Has Globalization Failed the United States?

 

Watching Howard Lutnick's rant on stage at Davos, as he insisted with great certainty and righteous indignation that globalization has failed, Mad Dog wondered--is this really the Secretary of Commerce?

Lutnick the Nutnick

He does not appear to believe in Commerce.

Of course, the Department of Commerce, as Michael Lewis has pointed out, actually does way more than think about trade: It runs the Weather Service, which is vital to all commerce, the military and average citizens; it runs the National Oceanographic and Atmosphere Administration which does all kinds of cool things, like be sure nobody is beating baby seals to death (as part of its charismatic mammals division); it runs the Census Bureau which is used to figure out how many Representatives each state gets in Congress and those are just a few of it's functions.

But, when it comes to trade, Lutnick is outraged that manufacturers have left the USA to make their stuff in China and places where labor is cheaper, or factories are more automated, or workers better trained. Here we have the Republicans, champions of private enterprise, efficiency and ruthless capitalism, saying that American shirt makers ought to make their shirts in the USA because that would provide jobs for American workers, but no manufacturer in his right mind would establish a factory in the USA for a whole variety of reasons beyond workers' salaries and, in fact, Trump has never brought manufacturing back to the Rust Belt or any place else in the USA. 

What factories have been built--a few Volkswagen, Mercedes and other auto makers--are not providing Americans with many jobs. The factories provide a lot of robots with jobs, but for human beings...not so much.

Oh, those robots are just as bad as globalization! In fact, one reason that foreign companies are beating the pants off American companies is robots.  Destroy all the robots!

(In America, in Mad Dog's experience the only robots he encounters are trolls on his blog.)

In fact, as Paul Krugman has noted, the supply chains are now so complex and interwoven that figuring out whether an automobile is made in America is nearly impossible, as parts from Mexico and Canada are so interwoven, because that's the most cost effect way of doing business.

Of course, Lutnick betrayed a little slip when he used electric cars as an example of how distorted the world market is: China doesn't have any oil, so of course they make the best electric cars and far more inexpensive cars than the US, which has plenty of oil so why should the US bother with electric cars? The fact is, the BYD runs about $10-15K and is way better than any Tesla, and you can buy one in Canada now, so that might tell you something about Lutnick the Luddite, crying out that something way better than what America makes should be banned from our shores because America isn't smart enough to make them.

The fact is, America may have plenty of oil, but Mad Dog would love to buy a $15,000 BYD if only Lutnick and Trump would allow him.

Once upon a time, American politicians tried to keep Toyota and Honda out of American markets because Americans were sick of those unreliable, expensive, gas guzzling GM cars, and you see how that worked out.

The Seawall North Beach Hampton: Keep out the Ocean

Not to mention windmills. Well, Donald Trump mentioned windmills at Davos, saying they make lots of windmills in China but none of them are working, which must come as a great surprise to the Chinese, and, of course, if you travel the American West, drive through California out to Joshua Tree, you see prairies of windmills pumping out electricity.  So not only are there working windmills in China--we got 'em right here in the US of A. Just a lot fewer because Trump keeps blocking their installation off the East Coast because windmills blocked his view from his golf course in Scotland and nobody who makes a windmill ever gave him a Nobel Peace Prize, and he has stopped 8 wars, so many wars, in fact hundreds of wars you never even heard about in places Trump cannot even pronounce, but even Putin told him he was a great peace maker and Putin should know.

Lutnick scolded the Europeans for wanting electric cars but not making a single battery. Where he got that, Mad Dog does not know, but Mad Dog has bought batteries all over Europe.

We have to be self sufficient in batteries and all the fundamental things a nation needs to make for itself--manufacturing self sufficiency! But, of course, solar and wind, which could provide Americans with jobs, are an anathema to Lutnick and Trump. They are made more cheaply and better in China. They must be unAmerican!

Bring Back Those Good Factory Jobs!

Oh, well, at least we can grow soybeans and beef in America. Ooops! 

Ask American farmers what Trump has done to them with tariffs. 

ICE: The New Kapos?

 

Who are these ICE agents, anyway?

"Inbred Cop Excrement" seen on posters held by protestors.

"Imbecile Creep Excretions."

This is clearly not the way the ICE agents see themselves.

