Change of Heart: Bring It On, Dude

I've changed my mind. In an epiphany (of sorts) overnight, I have dramatically shifted my mindset from one of "outrage" and "blame" regarding neo-mercantilists' self-serving treatment of the international monetary system to a "take charge"attitude of "Bring it on Dude - The More The Better". Let the Japanese and Chinese play their petty mercantilist games, but we too can play and win. They may have won this battle whereby they escaped with a sizable amount of America's manufacturing base, but looking forward with some skill, scheming, and Muhammad Ali rope-a-dope tactics, American can yet win the war.

Here is my plan: America should subsidize and encourage Disney, Dreamworks, etc. to dump as much Bambi, SpongeBob and "Friends" as well as Video games (e.g. Grand Theft Auto) upon China & Japan. Encourage their piracy for THEIR domestic markets - since the more distribution the better. The lamer, more hynotic and saccharine the plot, the more we should encourage its consumption. Next, we should subsidize and encourage the export of our world-class Processed Food. Oreos. potato chips, Nacho-flavored Bacon Bagels, Chocolate Chicken Nuggets, TV Dinners, BigGulp Sodas, Campbell Soup, Philly Cheese Steak Pizzas, and loads and loads of ice-cream. With fertility rates already low in Japan & China, and their darling little spolied children already over-indulged getting fat and lazy, hanging about in Yoyogi Park dressing like Elvis and slacking with computers & pop culture, we are already half there. Then we need to send them skateboards and snowboards. And perhaps AC/DC or The Scoropions, Kurt Cobain or something else rad to accompany it. Gen-X-J & Gen-X-C!! Brilliant, huh? Oh a couple of more things. We need to train lawyers for them. Lots and lots of lawyers. If we can get their lawyer-to-population ratio up to where we are in the USA, we can really throw a proverbial spanner in their works. And we should try to teach them the benefits of LObbying within government giving them the whole spiel on aggregation of interests and how it breeds efficiency. Maybe they'll bite. Finally, we must encourage the promulgation of CNBC China, and stealthily encourage E-Trade & all manner of on-line brokers to expand & grow in Asia. We could even send Maria Bartiromo over there and make trading "free". The combination of hypnotic pseudo-financial news and essentially "free" on-line gambling coupled together would be absolutely toxic and would grind work and efficiency to a slow halt since we know that both cultures are already inveterate gamblers. Together, these things, in the absence of government policy, will drive convergence on the Asian side.

But that's only half my plan, not to mention half the battle. Causing convergence on the eastern edge of the Pacific will be tricky, and for this we must use reverse psychology and counter-intuitive methods. The USA must encourage the Asians to continue to accumulate dollar reserves and make our dollar even stronger. We will at once both raise rates, and taxes upon the rich to ease our fiscal deficit. This will cause the dollar to soar and will be like putting one's balls into a vise and squeezing. The dead will awake from the excruciating cries of pain, but this time something different will emerge. Not the historical moaning and whinging about cheating and unfair competition, but a John Wayne-like gritty determination to figure out ways to compete and win. Whereas in the past companies simply up and left, moving to China, this time they'll stay and fight. Like in Iwo Jima. Or the beaches of Normandy. This time, like the Japanese and the Germans, capital will take a haircut on returns and invest in training, new and more efficient plant & equipment, while management takes across-the-board paycuts, especially at the executive levels. Labour too will work longer, harder, more efficiently discarding all remnant lines work demarcation that are vestiges of the UAW and labour struggles of the past. And most importantly, management, labour and capital will work together to figure a way to best their neo-mercantilist competition. The Federal government will also pitch-in. They'll unburden companies of their current and legacy pension and healthcare obligations, finally placing US companies on equal competitive footing with their European and Japanese counterparts, and taking a huge burden off of the day-to-day worries of labour, finally letting everyone focus on how to improve and get better, cut the fat, make production processes leaner and more intelligent, with less waste. They can also perfect the Japanese art of "our rice is different" and "your meat smells funny", or the Chinese skill in protecting "key" or nascent industries from competition, by resurrecting any number of non-tariff barriers, security checks and port-controls for Asian cargos to make sure there are no Zerba Mussels or Japanese Beetles aboard. Americans have historically been up to meeting a challenge. But the narcotic effect of affluence, unrequited indebtedness (and, yes, Taco Bell) have numbed our ability to respond to a such an important challenge. In fact they've even numbed our ability to know we're being called out!.

America can regain her competitive feistiness, but it will take pain. Not pain for the sake of masochistic pleasure, but pain for the sake of regaining our senses. How can one know pleasure if one doesn't feel pain? How can we overcome our parochial selfishness if we are not forced by circumstance to work together?? Ok besides meditation, is there a route? And in an increasingly hedonisitc world, this lack of ability to sense and react accordingly will be our undoing unless she can regain a sense team spirit, rejuvenate her ability to manufacture, innovate, and compete effectively, and collectively rise to the occasion.