Commentary: A War Cry From a Battered America

The economy is in a tailspin because the price of metallurgical coal has collapsed!  Huh?  Let me explain.  Former Reagan White House Budget Director David Stockman tracks these canaries in the mines.  Met coal has hit rock bottom price.  It’s used in steel production.  The price collapsed because of a glut of met coal.  There is a glut because steel production has greatly slowed.  How slow?  The Wall Street Journal says the slowest in a decade.  When I shared Stockman’s chart with a friend familiar with trading he returned a chart depicting the bottoming of the copper price.  Remember during the rise of China copper became so valuable thieves were stripping it from farms and lampposts in the dead of night.

China recently reported 7 percent growth to open the year.  Analysts doubt China’s figure.  You mean totalitarians lie?  In New Zealand farmers are dumping milk.  Sales to the biggest customer, China, have dried up.  Singapore’s economy suffered a severe setback at the same time China claimed a return to growth.  Singapore’s main customer is; guess who?

We’re talking about numbers and some can be plucked from thin air.  President Obama’s minions point to first time jobless claims and crow about the fewest filings since before the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973.  Never mind a record number of adult Americans aren’t working and teen employment appears something of a myth your parents tell you about.  Could it be the jobless claims have dropped so low because there are so few jobs to lose?  Could it be the White House has learned a thing or two from China?  Toss out a number and the Obama sycophants in media carry the ball.  They’ve told us for so many years to criticize the man is nothing but racist.  Now they’ve painted themselves into a corner.

This weekend a political writer at the Washington Post shared how he and the political class have just discovered the country is in pitchfork mood.  Even if there are a few in elected office who understand they’ve already sold their souls to their sponsors.  They hang on and try to ply us with further distractions.  Then along comes Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and suddenly the political world isn’t quite so dull anymore.  People who haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to the masters-of-the-game even while suffering as pawns on the chessboard are taking an interest.  An actual large voter turnout could be disastrous for the political class.  They’ve been working for decades to depress turnout and to rally small bases to carry Election Days.  A mass turnout 16 months from now could well produce frightening results from the perspective-of-the-masters.

This weekend I went for a drive and I didn’t need go far to see portraits of what’s to come.  This isn’t the Third World or even remotely close to Appalachia but as you can see from illustrations something is critically wrong.  These aren’t the only communities I’ve seen in recent months on the intensive care waiting list.  I doubt many politicians even come to these places.  Being photographed in front of crumbling buildings raises questions about failure, failed promises and an inability to solve the problem.  In one small town here in Idaho I spotted two Army of Northern Virginia battle flags.  Known incorrectly as the Confederate Flag.  A generation passed following the Civil War before Idaho even became a state.  If you have any sense of geography you’ll also notice it’s nowhere near the old battlefields.  What’s going on here?

For all the talk of symbolism about race and slavery I think the flag represents something entirely new.  A few years ago members of the Tea Party revived the Gadsden Flag from the Revolutionary Era.  Now the old battle flag from Virginia is emerging as the standard of a new war cry.  People are pissed!  They’re angry about dead downtowns, future prospects for security, lack of opportunity for their kids.  Governments at all levels refuse to hear many of the complaints.  The politically correct attempt to tear down and burn your Confederate Flag and claim you’re privileged to be unemployed and living in squalor.

The rise of alternatives to the traditional two-party system isn’t something of which is unheard.  There were four major Presidential candidates in 1860.  Welcome to 1859.