History Articles

Real Conservative Don T Drink Lattes Or Do They

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If Barry Goldwater were alive today to witness the new transformation of the GOP, he would grow a beard and become a bead vendor on Constitution Avenue in Washington.

While in Indianapolis recently this author noted numerous well dressed business people standing in line waiting to buy coffee. Mostly latte or some contortion thereof was ordered. This city is known for its GOP leaning conservative nature.

Many were rapidly moving in the line talking conservative politics while I was ordered to stand off to the side like an oddball waiting 20 minutes for my street brand coffee.

But one thing was obviously clear. The GOP of the past is not the new GOP. Or better said, the Party has been taken over by a new breed.

The RNC has clearly abandoned its basic principals that drove it to become the majority choice with the Contract With America Initiative in 1994.

Instead they have taken on noble projects such as waging war on the middle class, to pursuing international adventures of questionable value, to ignoring obvious Chinese trade atrocities in our domestic markets, to name but a few.

This begs a few questions.

Since when do Republicans support "budget deficits"? Since when do Republicans support decreases in military spending? Since when do Republicans support Chinese economic invasion of our country? Since when do Republicans advocate runaway growth in government spending? Since when do Republicans support tax increases by another name? Since when does such a great Party constantly resort to the use of terror and scare tactics in order to divert electoral attention away from its own failings?

You would think the GOP is full of traditional liberals sucking down lattes in the morning at the local Starbucks, eating California salad plates for lunch, and ordering up quiche dinners.

Na, they are just good ole fashion George Bush neocons trying to redress the Republican Party to their own liking.

Let's hear some of their wholesale excuses spoon fed the American public.

Budget deficit don't matter. Despite their age old proclamation that deficits don't cause interest rates to increase, well that's water over the dam if the present is any example. Bush and his economic team make Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin look like miracle workers spinning budget surpluses accompanied with historically low interest rates.

Military spending as a percent of GDP, and adjusted for inflation, is near all time lows at 3.3 percent of GDP according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. Absolute dollars spent on the military is not much more than the waning years of the Reagan Administration, and once it is discounted for inflation, below the Reagan era of 6.1 percent of GDP.

This is why the concept of "overwhelming" force can not be applied to Iraq or any potential enemy for that matter and the real reason we are having trouble containing the Middle East situation and unable to respond to the North Korean threat, at least on a conventional military basis.

The Bush family, and their agents, are all are military "cutters", not builders. Closing military bases, retiring medium range bombers, cutting back the number of active Army divisions, and mothballing our battleship fleet have been their forte. Way back in the Nixon and Ford years, Senior Bush and Rumsfeld supported defense cutbacks.

They argue that historic military spending is down because the Cold War is over. We only hope someone tells that to the billion or so Communist Chinese who chant, "Beat America". They don't know the Cold War has ended.

Not that raising military spending to Cold War levels is a cure all for our present international difficulties. But the America people need to be told the truth, and not boondoggled on this issue, and let them make those defense choices through the electoral process.

And how come federal government spending is increasing at a much faster rate under this Republican Administration than it did under Clinton Clan?

The conservative think tank, Cato Institute, sums it up nicely. "President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson." Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. His 2006 budget doesn't cut enough spending to change his place in history, either.

The Institute went on to say, "the federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton's last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of Bush's first term."

Now to pseudo tax increases or whatever you want to label them.

When those low rate adjustable rate mortgages begin to convert in this era of much higher interest rates, personal disposable incomes as a percent of total personal incomes are going to significantly decrease and severely damage the economy. Bush's tax cut is going to look like a nickel in the Sunday collection plate in comparison. And he will exit office in 2009 leaving his party exposed to the electoral backlash that will ensue because of this economic debacle.

And let's not forget that every time the electorate begins to focus on the real economic issues plaguing this economy, an elevated terror alert is issued. Why?

The neocons are trying to blame 9/11 for our vexing discomfort with multiple issues facing the nation. Surely the attack five years ago changed America forever, maybe expelling the remaining vestibules of innocence left over from the Kennedy assassination.

But it has not changed the basic tenants upon which this nation was founded. Only botched economics and a questionable war with almost 4000 dead to its credit, and a bellicose jingoistic attitude toward the world community can harm us. And harm us it has with payback just around the corner for the GOP.

The question is simple.

Will the same old scare tactics, diversionary attacks, and negative campaigning the Bush boys have engineered to such a fine art, once again prevail?

