Yahoo! has the article Stocks- Wall Street Higher as U.S. Softens Foreign Investment Stance.

Investing.com – Wall Street opened modestly higher on Wednesday amid news that the White House administration would take a less harsh approach to foreign investment restrictions.

This is utterly ridiculous. The USA refuses to take actions that would make us economically competitive with China. That being said, we at least had investment restrictions that kept China from taking complete advantage of its superior competitive position. By starting a trade war, #45 has now backed himself into a position that he has to soften the one effective tool that we had to stave off the competition until we woke up to how the world economy really works.

What the USA government should be doing to compete economically is to invest in our economy to make it more productive and to stimulate it into full capacity operation. We should moderate the income and wealth inequality to put more money into the hands of people who actually buy stuff. We should lift the financial burden on getting an education to become a world class participant in the world economy. We should stop spending so much money on munitions that we then just blow-up to keep our empire going. We should lift the burden of paying for health care from our corporations by implementing Medicare For All.

Business Insider has the article There’s a compelling explanation for why we’ve never found aliens — and it could mean humanity is doomed.

A study recently published in the journal Astrobiology suggests there are four different scenarios a civilization can follow as it develops. One of those four pathways leads to sustainable existence. But in the other three, civilizations overuse resources and collapse or die off as a result.

The article also links to the YouTube video Could Alien Civilizations Predict the Fate of Our Planet?

Truthdig has the article America’s March to Inequality: Why the U.N. Poverty Report Alarms Trump’s Plutocrats.

So if the UN report were taken seriously, the US would require a social revolution to even approach the normality of a France or Germany, where a handful of billionaires don’t take food out of the mouth of hungry babies.

And that is why the shock troops of Trumpism are so eager to discredit it.

Just read the article if you need any more statistics on what is going wrong in the USA society these days.

The Supreme Court made a huge mistake when it decided that Corporations are the same as the Persons or People mentioned in our Constitution.

Natural persons or people have a conscience. The corporation is a creation of the government. The modern (but erroneous) interpretation of how corporations should be run is that they are supposed to make money for their owners, but they are not supposed to have a conscience except for what is mandated by law.

Our founding ancestors, in their infinite wisdom, wrote into the constitution that our government is to be run by natural person with a conscience. They knew that was the only way we would ever keep our democracy going. It was the collective conscience of the people that would keep us safe. Therefore, only natural people, should have a say in the running of the country. The creations of the government that do not have a conscience should not be deciding how the country is to be run.

People who have no understanding of this basic premise do not belong in any of the three branches of our government, executive, legislative, nor judicial.

Econintersect has the article The President Thinks We Need To Pay More.

This is a good article with one tremendous flaw.

And if weak demand at home is keeping unemployment too high or wages too low, the appropriate policy response is fiscal relaxation- either a tax cut or spending increase- and not to tax or otherwise drive up the cost of imports, even if that results in a higher public debt.

Cutting taxes allows people to spend the money on whatever they want including creating a bubble in the stock market.

There are some things that are for the good of society collectively including business interests that are not a profitable investment for individuals nor corporations. These are the things we depend on our government to buy for the collective good.

When you put tax cuts on a completely equal footing as investment spending for the common good, you are leaving out a very important part of the picture.

When you hear that tired old saw complaint by the Republicans that “you know how to spend your money better than the government does”, remember what I said above. You will be able to retort, “There are some things I want my government to spend on because the country and the economy needs them, but it makes no sense for individuals to pay for them only voluntarily”.

YouTube has the video Burlington Mayor Bernie Sanders Address at Puerto Cabezas Sister City Program.

Burlington established a sister city relation with Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua in 1984. Over 35 years ago Bernie Sanders was railing against the USA behavior that seems to have come to a head right now.

Here is an excerpt from my previous post How US policy in Honduras set the stage for today’s mass migration.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in particular, sent conflicting messages, and worked to ensure that Zelaya did not return to power. This was contrary to the wishes of the Organization of American States, the leading hemispheric political forum composed of the 35 member-countries of the Americas, including the Caribbean. Several months after the coup, Clinton supported a highly questionable election aimed at legitimating the post-coup government.