Looking into publicly available data, one thing which leapt out at Mad Dog was that 18-30% (depending on the source) are Hispanics, often recent immigrants. Only 6% are Black.  

The large proportion of Hispanic males is striking. The usual explanation is this line of work offers good pay, job stability and a chance to display lots of machismo in a safe setting where mostly only you have the guns and you have an overwhelming number advantage over your victims. (Sort of a safe space for sadists.)

Mad Dog found all this a little disorienting. His idea of immigrant communities is obviously a little dated--the idea of a community of folks watching out for each other, isolated in a sea of sometimes hostile natives.

But, thinking about it, two things popped up in Mad Dog's febrile mind: Kapos and Patty Hearst.

Kapo with Nice Coat in Camp

Kapos were concentration camp prisoners, usually Jewish, who got special benefits working for the SS guards in the camps, relieving the SS of jobs they did not especially want to do, like herding crowds of prisoners into gas chambers, and hauling out their bodies, and a whole range of menial tasks which helped police and keep the prisoners working (if it was a work camp) and dying (if it was an extermination camp.) Another clear benefit of being a Kapo: They didn't kill you right away.

When the camps were liberated, Kapos were, not surprisingly, frequently hanged by the prisoners they betrayed. Kapo lynchings were widely reported.

Patty Hearst

Patty Hearst, the grand daughter of that news baron Hearst, was kidnapped by a group of Black men calling themselves a revolutionary group, who figured the best way to start a revolution was to rob banks, which, after all is where the money is, and if the revolution didn't pan out, at least they'd be rich, and eventually Hearst was photographed participating in the robberies, holding a gun and she recorded some bits condemning her rich ancestors and voicing support for the bank robber revolution.

And WHAT is Wrong with this Picture?

She was said to have "Stockholm syndrome," which described the peculiar reaction of some hostages to express sympathy or otherwise bond with their captors, seen as a sort of self preservation response: If I tell them I love them maybe they won't kill me. 

Georgie Porgy/Pudding Pie/
Kissed the Girls and Made Them Cry

This is the subject of any number of crime movies where an attractive woman is first abducted, but then one of the captors falls in love with her, or at least sympathizes with her, and she may demonstrate the zealotry of the convert, or maybe the ravished woman who decides rape was not all that bad and she really loves her abuser. 

Some of this may fit into that whole rape fantasy thing, but really dates back to the time of Genghis Kahn or at least to the Plains Indians where women were carried off and adopted into the nomadic tribe, because, really, what choice did they have? And so the ICE agents might be seen in that light: sort of squaws just making do.

But when the Boys Came Out to Play/
Georgie Porgie Ran Away

Or something.

In any event, this surprising "I should hate you, but I'll love you if you give me a badge and good paying job" phenomenon may explain those Hispanic ICE agents and few of the Black agents as well. Or, some may abbreviate this as they are the classic "prison bitch" type who needs a protector and gets all into being privileged.

The Chattering Class

 

My father did not fish, play ball, jog, play a musical instrument. (He did play opera on the radio, which was enough to drive me and my brother out of the house, but that was, mercifully, only on Sundays.)

Edward Steed, The New Yorker 1/19/26

He did go to the gym and pump iron.

When he was in his twenties he played handball.

But when I knew him, he mostly read. 

He read the Washington Post and on Sundays, The New York Times. And there were always books scattered around. Reading what others wrote seemed important to him. This was before there was way more written and easily accessible than you can possibly consume. 

The only political rally he ever attended, to my knowledge, was the famous  March on Washington, Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The rally was at the Lincoln Memorial, and people fanned out along the reflecting pool, and he had some time off from work that day, what with all the disruptions from people flooding into Washington, D.C., and his office was not far from the Mall so he wandered over. When he got home that night, he remarked that he had stood around and listened to some of the speakers and he particularly liked one of them. 

"Haven't heard rhetoric like that since Roosevelt," he said, admiringly. 

My brother turned on the TV with the news in the other room--it was about dinner time and the evening news, which then came on only at one hour of the day, was on-- and there was Martin Luther King in the midst of his "I have a Dream" speech and Pop pointed at the TV, "Yes! That's him. That's the guy!"

My brother and I watched it with him, and my mother wandered in, and we all watched and listened. 