Human Made Monsters

(category: History, Word count: 386)
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Humans made monsters by inhuman treatment abound in literature. In "The Man Who Laughs", published in 1869, the French author, Victor Hugo (1802-1885), described the comprachicos thus:

"The comprachicos (child buyers) were strange and hideous nomads in the 17th century. They made children into sideshow freaks. To succeed in producing a freak one must get hold of him early; a dwarf must be started when he is small. They stunted growth, they mangled features. It was an art/science of inverted orthopedics. Where nature had put a straight glance, this art put a squint. Where nature had put harmony, they put deformity and imperfection. The child was not aware of the mutilation he had suffered. This horrible surgery left traces on his face, not in his mind. During the operation the little patient was unconscious by means of a stupefying magic powder.

In China since time immemorial, they have achieved refinement in a special art and industry: the molding of living man. One takes a child two or three years old and puts them into a grotesquely shaped porcelain vase. It is without cover or bottom, so the head and feet protrude. In the daytime the vase is upright, at night it is laid down so the child can sleep. Thus the child slowly fills the contours of the vase with compressed flesh and twisted bones. This bottled development continues for several years. At a certain point, it becomes an irreparable monster. Then the vase is broken and one has a man in the shape of a pot."

The Kyrgyz writer, Chingiz Aitmatov (or Aytmatov) (1928 - ) recounts in "The Day Lasts More than One Hundred Years" (1980) the legend of the Ana-Beiit cemetery and the zombies known as "mankurts".

According to tradition, the nomad Zhuan'zhuan, shaved the heads of the younger and more fit prisoners of war and wrapped their skulls in raw camel hide. The prisoners were then left to shrivel in the desert's scorching sun, without food or water. As the caps shrank around their heads, they perished in terrible agony. The survivors completely lost their memory. Their subsequent submissiveness and loyalty made them ten times more valuable than a regular slave and three times as precious as a free man (in terms of pecuniary damages when accidentally killed).

Clarity Crafted From Common Sense

(category: History, Word count: 695)
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A massive show of political unity at home will affect troop morale, on both sides!

Let's face it; we are all liberals, no matter how conservative we may be. The Puritans who founded America conquered dangers and disasters to win religious freedom, but they were liberals. In 1754, Benjamin Franklin depicted a rattlesnake cut into eight sections in his Pennsylvania Gazette. The eight sections of snake symbolized eight eastern seaboard colonies and the caption said "Join or Die!" It was a call to arms during the French and Indian war. By 1776, an image of a coiled rattlesnake, with "Don't Tread on Me", became an American icon of independence and a battle cry engrained in the Spirit of '76.

What is different about the liberalism of the Puritans and the liberalism of the progressive movement in America today? In a word, the difference is morality. The Puritans personified deeply held, Bible based morality with their liberalism. When morality is stripped away from liberalism, the result is 30 million aborted babies over thirty years, legalized sodomy and the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), all protected by the immoral ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union).

Born in 1954, I was a classic Love Generation, anti-Vietnam War liberal, living at the speed of party! It is unbelievable; what our generation has lived through. The sexual revolution, women's lib, the music revolution, the recreational drug awakening, the Civil Rights marches, the nuclear arms race, the space race, the information revolution spawned by the computer, the internet, satellites and cell phones are just part of what we have witnessed! What a wonderful life and evolution of our democracy, in our time!

Our choices for president in 1972, when I turned eighteen and got a draft card, were Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. I did not vote that year. Most profound, perhaps, we stopped the Vietnam War to protect those poor rice farmers, from US troops. We quit and came home. Then, between 1975 and 1978, the Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge slaughtered about three million of those peasants who we demonstrated in US streets to protect, from US troops. How foolish we were!

The lesson is clear: really bad guys immediately fill the muscle void when good men stand down and go home. Those who rallied our utopian filled minds to stop the war were mostly silent about the genocide that ensued, after US troops were withdrawn. Our killed and wounded were sacrificed in great numbers. In the end, their mission and our allies were simply abandoned by Congress and our divided nation.

We grew up with Why We Fight, Victory At Sea, Combat, Black Sheep Squadron, Rat Patrol and other programs about WWII, the death camps and the cost of freedom on TV. This type of programming saturated the few over-the-air channels and we found it educational, entertaining and fascinating. Many of us still find it fascinating. It was all about the gritty, epic struggle between freedom and tyranny and it was very patriotic!

