State ideology and the corporate creed have converged. Between them, they suborn the individual in one way or another ~ilana

 Between the State and the Corporation, Homo sapiens has been reduced to a Hobbesian, hedonistic version of homo economicus and a sad iteration of homo solitarius ~ilana

The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy is the first in a series of volumes, to form part of “The Paleolibertarian Guide” (TPG) compendium.

“Deep Tech,” my preferred term for the high-tech sector, denotes how deeply the head honchos of high-tech have penetrated and poisoned the American public and private sectors. As a coinage, Deep Tech is superior to Big Tech. Drawn from the term “Deep State,” the term “Deep Tech” better captures Big Tech’s overarching, enervating and tentacular reach into state and civil society.

“Deep State,” of course, is no conspiracy. Before the Left turned the term against the Right; it had long since been deployed on the Left and by libertarians to denote the state within a state, operating, for the most, extra-constitutionally. To all intents and purposes, Deep Tech has become almost as powerful as the State in molding the Little Guy into a right-thinking Global Citizen.

In The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy, I make the case that state ideology and the corporate creed have converged. Between them, they suborn the individual in one way or another. The State no longer merely silhouettes civil and commercial society; but is absorbing it. What’s more, corporate culture, my purview in this volume, has been thoroughly co-opted by the State. Willingly so.

It has become the reflexive habit of corporations, not necessarily malevolently, to work together as well as to collude with government, to snuff out all lineaments of subversion in labor. After all, the progressive ideology is a gospel which these industry leaders never cease to proclaim and act upon. And if you fail to conform to it; they’ll fire you, isolate you, expose you, silence you, cancel you for good. These observations apply across party-lines.

“The Aberrant Economy” in this work denotes the attitude of the multinationals toward economic growth. This attitude is today rooted not in healthy, community-based practices stateside and abroad, but in some aberrant economic gigantism. The derogatory diagnosis of economic elephantiasis undergirded by hubris, greed, and devout woke religiosity is warranted, I believe. Acromegaly is a physical deformity. In the human body it is caused by overproduction of certain compounds and is characterized by aberrant enlargement of the structure under discussion.

A diagnosis of economic acromegalia in Deep Tech is warranted ~ilana

The economic acromegalia or giantism diagnosed here in Deep Tech is one that manages to trample individual rights and other elementary decencies. Let us thus not confuse the metastatic multinational, motivated mostly by stratospheric wealth and a woke worldview—itself a gutter-like philosophy—with a business propelled by the good old-fashioned profit motive, whose growth is sustained by individuals and families tethered to corporeal communities, as opposed to colonies of imported laborers. Individuals, families, living in authentic, organic communities: These misty attachments are anathema to, and enemy of, the multinational’s clubby elites.

I underscore, as if in red ink, and deconstruct in detail how the awfulness of the COVID years, in particular, was underwritten by giant government, Big Pharma, and its latest malignant offshoot, the COVID Cartel—Disease X ad infinitum, if you will—in informal cahoots with social media. Again, a state within a state, operating, for the most, extra-constitutionally.

Just how control is achieved—more reflexively than conspiratorially—I demonstrate by taking the reader through the COVID years, when “Agency And State Capture” were consolidated. I show how and why the Grand Old Party, Republicans, will always be missing in action on matters of individual and constitutional rights. On all matters, actually:

The overton window alludes to a range of ideas once considered unthinkable, but now normalized. With their flaccid, crushingly stupid responses to most situations—Republicans have helped to normalize tyranny ~ilana

And I touch on the deformed foundations of the American Third-Party run healthcare system, down to how Deep Pharma’s patent privileges subvert market-based profits and free market medicine. Fault Deep Pharma, I counsel, not China.

In fact, not mere jobs, but “the very stuff of life is outsourced” by High-Tech, which loathes a labor market. (Chapter 7.) After reading “Homeless In The Homeland” (Chapter 6), the most heartbreaking of the book’s chapters, the reader will understand not only how “High-Tech Compounds Homelessness,” but that “homelessness in the United States is both physical and metaphysical”:

When your home belongs to The World; it’s everybody’s home, and nobody’s home, not even yours, which means you could find yourself homeless ~ilana

Ultimately, the sundering of cherished natural and constitutional rights by entities whose market penetration and capitalization equal those of many countries combined is why a solution is urgent.

Free-traders such as myself contend that it is worse than corrosive for big, powerful business to usher in a mind-controlling creed which they enforce against the Little Guy—on pain of social and financial demise—so that his speech is confined to politically correct, do-or-die guiding lodestars, the kind that sap and leach away the individual’s native power. Such an immoral drive ought to have miscarried a long time ago. A solution is provided in Chapter 9, “Dispatching Deep Tech; Enforcing Natural Rights.”