"Now, that's rhetoric," my father added after King finished.

My brother was home from college, it being August, and I was 16 and had worked at the swimming pool all day. My mother, a school teacher, was in the last week before she was going back to work. We were all home that evening. I don't recall my mother saying anything, but she was smiling as she listened. I don't recall us talking about it.

We all had our lives--my brother was headed back to his senior year in college, and after that, medical school. "Current events," i.e. politics, were of interest but didn't affect us personally, in our home in suburbia, or at least it didn't until some years later, after my brother graduated medical school, and got sent to Vietnam. 

As the civil rights and anti-war movements picked up momentum, I would go to anti war marches during my summer breaks home from college. 

Four years later, I was working at the National Institutes of Health for my summer job, and I met Mickey Hutchens, a Black Howard University medical student, who worked in our lab. There was a ravishing blonde woman who worked in the lab, Sue Hayes, from New Jersey who went out with us to various bars Mickey knew, where they snatched your beer bottle as soon as you drained it because they didn't want those bottles used in bar fights. 

We went down to the Washington monument for some demonstration one evening and they sang "We Shall Overcome," and Sue sang along, but Mickey winked at me as we were walking back to our car, and he said, "She sings it, but she doesn't feel it." 

I had no idea what he was talking about. 

Later, I understood, when I got to know her better. 

She looked like a mix of Goldie Hawn and Julie Christie--same blue eyes and blonde hair, but Sue was prettier than either. I didn't care much about her political views, actually. I was 20. I had hormones. People nowadays talk about how kids don't care about big issues because they are too focused on their iPhones. We didn't care because of hormones. Probably the same thing works today.

All this is to say, people have their own lives and events, and issues are not what drive most people.

So I read a Substack article about Heather Cox Richardson written by Nate Silver, who apparently is envious of HCR's huge Substack audience. She is the leader of one of the three factions of the Democratic party:

1.The Richardson Resistance Libs faction. 

The other two factions are: 

2.The Capital L left faction  

3. The Abudance Libs (led by Ezra Klein) 3. 

Personally, I have never understood all the attention given to the number of hits or the number of "viewers" thing, which seems to obsess Silver, PBS News and even Paul Krugman. I sign up for lots of Substacks, the freebie option, and maybe read the first sentence.

What does a click really mean? Just because lots of eyes follow a woman into a room doesn't mean they are liking her. 

I understand if you pay for your Substack subscription, the author gets money and Silver estimates HCR makes millions from her Substack which has millions of "subscribers."

But if most of her subscribers are like me, they've stopped actually reading her posts.

I never pay for stuff like that, and I don't often read HCR's Substacks beyond the first sentence any more because it's like listening to myself think--no new insights. Yes, yes, yes. Yada. Yada. 

Maybe if she spent more time examining the opposing arguments, dumb as they are, if she did the aude alteram partem thing--hear the other side--it might be more engaging. But she is really just one polemic after another. 

Krugman (who I also get for free) I do read, until the charts, and Paul Offit's Substack I read all the way through every time. Offit starts with the latest inanity from RFKJR, playing a video of him croaking out his argument and then Offit takes it point by point and demolishes the whole thing, in particular, at length, thoroughly.

Krugman at least mentions the stupid things his prey have said, but then blows them up with graphs and charts and math I sort of follow.

Am I influenced by HCR? 

It's really all just stuff I already thought, but maybe I get a phrase or two I can use if I ever find myself debating a MAGAhead, but I almost never do debate MAGots now. 

Which, by the way, brings me to the topic of argument : I'm sorry to see Sig Sauer Savant bow out from commenting on this very small blog, with no where near a million viewers. He got sucked in commenting on "Anonymous," who I long ago realized is not actually a living breathing human being, but a robot and it seemed really weird to be going back and forth in heated debate with something which is no more sentient than a slot machine at a casino.

This bot comes very close to sounding like HAL (in the Stanley Kubrick movie "2001") which sounds very human or humanoid, but eventually, the human protagonist realizes HAL has gone rogue and has to be undone, and so wires get pulled and HAL winds down and ultimately winds up singing, in a very slow dirge, "Daisy, Daisy," which was one of the first songs this prototype for AI had been taught. And that's where, I'm afraid, BOT ANON is, winding down, spinning out the early stuff. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U0XpiqxXZ0

Sig Sauer Savant, is clearly a human being, with a back story, an evident military background, and I'm guessing some post deployment job in police or security but clearly a fondness for guns. And, this being a New Hampshire blog and Sig Sauer having its headquarters here...well, we can draw our own conclusions. 

