Trade Deficit: The means through which foreign countries are able to own and control our consumption.

Trade deficits are just like other debts in many respects. They must be repaid. When our country buys more than it sells from other countries, these other countries accept our dollars. These dollars must eventually return to the U.S. and be exchanged for something of value. Since we are producing less and less, in all likelihood, the trillions of dollars will come back to buy our assets and wealth producing companies. This has resulted in many of our core industries now being controlled and managed for the benefit of foreign companies and countries.

These loans by foreign governments have given them leverage over our decisions, forcing us to enter into agreements with them to allow them to control our key assets (technology, ports, natural resources, etc.). In fact, these loans place us in a disadvantageous position in all our negotiations abroad. Witness our inability to offset China’s currency manipulation that is making it nearly impossible for American exporters to compete.

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Like many other states, Maine allows for citizen initiatives, the process by which individual citizens and nongovernmental organizations directly propose legislation. Also like many other states, Maine’s initiative process attracts more than its fair share of bizarre characters and proposals, including this referendum to end the fluoridation of Maine’s drinking water. Considering the most famous attempt to end the fluoridation of drinking water ended in a nuclear war, I suppose that the initiative process is a vast improvement.

However, the occasional strange referendum isn’t the only thing that makes Maine’s initiative process interesting. In addition to allowing conventional initiatives, Maine also gives its citizens a “People’s Veto”, through which the voters can veto laws passed by the state legislature. The right to a People’s Veto is enshrined in Article IV, Section 17 of Maine’s Constitution, which also outlines the process by which a veto can appear on the ballot.

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The theme of this year’s annual policy conference for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was “Israel: Tell the Story.” And it was quite a story that AIPAC wanted to tell.

The conference aimed at imparting to the over 7000 attendees “an intimate understanding of the many ways that Israel is making the world a better place,” with a focus on peacemaking and innovation. According to the AIPAC web site, conference goers will also “meet Israelis who rush to the scene of natural disasters in far away lands because they believe that to save one life is to save the whole world.” No mention was made of the 1400 people killed during the Israeli assault on Gaza.

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How an issue is framed is crucial to how it is decided. Advocates of the package of health insurance regulations, taxes, and mandates known as ObamaCare managed to frame the issue as “reform versus the status quo.” But to call the Obama-Pelosi-Reid plan (OPR) “reform” is to beg the question by assuming precisely what needs to be proved: namely, that the legislative package would actually reform — that is, improve — the medical system. Therefore the debate should have been not whether reform is desirable – real reform (improvement) is always desirable — but whether OPR is really reform.

A better framing of the issue would have been: real reform versus the status quo on steroids, for in the end OPR is little more than what Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal calls a “doubling down on the system’s existing perversities.” For example, under OPR everyone will be forced to become a customer of the health insurance industry that the ruling political class just spent a year demonizing, and that industry will reap billions in taxpayer subsidies. Moreover, demand for medical services will be further insulated from true costs. That is already the source of so much of what’s wrong today.

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Municipal bonds are where a lot of the political kickbacks and corrupt deals are typically hidden, so I can’t say I’m surprised. In fact, it’s sort of funny that the governments dealing with these guys apparently thought they could trust them, considering how crooked the business is. Lie down with dogs, rise up with fleas, as the nuns used to say:

March 26 (Bloomberg) — JPMorgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and UBS AG were among more than a dozen Wall Street firms involved in a conspiracy to pay below-market interest rates to U.S. state and local governments on investments, according to documents filed in a U.S. Justice Department criminal antitrust case.

A government list of previously unidentified “co-conspirators” contains more than two dozen bankers at firms also including Bank of America Corp., Bear Stearns Cos., Societe Generale, two of General Electric Co.’s financial businesses and Salomon Smith Barney, the former unit of Citigroup Inc., according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on March 24.

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Underscoring his administration’s commitment to continue the already eight and a half year long occupation of Afghanistan, President Barack Obama made a surprise visit today and delivered a speech declaring the war ‘absolutely essential.’

Citing 9/11, President Obama insisted that continuing the conflict makes all Americans safer, and assured the troops that “everyone” knows the importance of the continued occupation of the landlocked nation.

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Do I need to explain this one? If you say I do, let me explain that you’re to dumb for me to explain anything to you. Go watch TV before your mama finds you one the computer. You can see it here.

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It comes down to "the rule of law or the rule of fear." Protecting American citizens and national security is one thing. Discarding core legal principles to do it reflects the worst elements of police state justice.

If enacted, it will advance what this writer addressed in a December 2007 article titled, “Police State America – A Look Back and Ahead,” covering numerous Bush administration laws, Executive Orders (EOs), National and Homeland Security Presidential Directives, edicts, and various illegal acts targeting designated domestic and foreign adversaries, dissent, civil liberties, human rights, and other democratic freedoms.

Straightaway post-9/11, George Bush signed a secret finding empowering the CIA to "Capture, Kill or Interrogate Al-Qaeda Leaders." He also authorized establishing a covert global gulag to detain and interrogate them without guidelines on proper treatment.

Other presidential directives ordered abductions, torture and indefinite detentions. In November 2001, Military Order Number 1 empowered the Executive to capture, kidnap or otherwise arrest non-citizens (and later citizens) anywhere in the world for any reason and hold them indefinitely without charge, evidence, due process or judicial fairness protections of law.

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An American charged with helping plan the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, moved effortlessly between the United States, Pakistan and India for nearly seven years, training at a militant camp in Pakistan on five occasions, according to a plea agreement released by the Justice Department last week.

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For the better part of the last century, the United States led the industrialized nations through an unparalleled period of growth. These days, the only things in the developed world growing with any certainty are bureaucracies and the debts and deficits they invariably inflict upon those they were elected to serve.

After fifty years of credit expansion, the era of first world dominance is drawing to its climactic finale. And, as the characters turn and the plot twists, it is those in the developing nations who have some of the best seats in the house.

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