The lending and leasing law was true free trade, not a chopped liver, as in the flat globalist world.
Globalist Free Traders have found an evangelist in Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. In his book The World is Flat, Friedman calls out the periods in history that paved the way for globalization and free trade, but omits some of the most important. The Law of Lending and Leasing in the WWII era is one of them. It changed the course of history and proved that you can’t do business with people who don’t have money. Either you have to find a way to get them money or you have to give them things to restore their economic values in a balanced geopolitical environment. You cannot move production from one place to another looking for the cheapest labor markets in the world because there is an endless group of workers who will do almost anything to survive and will never have enough money to buy anything that the economic host nation may have. sell.
In the end, you have a continuous process of decline in which a poor working class needs cheaper and cheaper prices, while the impoverished indigent classes do not earn enough money to grow their own economy, showing that they cannot do business with people. they have no money. You can only use them for selfish purposes. This then acts like a boomerang coming back to knock you out as well. It is like a dog chasing its own tail. Consumers in the US shop to get out of their jobs. Money spent at the retail levels quickly spreads to the places where the products are made. Money does not stay in the United States to grow its own economy.
Who won World War II? American workers did. Who lost World War II fifty years later? American workers have. The United States has gone through the most massive displacement of workers in American history, with millions of people losing their jobs. More than 700,000 workers related to the steel industry, more than 400,000 workers in the automotive industry and more than a million workers in the computer industry lost their jobs. A third of those over 55 who lost their job never found another. Now, the workers as taxpayers pay to bring in foreign car assemblers. The state of Indiana, after all things considered, is paying Honda about $ 150 million to bring an assembly plant to its state. This will provide 4,000 new assembly jobs, but recently, nearly 20,000 auto parts factory workers have lost their jobs in the state. Taxpayers from other states have paid even more for KIA, BMW, and other foreign car assemblers to come to their states. Misssissippi is paying KIA $ 400 million to assemble KIA cars in its state. These cars are described as made in the USA and not made in the USA as the parts come from the world’s wage slave laborers. The number of assembly workers at all of these foreign plants is just a fraction of the existing worker workers at US auto manufacturing plants.They also work for about half of what auto workers earned in the past. .
Who won WWII in the final analysis?
Let’s go back in time to 1940. America was still coming out of the Great Depression. Tariffs were blamed as the main cause of the depression. However, the main cause of the Depression was the stock market crash and the economy took this big hit at a time when tariffs weren’t even enforceable. Today’s Free Traders like to blame the Smooth-Hawley tariffs as the cause of the Depression, but this bill was passed after the Stock Market crash in 1930 and never took hold before Roosevelt took office. the control. Soon after, Roosevelt had the authority to lower and increase tariffs at will in 1934.
The next phase ignited the most powerful industrial power in history. Tariffs did not participate in the process. Roosevelt knew that our nation could not mobilize semi-independently; mobilization had to come as a whole on the basis of many vital needs, whether for military or civil uses. President Roosevelt had to sell the war to the American people in a sequence of actions. He started out doing it with executive orders and schematics. Roosevelt said, what I’m trying to do is remove the dollar sign, we have to get rid of the silly, silly dollar sign. This was good news for England and Russia, who did not have much money to fight a war.
Thus began the first wave of free trade, but it was based on giving away products made in the USA.
Many Americans accepted the premise thinking that they could stay out of the war and, at the same time, develop our economy.
Lack of money was the biggest problem in the world. The world was coming out of a Great Depression. After World War I, the Allies wanted Germany to be just a large farm without any production capacity. Hitler came and filled the void by creating a strong army to invade other countries killing people who got in the way. In the process, Hitler demonstrated how a war machine can create industrial power out of nothing. China and Russia, with elite groups controlling the masses, did not have the same capabilities, but they still killed millions for their causes. They killed more people than Germany, but the United States chose Germany as its first enemy. At the same time, Japan claimed a right to the continent for the sake of its own economic survival. The United States approved their claim at the turn of the century, but revoked their agreements with Japan in the 1930s. Japan felt that the United States betrayed them. This set the stage for Pearl Harbor. After all that was said and done, it wasn’t really a surprise attack.
Roosevelt didn’t want money to get in his way. He took many by surprise when he said, what I’m trying to do is remove the dollar sign, we have to get rid of the silly, silly dollar sign. This also dovetailed with the new economic theories that state that you do not owe anyone and money if you owe it to yourself. On September 2, 1940, Roosevelt gave Great Britain 50 Navy Destroyers under his own executive order. This violated international laws and the understanding on neutrality. In essence, the United States unofficially declared war on Germany on September 2, 1940.
Around the same time, Roosevelt used an old 1917 law to trade private manufacturers’ planes for newer models with the understanding that private companies would ship the old model planes to Britain at no cost. Then Roosevelt took another step. After being re-elected, he got Congress to pass the Lending and Leasing Act that sidestepped any money problems that communist and British Russia might have had. Immediately after the law was passed, Roosevelt made a list of products that we could loan to allies. However, of the billions of dollars in products shipped to the allies, the United States was later reimbursed for only a fraction of the total amounts, including ten percent of total U.S. agricultural production that went to Great Britain. Britain and Russia. The United States also produced and supplied 50% of all the munitions used in World War II.
Of course, this brought prosperity to the US After the war, based on impressive industrial power, the United States launched the Marshall Plan. This helped restore local value-added economies in Europe and Asia. If we had given Japan this big economic boost before the war, there would have been no reason for the war with Japan. Free Traders ignore most of this and sing about the non-existent tariffs that broke our economy during the pre-war era, when undeclared war began years earlier with Roosevelt’s version of Free Trade. They sing about how competition rules the game, but as we know, this was not the case during the WWII era. Then and now it is highly questionable whether the US ever had to compete on a global stage. Who, what, when and where concluded that we had to compete on a global stage.
Lend-Lease showed that the only thing that works is local value-added economies that increase values at various levels, from the raw product to the retail or end-user stage. It also shows that a long-lasting war cannot be fought without a strong industrial sector. Today, we have cut off our local value-added economies and spread them around the world. In the WWII era, we gave away the golden eggs laid by our golden goose industrial power. Now we have cut up the goose and shipped the pieces all over the world. Why have research and development if the manufacturing phase goes elsewhere? Now we have a small high-tech army that is being defeated in a small country with human bombs. Rumsfeld’s theories of war are like a child who grew up too fast and needs to get out of any fight quickly before his weak stature is exposed.
Finally, said President Franklin Roosevelt, economic diseases are highly communicable. I wonder what he would say today. Free trade is like sex, you sleep with a lot of partners and, later, with all the people they have slept with. It is an economic epidemic.