If you watch ABC’s Shark Tank you may have noticed that a lot of the start-up companies on the show make food products. I have a theory about that. See if you can guess what it is.

Mark Cuban eats a cupcake on ABC’s Shark Tank.

More clues can be found in this pro-NAFTA propaganda piece: “Middle-class Mexicans snap up more products ‘Made in USA’”

What are the Mexicans snapping up? I have made bold the products in these quotes from the story:

“…marbled slabs of steak from Greeley, cans of pinto beans from Holyoke and sacks of russet potatoes out of Monte Vista.”

“In a Costco store in the suburbs at the edge of Mexico City, shoppers browse shelves loaded with pallets of Kirkland vitamins, value packs of Nature Valley granola bars and sacks of Cape Cod kettle-cooked potato chips.”

“The biggest growth came in modern retail chains, filled with U.S. products, that are challenging, for better or worse, the traditional mom-and-pop stores doling out soda, eggs and tortillas.”

“At Costco, even the walls in the butcher aisle boast the USDA Premium and USDA Choice labels, in English.”

“In Mexico’s Costco stores, staples such as tortilla chips and chipotle salsa are trucked in from factories in California and Texas that produce for both sides of the border.”

“The Mexican consumer is less focused on price and more focused on freshness,” said Sonia Denham, a senior sales manager for California organic produce giant Earthbound Farms, which supplies Costco stores in Mexico and the United States.”

“Jim Walstrom, chief executive of Motely, Minn.-based Morey’s Seafood International, said his company’s relationship with Costco has opened doors to a vast market of 114 million Mexicans who will increasingly serve items such as Pacific salmon and mahi-mahi to their families.”

Almost every product mentioned was a food product. And what do we buy from Mexico?

“…televisions, cellphones, computers and passenger vehicles.”

Well sell Mexico potato chips, and they sell us electronics and cars! Can you imagine?

Perhaps one day Mitt Romney will figure out how to import cupcakes from his sweatshops in China and put American bakers out of business. But until then, food products are one of the last refuges from globalization for American entrepreneurs.

But that is little solace as we revert back to being an agricultural nation. And it is ironic that that is exactly what the British Empire had planned for their American colonies 250 years ago. Here’s Adam Smith trying to talk the colonists into remaining country bumpkins (Wealth of Nations, page 299):

“Were the Americans, either by combination, or by any other sort of violence, to stop the importation of European manufactures, and, by thus giving a monopoly to such of their own countrymen as could manufacture the like goods, divert any considerable part of their capital into this employment, they would retard, instead of accelerating, the further increase in the value of their annual produce, and would obstruct, instead of promoting, the progress of their country towards real wealth and greatness.”

Either Smith was a buffoon, or an intelligence agent acting on behalf of the British Empire trying to keep America down. Luckily, our forefathers didn’t listen. They threw up tariffs, and launched an industrial revolution of their own. Today, that is all being undone, as we race down the path to being the Cupcake Superpower.

Thomas L. Friedman’s job at the New York Times is to make you feel like being kicked out of the middle class is your fault. From this column:

“…median incomes are falling, inequality is rising and high unemployment remains persistent. How to adapt? It will require more individual initiative.”

See? It’s your fault for being lazy. It’s got nothing to do with the globalization- and mass-immigration policies that Friedman pushes.

The Left acts like “tax cuts for the rich” are the only driver of inequality. And that’s what I call The Big Lie of the Left. By championing off-shoring and mass-immigration, the Left is equally culpable along with the Right for the pulverization of the middle class.

Last week, IBM announced that it is moving manufacturing jobs from its huge Rochester, Minnesota facility to Guadalajara, Mexico. Industry analysts think about 2,500-3,000 jobs will be lost. IBM didn’t say how much they will pay their new factory workers in Mexico, but if they pay anywhere near the prevailing rate, it will be far lower than what they have been paying in Minnesota.

Profits will surge, of course, and a nice chunk of those dividends will be paid out to America’s jolly old grandpa, Warren Buffett, who is a large shareholder. Buffett is famous for “not understanding technology” but he seems to understand carpetbagging technology just fine.

The facility which made servers, and hardware to run big-data and cloud systems, is one mile long, and about half the size of the Pentagon. How long before it is shuttered?

Read more in: Warren Buffett’s Plan to Destroy America.

If you have never seen ABC’s Shark Tank show, here is what it is: entrepreneurs come on and pitch their business propositions to the “sharks” – five investors, the most famous of which is Mark Cuban. If the sharks like a business, they negotiate a deal with the entrepreneur.

When I first started watching this show, I was jarred by how the sharks insisted that production be done in China. Of course, I knew that sort of thing was going on, that venture capitalists had been asking entrepreneurs about their “China strategy” for many years now. But to see it on TV made it more real.

So, if a patriotic American came on the show and said that she wanted to manufacture her product in the USA, the sharks would not invest, and would make a lot of negative remarks about how being patriotic is “closed minded,” foolish, etc.