In the “Epilogue: On Globalism & Giving,” I round up by juxtaposing global integration with regionalism and localism, and spotlighting the last inspirational capitalist heroes of international standing. I hope to leave the readers with thoughts about charity, grace and what distinguishes The Good Giver from the Showy Giver.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK

Analytical thinking precedes empiricism and is at the root of solid thought as well as good science ~ilana

The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy, as mentioned, is the first in a series of volumes, to form part of The Paleolibertarian Guide (TPG) compendium. The TPG’s polemical impetus is analytical in nature. The framework of this and future works in the series will systematically demonstrate that analytical thinking precedes empiricism and is at the root of solid thought as well as good science—and liberty itself.

To wit, certain propositions in life need no “empirical evidence” for their validation. If anything, the constant insistence on scientism is in itself evidence of a deep corruption of reason. While solid empirical data are never to be dismissed, these are supplemental to a solid philosophy of science.

Derived from the Aristotelian method, the method I follow, Austrian-School thinking, is based in the laws of reason. To the extent that research contradicts reason, to that extent research is rubbish. The idea that science without the philosophy of science is nonsense comes alive for readers in Chapter 2: “COVID’s Cartel Of Cretins,” where, vivid and fun examples of a priori truths are provided.

THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON of this volume and those to follow is how to repatriate thinking outsourced to the expert class. For, these days, the simplest of logical deductions often appear to evade the ordinary man or woman.

The cognitive class, a managerial malignancy now glommed onto the Managerial State, will often cloak itself in the raiment of “science” and is instrumental in generating consensus. The insidious Expert Class that shapes and manages perceptions about public affairs I see as an extension of James Burnham’s Managerial State.

New Yorker James Burnham (1905-1987) began his intellectual odyssey as a Trotskyist before abjuring Marxism altogether and becoming a passionate anticommunist. He coined the phrase “managerial revolution,” which was extremely influential in the 1940s, and which served as the title of his bestselling book, one that had a marked impact on Orwell’s philosophy.

Lilliputian Man now finds himself pinned down like a butterfly, incapable or unwilling to derive and arrive at the truth without outsourcing his thinking to some authority or another. Restore we must the ancient philosophical notion whereby some things are simply axiomatically true (or false, for that matter), for it has profound ramifications for liberty.

A free-thinking people does not outsource thinking—the very business of life—to anyone.

©2024 ILANA MERCER
WND, February 29
Unz Review, February, 23
The New American, February, 24

****

When it was first released, The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy claimed a nice No. 1 spot in the category of Ethics & Morality.

I’m buoyed to report that today, March 3, The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy is No. 31 in the Kindle category of “Best Sellers in Philosophy Criticism.”

The post BOOK: The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The Woke Universe is about inverting reality—turning truth, morality, ethics, and aesthetics on their heads, and destroying every categorical imperative bequeathed to us by the ancients. The goal? To make The World safe for Ugly, Evil, Idle and Aberrant ~ILANA Mercer, 6/022

America has made a habit of exporting democracy at the point of the bayonet, be it by fomenting war or agitating for color-coded, plant-based revolutions, blessed and backed by the duopoly.

While not as lethal, cultural trends and products exported can be toxic, too. They, moreover, displace and contaminate indigenous culture. To wit, Wokeism is made in America, is entirely toxic, and, sadly, suffers no supply-chain disruptions in its spread abroad.

In case you’re not awake to it, woke is the current state-of-being in America. In particular, to be woke in America is to be anti-white and to be anti-white is to be woke. More so than “in” and “hip”—to be woke is existentially important; it will often determine whether one gets and keeps a job, a social media account, even a bank account.

Although Wokeism is a product of a distorted and deformed American marketplace of ideas—there is always a libertarian who sees a free and energetic agora worthy of defending and exporting, where there is only coercion and cruelty.

“Wokeism has passed a market test,” effuses Tyler Cowen, an economist writing for Bloomberg.com. “The woke movement could be the next great U.S. cultural export—and it is going to do many other countries some real good.”

Yes, Cowen, a libertarian, both explains and exculpates an increasingly entrenched, coercive system of pigment-based prejudice and persecution. “Wokeism,” he further enthuses, “is an idea that can be adapted to virtually every country: Identify a major form of oppression in a given region or nation, argue that people should be more sensitive to it, add some rhetorical flourishes, purge some wrongdoers (and a few innocents) and voila — you have created another woke movement.”

Welcome to the quintessential, collectivist, libertarian Jacobinism—Cowen’s. Omelets can’t be made without breaking the few proverbial eggs. Cowen, like most of his ilk—and against all evidence—also thinks that, “American culture is a healthy, democratizing, liberating influence,” so he wants “to extend it.”

This is of a piece with a libertarian fetishization of any and all market forces driven by the demos, especially economies of scale. No doubt, Cowen would argue in favor of all cultural trash mass produced, consumed and exported by America, because … “market forces.” For example, objectively speaking, rap and hip-hop are gutter culture—and not because of the lewd lyrics bemoaned by conservatives. Say the greatest composer ever, Johann Sebastian Bach, had set his divine cantatas to the naughty lyrics of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—would I decry these heavenly compositions as immoral? Of course not. The music would still be sublime. Rap, very simply, is crap—structurally, technically and tonally. While mistakenly classified as music, it is without musical merit. The rap, hip-hop genre is properly classified as street theater.

