Repugnicans and Dumbocrats…

Don’t usually travel into political waters but what the heck. I’m Canadian, and this amazing, wonderful country of America has been so kind as to put up with me for more than 20 years now and I am extraordinarily grateful. It is that gratitude that makes me so disappointed and angry about what I see happening in this once-great country. This is what I see, and I’m open to being contradicted or shown I’m wrong (in fact I hope I’m wrong): the elimination of tariffs and signing of disastrous trade treaties (mostly by Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton, especially Clinton) have created an uneven playing field on which we can’t compete because foreign countries can produce goods at far below market value because of underpaying employees, not having to pay out money for environmental protection or employee benefits, etc. Previously tariffs would have evened that playing field but no more. So of course those foreign countries eventually swamped America with their cheap goods, with Wal-Mart being a prime example, thus the “Wal-Martization” of America. American manufacturing dissipated in the heat of this unbeatable foreign competition, and at one point someone apparently decided the way to compete was to just ship all our jobs overseas to take advantage of lower wages and lack of environmental and other social policy requirements, so even more of our manufacturing went away. Then someone apparently had the bright idea of shipping in our own cheap labor in the form of illegal immigrants, but all this did was add a huge burden to the already growing government budgets, and strain our health care, justice and educational systems to the point of breaking. So here we are, the country gutted from the inside out, aided and abetted by crooked politicians (traitors, really) like Reagan, Bush and Clinton). That is what I see. And I’ve seen the degradation accelerate in the mere 20 years I’ve been here. Now comes the important question: what are we going to do about it. Hm?