No longer do the Presidents or Congress act in the interests of the American people, nor even the larger national interest conceived as our industrial system. Instead it is private profits and private wealth accumulation that drive all economic policy.

It goes back further than Reagan, not necessarily as conscious sell-out in the beginning, but certainly as the results become more exaggerated and incontrovertible, we can only call its continuation a complete sell-out of the American people. It could be said to go back to Nixon’s era, when liberalization of trade was seen as the way for US-based multinational corporations to make maximum benefit of the rise of other countries as growing markets. Import quotas and other import controls were being abandoned in order to make diplomatic gains on other issues, such as geo-strategic alliances. The thinking underneath it was that by leading the world in this new liberalized trade policy, other countries would follow.

Well, despite the subsequent creation of the WTO and many FTAs, it hasn’t worked out that way. Instead America has a wide open market while other countries have a host of import controls and govt-business partnerships that serve their national interests. This is in stark contrast to American policy that is made by Republican and Democratic parties funded by the 1% in service of the 1%, who have staked their future with the profitability of multinational corporations rather than the fate of our nation.

And so America is flooded with cheap imports that are more profitable to the corporations, enriching the 1% at the cost to the nation of offshoring our jobs, factories, GDP, tax base, and worst of all, our ability to make wealth in the future. Now that Presidential election campaigns cost over a $billion, and Congressional campaigns can go into many tens of millions, we see that these are crumbs compared to the $Trillions accumulating at the top, even as ordinary Americans are losing jobs, houses, real wages, savings, and hope.

That same greed and sell-out of the nation by the super-rich and their political puppets in Washington explains why the wealthy have enjoyed such a tax holiday for decades (relative not only to other developed nations but also to our own past) and an underinvestment in infrastructure and science and R&D.

And of course that same greed that off-shored America’s engines of wealth creation has now exploited our resulting economic crisis to advance their permanent agenda to dismantle Social Security and all other social spending.

The trade deficits are just one more symptom of the smash-and-grab looting of America by the 1%, who pushed for and got the deregulation of the financial sector so they could make bubble economies enriching themselves on commissions and fees and then, after gambling with the money of ordinary small investors and working class mortgage payers, when their bubbles pop they get $Trillions in bailouts while crying for cuts to SS payments to the poorest Americans.

There will be no solutions until Washington DC can be made to serve the national interest, ie, the American people and our collective future as an economy and society, instead of the 1%.