Compare the foreign policy expereince of Bernie Sanders in 1984 with what Hillary Clinton displayed in 2009. Now do you understand why I would not vote for Hillary Clinton? If people understaood what Hillary Clinton was and is, I don’t think they would have voted for her either.

The Conversation has the story How US policy in Honduras set the stage for today’s mass migration.

U.S. military presence in Honduras and the roots of Honduran migration to the United States are closely linked. It began in the late 1890s, when U.S.-based banana companies first became active there. As historian Walter LaFeber writes in “Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America,” American companies “built railroads, established their own banking systems, and bribed government officials at a dizzying pace.” As a result, the Caribbean coast “became a foreign-controlled enclave that systematically swung the whole of Honduras into a one-crop economy whose wealth was carried off to New Orleans, New York, and later Boston.”

By 1914, U.S. banana interests owned almost 1 million acres of Honduras’ best land.

As you read more of the story, it just gets worse.

The Reagan administration also played a big role in restructuring the Honduran economy. It did so by strongly pushing for internal economic reforms, with a focus on exporting manufactured goods. It also helped deregulate and destabilize the global coffee trade, upon which Honduras heavily depended. These changes made Honduras more amenable to the interests of global capital. They disrupted traditional forms of agriculture and undermined an already weak social safety net.

These decades of U.S. involvement in Honduras set the stage for Honduran emigration to the United States, which began to markedly increase in the 1990s.

What our oligarchs did in Honduras was just a rehearsal for what they are now trying to do in the USA. Unless you want to live a life like the majority of Hondurans do, we need to wrest control of our government from the big money interests.

Nightly Business Report has the story China has a limited number of weapons to use in a trade war with the US.

China is limited somewhat in the amount of retaliatory tariffs it can apply, simply because it doesn’t import nearly as much in American goods compared with what the U.S. takes of Chinese products. China imported just $129.9 billion from the U.S. in 2017, compared with $505.5 billion in exports, according to the Census Bureau.

I did a little Google search to find the WikiPedia article Foreign-exchange reserves of China.

In October 2016 China’s foreign exchange reserves totaled US$3.12 trillion, the lowest total since 2011, but remained higher than the foreign exchange reserves of any other nation.

The Chinese really need to be able to sell us the exports they send to the USA considering they are selling this stuff at a loss, and taking in our money that they have no use for.

One lesson here is don’t count on Nightly Business Report for information about investing, money, finance, or international trade.

Naked Capitalism has the article Missing in Action: The Poor in America.

Imagine this: every year during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 there were nearly four million home foreclosures. In that period, with job losses mounting, nearly 15% of American households were categorized as “food insecure.” To many of those who weren’t foreclosed upon, who didn’t lose their jobs, who weren’t “food insecure,” to the pundits writing about that disaster and the politicians dealing with it, these were undoubtedly distant events. But not to me. For me, it was all up close and personal.

I did not experience this as I was growing up, but I did have friends who were lower down on the socio-economic ladder than my family was. As I grew into being an older teen, I do remember the worries I had of how I was ever going to keep myself in the lifestyle to which I had become accustomed.

I was never sure how my father managed to pay the medical bills for my mother and send two kids to college. As an adult, if I weren’t able to get and keep a good job, I feared what would happen to me.

CNBC has the article Why China ‘holds all the aces’ in a full-blown US-China trade war.

Here is something that is news to me.

The current $370 billion deficit estimate does not account for value-added. When looking at the value-added content of Chinese exports, the U.S. deficit with China is actually only half of what it seems. And if we then add back the U.S. surplus in “invisibles” and how much money the United States brings back from investments in China, the U.S.–China deficit shrinks from 2 percent of U.S. GDP to 0.8 percent, a report from Oxford Economics revealed.

Here is the bottom line.

Above all else, the Trump–Xi trade shenanigans seem to underscore the different agendas at play here: one oriented toward political posturing and “winning” against a dubious scorecard, and the other focused on economic realities and a long-term development strategy. While the United States will undoubtedly declare victory, China seems to hold all the aces.

It seems like China is the adult in this game, and Trump is the childlike novice. For a country that claims to be a capitalist country, we don’t seem to really know how to play the capitalist game very well.