The Rifleman, Leave It To Beaver, Gunsmoke, My Three Sons, Bonanza, The Waltons, Wild Kingdom and All In The Family are just a few programs I recall that were favorites for lighter entertainment. And the Ed Sullivan show. It was all pretty wholesome fare and we loved it. The America of our youth is already gone forever, in case you missed its passing.

We watched in naive befuddlement while the Shah of Iran was overthrown by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard in Tehran, who used US hostages as pawns on TV for over a year beginning in 1979. Interest rates were sky high and lines at gas stations were longer than that. Our President at the time was a former peanut farmer and most of us watched, from afar, the rise of radical Islam without understanding it.

As a result of the gasoline shortages that followed, there was a lot of talk about energy independence. Certainly, the masses of us did not connect the dots between buying foreign oil and funding terrorism. Apparently, neither did our elected leaders who were most interested in re-election, as they almost always are above al

This Is Not Your Dad S Republican Party Anymore

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Stock markets are strange because they reflect the sum total of all our hopes, fears and prejudices at the end of each day. Every so often something big comes along that can have very strong influence on the stock market, and the direction the market is going to take. Bear markets when they do come, come out of nowhere. Everybody is surprised by them, but once they happen, the pundits have what seem to be perfectly reasonable explanations for why they happen.

I submit to you that next week's Congressional midterm elections will be seen retrospectively as a so-called WATERSHED election whereby dramatic change will be brought about. You will only know this in hindsight over time. If the Republicans are trounced in the House, and lose heavily in the Senate, there will be a tidal wave type change in the direction that the country is going.

During the course of the modern Presidency which is considered to be 1932 onward with FDR's election, our leaders have always been influenced by polls. This is true for all Presidents except for our current President, George Bush. It is absolutely amazing to consider that our President won the White House by 557 votes in Florida in 2000 and 85,000 votes in Ohio in 2004, and nevertheless governs like he had a 40 state landslide.

He has adopted the notion that all he had to do is win by one vote, and the power was his to effectuate and do whatever he wanted to. For six years, he has been right. The Congress has essentially rubber-stamped everything the President has asked for, and he has not been held accountable for the false assumptions under which the war in Iraq was initially waged. Next week will be the first time to hold the President accountable for the mismanagement of the war over the last three years.

What kind of conservative is the President? He has outspent any liberal Democratic President in history, mounting up deficits at a rate that a drunken sailor would envy. He gave tax cuts to the rich, and financed the cuts through deficit spending by borrowing the money from Japan, China, and Europe, and leaving the unpaid burden to our children to worry about. Does this make sense to you? If you are going to give tax cuts, shouldn't your budget be in surplus first.

He has chosen to cut all spending for stem cell research to protect the rights of the unborn, yet doesn't believe in programs for the poor. A third of this country is running around without even the most basic health insurance, and he's protecting the rights of the unborn.

He doesn't want the government to fund abortions. Okay, but think about this. Without abortions over the last generation, there would have been 20 million unloved, uncared for additional children born in America. It would not have affected the rich; they always had access to abortions, and always will, regardless of the law. Where would we be today with such a policy? If you want to argue that these unborn children would have been adopted and cared for, I have one word for you, SURE. There are already hundreds of thousands of abused children going through our foster care system that nobody wants. The President would have added 20 million more.

Iraq is bleeding this country financially, and is in the very beginning of destroying our social fabric. You can count the children serving in Iraq of our Senators and Congressmen, and White House staff on the fingers of a mutilated left hand. Why is it that the so called folks who run the government never seem to have their children's blood spilled on these foreign adventures? They are always willing to send somebody else to die.

By the way, just so you know, I consider myserlf a conservative Republican that is appalled at the actions of the leaders I participated in putting into office. This is not the party of Barry Goldwater who believed that abortion is a personal right, who believed that you don't wage wars, unless you bring overwhelming force to the objective. This party has turned into a party of elitists, who were elected by average citizens just trying to do the right thing.

At the same time, these elected leaders are not responsive to us. Strange as it may seem, we elect our leaders, and after the election, the lobbyists OWN them. How can you possibly spend a hundred billion dollars on drugs for senior citizens, a program I support, and NOT write into the law that the government has the right to negotiate lower prices for these drugs? Wow, the drug companies give the Republicans over $10 million to fund the election, and the Republicans give the drug companies another $20 to $40 billion dollars in excess payments for their drugs. Frankly, the payoff wasn't big enough.

