contains all the terms presented to Iran before the war, including complete cessation of uranium enrichment, surrender of all previously enriched uranium, curtailment of their missile program, cessation of sponsoring proxies (Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis), and cessation of any attempt to build a nuclear weapon.

Apart from the last item, the terms comprised an offer the Iranians couldn’t accept, rather than one they couldn’t refuse, and appeared to be merely a pretense for the U.S. and Israel to launch the war they planned regardless. That they attacked Iran while the latter was meeting internally to discuss the terms all but confirms that.

In addition to making clear they are no longer interested in negotiating with the United States, the Iranians have issued their own set of demands to end hostilities: cessation of attacks and a binding agreement(s) it will not be attacked again, reparations for the damages caused by the attacks, recognition of its control over the Strait of Hormuz, continuation of its non-military nuclear program.

Although these also seem like “an offer the U.S. can’t accept,” they are eminently reasonable demands outside of control of the strait. The Strait of Hormuz is only partially in Iran’s territorial waters, the southern half belonging to Oman. Iran has already expressed a willingness to consider joint custody of the strait and would likely also consider an international arrangement if its other demands were met.

Iran’s demands are reasonable. Washington’s demands are not. The latter would leave Iran utterly defenseless against Israel and the U.S., both of which have repeatedly demonstrated their predisposition to attack it.

Should Trump follow through on his threats to destroy Iran’s energy infrastructure and possibly its desalination plants on Monday, Iran has vowed to do likewise to the energy and desalination infrastructure of every GCC state hosting American military bases. And despite Trump’s claims that their missile capability has been “dramatically curtailed,” they have since demonstrated a robust capability in their missile attacks on Tel Aviv immediately following Trump’s address.

If Trump and Iran follow through on their threats, a significant portion of the world’s energy infrastructure will be destroyed. The civilian populations of Iran and the GCC states will be devastated. Tens of millions could die. And the rest of the world would undoubtedly plunge into a global economic depression that could kill tens of millions more.

Contrary to Trump’s claims that oil from the Strait of Hormuz is largely not imported into the U.S. and therefore of no concern to the U.S., Americans are already suffering from the effects of Iran’s closure of the strait. This is basic economics. When the world supply of oil decreases, the price paid worldwide increases. Regardless of whether the particular oil exported through the strait normally reaches the U.S., those who do import that oil will compete with U.S. importers for what the latter do import when supply is reduced or eliminated from the strait.

That is why American importers are currently paying double what they paid for a barrel of oil just three months ago. And that price will rise dramatically if the supply of oil from the region is indefinitely reduced due to destruction of the region’s energy infrastructure rather than merely interrupted by Iran’s blockade.

This would seem far too high a price to bring Iran to heel, but for anyone arguing it is “worth it” in the long run, there is a very important question one must answer: Will it actually bring Iran to heel?

Read the rest on Tom’s Substack…

The real problem with Biden and Trump

Leave a reply

Winds of uncertainty swirl inside the imperial beltway as prominent Democrats continue to call on President Biden to abandon his campaign for the presidency due to his now acknowledged cognitive issues. The Atlantic last week went so far as to call for Biden to resign as president, saying it would “give American democracy its best chance of surviving.”

The Democratic Party and the media (but I repeat myself) would have you believe Biden’s cognitive issues present America with two grave problems. One, that he is presently unable to fulfill his present duties as president; two, that he will be unable to defeat former President Donald Trump in November and “save democracy” from the candidate who could potentially get the most votes.

Trump supposedly presents a third problem, that being the “danger to democracy” he represents. This despite the fact that we’ve already lived through four years of Trump being president and “democracy,’ at least the way the empire defines it, is alive and well.

None of this is true. The first clue to its falsity is the media saying it. Since Trump first entered politics and at least since 2020, the national media has served as a perfect contraindicator for the truth and the narratives related to the 2024 election are no exception. Biden’s incompetence poses no danger to everyday Americans in the present. It will likely matter little for his chances to defeat Donald Trump in the November election, just as it mattered little in 2020.

And no, Donald Trump represents no danger to “democracy,” whatever the power elite actually means by that, nor to the republican form of government created by and guaranteed to every state in the union by the U.S. Constitution.

Make no mistake, Biden and Trump are a problem, but not for Americans. They are a problem for the empire. Ultimately, they represent the same problem for the empire, although it would have you believe otherwise.

To understand this, one must put aside civic fairy tales and acknowledge how the American political system really works. The fairy tale says the American system is “a democracy,” and the president is elected by a majority vote of the people and directs the federal apparatus according to the “will of the people.”

The Congress is also elected by a majority vote of the people in the states and districts therein and writes the laws the president executes and must abide in fulfilling his duties.

That is certainly what the Constitution says, but it is not how the American political system works. Nor has it worked that way for close to a century.

In reality, that system of government was replaced during what Garet Garrett called “The Revolution Was,” referring to the New Deal. The revolution consisted of Congress creating myriad federal agencies to “regulate” the economy and then delegating its legislative power to the unelected bureaucrats comprising those agencies.

At first, the bureaucrats took their direction from the president, drawing praise from both Hitler and Mussolini due to the system’s similarity to the fascism that had inspired it. But over time, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. The bureaucrats began telling the president what they were going to do instead of the other way around.

Yes, the elected president may still make the final decision on this or that policy. But he makes that decision between two choices presented by the bureaucrats, their Choice A and their Choice B. This is why so little seems to change even when the incumbent party is swept out power in an electoral landslide. Thus, even after the Republican Revolution of 1996 or the election of supposed ubermonster Donald Trump in 2016, nothing really changed. The imperial machine kept grinding on as if there had been no election at all.

After WWII, foreign policy was reconstructed in similar fashion. A national security state was created wherein permanently employed bureaucrats in the State Department, Pentagon, and “intelligence community” assumed the power to direct foreign policy in the same way the administrative state runs domestic policy. Again, the president may make the final decision but it’s usually after being presented with a binary choice between two options amenable to the bureaucracy.

“Mr. President, do you want to bomb Syria or merely impose economic sanctions?”

All of this begs an obvious question: if the permanent bureaucracy is really running things, how do either Biden or Trump pose a problem?

Read the rest at Tom’s Substack…

Read the rest at Tom’s Patreon…

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

We Need to Really Gut the Military

Leave a reply

U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter told the Harvard Kennedy School Tuesday that Americans will be grappling with violent extremism for generations to come. If that feels like déjà vu, you’re not imagining things. Air Force Brig. Gen. Mark O. Schisslersaid the same thing – in 2006.

Schissler was expressing concern at the time over wavering public support for a war that had already lasted longer than WWII. His concern was warranted. The Republican Party had just suffered a shellacking in the mid-term elections, largely due to public dissatisfaction with “neoconservative” foreign policy. They would lose the White House two years later for largely the same reasons.

American voters may have believed they “threw the bums out,” as Carroll Quigley might put it, but the foreign policy never changed. The Obama administration may have used different tactics, but it’s been even more interventionist than Bush’s. It’s certainly intervened in more countries.

Bush and the 2000s Republicans were called neoconservatives, but they weren’t. Their way of seeing the world is classic conservatism, straight out of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes not only saw all individuals, but all nations, in a de facto state of war with each other, in the absence of some overwhelming external force “keeping them in awe.”

This was the inspiration for the British Empire, which sought to “civilize” the world by force of arms. It eventually bled itself dry, its biggest failures occurring on precisely the same ground the United States is bleeding on now.