The hip-hopster or rapper hoots and gestures obscenely like a primate in heat or in estrus. The movements that accompany the atonal grunts are a simulation of animalistic sex, the call of the wild, if you will. The whole production is as repulsive as it is popular worldwide, courtesy of USA Exports.

Dismissing objective standards for subjective, popular tastes, the Cowens of the libertarian universe would celebrate the rap pollutant because people want it. The market has spoken; it’s popular. Fine. You can just see this economist waxing fat about trade in celebrity flatulence, but why Wokeism? Who loves it? What’s to love here?

Wokeism is not popular with ordinary Americans. Rattling off lists of pronouns hardly gratifies the Pleasure Principle as twerking seems to do. And the list of demands the culture’s kidnappers issue as proof of compliance is too convoluted to catch-on or to matter.

Cowen’s utilitarian case for the market-based legitimacy of world-wide Wokeism is a rickety scaffolding propped up by force: that of the Khmer Rouge-like MeToo, BlackLivesMatter, Antifa and corporate and political enforces combined.

While the hump-along that is hip-hop was voted-in democratically by the consuming masses; Wokeism was not.

Wokeism is a made-in-America deformed form of cultural, even financial, oppression masquerading as social justice. Wokeness is anti-white and anti-straight injustice, shored-up by political and corporate force and institutionalized. No doubt, America’s wokerati have plunged our now institutionally radicalized country into dreary, postmodern deconstructionism and it matters not that the demos is not exactly along for the ride.

Only in America, however, can there be a marketplace for libertarian exuberance about the pox of Wokeism.

WATCH “Exporting Wokeism” on Rumble And SUBSCRIBE

©2022 ILANA MERCER
WND, January 13
Townhall.com, January 13
Unz Review, January 13
The New American, January 14
CNSNews.com,  January 14
American Renaissance, January 14

The post Exporting Wokeism appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

This column is Part 2 of a 3-part series. Read Part 1, “Big Tech’s Financial Terrorism And Social Excommunication” and Part 3, “Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech (Part 3)

PAYPAL HOLDINGS, Inc, is an indispensable, American, global corporation, without whose services, financially transacting online is difficult. The company is worth $16.929 billion.

The worthless Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a meddlesome shakedown operation, in the mold of the Southern Poverty Law Center, that has taken it upon itself to decide who lives and who dies socially and financially. People like Pat Buchanan and Tucker Carlson the ADL deems to be mired in white supremacism. What next?

The ADL and PayPal have conspired to ferret out “bigotry and extremism” from the financial industry, by which they mean ban thought crimes.

“Racism—systemic or other—remains nothing but thought crime: impolite and impolitic thoughts, spoken, written or preached. Thought crimes are nobody’s business in free societies.”

In response to this particular collusion against thought crimes, Fox News personality Tucker Carlson has vowed to stay chipper. This is not sufficient a solution from so powerful a persona as Mr. Carlson.

Justice Clarence Thomas’ Solution

The requisite and fitting noblesse oblige comes from Justice Clarence Thomas.

As one of the few public intellectuals to grasp the gravity of social and financial excommunication by Deep Tech (to denote Big Tech’s enmeshment with The State), and for proposing a way to prohibit wicked social and financial ouster of innocents—Justice Thomas is my hero.

To blabber on about simply finding alternative outlets to Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, PayPal and other banking facilities is asinine verging on the criminal. Coming from political representatives, such advice ought to guarantee loss of face, even political expulsion.

The ordinary guy or girl (check) is told to go up against economic and political entities whose revenues exceed the GDP of quite a number of G20 nations combined.

“It changes nothing that these platforms are not the sole means for distributing speech or information,” inveighs Justice Thomas:

“A person could always choose to avoid the toll bridge or train and instead swim the Charles River or hike the Oregon Trail. But in assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power, what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today’s digital platforms, nothing is.”

I’d go further. It would hardly be hyperbole, in driving home Justice Thomas’s ingenious point, to put it thus:

With respect to financial de-platforming, barring someone from PayPal is like prohibiting a passenger from crossing the English Channel by high-speed train, via ferry and by means of 90 percent of airplanes. “Sure, some options remain for you to explore, you hapless loser. Go to it!”

Thomas has argued in favor of the “two legal doctrines” that “limit the right of a private company to exclude”:

The first doctrine, he explained, involves “common carriers,” such as railroads and telegraphs, which have historically been required “to serve all comers.” The second involves “places of public accommodation” or amusement, such as inns, restaurants, and theaters, which have generally been forbidden from denying service to certain categories of people. “The similarities between some digital platforms and common carriers or places of accommodation,” Thomas wrote, “may give legislators strong arguments for similarly regulating digital platforms.” (Via Reason.)

Republicans, especially the tenured motormouths on TV, have refused so much as to grapple with Justice Thomas’ outstanding assessment of Big Tech and his attendant legal recommendation.

Too complex?

