Thank You, President Obama.

Can this really be happening?

President Obama's decision to slap real, substantial punitive tariffs on Chinese tires imported into the USA is only a start, but it is an awfully good and promising start.

After thirty years or so of the toxic fraud of free trade and the "global economy," the chickens have come home to roost in every corner, town and hamlet of our once-affluent land. For lo these many years and years, the people of this country in increasing numbers have demanded the government cease and desist its perverse, corrupt and unpatriotic campaign to help the international corporate hegemon bleed America dry of its wealth and self-reliance. The bill of particulars reads like a primer on treachery and cynicism as written by the Borgias: Tax subsidies for the export of American jobs and factories; the progressive elimination of American tariffs while tolerating the protectionism and economic nationalism of our trading "partners;" creeping neglect of any meaningful standards of environmental, child labor, workplace health and safety, and product liability; unfair and destructive wage competition; and on and on and on.

And what do we have to show for it? On the one hand we certainly can enjoy the spectacle of very happy, fat, rich multinational corporations who have -- surprise! -- been the leading cheerleaders and financial backers of this high-minded national suicide. Good for them. But on the other hand, the rest of us have the reality of a rapidly vanishing middle class, an evaporating tax base, a rotting and shrinking public infrastructure.and manufacturing capacity, the greatest concentration of wealth in our national history, untold mountains of private and public debt, global financial and economic instability, declining expectations and indices of national well-being, and God only knows what kind of negative implications for social order.

Our capacity to produce wealth and govern ourselves has been whittled away, piece by piece.

We have been engaged in the process of exporting our golden eggs and the geese that laid them, and the people who made that happen got rich on the deal.

Worse, the US government enabled it even as its people increasingly demanded an end to this madness. Our leaders in both parties have been proudly complicit and in fact, until recently, treated opposition to free trade with condescending pity. Ross Perot ran for President in 2000 almost solely on the issue of opposition to globalization as represented by NAFTA, and on that account was hooted and derided as, variously, a kook, a yahoo, a nutcase, a Know-Nothing, or a psycho (Having done a great deal of this deriding at the time myself, I speak with authority on this. I know a little better now.) Pat Buchanan, whatever his other views, is absolutely right on this issue and has been banging this drum very effectively since he run for President in 1988; his views on trade are routinely marginalized and dismissed because, well, they come from Pat Buchanan. But Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan have been right all along, and both Bushes, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, John McCain, and the rest of them have been not only wrong, but very expensively so. And in addition to being wrong, it is astonishing how much ignorance of American history they have revealed with this platform. Do they really not know of the tariff based trade policy of our Founders that nurtured our industries, funded our government, built a continental market, protected our workers and developed a self-sufficient national economy that was at once the rival, the envy, and the engine of the world? Have these people never heard of Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures? Or do they just not care?

Free trade and globalization are preposterous scams to transfer wealth upwards, to enable thinly disguised slavery all over the world, to evade environmental regulations and despoil the planet with impunity, to escape taxes, regulation, oversight, supervision, legal authority, and independent investigation, to undo the New Deal and to degrade and reshape American society.

Free trade and globalization are bad for America, bad for the people of the world, and represent a cutthroat betrayal of any civilized values.

So here comes Barack Obama to slap tariffs on Chinese tire imports in the context of their export subsidies, which violate the spirit and the letter of longstanding agreements. The President has upset an apple cart that has long deserved upsetting. It seems a small step, but choosing to do this to China -- our competitor and reluctant financier -- signals that is is a well thought-out and almost inevitable policy change that heralds more to come. It calls to mind Reagan's firing of the Air Traffic Controllers which ushered in an era of union-busting, or LBJ's fight for the relatively weak 1964 Voting Rights Bill as a prelude to the more far reaching 1965 Civil Rights Act. It has the air of a high-profile, self-consciously serious act of state that has noticeably little hemming and hawing in it.

It also suggests a willingness to fight. It tool backbone for the President to do this. He will reap political reward at home, but this is not what the Chinese Ministry of Trade wanted -- nor what any of the free-trade bandits can afford. There will be pressures from abroad to retreat, to strangle the baby in the crib. They will talk of the risk of a trade war -- as if they have not been waging a trade war against us for years.

If there is to be a trade war let it be two-way. And all hands on deck.

In contrast to his predecessors, the President has been listening. Obama is saying that corporate profits and the welfare of foreign workers are not the primary concerns of the US government; the interests and future of American citizens and the American Commonwealth are. If he sustains this in policy, we are in a whole new ball game in this world.

What is remarkable is how little vocal opposition this decision has generated domestically. That is evidence that for the American people, the jury is in on free trade.

Free trade and globalization may have worn out their welcome in American political discourse.

Thank you, Mr. President.