Thursday, July 21, 2022

Like "Free Trade?" How About When You're Starving?

SOME of us have been suspicious of  "free trade" for decades.

Others are just waking up to it.  Take potash, for example.

...Why is there a fertilizer shortage, you ask?  Because the United States imports 93 percent of our potash, a key nutrient used in making fertilizer, while Russia and Belarus are responsible for 40 percent of the global potash supply.

Naturally, the folks who decided to make us dependent on fertilizer imports are the same people who decided to blockade Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. That should tell you everything you need to know about our ruling class....

That's just the Stupid Government and Bill Gates part.

...Yet conservatives also deserve credit for this catastrophe. They’re the ones who are constantly going on about the blessings of capitalism and free trade. 

To be fair, a trained economist could probably tell you how we save eight cents per ton by making our Illuminati Burgers out of soy grown with fake Russian dung—assuming stable global markets, of course. But, as everyone without an economics degree knows, global markets aren’t stable. 

To you and me, it’s obviously a bad idea to become dependent on fertilizer imports. It’s obviously a bad idea to become dependent on any import that your people literally can’t live without. Obviously, it’s an especially bad idea when that industry is dominated by a hostile power. Obviously. To you and me, this is all clear as day. But that’s because we’ve never studied economics....

Studied economics like the Free Trade Geeks in Americans for Prosperity, or the Chamber of Commerce.  (Note well:  they are still eating well!!)

So what do we really have here?

 ...For decades, the elites of both parties been advocating for both “free trade” and “wars of democracy.”  We became more dependent on the nations we intended to invade. We fed the crocodile, hoping it wouldn't eat us next. Honestly, the Gateses and the Kochs and the Clintons and the Bushes might as well have walked around Indiana setting wheat fields on fire, for all the good they did us.

This is why I say all conspiracy theories are nonsense. There’s no secret cabal of the rich and powerful controlling human affairs. There is a cabal, of course, and they do control human affairs. But it’s not a secret. They go on TV and brag about it.

We invent these fantasies about an omniscient, omnipotent elite because the truth is so much more terrible: our rulers have no earthly idea what they’re doing....

In a way, that's a good thing;  they are so f***ing incompetent that they will never know who has the weapons that will take them out.

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