**
Next Week: Part 3, “Mercer & Mystery Man’s Big-Tech Solutions.”

Part 1: “Big Tech’s Financial Terrorism And Social Excommunication” (The Problem).

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, August 12
Townhall.com, August 12
Unz Review, August 12
CNSNews.com  August 13
The New American, August 13
Quarterly Review, August 16

The post Justice Thomas’ Solution to Big Tech’s Social And Financial Excommunication (Part 2) appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

For the purpose of making your way adaptively and smartly in a society that is systemically anti-white, you need to understand what distinguishes Critical Race Theory from Marxism and quit the socialism/Marxism theoretical escapism, for once and for all.

Get this into your head: For conflict in society, Marxism fingers social class; critical race theory saddles whites. That means you, if you are white!

“If anything, for its failure to finger whites for all the ills of society, Marxism is viewed as incompatible with Critical Race Theory by CRT’s leading sophisticates.” (See “A White-Out Of Whites: Ignoring The Albino, Dhimmi Elephant In The Room,” May 27, 2021)

More on this do-or-die distinction in my latest YouTube video, “Distinguish Critical Race Theory From Marxism: Your Life Depends On It!”

David Vance and I further flesh out the Marxism vs. Critical Race Theory vexation in our weekly, Wednesday chat.

Whatever conservatives think of Marxism—and this writer follows the antiwar, anti-state, free market Austrian School of economics—Marxism in the origin is serious political economy; an intellectual treatise with gravitas. Critical Race Theory is a priori gibberish.

Scrap that: Befitting the boors who originated CRT anti-whitism—the theory is based on reasoning backwards: if B then A; if white then … complete that sentence with all manner of evil that comes to mind.

We also discuss uni-party politics, the futility of it, and the war on MAGA folks, all 74 million of us. And, prompted by David, I might have thrown in a quip about plagiarism made way back, in a witty joust between Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler—two giants of the West your kids should know, but don’t, because … critical race rot.

Watch:

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, June 3
Unz Review, June 3
CNSNews.com, June 4

The post Conversation: Distinguish Critical Race Theory From Marxism: Your Life Depends On It! appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Rush Limbaugh died on February the 17th. In the encomiums to conservatism’s radio king, mention was made of his 2009 address at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.

CPAC for short, or CPUKE before Trump.

At the time, I had surveyed the perennial, Republican Party dynamics surrounding the event. “Addicted to that Rush,” the March 6, 2009 column’s title, came not from Rush’s brief addiction to painkillers, following surgery, but from an eponymous hit by the band Mr. Big. (It, in turn, came from an earlier time when the American music scene produced not pornographers like Cardi B, but musicians like Paul Gilbert and Billy Sheehan.)

Nevertheless, that title alluded to one of Rush’s missed opportunities: Speaking against a war into which he was involuntarily drafted and by which he was almost destroyed: The War on Drugs.

Still, how petty does that war, in all its depredations, seem now?! How unimaginably remote do the issues Rush spoke to, in 2009, seem in light of a country that has come a cropper in the course of one year, due to an unprecedented consolidation of state power around COVID, compounded by an amped up, institutionalized campaign against white America. And, in particular, against white Trump voters.

Other than champion tax cuts and globalization, the Rovian cadre of the GOP had been doing what it has always done: Calling for a more upbeat, inclusive and diverse party. Michael Steele, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, today an “analyst” for MSNBC, had derided Rush as a mere entertainer, describing “The Rush Limbaugh Show” as incendiary and ugly.

Then as now, Steele’s main concerns were not those of main-street Americans. Rather, Steele’s cares were “conciliatory.” The Rovians, like the Never Trumpers and the Lincoln-Project perverts, believed in the urgent need to broaden the Republican Party’s base and “appeal” to traditionally hostile minorities, when in fact the GOP had been courting traditional Democratic constituents with every trick possible, with little success, all the while sticking it to the base.

The Steele-Limbaugh spat fell into Barack Obama’s lap. The former president was losing it—throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the thing he called “the economy,” but which is really no more than the trillions upon trillions of voluntary, capitalistic acts individuals perform in order to make a living.

Introduce government force and coercion into this synchronized spontaneous order, and it starts to splutter. The economy responds poorly to economic planning and planners. BHO had imagined that he could walk on water. America facilitated his fantasy. The former president was realizing that he was not the magic man he imagined he was. Desperate times called for desperate distractions.

In short succession, Democratic henchmen—Paul Begala, Stanley Greenberg, James Carville, and Robert Gibbs—began picking on Limbaugh. Strong-armed too by the Obama administration was CNBC reporter Rick Santelli, who led a revolt from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange against the bailout billions for mortgage delinquents. Little wonder, then, that the contents of Limbaugh’s speech at CPAC garnered less attention than the characters involved.

Rush spoke stirringly. He railed against the enormous expansion of government in the first few, frightening weeks of the Obama presidency.

But, as I noted at the time, not a word did one hear against the man who began what Barack was just completing. George Bush set the scene for Barack. Stimulus, bailouts, a house for every Hispanic—these were Bush’s babies. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights had been abandoned well before the fist-bumping Obamas moved into the White House.

