You are quite right, Johannes, to fear nuclear war.  The lack of economic demand during the depression led to WW 2, including the second European civil war.  No wars between major powers have occurred since then because the major wars led to communist revolutions, and the threat of nuclear bombs and revolution directed the US into low intensity wars in an insane attempt to corner the oil and gas deposits.

But as economic inequality incrased within the US, and violence increased to maintain it, the plutocracy became increasingly deranged.  The Republican party consists of outright loonies and the Dem party is sweethearting up to their policies.  these policies are supported by a faction of the European ruling class who gave Obama a Peace Prize for continuing wars.

The US-Israel is a danger to the whole world because its ruling class appears to be glued to a neo-colonialist reaction to maintain its power.  It cannot compete effectively economically and so is bent on competed militarily.

but how can the American population assert control over it?  Globalization has destroyed the unions, and the media owned or controlled by the plutocracy has systematically deluded the population. the American peple have to unite to oppose the plutocracy, and this requires adhering to an ideology that contain truths that Americans don’t want to know.

Over historical time these truths will become self-evident.  In the meantime…  I look forward and also fear.

Sooner or later to deprive it of its power, I hope so Mister folktruther, before its to late, and the atomic boms are raining down on us.

I am so glad to see that a few Americans like Me Cha and Mike understand what is happening to us historically.  Mie’s question:

  “So why does our political system continue to facilitate loss of a major job source (manufacturing) by passing so-called free-trade agreements?”

Because it’s extremely profitable for the plutocracy that rules us.  American corporations can manufacture in low wage countries and sell their goods in high wage countries, reaping enormous profits.

But as anyone can see, the high wage countries will eventually become the low wage countries of unemployment. 

Business executives DO see it, as I know from talking to them.  BUT IT ISN’T THEIR PROBLEM.  Their job is to make money for their corporation, not to anticipate the historical direction of the world of earthpeople.  they know, better than the American people, that this trend can’t continue indefinitely.  BUT WHAT CAN THEY DO ABOUT IT?

And that is the difference between China and the US.  the Chinese state owns the banks and over a third of the economy and is subjected to the governance of the communist party.  the party, like all power systems, wants to increase its power, and does so by turning China into a modern industrial state.

In the US the banks and other money organs own the government, funding the political leader’s elections and owning and funding through advertising the mass media.  In China the banks do what the government says, and in the US the government does what the banks say.  The banks want to make money to increaee their power, and everything else is secondary.  so they do, at the cost of 20% or so of unemployment, enormous and growing class inequality and destitution, increased violence at home and abroad, and the media bullshit necessary to justify, rationalize and humanize it.

The American economic and political system is obsolete.  It must be replaced or transformed.  this is a hard truth that Americans don’t want to hear and don’t want to know.  the American Dream has turned into a nightmare, and it is from this nightmare that we must awake.

Economics, along with political science and history, is the major area of deception of the Amereican people in political and social theory.  As Paul Craig Roberts, a former asst US Treasurer has stated, the US statistical indexes are fabrications, notably the unimployment index.  the Chinese economic growth is routinely fabricatted in the US media, recently its production mesurement reduced 40% to display how much it is behind the US.  In 2008, on the contrary, China industrial production was probably close to twice that of the US.

What the Chinese have done is to socialize living conditions to make necessities cheap, leaving the wages as desposable income.  That is how the Chinese can save so much given their small wages.  the firms also hire an additional fraction of workers they don’t need immediately to keep up with the growth planned by the communist central committee.  this process tends to demonetize the economy relative to neoliberal capitalism, allowing the low labor costs to undersell their goods.

This is a new form of power system, a planned-market economy.  It is far superior to the US neoliberal eonomy, which can’t compete with it in the world arena.  the War on Terrorism was an attempt to maintain US domination by violence, low intensity wars to control the world’s oil and gas deposits.  It was a demented strategic manuever in the modern world, but has led to the barbarism of mass murder, torture, mass refugees, etc.

The violent and fraudulent War on Terrorism has produced the US as a Failed State, according to Roberts.  The US plutocracy has maintained a strategy of increasing income inequality, and this class inequality, and consequent destitution, can only be maintained by violence and coercion at home and abroad.  The simple truth is the first victimof this violence which is justified by deceit, delusion, ideological repression, and irrationality in the American truth consensus.

Meanwhile China is growing economically at an unprecedented historical rate, and this economic growth eeventually translates into military, diplomatic and ideological power.  The function of both the Conservative and Progressive media is to prevent the American people from understanding what is happening historically, and its geo-strategic consequences.  Because with the US plutocracy losing world power, the Ameriecan people will sooner or later unite against it to deprive it of deomestic power as well.