Santa Claus as Chinese is the brainstorm of Lester R. Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute. Among his reasons for that designation are these:
* Around 70 percent of all presents exchanged in the U.S. consist of goods made in China.
* Roughly 80 percent of the toys sold in the U.S. are made in China.
* Many of the electronics products sold in the U.S. are made in China.
* The majority of artificial Christmas trees, "nativity" scenes, and ornaments come from China.
Brown laments this situation because we Americans have thus become a nation of buy now-the hell with the future consumers, and that characteristic has produced our debt-laden society wherein we owe somewhere between eight and nine trillion dollars to private and foreign government-owned banks - a figure no one can practically visualize - while our international trade deficit is at an all-time high. Since China benefits so hugely from that situation, no wonder the Chinese have taken to celebration of Christmas.
It is not merely the predominance of goods made in China that Brown laments, "but rather the mindset that has led to it...We want to consume no matter what. We want to spend now and let our children pay. It is this same mindset that introduces tax cuts while waging a costly war...after 9/11, President Bush urged us to go shopping...we are so intent on consuming that personal savings have virtually disappeared. We have an average of five credit cards for every man, woman, and child. Of the 145 million cardholders, only 55 million clear their accounts each month. The other 90 million cannot seem to catch up and are paying steep interest rates on their remaining balance. Millions of people are so deeply in debt that they may remain indebted for life."
It is not merely the predominance of goods made in China that Brown laments, "but rather the mindset that has led to it...We want to consume no matter what. We want to spend now and let our children pay. It is this same mindset that introduces tax cuts while waging a costly war...after 9/11, President Bush urged us to go shopping...we are so intent on consuming that personal savings have virtually disappeared. We have an average of five credit cards for every man, woman, and child. Of the 145 million cardholders, only 55 million clear their accounts each month. The other 90 million cannot seem to catch up and are paying steep interest rates on their remaining balance. Millions of people are so deeply in debt that they may remain indebted for life."
The dire consequences
More than once I have explained in my journal that it is not ostriches who bury their heads in the sand when confronted with danger (that being a fairy tale you had better not believe if an ostrich feels threatened by you and you do not have an easy escape route or a gun with which to kill it), but rather human beings. From Bush to the Congress, to our business and labor "leaders" (really non-leaders), to the Mass Miscommunications Media, to the "man and woman on the street," heads are buried in the sand while the dire consequences of this insane conduct build up: the largest number of U.S. Treasury securities owned by China and Japan; China as increasingly our banker; growing costs of Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare; higher and higher interest payments on our personal debts to the banks and to China and other countries; a trade deficit of between eight and nine billion dollars.
"We have lost influence in world financial markets," Brown points out, "because of our mounting debt, much of it held by other countries. If China's leaders ever become convinced that the dollar is headed continuously downward and they decide to dump their dollar holdings, the dollar could collapse."
Brown does not reach the conclusion I reach from all of this data: The United States of America is headed for a monster depression far worse than that of the 1930's and also to another world war, unless we Americans collectively come to our senses and stop the "outsourcing" of product manufacturing to other nations, the handing over of our banking industry to banks from foreign nations, the growing monopolization of a major part of the American publishing industry that is owned by a German corporation, overpopulation, out of control immigration both legal and illegal that is the major factor in overpopulation, the increasing control of our government and our courts by self-professed "Christians" who are not Christians as defined in the New Testament but rather theofascists, and either a dramatic reversal of the owe now-pay later mentality or the nationalization of all banks. (I will have much to say about nationalization later.)
In the meantime I point out that the majority of the goods we are now consuming are safety-suspect because of the lack of protective standards, and they come from countries where production, including production by American corporations, is effected by a modern form of slave labor or peonage, and yet somehow we manage not to feel guilty about the factor underlying the ability of merchants to keep product costs within range of our credit card spending.
Visit the web site of the Earth Policy Institute at least once in awhile - http://earth-policy.org - to take in the wisdom of Lester Brown, a modern day prophet to whom everybody should be paying attention. And PASS ON THIS ISSUE OF THE WOLFE'S LAIR to your representative in Congress, to bloggers and other online or offline newsletter and journal producers, and to any member of the Mass Miscommunications Media who might be brave enough to reprint it. If you just sit on the information and analysis I provide, I may as well not bother.