But anyway, all I meant to say is there is reading, and listening and politics as a hobby, but in reality, most of us have our real lives we live until we are personally faced with some hooded goon on the street, but until we are mugged we don't think much about the police, or the government or what going from democracy to totalitarianism means for us individually.

The Letter

What do you do when you have a piece of evidence which looks so convincing, you think there is no way anyone can see it and not be convinced, but then you remember, there are cult followers who will see that thing and simply not see what you are seeing? 

So here is that piece of evidence, in the form of a letter written by Donald Trump to Norway's leader:

Dear Jonas,

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT

All you can say is, well, let's let it fly and see what happens.

If you can't see the brain rot in this, well, that's another problem. But as far as Donald Trump's brain, this is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond any doubt whatsoever: You didn't give me the Nobel Peace Prize, so I'm going to attack Greenland. Well, okay, there it is.

I know, there will be Americans who read this and smile and say, "Go get 'em Donald! 'At's our boy!"

To me, however, this is like that CCTV tape in the Netflix series "Adolescence" where you are in total sympathy with the 13 year old boy who has been arrested by police for the murder of a girl, a classmate, and you believe him, because he is so convincing, until you see the CCTV tape showing him stabbing her repeatedly in a parking lot.

That is what is called "dispositive" evidence.

But, in Trump's case, there can never be such a thing as dispositive evidence because look at the people viewing it.

Trump's Principle, Their Village

 

There is a wonderful scene in "Dr. Zhivago" when Zhivago, captured by a partisan group led by a particularly blood thirsty partisan is brought before this fearsome man and, unexpectedly, the partisan engages him in a discussion of principles, why the partisan is fighting for the Reds against the Whites. It's all a matter of principle he tells Zhivago. 

"Oh?" Zhivago says. "I saw an example of your principle on the train ride out here: A village was burned."

"They had been selling horses to the Whites," the partisan says. "It was a matter of principle."

"Yes," Zhivago rejoins, "Your principle, their village."

Mad Dog was reminded of this at a meeting of the Select Board where the 5 member Select Board voted down a Warrant Article which would have instructed the Hampton Chief of Police to not sign a contract with ICE.

As is typical of Select Board meetings, the members of the Board listened silently as citizens speak in the "Public Comment" part of the meeting, but none of the Board ever replies to any of the concerned citizens and usually, none of them engage in any discussion with the other select Board members, lest the public, which is watching on Channel 22, should be informed of the thinking of these gods rendering decisions from Mt. Olympus. 

One of the Select Board members, Amy Hansen, who had been elected with the endorsement of the town Democratic Party, broke with this code of silence, and said she did not want to make this Select Board action "partisan," before voting against the other Democrats against supporting the warrant articles. 

"Well," replied Carleigh Beriont, a Democrat, "Due process is hardly a partisan issue." In the end only 2 of the 3 Democrats on the Board voted for the article and the 2 Republicans against, * along with Amy Hansen who is now referred to in Democratic circles as a "DINO."

Less than a week later, Renee Good was shot in the face by an ICE agents in Minneapolis, a cold blooded murder, recorded from multiple angles. It was, one might say, a murder by a partisan on principle.

Mother murdered on Principle

Chris Muns had introduced the warrant articles for the Board's consideration. Chris speaks Dutch and lived with his family in the Netherlands, and he is very aware of Anne Frank, who was arrested for being an illegal immigrant, deported and killed in a concentration camp. He says he does not want to remain silent in America under current circumstances. He happens to represent Hampton in the state house of representative in Concord. 

On the ballot, below the text of the warrant article will be a line in bold letters: NOT RECOMMENDED BY THE SELECT BOARD. That's another Hampton tradition. There are 30 pages of warrant articles, and most voters know little about any of them, so they simply read the recommendations of the Select Board, or the School Board or the relevant board and vote that way. It's supposed to be Norman Rockwell civic participation in town government but, in practice, it looks more like Soviet Russian elections: Recommended by the authorities, or not.