One such patriotic American was Donny McCall, who insisted on manufacturing his Invis-A-Rack product for pickup trucks in the USA. The sharks wanted nothing to do with him. That was on February 24, 2012 (episode #2 of season #3).

In recent episodes, I had noticed that the show had toned down its anti-American rhetoric, and I thought: “aha, just like Walmart and Apple paying lip service to creating jobs in the USA.” Then on February 15, 2013 (episode #16 of season #4), Shark Tank did an update on Donny McCall, who is now manufacturing his product in Iowa. It’s too early to tell if the product will be a success or not.

So, the moral of the story is that the sharks were wrong, right? Not so fast. Keep in mind that nothing has changed. The deck is still stacked in favor of China. The yuan is still pegged to the dollar, there are no protective tariffs to encourage domestic manufacturing, etc.

Even worse, if Invis-A-Rack is a success, Mr. McCall might soon have a Chinese man knocking on his door, offering to buy him out, or face having his product knocked-off, and made in China for a fraction of the cost. That happens. A Chinese man will literally knock on your door, and he will bring with him a sample of the product so that you can see that he is not joking and that the quality is comparable.

Or a large retailer will help a competitor set up in China. American retailers have a long history of undermining domestic manufacturing companies. Or maybe one of the sharks will go into business against McCall.

This, by the way, is the reason why bringing in “magical” immigrant entrepreneurs to create jobs for us knucklehead Americans has not worked, and will not ever work. It doesn’t matter who you are because when you go to raise investment capital, you will be asked the same question that the sharks asked McCall: “What is your China strategy?”

So, the moral of the story is: don’t hate the player, hate the game. But also, we should hate the architects of the game such as David Rockefeller, and Walmart, which campaigned hard for NAFTA, etc. We should also hate the players that uphold the game, and seek to perpetuate it.

If all of your competitors are undercutting you by manufacturing in China, by all means, move your plant to China and compete with them. But your political position should support policies that re-stack the deck in the USA’s favor so that you can one day bring your factory home.

And one last thing about Shark Tank: in the intro to the show, they describe shark Robert Herjavec as “the son of an immigrant factory worker.” They don’t say “mere factory worker” but it still rubs me the wrong way. As if his father was a liability because he was a blue-collar worker. It strikes me as condescending, and even insulting to a man whom I’m sure worked very hard to give his son every advantage within his power to give.

The big story is the trend where more-and-more companies and politicians are feeling the need to pay lip-service to creating jobs in the USA, because that is most-certainly not our policy today. Maybe one day this trend will turn into an actual policy shift, though I suspect that companies like Walmart are just trying to ride out the storm until the American people are distracted by something else, and patriotism is killed off for good.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder declared a fiscal emergency in Detroit today paving the way for the city government to be taken over by the state. As this is discussed in the coming weeks, you will hear a lot of talk about how Detroit’s auto plants went south. And that is certainly true, but some of those plants went north to Canada.

In the Auto Pact of 1965, factories were sent across the Detroit River to Windsor and southern Ontario. Here is a map of Detroit/Windsor where you can see the Detroit River (click to enlarge):

What was the point of sending plants a few miles across the river? Greed of course. Corporate profits. Wages were lower in Canada at the time, and the welfare of Detroit was simply not an issue to the multinationals that run the global economy. And like I say in my book, Dark Arts of the American Oligarchy, “globalization” is just a euphemism for the carpetbagging of America. Detroit is “gone with the wind” just like the Old South. The difference is that Detroit didn’t deserve to be razed to the ground.

A long time ago, I added the chart below to my food-stamps page, along with this paragraph:

“When China was admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2001, tariffs were lowered, and it became very profitable for American companies to relocate production to China’s sweatshops. Millions of American jobs were lost, and those former workers have piled up on the food-stamp rolls.”

Click chart to enlarge:

During the presidential campaign, when food-stamps were an issue, my food-stamps page got a good amount of traffic: 285,000 page views for the year. And I gave permission to other bloggers to publish my chart, which some of them did.

So, I’m taking at least partial credit for what I’m calling the China-WTO meme, which is that the economic back of the USA was broken on December 11, 2001. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s been nothing but economic/financial chaos since then.

And the meme is spreading. You can see it at the 14 minute mark of the video below when John McLaughlin gives “The Bummest Rap of the Year Award” to Bill Clinton:

“Okay, the bummest rap: The rap recited by Bill Clinton to a throng of Democratic Convention delegates that the Republican Party’s policies are responsible for the global economic crisis. Experts say the cause of the ongoing crisis is trade imbalances created by then-President Clinton about 20 years ago when he granted China most-favored-nation trading status and when he — and then negotiated World Trade Organization membership for China.”

However, China’s WTO status did not become official until after Republican George W. Bush was sworn into office. Bush was all for China joining the club, so while Clinton negotiated the deal, Bush permitted it to sail through. While Clinton did NAFTA and WTO, he couldn’t have done it without help from Gingrich and Bush. Destroying America is a bipartisan project.