“Contrary to popular myth,” wrote James Ostrowski, President of Free Buffalo, in 2002, “every Republican president since and including Herbert Hoover has increased the federal government’s size, scope, or power—and usually all three. Over the last one hundred years, of the five presidents who presided over the largest domestic spending increases, four were Republicans.”

“Include regulations and foreign policy, as well as budgets approved by a Republican Congress, and a picture begins to emerge of the Republican Party as a reliable engine of government growth.”

As rousing as his speech was, not a word did Limbaugh devote to the Warfare State, every bit as corrupt, corrupting, and bankrupting as the Welfare State. As I observed, at the time, over $1 trillion was being spent yearly on imperial expeditions that were awash in American blood, but offered few benefits to the sacrificed, stateside and abroad.

Besides, I asked, “what kind of a nation neglects its own borders while defending to the death borders not its own?”

Rush rightly denounced the State’s failed war on poverty. It failed not because fighting poverty is not a noble cause, but because, given the perverse incentives it invariably entrenches, government is incapable of winning such a war. The same economic and bureaucratic perversions also make the State’s stalemated War on Drugs equally unwinnable and ruinous.

Lysander Spooner, the great, American 19th-century theorist of liberty, defined vices as those acts “by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which a man harms the person or property of another.” Government has no business treating vices as crimes.

If for harming himself a man forfeits his freedom, then he is not free at all.

Limbaugh accused Obama of wanting to transform America. This was obvious then, as it is today. But what of George W. Bush, who had wormed his way into the affections of conservative leaders like Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham (who used to call Bush a patriot)?

What, I had asked, was Bush’s insistence on unfettered, open borders if not an expression of his disdain for “America the way it had been since its founding,” to quote commentator Lawrence Auster (also since deceased)? The former president refused to enforce immigration law. That was his way of converting “America into something quite different.”

Just like Obama, Bush harbored a death wish for America of the Founders.

Added Auster: “Until conservative opinion makers render unto Bush the censures he richly deserves, especially for the same things for which they now excoriate Obama, their criticisms of Obama will have the [odor] of rank partisanship.”

It took Trump to dispatch Bush.

At the time, I had expressed my hope that conflagrations such as the one between Steele and Limbaugh continue and deepen. “It’s good for the GOP─the party needs to be gashed good and proper if a coherent articulation of ordered liberty is to be forged from the current philosophical chaos.”

Come to think of it, that this tract began with Rush Limbaugh, of blessed memory, and ended with Trump, is in itself significant. For it took the “Donald’s creative destruction” to finish the Republican Party off.   

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, February 18
Unz Review, February 18
Quarterly Review, February 21

The post Still Addicted To That Rush: Revisiting The ‘09 CPAC Speech appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

If President Trump doesn’t waver, his border deal with Mexico will be a victory. The Mexicans have agreed to quit serving as conduits to hundreds of thousands of central Americans headed for the U.S.A.

Despite protests from Democrats, stateside—Mexico has agreed to significantly increase enforcement on its borders.

At first, Mexico was as defiant as the Democrats—and some Republicans.

Democrats certainly can be counted on to argue for the other side—any side other than the so-called sovereign people they swore to represent.

In fairness to the Democrats, Republicans are only notionally committed to the tough policing of the border. And certainly not if policing the porous border entails threatening trade tariffs against our neighborly narco-state. Some Republican senators even considered a vote to block the tariffs.

Nevertheless, to the hooting and hollering of the cretins in Congress and media, Trump went ahead and threatened Mexico with tariffs.

More than that. The president didn’t just tweet out “strong words” and taunts.

Since Mexico, the party duopoly, and his own courts have forced his hand, the president proceeded to “retrieve from his arsenal a time bomb of ruinous proportions.”

Or, so the Economist hyperventilated.

Trump issued an executive order, according to which a schedule of tariffs will be implemented unless Mexico polices its borders and ups its dismal rate of deportation, currently at 10 to 20 percent.

Beginning on June 10, “a 5 percent tariff was placed on all imports from Mexico, to be increased by five percentage points each month until it hits 25 percent in October.”

Lo and behold, Mexico quickly promised to arrest Central American migrants headed north. Agreements may soon materialize with Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, to which Trump has already cut off foreign aid, in March.

It remains for Trump to stick with tough love for Mexico and the rest. If the torrent of grifters from Central America does not let up, neither should the tariffs be lifted or aid restored.

Trump’s trade and tariff tactics are about winning negotiations for Americans; they’re not aimed at flouting the putative free-market.

How free and fair is trade anyway? Are unfettered markets at work when Canada, for instance, taxes purchases of American goods starting at $20, while America starts taxing Canadian goods at $1000? Hardly.

Free trade is an unknown ideal, to echo Ayn Rand’s observations. What goes for “free trade,” rather, is trade managed by bureaucratic juggernauts—national and international—central planners concerned with regulating, not freeing, trade; whose goal it is to harmonize labor, health, and environmental laws throughout the developed world. The undeveloped and developing worlds generally exploit labor, despoil land and kill off critters as they please.

