Dear Mr. President, all my fellow citizens, it is imperative that we all move together swiftly to adopt an emergency American industrial policy in the national interest.  We cannot survive long as a nation without this program.

 

 

 

William Ewart Gladstone, left, was a dominant and controversial figure in Victorian England and the leading British statesman of the 19th century. He served in the British government from the 1830s to the 1890s, and as Prime Minister of Britain on four occasions, he reformed both British government and society.

Ronald Wilson Reagan, right, was the 40th President of the United States. Prior to that, he was the 33rd Governor of California, and a radio, film and television actor. Ronald Reagan. 40th President of the United States. In office. January 20, 1981 – January 20, 1989.

English Prime Minister Gladstone and American President Reagan shared a common tongue and a common economic attitude.  Their common tongue is simply down to blood but no scholar has yet been able to educate me as to if Mr. Reagan’s remarkable symmetry of thought with Mr. Gladstone’s earlier attitudes was down to conscious mimicry or mere coincidence.   That said, it is, indubitably, a remarkable bond of thinking between these gentlemen for us to contemplate.

 

We are all here heavily indebted to Mr. Martin Sieff, Chief Global Analyst at The Globalist Research Center and Editor-at-Large at The Globalist, for his observations, used liberally in this letter to the President and the American people, with specific citation where used, which contribute greatly to an ongoing discussion between myself and Mr. Hedrick Smith, long of The New York Times and late the author of a splendid new book, Who Stole the American Dream?  Many others have put their considerable mental prowess to discerning how best to get a solution to our vexing economic times and we welcome all lucid opinion.

 

Mr. Smith’s most illustrative book, available at a reasonable and most sensible price today given the strain of the times on American pocketbooks, can be found here:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Who-Stole-American-Dream-ebook/dp/B007MEWAX2

 

This note to the President and to all my fellow citizens, is penned that day, plus one, past November 6, 2012.  I am told, now reliably, that the incumbent President has now been re-elected.  This election process has been tumultuous and very emotional for all concerned.

The time for votes counting done, the time for solutions to the dire economic troubles of the nation that vex all of us is at hand.  What to do about our economy?  What best way out of the woods now?

I have put myself to the task of advocating for a new American Industrial Policy for the past year, after careful consideration of what needs to be done in the wake of the Panic of 2008.  I have made myself a bit of a pest but, needs must we all know to say.  And, considering the condition of our industrial base, needs surely must in America today.  Whilst pestering, I have suggested specifically just this:

The Objective:

The President must call an
emergency joint session of Congress
and that joint session must agree,
the day of the President’s address,
these laws for him to sign that very
day:

• A federal law that eliminates any
and all corporate and other business
taxes on commercial American
flagged enterprises of all sizes for
business conducted inside America.
Simultaneously, all capital expenses
of business, to include plant
building, research and development

and shipping costs incurred by
business, will be fully depreciable in
the year they are incurred.

•A reciprocal law that all tax
reduction benefits thus derived by
business will be used exclusively to
employ American workers inside

America, working in American

businesses and producing American

products and services using
American raw materials. All jobs
now held off shore by American
flagged companies must be brought
home to America immediately.

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5A-gqGrLAv9rfwsYh3rRgA?feature=mhee

 

Various men of letters put forth various ideas as to how the American Industrial base has reached the present, sad and sorry state of affairs.  Mr. Hedrick Smith has many, well-annotated ideas and I commend them to you in his cited book here today, Who Stole The American Dream?  Other, very talented,  men think other things.  The important thing is that collectively we endeavor to understand how we got here and, far more urgently, far, far more pressingly, how we find our way safe home again. I search for solutions. Along the way, just today, I am happy to have this follow quote taken from Mr. Sieff.

I commence to quote Mr. Sieff in his note of today, to me:

Under Reagan’s stewardship, America’s old industrial base, on which the country’s unprecedented economic expansion and prosperity had been centered since the end of the Civil War in 1865, was allowed to collapse and die — without any effort being made to renew it. The nation ultimately became totally dependent on a huge flow of manufactured imports from China instead.

Coincidentally, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and exactly a century before Reagan’s first national victory in 1980, William Ewart Gladstone, the greatest of all Liberal Party leaders, won re- election as prime minister of Britain.

And he then made exactly the same fateful choice to abandon any serious engagement with industrial renewal that Reagan did a century later. Like Reagan, Gladstone bet his country’s future on a policy of unregulated financial speculation and overseas investment instead.

And also like Reagan, Gladstone was a charismatic political tribal leader whose policies, principles and faith were slavishly followed by his successors for decades.

The results were exactly the same. For 200 years, Britain had been the most advanced industrial nation in the world. The growth of its empire and its unparalleled surge in population, per capita prosperity and global power were all based on that industrial supremacy.

But in the next 30 years, as Lord Correlli Barnett documented in his classic book The Collapse of British Power, British industry fell, fatefully and permanently, behind the United States and Germany. It became deeply dependent on continued technology transfusions from both countries.

Like the Reagan-inspired policy of unregulated financial activity, Gladstone’s lasted just around 30 years. The Reagan-induced financial bubble — with a strong helping hand from the Clinton Administration! — finally popped in September 2008.

Gladstone’s dream dissolved with the onset of World War I in 1914. Bereft of sufficient industrial capacity by itself to meet the demands of war with Imperial Germany, the British progressively had to sell off most of the vast swathes of overseas investments they had accumulated since 1880.

Like Jimmy Carter in 1980, Britain’s defeated Prime Minister in 1880, Benjamin Disraeli, recognized the scale of the problems facing his industrialized society. And like Carter he didn’t have any real answers for them. But at least he recognized the problem.

Gladstone, like Reagan (and much of the rest of today’s Republican Party), was an economic naïf and a prophetic Candide. Like Voltaire’s hero, he imagined that everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Gladstone and Reagan simply refused to acknowledge the existence of any facts or trends that contradicted their simplistic, rosy vision of the way things ought to be.

After 1880, British wealth — rather than being invested in the modernization and revival of the home industrial base — flowed out of the country for cheap profit and financial speculation. But this proved unsustainable after 30 years.

After 1980, America’s new leaders followed the same path as Gladstone and his Liberals. After 30 years, the bankruptcy of that policy is becoming apparent too.

I here cease to quote from Mr. Sieff’s note to me of today.

Let all Americans today come together and agree to lay aside our differences in the national interest and to advocate for the passage and enactment of our new American Industrial Policy–M. Alexis de Tocqueville cautioned us to advocate for the things we most need.  Let’s follow his advice to us here:

Alexis de Tocqueville
Thinker and advocate

The President must call an emergency joint session of Congress and that joint session must agree, the day of the President’s address, these laws for him to sign that very day:

*A federal law that eliminates any and all corporate and other business taxes on commercial American flagged enterprises of all sizes for business conducted inside America.  Simultaneously, all capital expenses of business, to include plant building, research and development and shipping costs incurred by business, will be fully depreciable in the year they are incurred.

*A reciprocal law that all tax reduction benefits thus derived by business will be used exclusively to employ American workers inside America, working in American businesses and producing American products and services using American raw materials. All jobs now held off shore by American flagged companies must be brought home to America immediately.

Please see the following four parts film respecting how to best pressure the politicians to do what we all want done:

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5A-gqGrLAv9rfwsYh3rRgA?feature=mhee

Let’s work together, all of us, and likewise encourage the President and Congress to adopt our policy and, in so doing,  make America the great industrial giant she has been before and can be again!!

At Washington, DC, 7th November, 2012, Wednesday

JOHN DANIEL BEGG

PRESIDENT
john daniel begg public affairs and speechwriting

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