Thurston Macaire's rant page 3

Before WWII, federal programs improved urban conditions caused by WWI and industry (monopolies).
Federal programs fostered an urban and then ‘suburban’ boom, and also some good old fashioned fraud and corruption, selling arid or submerged raw land to absentees. We got in on some of that, in Arizona, California, and Florida, particularly, ‘holding companies’.
We made money ‘the good ole fashioned way’, we stole it. Meanwhile, federal trade and military giveaway deals after the war caused a deindustrialization (I hate big words) bust, affecting companies (except of course military and housing firms), and cities.
Most of my money was made in cities, ‘til we had to go to Taiwan. I actually kept it in the Caymans, of course, not here.
Successive presidents, from FDR on, subordinated state and local economic interests, like mine, yours, and ours, to supposedly military and diplomatic ‘higher’ goals.
Don’t get me wrong, I like a little help for allies, after a war. I like military goals as much as the next guy. I’m a veteran too. But this all went overboard (even by the Minnow’s standards)!
It was too easy to sell trade favors for so-called protection from the bomb, or to ‘fight the spread of world communism’.
Most folks, what you might call ‘MacNeil Lehrer’ watchers, (I did not invent this term) think things like globalization (big word) ‘just happen’. (By the way, Lovey watches it every night, while I get away from my doctors and smoke a cigar!) They don’t know the recent version began as part of WW II military strategy and relief programs, back when I was just starting out. Trade favors were a lot easier than foreign aid for a dysfunctional system to do.
Trade and war have always been close buddies.
Yet, after Eisenhower, who I liked, republicans, except smart ones like me, joined democrats as ‘free traders’. Both parties abandoned the American System for what you might call the British (and the Confederacy’s) System of ‘free trade’. Makes it sound a lot like a founding fathers’ slogan, doesn’t it: “A Free People Needs Free Trade”.