It is paradoxical that, having led the Western world to triumph over fascism and then communism, the United States is now the vanguard of yet another world socialist order.  This American Empire, based on the benevolent neoconservative principles of borderless free enterprise, trade, and migration and consisting of multicultural social democracies enforced by U.S. military might and reinforced by U.N. policing, is becoming uncomfortably similar to the socialist “brotherhoods” our country once withstood.  This American hubris will cause a destabilization of the present world order and will weaken our defense of worldwide freedom.  And it portends an end to America’s already vanishing heritage of citizens’ rights to freedom, self-sufficiency, and republican government.

A look at the effects of our undiscriminating “free trade” policy—which does not require reciprocity from foreign competitors—on American manufacturers reveals the destructive nature of the neoconservatives’ global agenda.  Pressured by the United States, the world’s developed nations reduced tariffs from the Depression levels that prevailed at the end of World War II, causing a widespread growth of international trade by the mid-1960’s.  With the United States pushing them to eliminate tariffs altogether, the member nations of the European Common Market (now the European Union) lowered tariffs even more—then replaced them with border-adjusted value-added taxes (VATs), which provided the same protections against non-E.U. countries as the old tariffs but were reciprocally neutral within the European Union.  Over the course of the next two decades, virtually every developed nation adopted either VATs or comparable levels of retail-sales taxes to replace tariffs—except for the United States, which kept reducing tariffs until they reached today’s negligible levels.  The rest of the world had drawn the line, refusing to allow their domestic producers’ goods and services to be left unprotected.

What have been the consequences for U.S. manufacturers, whose products must compete with tax-subsidized foreign goods in our markets while facing double taxation in foreign markets?  The price disadvantage has been catastrophic for the U.S. manufacturing sector, which has lost one half of its former share of U.S. Gross Domestic Product and now produces only two thirds of the goods Americans consume, resulting in an unsustainable annual trade deficit in goods of $750 billion.  Outsourcing adds to this burden.  The business-services sector is now being outsourced, which threatens to make domestic competitors comparably uncompetitive.  According to BusinessWeek, this outsourcing puts at risk 14 million jobs.  Yet Washington has no plan in place to stop the bleeding.

Fear not!  The neoconservatives are flooding the United States with immigrants to provide the cheap labor necessary to restore American competitiveness.  This policy is a slap in the face to American workers.  Massive layoffs in U.S. manufacturing—over three million workers lost jobs between 1998 and 2003 alone—have already depressed hourly earnings, which have seen a meager seven-percent real increase (Consumer Price Index-adjusted for inflation) over the past four decades, despite a 250-percent increase in output per hour.  Now, the relentless tide of immigrants, legal and illegal—over 1.3 million per year—will result, before the end of the decade, in the highest percentage of immigrants in the U.S. population ever recorded, if left unchecked.  Despite a 132-percent increase in output per hour for the entire U.S. private sector, our foolish trade and immigration policies have kept the average real  wages of hourly workers virtually the same since 1965.

One quarter of the new immigrants—those who come to the United States with college degrees—may well have made positive contributions to our economy, in composite, as citizens, without causing a depression of labor incomes.  The same cannot be said for those who come without high-school diplomas—one third of all immigrants, and one half of those from Latin America—whose median incomes were, as of 2002, below $20,000 and whose numbers substantially exceeded those of the native population in unemployment, welfare participation, and criminal behavior.  Their presence has clearly had a negative effect on hourly wages and has increased the burden on the average American taxpayer.

In the private sector, the growth of real hourly compensation—which includes social-insurance taxes and fringe benefits—for both salaried and hourly wages does not look quite so depressed, but looks can be deceiving.  Half of the increase in compensation since 1965 has been in social insurance taken from current workers and spent on retirees, and in fringe benefits, including medical insurance, the costs of which have been inflated far above CPI while providing less coverage.  And even taking into account these dubious “increased benefits,” the overall earnings of U.S. private-sector workers, which had been a constant percentage of GDP for decades, has seen a 25-percent decline since 1965.  Simply stated, government and the corporate owners of the New Corporate State have enlarged their share of the economic pie at the expense of all private employment—particularly hourly workers.

The decline in savings, accompanied by an increased growth of welfarism, among American workers further illustrates the destructive nature of the neocons’ globalist agenda.  Personal savings have spiraled downward since the 60’s from five to six percent of income to negative savings (or indebtedness), despite substantial rates of saving among upper-income earners.  Government, too, is spending in excess of income, so it follows that the owners of private enterprises collectively account for all of our economy’s saving—and, therefore, virtually all of the additional accumulation of wealth.  Since a sizeable proportion of hourly workers require government assistance to make ends meet, these welfare transfer payments amount to government subsidies to employers who are paying substandard wages.  Were Marx and Engels still alive, they would be thrilled to discover that neocon economic policies—which promote the redistribution of wealth, at an accelerating pace, to the “begabuck” class (billionaire multinationals whose government shills disperse alms to the needy); a shrinking bourgeoisie; and a growing proletariat (Charles Murray’s “underclass”)—are now dominant in the United States.

American workers in the private sector—especially those in manufacturing—and hourly workers in general have borne most of the cost of our neocon elites’ infatuation with globalism.  Mid-sized manufacturers and specialized manufacturing services (which have been, by and large, family-owned businesses) have joined their workers as the principal losers, along with modest-sized cities and towns that had once turned to manufacturing to replace declining agricultural-sector employment.  These communities have also seen the decline of their retail sectors as Wal-Mart and other big-box discount stores drove out local retailers and American-made goods with mass-merchandised cheap imports.  Communities that were once the image of the American dream now have boarded-up Main Streets, and the best and brightest of their youth are fleeing to the big cities to seek better opportunities.

