"Bin Laden wanted to lure the United States into Afghanistan, which was already being called the graveyard of empires. The usual object of terror is to draw one’s opponent into repressive blunders"
Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower (p. 272)
Trump's delusion of "winning" a global trade war is pathetically reminiscent of George W. Bush's delusion of "winning" the war on "terra" - "terror" for the literate-set. It's what anyone who has an uninformed, facile and infantile view of the world would choose to believe.
Trump's speech at the U.N. yesterday was a wholesale repudiation of the post-WWII American-defined world order. Call it the "Sorry folks, change of plans" speech:
“We reject the ideology of globalism and accept the doctrine of patriotism.”
It was a wholesale abdication of hegemonic responsibility while maintaining the actual hegemony intact of course. Trump will retreat to command post Twitter to direct the empire via grammatically-challenged fiat command. The other part he left out of course was that he wants the U.S. to continue to be the net beneficiary of global capital flows. "Want" being an inappropriate term, "need" being the operative word. We need to be able to continue to exploit the "global savings glut" thrown off by the Third World sweatshop. We just don't want to pay into the system via Industrial arbitrage - The Faustian Bargain first enjoined by Reagan thirty-eight years ago. Bush Senior called it "Voodoo Economics" and vowed that it "wouldn't work". Before he pretended to have said no such thing. Trump made sure to boast during yesterday's speech that military spending will be $700 billion this year. He forgot to mention that it's all borrowed money. The U.S. Federal deficit this year is projected to be $800 billion this fiscal year (ending this week), and a trillion dollars in FY19. Which would mean that next year, the deficit will be 140% of the U.S. defense budget.
This insatiable demand for capital driven by insatiable greed and asinine hubris is why the dollar is rallying, and why the trade deficit is widening. It's Trump's patented strategy of "winning" by losing. The year-to-date trade deficit in manufactured goods is the widest it's been since September 2008:
When Cramer says the "stock market", he means Netflix and Go Daddy. Real businesses that have skin in the global economic game and are not binary call options on Ponzi capital infusion, are rolling over hard:
If we didn't realize that we are now captured in an old age home run by entitled geezers who've been fucking everything up for decades, none of this circus would make any "sense". It's abundantly clear that the Alzheimer's-set will not be going gently into that good night, instead preferring to fuck things up as long as possible. They will be escorted from the highest office(s) in the land straight to the terminal care facility for the mentally infirm.
When I said that we are now wandering in the desert of failed ideas, I meant Death Valley.
