Wall Street Sees the Light of Domestic Reindustrialization

“Hate him or like him, [Trump’s trade] strategy’s working.”—Jim Cramer, CNBC’s Mad Money, October 11, 2019

Dear Progressives, get used to strange bedfellows. Because the High Strange is turning pro and who you wake up with in the coming months and years may surprise you.

Enter last week Jim Cramer, investment advisor to the lumpenprole and a newly arrived Trump bedfellow with a revealing mea culpa of sorts. Cramer is front-running Wall Street’s epic turn. The new pump is in sight. Even better, it’s a meritorious pump.

The people who represent 4.3% of the world’s population yet account for 25% of the planet’s GDP are getting a second look. Flat on their backs since financialization’s ultimate power-grab in 1973 (see the petrodollar and Triffin Paradox; household income peaked in January 1973), only to be re-flattened by Bill Clinton’s 2001 hopping the Chinese worker to the head of the line via that country’s premature WTO entry, America is looking sexy again.

Now if we can only work off all this silly false consciousness.

TDS is a litmus for just how vigorously a media-gorged populace can commit violence against its own interests. Can we please put all the left/right banter on ice until there’s something to talk about? There is no Organized Left in America because there is no Organized Center. Trump is re-creating a Pragmatic Center if people could only step out of their derangement bubbles and see. From this Center, a vigorous Left might yet even reappear. The continuum must regenerate like a sideways tree.

Today’s two-party system is Carroll Quigley’s Uniparty lookin’ atcha—two right-wing corporatist edifices that market-carve guilds for bucks: HMOs vs Insurers, Realtors vs Attorneys etc. As Ralph Nader has pointed out, there hasn’t been even a vaguely people-oriented piece of legislation since 1974. That’s not a drought folks. That’s a 100-year flood-in-reverse.

Cramer’s right. What does the average Joe or Jill’s personal animus/adoration for Trump have to do with the price of tea in China? TDS is a deeply solipsistic affliction that no Master of the Universe worth his salt cares about –unless of course it can be invoked, wielded and manipulated for big paydays.

Let’s get to the tectonic power that molds the social media pearl-clutchers (all this TDS heaving and sighing didn’t invent itself), but might not want to anymore.

Big Money.

Just as the peeps can be “purposefully exaggerated” (Adam Curtis, 2002) into a deranged froth, they can just as easily be de-exaggerated when the money template shifts and it suits the Manufacturers of Exaggerated Consent to kill the buzz du jour.

Slowly, Wall Street is coming around to the investment theme potential of economic populism in place of their prior glossy brochure, the China Miracle. At least the treason cloud goes away.

This shift will entail a massive sector rotation from multinationals (the bread and butter of Trump arch-enemy the US Chamber of Commerce) into more domestic-focused companies. Suddenly, Wall Street which couldn’t give two squats about Main Street, sees a lucrative way to look as though they suddenly give a squat. The future isn’t in plastics or in CCP brown-nosing. It’s in domestic reindustrialization. Magic! Lloyd Blankfein in a MAGA hat? Stranger things have happened.

As a critical mass of Wall Street thinking comes on board, look too for a similar ‘sector rotation shift’ out of Democratic Wall Street Wealth Taxers like Warren and Sanders and into Trumponomics. Another way of saying this is that if Hillary doesn’t step in, DNC salaries and perqs are in deep doo-doo. Only the abject cynicism of Clintonism can save the day for the Dems. But will the freshly aroused Left allow a further installment of Clintonian lesser-of-two evils self-abuse?

Again, the more overriding question may be whether Wall Street is willing to bankroll the DNC for anything OTHER than Clintonian lesser-of-two evils self-abuse. Might FDR get another crack at his party? He could, but only if the corporatists vacate the DNC en masse. The abyss-like internal contradiction of FDR vs. Goldman-Sachs that Clintonism has held in abeyance for a quarter-century needs a bona-fide Clinton to bullshit it forward for one more cycle. No one else can comport quite that level of nosebleed duplicity

Under USMCA, Mexico becomes one of the biggest winners on the planet. USMCA is to Mexico what Henry Ford’s $5/day program was to the US: a transformative high-water mark which literally invented the American middle class by creating disposable income and averting (for a century, anyway) the central crisis of capitalism: overproduction. By the way, it doesn’t take a Marxist to concede that capitalism, absent some militating intervention, still destroys in the long term the markets it seeks to serve. But that’s a whole ‘nother issue.

No flies on Mexico. In June, its Senate approved USMCA (by a lopsided 114-4 vote). Just the other week Mexico was prodding Pelosi to set a vote here in the US. How revealing. How embarrassing.

The North American trading bloc is going to be a fearsome beast. Trade and business are coming home. Supply chains are collapsing. Distance equals dollars and risk. Neoliberalism is folding up its tent. The people know this. That’s why they show up by the thousands at Trump rallies. Real change—as opposed posterized change fit only to heave upon—is coming home.

Of course, the last thing Organized Labor and the Democratic Party want is a pro-worker victory for Trump who’s already sidling in on a McGovern antiwar theme. Pretty soon all that will be left to the Dems are impeachment gyrations, off-the-scale kleptocracy and reduced corporate benies for the nomenklatura should Wall Street money take a hike.

As this writer has maintained for years, the way to tame the Empire’s military beast is to re-normalize trade FIRST, escape the reserve currency millstone and erase the MIC’s take-home pay. Clearly the Bank of England’s Mark Carney has been listening to me. The dollar’s successor, the Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC), is on deck. Yes, for that mouthful, you’re allowed a dystopic shudder.

Renationalization means America demanding the keys back from a transnational empire overlay to become ‘merely’ most-favored-nation-among-nations (rationalized again both by its commanding GDP and for possessing the most sought-after demand market in the world). This is a sea-level change that promises huge benefits for the world.

Before Lockheed-Martin’s Patriot system proved itself the Maginot Line of the 21st century, the petrodollar-MIC relationship was a gravity-defying oroboros based on an implicit interlocking quid pro quo. OPEC received a security guarantee for which petrodollar recycling would pay (handsomely) which would fund a military monstrosity for which the world would pay for ruinously. Meanwhile the money center banks would run all the way to the bank as the recycler-in-the middle.

If Trump can avert WW3 (no small task, as many power centers want it for all the reasons described above – trillions hang in the balance of this Mega-Rotation) he will go down as an historic President.

As Cramer gently informs his mass audience, no one that matters really cares about pet peeves and bent snowflakes. Show Wall Street the money and it will come, dragging the media complex with it. As for that that ever-trailing indicator, the Peeps? Piece of cake.

Norman Ball is a Scots-American businessman and consultant. Learn more about his new eBook from Eye Am Eye Books  ‘East-West Dialectics, Currency Resets and the Convergent Power of One’ at his blog Full-Spectrum Domino. His email is gspressnow@gmail.com