CNBC’s Larry Kudlow is campaigning for the exportation of natural gas. At 2:18 into the video below, Kudlow says:

“It’s a world market. So, if you’re exporting, there’s going to be global price setting just like there is in the oil business. Why would these natural gas prices explode?”

But it isn’t a world market. Natural gas has never been priced globally like oil because gas is much more difficult to transport. So, if Kudlow is not arguing his case from actual facts, what is he basing his case on? Answer: ideology. The same “free market” ideology that, when applied to banking, crashed the global economy in 2008.

I for one, would like to see an energy-independent America. Larry Kudlow does not. Like I say, Kudlow is not a patriotic American, but rather a patriotic globican.

With the growth of liquid natural gas (LNG) facilities, it is possible that natural gas would be priced globally one day. However, today, the USA has a huge advantage on gas prices over competing nations. From Reuters:

“Global LNG trading is much younger, and as a result of the immature market, LNG prices differ widely by region. Currently, North America benefits from the lowest gas prices at around $3.5 per million British thermal units (mmBtu), while Asian importers have to pay almost $14 per mmBtu for LNG imports.”

This makes it possible that some heavy industry might be able to move back to the USA. For example, energy intensive plants that make toys might come back from China.

Fracking has been a rare bright spot for the USA in recent years. If we are going to suffer the ecological degradation, however bad it may or may not be, we should definitely be keeping the benefits for ourselves. People like Kudlow are only for nation-building when the nation in question is not the USA.

It seems like it was only just yesterday that I was predicting that everybody would be protectionists soon, and then Jon Stewart brought up the subject to Warren Buffet on Tuesday (11/27/2012).

Earlier in the show (at 2:17 here), Stewart did a piece on the horrific sweatshop fire in Bangladesh. So, that’s why it was on his mind when he was interviewing Buffet. At 3:45 into the video below, Stewart says:

“This idea that, because in Bangladesh and China they accept working conditions that Americans would not consider optimal that you can’t ask for anything anymore because, hey man, we’ll just send our stuff over there. And I understand that but there has to be some sense of domestic policy that keeps that in there. Yes?”

In case you can’t decipher Stewart’s mumbling, he was asking Buffet if we should adopt protectionist policies to prevent offshoring and global labor arbitrage. Buffet didn’t say anything in response, but he did nod and grunt in ascent. So, did Warren Buffett endorse protectionism? Take a look:

I think he did, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Buffet to do anything. The fact is that our vast Asian gulag “supply chain” isn’t going anywhere until another Abraham Lincoln comes along and smashes it. How would he stop young Asian girls from being locked into burning sweatshops? First, you slap on a tariff high enough to bring the factories back to the USA. Then you unionize them, and enforce workplace safety laws. Problem solved. Again. We actually already did that back in the 1930s.

Will Buffett ever go back on Stewart’s show? Maybe not. I doubt if he appreciates being hit with that question. After all, the first thing they teach you in Main Stream Media school is that one does not raise the topic of sweatshops in polite company. I guess Jon Stewart missed that class. Good for him.

And you will be one too. It’s only a matter of time. Trust me. It’s coming. You will eventually agree with me. And for a very simple reason: it’s the only way out. It’s the only way to prevent China from superseding our superpower status.

In the 1840s, Great Britain adopted free trade. In the 1860s, we here in the USA slapped on a huge tariff, kept out British industrial goods, grew up our own industrial economy, and dethroned the British Empire a few decades later.

Today, we are repeating the strategic blunder of the British. We have thrown our borders wide open to Chinese products, and are in the process of being overtaken.

However, there is a crucial difference: we have seen this movie before.

The British didn’t know what they were in for by adopting their foolish new ideology. We have the benefit of hindsight. We know exactly what is going to happen, and because of that we have an excellent chance of pulling out before it is too late.

So, my advice to you is to declare yourself a protectionist now, for the bragging rights, before all the cool kids are doing it.

Note: After being a life-long, “free trade” knucklehead Libertarian, I turned protectionist back in 2009. I have written this post just to make my position unambiguous and emphatic.

With Mitt Romney in a horse race with President Obama, you might think that Bain would throttle back the offshoring a bit. The last thing you would expect is for them to literally be sending American jobs to China at the same time that Romney is promising to get tough with China.

But that is exactly what they are doing to Illinois auto-parts maker, Sensata.

Keep in mind that these globalists are waging a scorched-earth campaign against American workers and unions. And Bain is sending a message to them: “Nothing will save you. We don’t even need Romney to be president to finish exterminating you.”

They are flexing. Doing an end-zone dance. Trash talking. Taunting. Flipping America the bird.

They read all the angry blog posts with a glass of champagne in hand, and have a good laugh. They call the butler over and say: “Look it these puny Americans, Jeeves! They are made of marshmallows! When we herd them into the sweatshops, they will DESERVE it!”