Letter 2 America for April 3, 2018

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Dear America,

We seem to be at one of those pivotal forks in our historical road at which dispositive action must be taken to define us an our collective destiny.  In 1776, some revolutionaries wrote and published the Declaration of Independence.  In 1789, many of those same leaders wrote and saw to the ratification of our Constitution, which continues to define us as a nation today.  There were our entries into WWs I and II not to mention the Civil War from beginning to end.  What is impending now that requires such seminal action is the nature of our capitalist economic creed.  We are on the cusp of a new insistence of the great mass of Americans on a more equitable and durable form of common weal that will sustain us all without wide-spread poverty counterbalancing obscene wealth.  Our laws need change such as to favor the individual, productive worker rather than idle moguls, their executives and their scions.  And while that is what Donald Trump professes to be a force for achieving, he is nothing of the sort and his most recent acts on the international economic stage bear that out.

One of our president's motivations for the tariffs he is threatening and imposing is the "theft" of intellectual property by China in particular, which poses two seminal questions.  First, how does he define theft, and second, since the purported victims of these thefts are major corporations trying to do business in China for the most part, why should we ordinary people have to pay a price for such protection as tariffs that are precipitating retaliatory, reciprocal actions that will cost us money and jobs down here where the majority of us live.  As to the first question, American big businesses have puled for years about the fact that the Chinese government requires them to take on Chinese partners and disclose their proprietary secrets in order to do business in their country.  Those businesses comply in most cases and the result is that their innovations become a sort of community property in China, but overlooked is the fact that each of those American businesses could just say no.  The reason they don't is that China represents a market of 1.2 billion people and in American business, getting bigger is an end in itself for reasons that are too complex, and for the most part reprehensible to discuss in such a limited forum as this.  Thus, one of the functions of these tariffs is to protect American corporate greed and ambition to dominate the competition by growing faster than they do: a dubious undertaking at best.  And the consequence of the tariffs is that we will have to pay more for what we buy in an era in which business, which provides us with the jobs for which we are stubbornly underpaid, stands like a bastion of self-service against the financial progress of the working man and woman.  Wages continue to stagnate while wealth among the lucky few continues to burgeon, so why should be acquiesce in the trade war that our president is precipitating.  Why should we support those who withhold our prosperity for their own benefit by protecting them from Chinese intellectual predation when it will cost all of us money.

The second question is a bit more subtle.  Why should Americans expend precious resources to protect exportation, which often times enriches only the wealthy few, such as in the case of the almond business.  Most of the almonds produced in this country are produced in Southern California, and in a sort of invitation for us to rethink our economic creed, almonds are going to be the object of a new Chinese tariff.  But as it happens, almond growing requires a tremendous amount of water, which is scarce in Southern California.  Thus, a major portion of the almond market being Chinese consumption, we are wantonly expending a crucial resource needed by millions of American consumers so that a wealthy few can export what they produce to another country rather than focusing on producing something that we can use here so as not to squander precious resources in the quest for unnatural profit from abroad.

Whether or not there are other ways to rein in the Chinese is only a secondary consideration.  The primary consideration is the measure of the ostensible gain that we can hope will inure to us as Americans rather than to us as businesses.  We are not the American corporations.  We are the American people. 

Your friend,

Mike

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This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on April 3, 2018 1:09 PM.

Letter 2 America for March 31, 2018 was the previous entry in this blog.

Letter 2 America for April 11, 2018 is the next entry in this blog.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on April 3, 2018 1:09 PM.

Letter 2 America for March 31, 2018 was the previous entry in this blog.

Letter 2 America for April 11, 2018 is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.