The American market economy is massive. Trump knows its might. The difference between the president and his detractors is that Trump is prepared to harness the power of American markets to benefit the American people.

But what of the “billions of dollars in imports from Mexico” that are at stake, as one media shill shrieked.

Give me a break. The truth about what Fake News call a major trading partner, Mexico, is that it’s a trade pygmy—a fact known all too well to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard.

The reason these leaders were quick to the negotiating table once a schedule of tariffs had been decided upon by the president is this. Via the Economist:

Only about 15 percent of the United States’ exports go to Mexico, but a whopping 80 percent of Mexico’s exports head the other way. ‘There is nothing we have in our arsenal that is equivalent to what the United States can do to us,’ says Andrés Rozental, a Mexican former diplomat and minister.

Next, President Trump must compel Mexico to accept “safe third-country status.” Translated, this means that the U.S. can expel any and all “asylum seekers” if they pass through Mexico, as Mexico becomes their lawful, first port-of-call.

Thinking people should realize that Trump’s victory here is a Pyrrhic one. For what the president has had to do is convince the Mexican president to deploy his national guards to do the work American immigration police is not allowed to do.

The U.S. must turn to Mexico to police its border because the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has, to all intents and purposes, outlawed immigration laws.

Congressional quislings, for their part, have sat back and grumbled about the need for new laws. But as Daniel Horowitz argues convincingly, this is “a separation of powers problem.” Unless the Trump administration understands that the problem lies with the lower-court judges [usurping their constitutional authority] and not the law—there will be no fix.

For President Trump, the executive order serves as a way around the courts’ violation of the constitutionally enshrined federal scheme, within which the role—nay, the obligation—of the commander in chief—is to defend the country.

Although they’re temporary fixes, executive orders can serve to nullify unjust laws. As I argued in my 2016 book, “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Reconstructed,” executive orders are Trump’s political power tool—justice’s Jaws of Life, if you will—to be used by the Executive to pry the people free from judicial oppression.

Understand: The right of a nation to stop The World from flooding its communities amounts to upholding a negative right. In other words, by stopping trespassers at their borders, Americans are not robbing invaders of the trinity of life, liberty and property.

All Americans are asserting is their right to be left alone. What we are saying to The World is what we tell our disobedient toddlers every day, “No. You can’t go there.”

That’s all.

©2019 ILANA MERCER
WND.com, The Unz Review,
Quarterly Review, Townhall.com,
June 20

* Image courtesy of The Unz Review.

The post Trump Barters For Borders — And Wins, Big Time appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

“The U.S. government discriminates ‘against genius’ and ‘brilliance’ with its immigration system,” asserted President Trump, as he rolled out Jared Kushner’s immigration plan.

The president has insisted that “companies are moving offices to other countries because our immigration rules prevent them from retaining highly skilled and even … totally brilliant people.”

While it’s true that U.S. immigration policy selects for low moral character by rewarding unacceptable risk-taking and law-breaking—it’s incorrect to say that it doesn’t “create a clear path for top talent.”

Kibitzing about a shortage of talent-based immigration visas is just Mr. Kushner channeling the business and tech lobby’s interests.

No doubt, Big Business wants the “good” old days back. They currently operate in a labor market. They don’t like that, because, in a labor market, firms compete for workers and wages are bid up. Companies don’t like a labor market. They prefer that workers compete for jobs and wages not rise.

Multinationals, moreover, are stateless corporations. They are “global beasts with vast balance-sheets” and no particular affinity for American labor. But it’s not only about the Benjamins (to borrow from a U.S. congresswoman who, too, dislikes Americans).

The “men” who run multinationals are true believers. They are social justice warriors first; businessmen second. Tech traitors like the FAANG—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google—are certainly radical leftists, who believe in replacing American labor as a creed and as a principle to live by.

Back to the talent-shortage myth. The 2017 IEEE-USA Employment Survey, which appears to be the latest from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, has some “bad news.” “The nearly two-thirds of U.S. IEEE members who reported being unemployed at some point during 2016, had not been re-employed by mid-April of 2017.” Hopefully, the updated report will be more upbeat.

Still, there is unemployment in the ranks of American electrical engineers. Yet for years, consumers of the H-1B visa (multinationals) have insisted they were bringing in the best and the brightest because America had too few, if any at all. Not true. The H-1B visa brings in ordinary workers to displace ordinary Americans, the kind the IEEE tracks.

Why doesn’t the president know that the H-1B visa category is a huge high-tech hoax, not a special visa for highly skilled individuals? It goes mostly to average workers. “Indian business-process outsourcing companies, which predominantly provide technology support to corporate back offices,” by the Economist’s accounting.

Overall, the work done by the H-1B intake does not require independent judgment, critical reasoning or higher-order thinking. “Average workers; ordinary talent doing ordinary work,” attest the experts who’ve been studying this intake for years. The master’s degree is the exception within the H-1B visa category.