How did it come to this point? The Republicans always stood for the rights of the individuals, and fiscal responsibility. Now we have thrown fiscal responsibility out the window. The leaders argue as long as the rate of growth, of the deficit is lower than the rate of growth of the economy, its okay to have deficits. This is the same line the Democrats used for 40 years, only now it's coming out of the mouths of the Republicans.

Here's the bottom line, and read it carefully. You and I as citizens of the greatest country in 10,000 years of civilization are at the crossroads. We have to choose and choose now. Our freedoms are being usurped by corporate and institutional interests. Once we elect officials, it seems they are at the mercy of lobbyists who have what seems like infinite amounts of money to influence our democratically chosen leaders. The laws and programs that you, and I as liberal, and conservative thinkers would choose are not getting done. Instead, it seems that special interests are having their needs met to the detriment of 300 million Americans.

We can not survive very long as a viable society, and meet the growing economic and military threat posed by China's emergence, as well as other nation states unless we are all aligned in the same direction. The waste and mismanaged programs we are seeing are going to generate a drag on our system that will make us far less competitive in the next ten years to deal with the rest of the world. Farming is gone, it's a non factor. Manufacturing is heading the same way, with globalization. We are headed towards a post-industrial society. We are almost there. We will move towards a fully service oriented society shortly. Will we have the jobs for our people to replace those jobs going overseas? Maybe, maybe not, but next week we have an election, you must choose, choose wisely.

Goodbye and Good Luck

Richard Stoyeck

The biggest joke is that if the Democrats get elected, we are going to trade one set of lobbyists for another, one set of special interests for another, one party devoid of ideas for another. Somehow, the people need to be back in control again, and voting for the default party isn't the right answer either.

In The Footsteps Of D Company 2nd Oxfordshire And Buckinghamshire Light Infantry D Day 6 June 1944

(category: History, Word count: 88)
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On the 6 June 1944 the greatest seaborne invasion the world has ever known took place on the Calvados Coast of Normandy, France. This invasion was the beginning of the end of the Second World War and the 6 June 1944 will be forever known as D-Day. This article is an account of the first action that took place on D-Day at the Caen Canal and River Orne Bridges near B

Did Colorado Kill Doc Holliday

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John Henry "Doc" Holliday's final words, spoken as he lay dying in the Hotel Glenwood in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, were "this is funny". We'll never know, of course, exactly what the Wild West legend meant by this. Perhaps he found it ironic that after a life spent tempting death in the gambling dens of the American frontier, it was at last his 15-year long battle with tuberculosis that had killed him. But while it is certainly true that TB was the ultimate cause of his death, it may have had an accomplice...the state of Colorado itself.

Doc was born in Georgia in 1851. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was only 15, and it is likely that he contracted the disease from her. It lay dormant long enough for him to complete his classical education and graduate from Dentistry school before symptoms began to appear. After his diagnosis he was told he had a few months, perhaps a year, to live. He was 20 years old.

Climate was the only treatment anyone could recommend for tuberculosis in the middle of the 19th century. Seeking drier, hotter weather, Doc went west. Dying or not, he still had to make a living. Good dental hygiene, however, was not a priority for most cowboys, so Doc decided to try his hand at gambling.

Some historians have suggested that Doc deliberately put himself in harms way over the course of his life out of a desire to die a quick, if bloody, death rather than waste away as the result of his disease. Whether or not this is true, he certainly seemed to have the Devil's luck (good or bad) protecting him. Though he was sickly, scrawny, famously quarrelsome and habitually in a state if of mortal danger, he always managed to survive.

Holliday has passed into legend as one of America's most fearsome, steely-eyed gunslingers. But though he is credited with the killing of many men, these stories have no historical evidence. In truth, the one and only documented case of Doc killing anybody was at the infamous Gunfight at the OK Corral, when he shot Tom McLaury with a double-barrel shotgun at close range...hardly a feat the required a sharpshooter. Of his numerous escapades with a pistol he displayed abysmal aim, probably as a result of the constant flow of whiskey he consumed to control his cough. He is said to have stabbed several men to death, but this seems unlikely given his frail health and wasted physique; he supposedly carried only about 120 pounds on his 5'10" frame when he died.

