America in deceased: a pearl about empire, rates and deception
Nancy O’Brien Simpson
Photo: Weather.gov by полицевкое уавление пнта- better, https://creativeecommons.org/public-domain/pdm/
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The country trembling, trembling in the teeth of its own illusion. I heard that voice, that yawn from a treasure secretary, and almost cried in my morning coffee: what the mouth of men is not political, is the sound of a dry leaf that crawls through the asphalt. Shameful, humiliating, a show of a dying empire that calls the king of Itelf while the court dissolves powdered.
He said China was “technically intelligent.” Can you believe that? As if we were qualifying science projects in a seventh grade classroom, and China has just built a volcano that really explodes. Seventy years ago, they were barefoot in the fields, the good land of Pearl Bucking cavando their hunger deeply on the ground, and now, they did not wove bullet trains as silk ribbons on the map while we are still by Amtrak to not break.
China got up from the pile of ashes as we dug a hole and called it progress. They are not fun to succeed. They have. And here we are, moving our fingers, singing a enchantment about numbers are not reliable. Even the IMF -not Beijing’s fan, tells us that they are growing twice as quickly. Five percent growth? While we drag at two points and call it miracle?
And yet, they stain them, they spit in the mirror because the reflection shows a younger and more acute face. We used to build railroads. Now we build debt. Billions, thousands of millions: Kaper castles that balance with each burst of bond market contraction. Monday comes, panic attacks and wall street get wet. He continues on Wednesday, and suddenly the policy was reversed as a drunk driver hitting reverse on the highway of history.
Tariffs are the crack on the windshield. The president opens the economic war in the world as a circus barking that invites a crowd to see him juggling with the debt in flames and the raw steak. Despair uses a suit and tie now. And when the tremorable debt roof, when the market flashes, shudder as if the boys of the school put cheat, hurry to clean the slate of their own arithmetic.
The Chinese smile
The rest of the world sees it. The Chinese smile, the Europeans halfway their doubts, but they know. They have delivered a leg a gift. Trump, going crazy as if he were playing monopoly with real cities, has given all other leaders with an scapegoat. “CULPAME,” all but says. And they will. And will sound more true than his own lies.
You see it, right? It is not desperate. It is calculated. He wants to reduce taxes. You have to do it. Because the only prayer that remains in the gospel of greed. He looked back in history, deepened in 1776 through the chimneys of World War I, and found the sweet aroma of customs income. Duty. The government ended before there was an income tax. And that bulb shot in his brain, dim, flicked.
Tariffs don’t hurt barons
Tariffs do not hurt thieves. Tariffs do not take advantage of the vaults of real estate and ghosts of private capital. Tariffs fall like hammers in labor, in factories that need foreign steel, in workers who buy things made far away, we no longer do them here.
Trump has this dream. A photograph of Sepia or William McKinley in a framework in a dollar store. He thinks that reducing taxes and increasing tariffs is how we bring the miracle. But he forgets, he never knew, that it was the tariffs that build the industry. It was public investment. It was a government that tried, at least pretended, to import a damn workers, infrastructure, future.
But Trump is not reading the good land or even the richness of nations. He is reading its own bank content. And each line of the line says: “Keep cash, screw the rest.” The thieves of their dreams were villains in the novels we read at school. But he thinks they were heroes, legends, of God with gremted canes. Then he Cospa Rockefeller, forgetting that monopolies are not built, strangle. They do not nourish, they accumulate.
So now we wait. Ninety days. Three months or limbo. Tariffs on, tariffs outside the nobuerpo can plan, invest, build. No one knows what it costs tomorrow. And when the capitalists expect, Keynes told us, the rest of us suffer. The hero of the entire system as a hostage of the few who hold the keys, and if they won, turn them, the engine dies.
Inflation. Stagnation. Stagflation Choose your poison, everything is sour. And in the shadows of this catastrophe, the rich continue to rise. The tariffs are just a smoke curtain to maintain the focus of the real robbery: the resentment of the fiscal code at a personal automatic cashier for the obscenely rich.
So here we are. See an empire try to feed on their own myths. Confused by his own mirror. Terrified by a rising China not because China is, but because it reminds us of what we are no longer: builders, dreamers, strikers.
Despair is not only in politics, it is in the soul.
And the soul is tired.