During the Vietnam war, an American general famously replied to a reporter's question about a Hamlet which had been napalmed by his forces. The village had been giving aid to the Viet Cong, he said  and he added, "We had to destroy that village to save it."

Napalmed on Principle

That's what Trump and his toadies Hegseth, Leavitt, Noem and Miller are saying now.

* Technically, this is not entirely accurate. Rusty Bridle voted against the article, along with Amy Hansen and Chuck Rage was absent, but we are told he will be allowed to vote later and he is a well known "dead Red" Republican so his vote is thought to be a forgone conclusion. Hegseth and RFKJR might denounce Trump tomorrow, but that has about the same chance as Rage voting for this warrant article.

The Good, The Bad, And The Truly Hideous

 

So now we have the wagons circled, and Trump and his hideous henchmen are claiming this is all about rescuing White Minnesota, where so many Scandinavian immigrants settled a century ago, being defiled by Black Somali immigrants, who are eating their neighbors' pets and maybe even thinking about inter breeding with their White neighbors.  

And we have Trump claiming he won Minnesota in both elections, which means, of course, he is invading that state because he sees Minnesota as a festering wound, knowing the election results there showed he could not win an election for dog catcher there, even among those descendants of Scandinavians. 

The blond folks have rejected him and he's going to make them pay.

When soldiers, still in uniform, returned home from Vietnam, Americans in airports shouted at them, "Kill any babies today?"

Now it's ICE hearing the chants: "Hey, Hey, ICE go away. How many mothers did you kill today?"

American soldiers were called "baby killers." Now American ICE agents are already being called, "Mommy murderers."

Now ICE men are facing the "How many mothers did you kill today?" taunts.

Even if ICE ever did anything positive or constructive, how many Americans will see them as anything other than state sanctioned mother killers?

NY TIMES VIDEO SHOWS AGENT MURDERING RENEE GOOD

 

The wonder of the 21st century and ubiquitous cell phone photography has coalesced into irrefutable evidence of ICE Agent Jonathan Ross murdering Renee Good. The online New York Times January 16, 2026 video (which Mad Dog does not have the technical expertise to import into this blog) published by the NY Times shows the agent, from various angles as he approaches Ms. Good and reaches out with his arm to fire directly at her, first through the windshield and then through the open window. 

You can scroll through, frame by frame, from different angles and see the Trump/Noem/ICE lie exposed and debunked.

Police Law & Order

It also captures the murderer's "Fucking Bitch" comment.

While we can never know for sure a person's motives, we can understand the thinking of an angry man,  the dictator of the streets, whose every command must be obeyed. We can see that once his authority is ignored, he will do anything to restore it. And we might consider his belief that Ms. Good's failure to obey his command is tantamount to insubordination, but, of course, she is not a soldier under fire who is fleeing the fight; she is a frightened woman fleeing an assault. 

Irrefutable video evidence convicted Derek Chauvin, whose own certainty that he was a street dictator whose orders must be obeyed on pain of death. The same would clearly have to happen here, if Jonathan Ross ever had to face a jury of his peers in Minneapolis. 

That is unlikely, as Trump and his cabal will do everything to whisk him away to some hidden location, and hide him as deep as the Epstein files.

Sunshine is the best disinfectant and Trump fears nothing more.

Phony Tough

Never did the ICE agent's torso or legs get run into by Ms. Good's SUV. He was firing his weapon,  and as he fired his legs slipped on the icy street, and his body slammed into the car which had already mostly passed by. He was not hit by the vehicle; he hit the vehicle.

It's all there for anyone with an internet connection to the NYT front page today.

The evidence is dispositive. It comes as close to showing the workings of a man's febrile mind as anything can: He was furious this impudent woman did not stop, and he was determined to exert his dominance in a homicidal way. 

A man like that should never be armed by the government. In that sense only, one might say he was innocent. You do not blame an attack dog for lunging at a citizen and attacking that innocent passerby--you blame the man who put that dog and his handler on the street where it was apparent only this result could come, given enough time.

ICE Would Not Mess with Her

Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, Vance, Stephen Miller the whole hideous mob orchestrated a brew of nitroglycerin which they placed on that Minneapolis street, and then they took up the howl and blamed the victim when it exploded.