More than a decade of gambling, smoking, drinking and fighting with some of the most dangerous men in America didn't kill Doc Holliday, but it didn't slow the progression of his disease, either. As he deteriorated he once again sought out "better" climate. In Victorian times (and for a long time after) consumptives were encouraged to seek high altitudes. This led Doc to the state of Colorado, the place that eventually killed him.

High altitude sickness is caused when the "thinner" air, where there is less oxygen in the atmosphere, causes the amount of oxygen in the bloodstream to decrease, causing headaches, nausea and a host of other symptoms. For someone like Holliday, who suffered from a severe and advanced lung disease that already interfered with his ability to breath, Colorado's high altitude was torturous. With his health worsening daily he decided to seek treatment in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, a town famous for the "healing" waters of its natural hot-springs and vaporous caves.

Visiting the hot-springs was the worst possible course of action for the tubercular Holliday. Sulfur emissions from the mineral springs and geothermal steam baths at Glenwood Springs stripped the few shreds of healthy tissue from his already ravaged lungs. After a bitter lifetime of gambling with death at the point of a blade or the barrel of a pistol, his diseased body got the better of him. After 2 racking, bedridden months in the winter of 1887 Doc Holliday's lungs gave out and he died. Tuberculosis had been the loaded gun at his temple for almost half his life, but Colorado had finally pulled the trigger.

The Greatest Music Composer Of All Times

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Collecting gold coins falls into several different categories and I'm only going to mention a couple. There are historical gold coins minted by an actual mint controedl by a government. Collecting gold coins is a nice investment because gold is appreciating in value and easy to keep in your house or in safe keeping box in your bank. Monaco Rare Coins is selling coins in gold, silver and other gold form. Collecting gold coins can make something special for your family, specially if the coin you collect in the future increases value. Collecting gold coins, however, can be both fun and profitable if you go about it the right way. With gold values increasing some 200 percent over the past several years, the time is right to get into this exciting and profitable and fantastic hobby. Because it is important to make this point clear, collecting gold coins can be both a hobby and a source of income.

To start explaining about gold coins, we need to go a long time back in history and explain how coins in the history of mankind were issued in Lydia more than 3000 years ago. So this means you have over tre thousand years of history to find the perfect coins for your collection.

Rare coins are truly a challenge for anyone who seeks to make this a mission in life. Not only are they hard to find but it they are expensive to acquire. Rare coins that are extremely hard to find are often valuable and when found can be a good investment. The rare coin collection market in the United States has boosted their sales in recent years from 349. That is a huge increase, compared to any other market.

Some other interest field in gold coins is the coins collected from Latin America. Advanced civilisations in ancient Peru, Columbia, Guatemala, and Mexico gathered great caches of gold coins, jewellery, and treasures. In the United States gold coins were withdrawn from circulation, but silver token coinage was retained until 1964 while silver coins were not worth more than face value until the inflation of the 1970's.

If you are interested in gold coins they can be purchased from precious metals firms, coin dealers as well as individual investors. But be aware if you decide to buy rare gold coins, the coins should be accompanied with some type of authenticity certificate from an independent coin sellingservice.

Like any other business or hobbie, there are a number of trade secrets that make real coing gold collectors, successful collectors. First, try to find coins with rarity. Keep in mind that gold coins are a great investment idea for someone looking to diversify their portfolio, the reason is pretty easy to understand buying gold coins is a popular way of holding gold due to their availability in different sizes to meet the needs of different classes of investor and collector.

To many new collectors out there, buying gold coins may seem intimidating but it is really simple if you follow a few basic rules: Learn how to choose reputable gold bullion shops and buy gold from trusted stores. Go for rare coins, and be patient, you will make a profit on the long run, you just need to buy for the right price and sell later on your gold coin and double or triple your profits. Good luck.

Will The Next Cold War Be An Economic One

(category: History, Word count: 1716)
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Several big stories hit the financial news this past week but the real significance of these stories were not discussed anywhere. Number one, the U.S. Congress pushed to file unfair trade practices against China, stating that the Bush administration's quiet behind-the-scenes negotiation strategy was unacceptable as a tactic to bring economic reform to China. In another story this week, these words appeared - Rather than serve as "an apologist" for China, "I hope the administration will join this team," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told reporters after testifying before the Senate Finance Committee in the second hearing on China's economic and currency policies in two days.

