Note:
The two musings on the near future of our political planet are done, hardly the last word on anything, but I liked the challenge, and am eager now to return to the more isolated and less depressing aspects of human behaviors. After watching the primary and presidential debates, and listening to late night talk shows and the comedian at this past weekend’s correspondence dinner, it makes one wonder how American politics got to this ill-mannered, disrespectful, vulgar, malignant, vitriolic, acrimonious, and toxic level. While we can hardly be accurate where all this is heading, one thing is certain: Donald Trump set the stage for it all in the very first primary debate with his endless name calling, character assassination tweets, and rantings, which have only worsened as President. It seems like it came right out of ghetto level communications on an adolescent playground. It is no wonder the man has no long time personal friends or any cerebral ethics. We are now in a bar room brawl—find your mirror images, grab a weapon of some kind, and assault (verbally or physically) those of a different ilk. Then, at some point, seeing no light to an exit, take your own life—but only after you have taken with you a random maximized number of others. Having driven other species to a record rate of extinction, we have now turned on ourselves. Ready or not we will see how this all works out.
The Korean Question and the Likely Outcome
Predicting the near term outcome of the Korean Situation is tricky and maybe foolhardy. But here is how I see the most likely outcome.
One must first consider the major players in any summit. Kim Jong-il, Putin and Trump are all the same ilk, that is to say they have little to no tolerance for diversity, have endless compulsion for material wealth, and truth to them is whatever works best for them at any given moment. Xi Jinping of China is probably the smartest and sanest of the bunch. Moon Jae-in I know little about but he is listed as President of South Korea.
The loose cannons in every respect are Kim Jong-iL and Donald Trump. The wiliest is probably Putin. Moon Jae-In just wants no nuclear attack from North Korea.
After all these years why suddenly is there going to be various summit meetings between the major powers regarding North Korea? Kim Jong-il enjoyed playing games with the leaders of other major powers because he felt confident no one would risk an open attack. He feared more enemies in his own country. Putin, Kim Jon-il and Xi Jinping are all dictators. Both Trump and Kim Jon-il are driven by emotions, macho images of themselves, and little thought-through impulsives. Trump is likely the first of the major world leaders who Kim Jon-il feared might suddenly do something rash, unpredictable, and reckless. Like stated, they are of the same ilk.
Trump is not someone other world leaders admire, because Trump makes it perfectly clear that any deals will be made or kept only if it is in the best interests of the US, and he also makes it clear ‘best interest’ means everyone else will get the short end of the stick. That is his history his entire life. He made millions stiffing everyone he could including investors, workers, the government, contractors, anyone in real estate matters, business partners, etc. Up until now Kim Jong-il has been on everyone’s shit list while numerous economic sanctions have hurt the North Korean economy even as dismal as it is.
No one wants Kim Jong-il to have nuclear weapons. Most people in the world probably wished Trump didn’t either. Whatever Trump is, he is probably quite temporary, for health or political reasons. So it seems logical that Russia and China will be willing to form a defense pact with North Korea agreeing to come to the aid of North Korea if the U.S. attacks North Korea. A sort of mini Pacific NATO alliance to protect Asia from the United States just like NATO is there to protect Europe from Russia.
China will likely start dominating trade agreements in Asia and maybe even in Africa and South America. China will probably start offering better trade deals with third world countries than they will get from the United States. The reason: China is a dictatorship and can force Chinese companies to offer deals which give donor countries more real economic growth themselves. American companies are free to be as capitalistic as they please, which means the best deal is the one which benefits them much more than the third world country. America right now is getting a lot of back lash from third world countries in South America, Africa, and the Far East from the obvious: few, if any of them, have become more peaceful and prosperous from any economic partnership with the US or from any military invasion of their country to bring any positive changes. So the United States, for most of the world, is on a different kind of ‘shit list’.
Most countries across our globe are dealing with massive accumulation of their wealth into the hands of the few. This is true whether the country is a dictatorship, a democracy, or a communist country. Socialized countries in northeastern Europe are in better shape. Modern terrorism, spreading like a plague over the globe is a direct result of this grossly imbalanced spread of national wealth. America has for many decades believed that whatever is good for business is good for everyone. The wealth would all trickle down. It never much did and probably never will. America was blessed with endless natural resources and a remarkable constitutional government, plus a location away from all the turmoils in Europe and Asia. Workers here formed unions and were able to increasingly prosper from their labors. Children, women, and minorities gained more and more rights while progress, though slow, went forward. But as more and more wealth, and all the political power that came with it, after the frontier became nonexistent, this flow of even greater wealth to the already wealthy began to steadily strangle the ability of workers to keep pace with the prosperity of the wealthy. Americans never really brought into Lincoln’s insistence that labor comes before capital. As America grew to be the chief economic power in the world, the attitude toward other economic poorly developed countries was a continuation of our long establish domestic attitude that whatever was good for our businesses was good for the welfare of the other countries with whom we traded. Well, it wasn’t, and any money that ended up in these countries went to the already wealthy and for a long time our trade policies made our businesses wealthy and provided real domestic bargains for our own citizens via goods made by slave labor. Slave labor had moved from the cotton fields of the American south to the labor forces in undeveloped countries. This worked for some time in a simpler, less populated planet of the past.
