One thing Still-President Trump got absolutely right

There are many Americans [but surely not 50%! Ed.] who absolutely refuse to give Still-President Trump credit for a single thing that he did or tried to do to Make America Great Again. If he walked across the pool at his Florida estate they'd say he doesn't know how to swim! It's a pity that more Americans, especially the anti-Trumpers, didn't read The Expendables, by Jeff Rubin (PenguinRandomHouse 2020).

Ed. says that maybe the book didn't make a big splash in the Excited States of America because Jeff Rubin is a Canadian, and Americans just don't listen to Canadians. But Mr Rubin is not your typical Canuck milquetoast liberal. He is a world-leading expert on trade and energy, and former chief economist and chief strategist at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce World Markets, and recently served as a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. 

So Mr Rubin knows a thing or three about economics, and about the adverse effects of globalism and globalization, as promoted by George Soros and all the other Volvo liberals behind the campaign to turf President Trump out of office. They think globalism is wonderful, and why wouldn't they... it made them rich! But Jeff Rubin begs to differ.

The subtitle of The Expendables says it all. It reads: How the middle class got screwed by globalization. Our Agent 17, a member of said middle class, complained to me years ago (BT) that "China is eating our lunch." He was right. And the liberals made that happen! 

Through the World Trade Organization and trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership -- all endorsed and promoted by the Prez and Mr and Mrs Clinton -- tariffs were lowered to the point of being non-existent, and millions of well-paying manufacturing jobs were off-shored to places like Mexico ("that great sucking sound"), Vietnam, Bangladesh and, of course, China.

What happened? The owners of multinational corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Walmart, etc etc, got rich beyond the dreams of avarice, while the American (and Canadian and OECD) middle class actually shrank. 

But, the liberals say, the poor people -- below middle class -- became better off. Not true, says Mr Rubin. More people than ever are working in McJobs and the gig economy, rather than steady well-paying jobs in industry. And because wages have been stagnant while profits grow, their standard of living has actually declined, as witness the growing numbers of those "experiencing homelessness" -- living in cars and RVs even in supposedly prosperous areas like Silicon Valley.  

What Donald Trump did right, but gets little or no credit for, was to put the brakes on globalization, by getting the US of A out of rotten trade deals like NAFTA and the Obama-sponsored TPP. He also lowered taxes to encourage the multinationals to bring their manufacturing plants back to America, while at the same time raising tariffs to make it less profitable to import cheap manufactured goods from countries which are America's enemies.

Is it any wonder that the business interests for whom Sleepy Joe Biden fronts wanted to put Mr Trump out of office? The President was throwing a monkey-wrench into the machinery of  globalization. He was upsetting the plan of  Soros & Co. to make America second-rate, economically as well as politically. He was trying to Make America Great Again! 

In closing let me quote one short passage from The Expendables. 

History warns us that when monopolistic control falls into the hands of the few (who make massive fortunes as a result), someone is getting scrwed.

Some commentators have suggested that the CEOs of today's tech giants -- Apple's Tim Cook, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos, to name a few -- are the robber barons of our age. Their modern-day uniform of jeans and T-shirts may not scream "money" the way the three-piece suits and top hats of Rockefeller and his cohort did, but their enormous wealth dwarfs the riches of their nineteenth-century predecessors....

All of these CEOs are good at what they do. And what they do best is manipulate public governance in ways that the early twentieth-century global oil industry could only dream of. In the United States, where most of them are based, they have supported the establishment wing of the Democratic Party -- the same wing that was in power for eight years under President Obama [and Vice-President Biden. Walt] 

They've been outspoken on climate change, racial tolerance, gender equity, and all of the other hot button issues of American liberalism. But at the same time, the efforts to prove their liberal bona fides have helped protect this group from something they care far more deeply about: government regulation of the monopolies that have made them all multibillionaires.

"Gee, Walt," I hear some of you say, "Why didn't you tell us this before we voted?" Unfortunately I didn't start reading The Expendables until yesterday. But it's not like others weren't warning that the good works of the Trump presidency would be undone by the Democrats, once the likes of Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and the Squad get their hands on the levers of power.

Old Joe Biden himself promised that he would take care of the Obama administration's unfinished business, reverse the tax cuts, put America back in the Paris Accord and other globalist institutions, and generally turn back the clock to 2008. If you weren't paying attention and voted for him, you're about to learn, the hard way, why changing leaders and policies in the middle of an economic crisis was a baaaaad idea.