“They made many promises, more than I can remember, but they kept just one; they promised to take our land; and they took it” Red Cloud

It did not take long for Chief Red Cloud and all of the other Chiefs of the Lakota people to learn that the State lies. Not much has changed since the time of Red Cloud; the State still lies and it makes doing business with the US federal government a difficult proposition.

A good example of that occurred this week. In late 2018, President Trump renegotiated the NAFTA treaty agreed to by the US, Mexico, and Canada. It was one of his chief promises during the campaign to renegotiate such stupid trade deals. The new agreement, the USMCA, was heralded as a great success although to date only Canada has ratified it. However, on Thursday, President Trump announced new tariffs on Mexico that will escalate monthly until Mexico has stemmed the tide of illegals entering the US. The move caught the financial markets unaware and it resulted in a selloff in the equity markets. I’m not sure where the federal government evolved to the point where the executive can levy taxes at will (for that is what a tariff is and it is one paid by Americans). In civics class, I was taught that Congress had the authority to levy taxes.

While the latest tariff is one that will likely be reversed as even President Trump’s trade advisors were against it, the importance of it is that the US is in negotiations with China to resolve a variety of issues. As can be seen by the recent run up of the stock market, a new trade deal with China is as they say “baked in the cake”. If it proves to be wishful thinking and does not occur then the stock market will correct even further. Already, China is taking a step back as it sees that the US is an unreliable partner in trade agreements. You see China has quite a bit of leverage in the trade agreements. It holds over 1 trillion in treasuries which it could dump creating all kinds of issues as the US government seeks to refinance its debt and finance its ever increasing budget deficit. China also has the only refinery of rare earth minerals (with names like lanthanum, yttrium, scandium, etc.). These rare earth minerals are key to the production of all the electronic gadgets that we use today. You can find them all over the globe but the refining of them is a quite dirty process.

The lies of the State affect arenas other than trade. President Obama entered into the JCPOA with Iran and the most powerful countries (Russia, China, EU, Great Britain and the US) whereby crippling sanctions would be relaxed in exchange for Iran allowing inspections and crippling their Uranium enrichment plant by pouring large quantities of concrete into it. While there was much criticism of the deal, even the US government certified that Iran was keeping its end of the bargain. Despite the protests of Israel and the Arabian regimes, evidence existed that Iran was never really interested in building the bomb because Shiites read the Koran to prohibit it. Soon into his administration, President Trump rescinded the agreement and re-levied the crippling sanctions much to the angst of the other parties to the agreement. Now, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is traveling the globe threatening the other parties of the agreements with sanctions if they do business with Iran. You see the neocons in the Trump administration (Pompeo and Bolton) desperately want war with Iran. such war would cause even more economic trauma and death and misery.

Another arena of negotiations is with North Korea in an attempt to reach an agreement with its portly dictator, Kim Jung -un whereby he would get rid of his nuclear weapons and end all testing and firing of missiles. One problem is that the US has a bad record of honoring such agreements. After 9/11, Libya reaching an agreement with President George W. Bush whereby Libya would give up its chemical weapons. Seven years later, in an attempt to give Hillary Clinton some military leadership credibility for her upcoming run for president, President Obama led a NATO intervention which led to the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi. The lesson to Kim Jung-un could not be more clear – give up your WMD and share the same fate of Gaddafi (sodomized with a bayonet).

One can hope that all of these negotiations can be accomplished for it would be truly beneficial for the American people to enter a period of peace and stability. However, given its track record of the US government, I am not all that optimistic. I also think such antics hasten the time when the rest of the world just ignores it and the American empire culminates in decline and collapse.