While visa advocates—economist Stephen Moore, Trump’s adviser, is one—perpetuate the tall tale that the H-1B visa provides a steady supply of talent; visa opponents, for their part, like to cry croc about exploitation and slave-labor. I guess they think that misplaced compassion adds force to their arguments.

H-1B visa holders are not paid inferior wages. From the fact that an oversupply of high-tech workers has lowered wages for all techies, it does not follow that these (average) men and women are being exploited. Rather, it is the glut of average worker bees—their abundance—that has depressed wages for all. Which is just the way billionaire businessmen like it.

More significantly, and as this column has attempted to inform, since 2008, there is a visa category reserved exclusively for individuals with extraordinary abilities and achievement. It doesn’t displace ordinary Americans.

It’s the O-1 visa.  There is no cap on the number of O-1 visa entrants allowed.

“Extraordinary ability in the fields of science, education, business or athletics,” states the Department of Homeland Security, “means a level of expertise indicating that the person is one of the small percentage who has risen to the very top of the field of endeavor.”

So, you see, America could recruit as many as it wished from the world’s pool of “totally brilliant people.” Access to this limited pool of talent is unlimited.

But this is not what business wants. When Big Businesses bend Trump’s ear about “top talent,” they mean, largely, the H-1B system. Touted as a means of trawling for the best and the brightest, the H-1B system is anything but.

In 2018, ten years after my O-1 visa revelation, immigration lawyers who make their living by outsourcing American lives, are finally admitting as much: The H-1B visa was always meant to displace Americans. Via Forbes magazine:

“The drumbeat of an H-1B being intended to only bring the best and the brightest has been incessant the last three years or so. The problem is, of course, that was not the purpose of the H-1B and we already have a temporary visa for that – the O-1.”

©2019 ILANA MERCER
WND.com, The Unz Review,
Quarterly Review, Townhall.com,
May 23

• Image courtesy of the Unz Review.

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Let us not confuse the metastatic multinational, motivated by mammon alone, with a business whose growth is sustained by communities, as opposed to colonies of imported labor ~ilana

Adroitly, President Trump has optimized outcomes for the American Worker. His is a labor market like no other.

Long overdue in the U.S., a labor market is one in which firms compete for workers, rather than workers competing for jobs.

“For the first time since data began to be collected in 2000, there are more job openings than there are unemployed workers.” By the Economist’s telling (July 12, 2018), “Fully 5.8 million more Americans are in work than in December of 2015.”

Best of all, workers are happier than they’ve been for a long time.

Not so business. For American business, it’s never enough.

Big or small, business is focused on elephantine-like expansion.

Big and small, business is nattering about labor shortages: “Ninety percent of small businesses which are hiring or trying to hire workers report that there are few or no qualified applicants, according to the National Federation of Independent Business.”

With blaring headlines, the megaphones in the financial press are amplifying a message of dissatisfaction:

“The shortage is reaching a ‘critical point’ … A lack of applicants for blue-collar jobs such as trucking and construction has received particular scrutiny, as have states like Iowa where the unemployment rate is especially low (it is just 2.7 percent in the Hawkeye state).”

August 31 saw President Trump sign an executive order meant to further boost small businesses. These will be permitted “to band together to offer 401(k)s.”

Again, nice, but not enough. It never is. A businessman present piped up about “a very tight labor market … causing us a little bit of a problem.”

Contrast this gimme-more-forever-more attitude, with the patriotic perspective of your average Trump supporter: “I’m willing to take my lumps for the good of the country,” a farmer told broadcaster Laura Ingraham. “The Scottish in me says to the death.”

Look, a labor market allows wages to rise and productivity to grow, for unprofitable firms will soon fold when they find they can’t pay enough to attract workers. Scarce resources—labor and capital—are then “put to better use.”

More crucially, wage gains accrue “to the poorest workers.” As the neoliberal, Trump-hating Economist notes, “Full-time employees at the 10th percentile of the income distribution are earning almost 4 percent more than a year ago.”

Beware; the good times may be short-lived. Trump’s response was Pavlovian. He promised the bitching businessman to “start looking at, very seriously, merit-based immigration. We have to do it, because we need people.” Read: We don’t have enough fabulous people among a labor force 160-million strong.

This is the conditioned response corporate America has come to expect from Power. Business wants the world as its labor market, because? Fill in the blanks, dear reader.

For its part, government cares a great deal about outsized sectional interests and GDP (gross domestic product) numbers, as churned out by number-crunchers.

But, surely prosperity is about per capita growth as well, and—dare I say? —the wealth and health of local communities?

We know that multinationals—stateless corporations; “global beasts with vast balance-sheets”—are preoccupied with increasing value for shareholders. However, that and training American talent are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

What’s so wrong with making fellow Americans part of the success story? This may slow economic growth, but may increase its sustainability; make it the kind of growth around which authentic, organic communities can coalesce.

And what’s wrong with doing well enough with the labor available in the country? Or, with a view to training American talent? Or, with a mind to paying more for local labor?