But human population doubled and continues to grow, while at the same time all kinds of inventions created the lifestyle of modernity, at least for the upper classes across the globe, and the common people fell further and further behind in terms of salaries and access to modern amenities. Today, it is no longer just the workers in undeveloped countries who work for slave wages, but more and more Americans are suffering the same fate. On top of this, we now have a global economy, and the fate of the poor is not solvable by the actions of one country on it’s own. For a start, until there are global minimum wages, the poor everywhere will continue to suffer in exponential degrees.
There is a reason Americans are not very safe off the beaten tourist path when in other countries. To many people, in more and more countries, America is seen as a huge military power who simply uses the natural resources and cheap labor of others to provide bargains for it’s own population. For years, if political forces rose in these South American, African, and Asian countries to stop this unbalanced economic situation, America simply invaded to protect a cooperating government, supported rebels to topple an uncooperative regime, or imposed economic sanctions against the country. No matter what the form of effort made by undeveloped countries to rid themselves of American imperialism, they could not gain any progress.
The Achilles Heel here for the United States is that these policies have come home to roost, and now it is our own underbelly population who are being forced into slave wages, needing to work several jobs, or becoming trapped in very unsafe urban, rural, or suburban ghettoes.
Trump proudly refused the Pacific Rim Trade Agreement because it was not favorable enough to the United States. This inadvertently then opened up Pandora’s box. That is, it paves the way for China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, India, Thailand, and maybe even Australia to become the dominant economic force in the Pacific. Most Americans really believe that American capitalism can out bid and out perform others in any such contest. But this is an illusion that will probably burst, Trump or no Trump. This simply is not true. China is in far better position to dominate World Trade than any other country in the world including the United States. They have, in the last couple of years, become the leader in dealing with climate change, taking drastic actions to reduce carbon emissions and have recently assured underdeveloped countries that they alone can give them the best trade relationships in which the recipients will benefit as much or more than China itself. They can actually do this, if they choose, because they are a dictatorship and can literally dictate to their corporations what kind of terms they must give underdeveloped countries. The U.S. or most any other country cannot do this. Capitalism is based on getting the best deal for a company’s own bottom line, often by greasing the palm of the already wealthy in under-developed countries. China is in the best position to lend money without the recipient country having to spend it on products made in China. No more time here will be spent on today’s China as I am still in the process of acquiring the right stats to generate some conclusive insights.
Many nations across the globe were already tired of Americans absorbing so much of their wealth. Even the 800 military bases across the globe exist more to keep the profits high for our military-industrial complex—as if they they need exist to actually protect our own national security. American economic influence may indeed be waning on the global scheme, but for sure no one remotely imagines they could attack us militarily and win. And we have already proven the last 50 or 60 years that we cannot achieve victory by invading even the likes of Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, etc. And as the final nail in our economic coffin, few if any countries we have made our major trade partners have made any noticeable progress with their economy or peaceful communities as a result of our interactions with them .
To conclude, America is likely to become a secondary trade partner in the Pacific Rim, plus the only remaining isolated country not to sign the Climate Pact, the only major country in the world not to have universal health coverage for all its citizens, the one country which spends more on military matters than the next 6 major countries combined, the major economic power with the greatest growing wealth separation between the real wealthy and the rest of our population, scores far down the list in any happiness polls across the world, and has by far the highest per capita murder rate of any industrialized country in the world. A teenage American is 48 more times likely to be gunned to death than in any other modern industrialized society.
Korea may well become denuclearized after all these summits, and end up a major partner in whatever Asian Trade Agreement the Pacific powers reach without the United States. In return, for at least temporary cessation of nuclear bomb production, Korean gets non-interference with the inhuman manner in which it treats its own citizens, the economic sanctions will be lifted, and even South Korea, ever so eager to decrease the risk of being attacked with nuclear weapons, will probably find ways to co-exist with North Korea by being less friendly with the United States. I doubt Trump even vaguely realizes that for all his bluster, insults, and self serving demands, the most likely result will be very few countries will pay him much attention, and America become, in a strange way, more a pariah to the world community than a leader.
Well, here’s hoping I am off base with all this. In politics strange things can happen. In a separate email I will list the reasons China will now become the real economic and political power in the world. It has less to do with Trump and far more to do with a political situation that has left the United States crippled by endless political stalemate. Minus any sudden change in leaders, China is free to do the right thing for the right reasons, and is free from any political control by the wealthy. The forever-long primary system has created a circus and the kind of debates that few quality individuals would ever subject themselves to. We now have an increasingly large class of politicians who pander to the prejudices and ignorance of their constituents, and campaign basically on promising their base that debt, tax cuts, religious beliefs becoming the law of the land,, and so on be given to them while the constituents of the other party will pay the tab one way or another. Fairness to all citizens, and justice to all citizens, and opportunities for all citizens, health care to all citizens, decent livable wages for all citizens, and so on is not even seriously considered. We are now even going so far as to reduce welfare to the unemployed so that in order not to starve to death they will have to work jobs at slave labor wages. Then we brag that unemployment rates are down for the poor. Real smart ass. Terrorism of various means will grow exponentially with the kind of political climate existent in the United States today. We probably haven’t taken the lead yet in this area, but it won’t be for lack of trying.