“One man’s ox gets gored; another has a feast.”  Such is the mantra of the profiteers who benefit from globalism at the average American’s expense.  Those feasting are the financial behemoths of Wall Street who control the mergers, acquisitions, and financing of the multinational corporations and the U.S. manufacturers who have relocated abroad.  They also finance foreign trade and package the sale of U.S. assets and indebtedness that finances the federal and trade deficits in collaboration with their counterparts abroad—to the tune of over one trillion dollars each year.

Joining them at the table are the mass-discount retailers who manage the direct supply of low-priced imports from foreign producers and relocated U.S. producers, whose cheap products now dominate the American market.  U.S. manufacturers relocated abroad are able to take advantage of their established distribution system, brand recognition, and patented or otherwise protected technology.  They use closed factories or assemble foreign parts with a fraction of their former employees, serving as warehouses for foreign producers while remaining ostensibly American.  Still others outsource the bulk of their production to foreign sources without new products ever touching a U.S. factory floor.  (According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, in 2003, U.S. affiliates of foreign multinationals shipped $150 billion in exports, which was 21 percent of the U.S. total.  But they imported $356 billion in goods, with the likely effect that more than two U.S. jobs have been lost for every job created.  Meanwhile, U.S.-owned multinationals—formerly net exporters—are now net importers, to a difference of $137 billion per year, with nearly as large a probable loss of U.S. jobs.  Together, the foreign multinationals and the flip-flop of U.S. multinationals accounted for 85 percent of the increased U.S. trade deficit from 1994 to 2003.)  Most reap huge profits at the expense of their struggling or eliminated U.S. competitors.  Business services are seeing a similar outsourcing trend.  Meanwhile, bureaucrats, professionals, and academics, who form a sizeable and influential interest group with secure domestic employment, have found this globalism provides them a bountiful supply of cheap consumer goods and personal services, which only guarantees their loyalty to the globalist regime.

Also at the table are the globalist camp followers.  The U.S. Department of Commerce, the media, the public-policy institutes, the economist gurus and academics—all continually preach the “good news” that all is well, ignoring the crisis of the U.S. manufacturing sector, growing deficits and indebtedness, and the maldistribution of income and wealth, as well as the declining social indicators.  Self-declared “supply-side” economists have unjustifiably supported globalist policies: “Free trade maximizes national economic growth”—even if the trade is not reciprocal?  “Deficits don’t matter”—despite size, duration, and accumulated debt?  “Open borders benefit everyone”—despite lost jobs and lower pay for native workers, together with social disruption?  Unfortunately, history does not support these utopian maxims.

The neocon remedies for these problems are like the leeches used to treat the sick in the days of yore.  Devaluation of the dollar (read: printing more dollars), they claim, will balance the trade deficit.  However, commodities and physical or intellectual capital are very mobile and have world prices whose inflation is inversely proportional to devaluation; and government will inflate itself as necessary, leaving only labor to devalue its share of income, as the past four decades of increasing U.S. trade deficits and intermittent devaluations have shown.

The social consequences of these globalist policies are clearly contributing to the deterioration of our social fabric.  Middle-class marriage and birth rates continue to decline as American workers seek to maintain the comforts and lifestyle that their parents enjoyed.  The underclass forsakes marriage and bears illegitimate children who become wards of the state.  Such children are often underachievers in school and prone to substance abuse and criminality, conditions that perpetuate an intergenerational underclass.  Senior citizens join the underclass as dependents of the state.  If these trends continue, the United States will no longer be defined socially by a middle-class majority of citizens.

Neocon-driven U.S. military interventions abroad only add to the burden.  The futility increasingly evident in the American Empire’s foreign policy has seriously undermined its world image among both hostile nations and erstwhile allies.  At some point, our financial excesses, the deterioration of our manufacturing sector (which has traditionally produced superior weaponry), and our overall inability to project power abroad will provoke the emergence of more powerful and vigorous nations that will replace a nation that no longer leads by example, nor remembers how it achieved the hegemony that it squandered.  And it will prove increasingly difficult to ship volunteers overseas to fight interventionist wars who have little or no stake in the ventures of their overlords.

The United States is on a collision course with reality, but a change of direction is still possible.  The average American never sanctioned most of the policies that are now driving us to demise.  The electorate never sent a single representative to Washington to write a tax code that prevents reciprocal terms of trade and hinders manufacturers from staying competitive and paying civilized wages to their employees.  A replacement of income taxes with border-adjusted consumption taxes, such as a VAT or a national sales tax, would reinstate competitive prices and the saving for investment necessary to close the trade deficit and eliminate the federal deficit.

Voters have never sent anyone to the Congress on a mission to flood the country with unskilled, illiterate Third World immigrants who will drive down middle-class wages and fill the welfare rolls.  Nor has the American electorate at any time in the post-World War II era asked a president to invade any country that did not represent a clear and present threat to the United States or any of her principal allies.

What Americans want is a government that taxes them equitably and spends their money frugally.  They want protection—military, economic, and communal—not an American Empire that endlessly intervenes abroad while allowing illegal immigrants to stream across our borders, maintains uncompetitive terms of trade, and fosters excessive welfare burdens.

In short, Americans do not want globalism; they want a return to the traditional America that once was the envy of the world.  A revolution at the polls—sending neocons, socialists, and multiculturalists back to wherever they came from and replacing them in Washington with real Americans—is long overdue.