STEVE PIECZENIK TALKS

The State of The Union: So Far-So Good but Recession/ Drug Abuse Loom over the Horizon!

I just came back from a ten state trip visiting different parts of the northeast. Most of my time was spent in New Hampshire, traveling from town to town. In the process, I encountered Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and attended a political rally in Warner, NH where Bernie Sanders was speaking at a town hall.

His speech was a crowd pleaser which made me feel a part of a movement which on the surface sounded great—“a chicken in every pot.” However, the cold hard facts of reality hit me as I drank my Dunkin Donuts coffee. 

There is no money for what he wants to do.  In reality, the entitlement programs plus the bloated military budget accounted for most of our wasted tax dollars [not even including the compounded interest rate on the mounting debt]. I then dismissed my enthusiasm for him and his passionate speech as a fanciful political riff by a well-intentioned naïve politician.

Needless to say, the NH landscape in the fall is overwhelming. A flood of colors assaulted my eyes, as I travelled from one hamlet to another. Quaint towns like Harrisville NH had restored their antiquated manufacturing plants into visitor-friendly historical sites. In Manchester, the old textile mills along the Merrimack were converted into a high tech compound by the singular efforts of one man—Dean Kamen.

Kamen’s start-ups were neatly ensconced within the red brick sinews of the old textile mills which over time disappeared thanks to higher manufacturing costs, bad trade deals and cheap overseas labor [sound familiar?]. Kamen even created a very elegant restaurant called, “The Foundry” in an old mill which offered a panoply of exciting new cuisine that normally might be found in a seemingly more sophisticated urban setting like NYC, San Francisco or Paris. This conversion of old factory space into vibrant “Information Age” work space was quite impressive.

However, the most impressive site for me was the Bretton Woods Conference Room in the Mt Washington Hotel, located about two hours north of Manchester. The hotel itself was an incredible feat of engineering dating back to the early 1900s. It was, at that time the largest hotel in the USA, containing hundreds of rooms and thousands of glass pane windows. It still remains as a structural behemoth of untoward beauty. 

I was particularly interested in seeing only one room. I searched around the large lobby of the hotel to locate the room in which the Bretton Woods International Monetary Conference of December 27, 1944 was held. When I found the room in which the Bretton Woods agreement was signed by 44 countries, I felt like a kid who has gone back in time and witnessed one of the major financial turning points in the 20^th century history of the world. There, around a small round table, sat Henry Morgenthau Sr, Sir John Keynes as well as prominent statesmen from the Soviet Union, France, and other countries to sign an agreement which set gold standard at $35 an ounce and most importantly, designated the United States dollar as the backbone of the future international exchange currency of the world. It was there that America truly became the economic and political superpower it is today.

The winning of WWII allowed us to obtain both the legitimacy and leadership of making the USD the currency for any transactions anywhere around the world. Now that was brilliant forethought on behalf of the American political elite! At the same time, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were created to assist in helping war-torn Europe to regain an economic foothold in the post WWII world. Since that time, every country including France, Germany and China have tried to break the back of the USD  in order to make their particular currency the basis of transactions around the world.

After leaving the Bretton Wood Conference Room, I returned back to Manchester where I saw Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and the Ben Carson bus - --all ready for their circus tours around NH in a futile attempt to solicit votes from the people so that they could be the Republican presidential nominee. The sight of those three men quickly brought me back to a reality, I realized that American leadership and savoir-faire had truly disappeared after WWII. Now what we, Americans, are left with was a cadre of ambitious mediocre men with no knowledge of banking or international negotiations—who would one day enact the inane policies that their untutored minions had written for them.

I left NH with a despondent sense of uncertainty, fearing that the gains that were made at Bretton Woods would be eroded by a POTUS who knew nothing of history and knew less of America.  Adding to my sense of foreboding, was the heroin epidemic that is spreading across the Granite state, destroying young adults- blue collar and white collar alike.  Cheap heroin has invaded from Lawrence/Lowell Mass where South American/Central American gangs have a historic foothold. This new blight of NH, became the last memory of that beatific state as I drove through the urban decay of Boston, NYC, Scranton, Philadelphia, N.J. et.al. We were once great, now we seem to be just falling apart.

The current state of the union is fine---as long as we keep the masses with bread and circus and allow them never to learn about their amazing history of achievement.

 Let them shoot up and tune out, for that is the modus operandi of this new millennial generation.

Self-destruction has become the keystone of American military, political and educational endeavors. Get high and die!
As for tomorrow…. That’s not our problem… Someone else has to care of that.