This article reported that Congress aimed to pass bi-partisan veto-proof legislation that will force the Chinese Yuan to appreciate against the dollar. American manufacturers have claimed that the Chinese government's unfair manipulation of their currency has hurt them and their Congressmen are listening. Then finally at the end of the week, this headline appeared in an article: "The U.S. Commerce Department announced sanctions against paper imports from China, the first time in 23 years that U.S. duty law has been applied to imports from that country."

Reporting the above is fine, but what are its implications? Here is my view. For once, I agree that the Bush administration is taking the proper stance and their disapproval of these brash, flag-waving Congressmen is merited. When sending U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke and the U.S. Secretary of Treasury Paulson to China only resulted in China defiantly stating that they will not allow another nation to dictate to them how they should run their economy, U.S. Congress should have gotten the hint. Instead, they escalated an already potentially volatile situation with their threats and sanctions this week.

Stephen Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley warned Congress that currency valuation was far from being the sole component hurting American manufacturers. He stated that China's cheap labor costs, burgeoning modern infrastructure and technology and growing investment in human capital and research also have greatly contributed to the burgeoning trade imbalance between China and the United States. Mr. Roach commented, "The foreign-exchange rate is not the answer, in my view. You in the Congress need to ask yourselves an important hypothetical question: How would you feel if you got your way on the Chinese currency adjustment but found that after three or four years the pressures bearing down on American workers had only intensified? As I see it, that's a very real risk that should not be taken lightly."

Although I have vehemently disagreed with Mr. Roach's past views on other subject matters, I believe that he is on the mark 100% this time and I'll tell you why. U.S. Federal Chairman Bernanke has already publicly stated that everybody knows that the weak dollar is good for the U.S. government because it makes their debt cheaper and also helps to close the trade gap. So if you don't think that the U.S. is not guilty of manipulating their own currency as well to serve their purposes then you are living in some kind of economic fantasyland. There are a whole lot of American expats living abroad that would like to see their own government do something to protect the value of their own currency instead of lecturing other nations as to how they should be managing theirs. Furthermore, this event is indeed a watershed event in the ongoing re-structuring of the world's economies. In the past, colonized nations had bitterly complained to Europe and the U.S. about the harm their economic policies inflicted upon their economies. But now we see a 180% reversal, with developed countries complaining to emerging nations about their policies.

But this is almost beside the point when it comes to examining much more significant fallout of an open trade war with China. The reason the Bush administration is trying to negotiate quietly with the Chinese rather than take the more hard-line stance assumed by the U.S. Congress is that they know that the Chinese government holds far more important cards than the valuation of the Yuan, namely the more than one trillion dollars of U.S. dollar denominated assets that they currently hold in their reserves.

As I stated in a blog I posted about a week ago to The Underground Investor, the U.S. Congress would be foolish to aggressively alienate the Chinese government with so much at stake. The problems with the U.S. economy are much more a product of past U.S. fiscal irresponsibility than the manipulative actions of the Chinese economy and if the U.S. chooses to try to scapegoat an economic giant like China for their current problems, I believe, as Mr. Roach stated, that re-valuation of the Yuan will not be the answer. Furthermore, it is exactly these protectionist measures that the U.S. is seeking to implement that have hindered emerging markets in the past.

Instead of addressing the real reasons behind a lagging economy, protectionist measures many times seek to scapegoat another country's economic policies for far more deep-rooted economic failures at home. Furthermore, protectionist measures often harbor and encourages domestic inefficiencies to persist instead of encouraging proactive solutions that attack the root of the problem. In fact, if the U.S. Congress pushes through their punitive measures, I can tell you right now that revaluation of the Yuan will NOT be the answer to the problems of the American economy. And despite the fact that offloading massive amounts of U.S. dollars will hurt the Chinese economy as well, there will also come a time when the Chinese government, if pushed far enough, will offload massive amounts of U.S. dollars because their strong economy will be able to absorb its negative effects much better than the weak U.S. economy.

And if they do so, the U.S. Congress will have given them the perfect excuse to do something that I believe the Chinese government is planning to do anyway. However, they will be able to do it, save face at the same time, and do it earlier than anyone expects, as opposed to having the global community heap loads of criticism upon them for what would otherwise seem to be a sudden decision that came out of nowhere. Instead of such an action being viewed as the selfish actions of a nation, it will instead by viewed as a reaction to U.S. bullying, and U.S. Congress will have given the Chinese government the perfect out.