As it stands, business is permitted to petition The State to import the world at a price heavily subsidized by disenfranchised American taxpayers.

By extension, the attitude of business toward economic growth is rooted not in healthy, community-based practices (stateside and abroad), but in some aberrant economic gigantism; in an economic elephantiasis undergirded by greed.

Fair enough: Small business wants to be big when it grows up. But let us not confuse the metastatic multinational, motivated by mammon alone, with a business whose growth is sustained by communities, as opposed to colonies of imported labor.

©2018 ILANA MERCER
WND.com, The Unz Review, Quarterly Review,
Townhall.com, Constitution.com, American Greatness
&  Reckonin‘
September 20

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©2013 By ILANA MERCER
WND, Economic Policy Journal,
American Daily Herald & Praag.org
October 11

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The EU Commission president, a chap called Jose Manuel Barroso, told PBS’s Jeffrey Brown, on November 28, that the European suprastate is not quite up to American statist standards. Barroso lamented that the EU lacks America’s level of “convergence”: “We have a common currency, but not, for instance, a common treasury,” said this slick operator. Fiscal discipline (one wonders what our commissar means by that) can only come about with more “pooling of sovereignty.”

The Commission’s president certainly sees the US as a model “fiscal union,” with a high degree of “fiscal policy” “integration” throughout; and is almost envious of the fact that the US federal government possesses “the instruments” that have allowed it to accumulate enormous liabilities: Evidently, America’s debt-to-GDP ratio is larger than the European Union’s.

In a nutshell: Barroso longs for Brussels to be able to do the necessary tinkering to keep the PIIGS of the Eurozone —Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain—living at the expense of their more industrious, austere neighbors to the north. (Presiding European bureaucrats like himself live-it-up no matter where they reside.) The EU, complained its Capo di tutti capi, needs to create those “instruments.”

When it comes to Newspeak, Barroso still beats Obama.

In any event, when it grows up, the EU wants to be just like the US. That was Jose Manuel Barroso’s message to his host at the US Public Broadcasting Service. So successfully has the Unites States government submerged the sovereignty of its states that a top European technocrat longs to be like us. We must be in worse shape than we imagined.

Barroso’s aim is for Europe to fuse more completely together so that a central government and bank can manipulate compliant countries with ease. Alas, in his assessment, Europe has a long way to go if it wishes to approximate the degree of economic and legal harmonization accomplished by Uncle Sam, and to become one nation under inflation.

Aping America’s Federal Reserve Bank, the European Central Bank’s goal is to monetize the debt of the moocher member-states. Standing in its way—and in the way of just about any American president and Federal Reserve Bank chair—is Germany.

Germany poses the only serious opposition to the issuance by the ECB of euro bonds which, in contravention of European-Union treaties, would rope the Germans into working to keep the borrowing costs of the PIIGS down. For its part, the US is pushing Germany to bail out the PIIGS.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has resolutely opposed Obama’s monetary putsch. Her arguments are foolproof: she’d like to avoid the hyperinflation and the moral hazard inherent in enabling spenders and slackers. Just how badly do Barack and his banker want to cow Germany into servicing the rest’s debt?

On her way to the bank something embarrassing and unexpected happened to Chancellor Merkel. Mrs. Merkel’s country, which enjoys an AAA credit rating, and is expected to underwrite the Eurozone’s debt, failed last week to raise funds in a government bond auction.

The workhorse of Europe is an industrial dynamo whose highly-skilled workforce produces technology in the first rank. Germans have already exported more than a €1 trillion worth of goods this year. At 5.9 percent, unemployment there is low.

Asked columnist Paul Craig Roberts: “Why would Germany, the only member of the EU with financial rectitude, not be able to sell 35 percent of its offerings of 10-year bonds? Germany has no debt problems, and its economy is expected by EU and US authorities to bear the lion’s share of the bailout of the EU member countries that do lack financial rectitude.”

And Roberts replied: “I suspect that the answer to this question is that the failure of the German government’s bond auction was orchestrated by the US, by EU authorities, especially the European Central Bank, and private banks in order to punish Germany for obstructing the purchase of EU member countries’ sovereign debt by the European Central Bank.”

Roberts published his column before the disclosure of the latest scandal involving the Empire’s bank. According to information obtained by Bloomberg News, under the Freedom of Information Act, the Fed issued $7.7 trillion in secret loans between August of 2007 and April 2010. One of the beneficiaries was America’s Big Six Bank cartel.

I hazard that the failure of the German government to “raise funds in a government bond auction last week” is probably the doing of Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke. The boss of all bosses at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue promised Europeans that he would stand ready to do his part to help them weather the Eurozone crisis. Although White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has denied that there would be any “bail out of foreign governments,” even CNN’s Erin Burnett knows better: Bernanke has been given the authority to buy the debt of foreign governments, confirmed Burnett. “The U.S. Treasury could be out there buying bonds to keep Europe from crashing,” and we’d be none the wiser.

©2011 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com & RT
December 2

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