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A New Icon for Unmitigated Gall:

Obama’s Unexposed Economic Lie



Informed voters already know that the current Administration holds the modern era's record for lack of transparency, for corruption, and for misleading the public via extreme "spin" and outright, bald-faced prevarication. Despite the many exposures of such behaviors, there undoubtedly remains a vast store of them which remain unexposed. Let's expose one of the most outrageous of them now:
The President, in the debates and other venues, has claimed that US exports have risen under his Administration, and that he deserves credit for this. While the fact of increased exports (IN DOLLAR VALUE) is true, this is something deserving of BLAME, not credit -- of condemnation, not applause. Why? USUALLY, the phrase "increased exports" conjures up the image of a humming economy with increased jobs for people in factories, manufacturing the increased US goods which foreigners want to buy in increasing amounts. This is what Obama is counting on people to believe when they hear about our increased exports. But in the current case, NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH. The current case is a somewhat "special" or "less usual" one, certainly not unprecedented, but not as commonly the reason for increased exports. In the current case, our exports have been increased, NOT by providing more jobs and income to the average American, but by DESTROYING jobs and REDUCING Americans' disposable income. Here's how:

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The US is the world's largest exporter of RAW AGRICULTURAL COMMODITIES, such as corn, wheat, and soybeans. Primarily because of the ongoing and growing Administration "green" economic policies, it is not only gasoline and other energy costs which have been rising, but FOOD prices have also added their contribution to the decimation of the American middle class's economic well-being. Like gasoline prices, RAW FOOD COMMODITY PRICES TOO HAVE ROUGHLY DOUBLED. These are the BASIC FOOD COMMODITIES which are used to produce our bread, meat, eggs, milk, cheese, cereals, and other major food staples. Yet . . . The same farmers are still driving the same tractors over the same farmland and harvesting the same crops. But as a result primarily of various "green" energy and environmental policies instituted by this Administration, the PRICES of corn, wheat, soybeans and other basic RAW food commodities, have been forced to approximately DOUBLE (so far --but you ain't seen nothin' yet if The One is re-elected). Because raw agricultural commodities are such a MASSIVE proportion of our exports, their price increases have significantly increased the total dollar price received for our exports. HOWEVER, unlike the more usual case when exports are increased by greater competitiveness of US manufactured goods, this reason for "higher exports" actually hurts the American consumer (and incidentally it inflicts even greater suffering on poor people overseas, causing increases in malnutrition and even in the rates of starvation of people dependent on low cost food produced by an energy-efficient and productive American agricultural economy of the past). The enormously higher prices for the basic inputs to one of life's 3 basic necessities (food, clothing, shelter), constitute the main --virtually the sole -- reason why the value of our massive exports of these products has resulted in a higher dollar price on the total US exports figure. In fact, most of the time in recent years under this Administration, NON-food exports have been ACCELERATING THEIR DECLINE -- but per the above, IN TERMS OF PRICE ONLY, the strictly dollar value of our raw food exports has risen so much it has MORE than offset the decline in the export of manufactured goods and (of course, of manufacturing JOBS). Bottom line, the Administration has been demanding credit for the results of policies which deserve blame. It is on the backs of the US middle class and the most destitute and defenseless of the world's foreign populations that Obamanomics has engineered an increase in the dollar value of US exports. It is a lose-lose situation, and the Administration has been able to SPIN these 2 unquestionable negatives into a SEEMING positive only because so few people are in a position to understand the WHY behind recent export increases, which are most definitely NOT the usual reasons which come to mind (ie, NOT more manufactured goods being exported via more jobs in the US). Obama is counting on people's ignorance of the real cause to misdirect them into a blatantly false impression, thereby preventing them from understanding yet another disastrous consequence of his downright idiotic economic policies. In sum: The recent increases in the dollar value of US exports is a direct consequence of the same phenomenon that has helped to crush middle class Americans the past 4 years: rising food costs/prices, which were directly jacked up by this Administration's extreme green policies, and a bit less directly by its general economic policies which continue to reduce the purchasing power of the dollar generally. When the President demands credit for the increases in recent US export figures, he exhibits the unmitigated gall of asking poor and middle-class Americans to thank him for putting their hard-earned tax dollars at work to destroy their economic well-being.


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Morry Markovitz -- Bio and Archives

Morry Markovitz is a retired scientist, economist, author and businessman who still actively trades in commodity futures markets. 

After completing his formal education in physics at MIT, he took a staff appointment at MIT’s Draper Lab, where the computerized guidance system for NASA’s Apollo Project was developed, and where the countless thousands of computerized flight simulations were carried out in order to perfect, in theory, every detail of the mission—which eventually worked near-perfectly in practice as a result. 

Morry later switched professions to economics, taking a position as commodity market analyst for a well-known Wall St. firm—from which he was soon recruited by Commodities Corp (CC) of Princeton, NJ, which became within a few years the acknowledged premiere commodity speculating firm in the world.  In the mid-1980s, after becoming Senior Vice President at CC, Morry left that firm. to form his own company on Wall St., Mercury Management Associates, Inc. where he wrote, edited, and published a highly respected and often quoted market letter and also managed private speculative accounts.  BARRON’S Magazine called Morry “the thinking man’s trader.”  In 1994, Morry broke the Hillary Clinton commodity trading scandal for USA Today.


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