In this case, quiet negotiations is the proper way because any other way is bound to bring harm to not only Americans in the future, but to the global economy as well. When I have blogged about governments being chronic liars in the past, certainly the Chinese government or any world government is not immune. While the Chinese government has publicly stated that they will not take any sudden actions that will greatly hurt the U.S. dollar, do you really believe that they want to hold a trillion dollars of a currency that continues to lose significant value every year? Trust me, they are planning to get rid of these dollars as soon as economically possible and behind the scenes, they have a plan in place to offload them.

Again, I can tell you why punitive Congressional U.S. measures will not coax the Chinese to assume policies the U.S. wants but only anger them. To begin, Japan is on the verge of replacing America as China's number one trading partner. If the Chinese choose to bow down to American pressure, they would undoubtedly anger the Japanese who have heavily invested in China and would be adversely affected by the Chinese government's decision to appease the U.S. Congress. Angering your number one trading partner would be even worse than angering the U.S. And this just in, even as I write this blog, in a report originating out of New York:

Today, China called the first of U.S. protectionist measures, tariffs on their paper imports, "unacceptable." China strongly demands the United States to reconsider this decision and correct it as soon as possible," China Commerce Ministry spokesman Wang Xinpei said in a statement on a government Web site.

Secondly, I believe that the Chinese government, despite what diplomatic statements they release to the financial press about being concerned not to enact any policies that will cause the U.S. dollar to fall quickly, desire to unload a significant portion of their $1 trillion dollar of U.S. dollar-denominated reserves. The Chinese government realizes that offloading significant portions of dollars, whether it is to purchase oil and natural gas for their state reserves, or the purchase of other assets, will automatically cause the Yuan to strengthen. They are not going to appease the U.S. Congress now and watch the Yuan strengthen and then see this effect multiply as they unload U.S. dollars from their reserves. I believe that this is how the Chinese will eventually allow the Yuan to strengthen - by merely cutting back on their dollar-denominated assets, something that they want to do anyhow.

With this potential trade war, it is important to ignore the preening of the U.S. Congress but to consider the implications of their potential actions instead. U.S. Congressmen are no doubt influenced a great deal by their most important constituents, in this case, large manufacturers. However, in this case, it is not the concerns of the large manufacturers that are most important. Here they serve merely as a smokescreen.

Sure, large manufacturers are being hurt right now by Chinese imports, but rather than considering this part of the equation which the financial media gives much attention to, it is more important to consider the other side of the equation that is never spoken of in the financial media. Rather than listen to the complaints of the hurt, seek out what the very wealthiest of individuals are doing to not just protect their assets as the geo-political balance progresses towards a tipping point, but how they are positioning their assets now to prepare to profit from these future crises. As is a common theme at the Underground Investor, sometimes the loudest chatter will distract you from the most important information, the information that dwells below this chatter.

Communicating Democrats Agenda For The Common Good

(category: History, Word count: 365)
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All the polls today point to a significant Democratic advantage, both on how the parties are handling the key issues as well as how people will vote on Election Day.

Yet, as early November approaches, Democrats would be wise to understand that they are where they are, not because of their efforts, but frankly in spite of them.

The only conclusion we will be able to draw from a big Democratic win is that Americans are not so much embracing Democrats as much as they are rejecting Republicans.

As a Democratic strategist who helped President Bill Clinton fight his way back from the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994, I have been disappointed that the Democrats have not offered a positive and forward looking agenda for America that expresses how in President Clinton's words they will address the "common good".

The 2006 Congressional elections thus far are a missed opportunity for Democrats to lay out an agenda for change that both unifies the party and presents them to the electorate as the logical (and acceptable) alterative to what the Republicans are offering America today.

Unfortunately, the Democrats have simply not done a credible job defining who they are or what they stand for. Their rationale today is simply a litany of individual top scoring policy proposals, and not an agenda to move the country forward by addressing the common good.

Some quarters of the Democratic Party are already calling for an ideological agenda should the Democrats win. This unfortunately isn't the answer. The Democratic agenda must not tackle ideology. Real results for average people must come first.

Just last week, The Washington Post ran an article about nine Democrats on the ballot who are all former Republicans. They are running as Democrats, not because they now believe in more progressive policies, but because they are rejecting the Republican policies that put conservative ideology over everything else.

This apparent microcosm is important for Democrats to understand. If they should take control of Congress, the country will begin to turn to them for answers to their pressing everyday problems. People like never before are looking for practical answers and results

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