A Nation and People Caught in Torrent of Loss and Costs

Rabid Wastefulness of Life and Treasure, Entrenched Power Turned against America

US Officials and Partners Reject 

America’s People

Duty of Governance

Loss: Shutout, Shutdown

SUMITOMO closes shop, dumps Americans
Why would those Over There care if those OVER HERE do not care

Evidence of Intertwined Public-Private Sector Betrayal

Sumitomo Rubber USA, LLC, on November 7, 2024, announces immediate shutdown and cease of all production at its “Tonawanda, New York-based facility (manufacturing automotive tires for passenger cars, trucks, buses and motorcycles). However, the announcement said, the conglomerate would by use “a larger percentage” of subsidiary Sumitomo Rubber Industries Ltd’s “global production capacity” so as not to interrupt “service to existing customers.” Contact: media@sumitomorubber-usa.com; https://srusa-tonawanda-update.com/Media%20Release%20Landing%20Page%20Nov%202024%20Final%201.pdf]

The history of the Tonawanda plant extends to the early twentieth century, long before 2015 Sumitomo takeover.

TONAWANDA is situated in Western New York 5.8 miles from Amherst, NY, 7.5 miles from Buffalo, NY; 284.2 miles from Philadelphia, PA. Its population estimate around 15,000, among them some 1,200 foreign born residents; and more than 10 percent of Tonawanda’s total population (more than 90 percent secondary school graduates) living in poverty. https://www.city-data.com/city/Tonawanda-New-York.html

SUMITOMO CORPORATION is a Japanese Conglomerate (owned by Sumitomo Group, headquartered in Tokyo; subsidiaries: SCSK; TBC Corporation; constituent company: The Nikkei 225 or Nikkei Stock Average); estimated revenue and net income latest update $32.16 billion, $ 2.16 billion respectively. Sumitomo is described as a general trading industry its commodities metal, construction, transportation, infrastructure, chemicals, energy, mineral resources, food, other goods.

MULTINATIONALS
Now you see them - Now you don’t

DUNLOP or GOODRICH or GOODYEAR or SUMITOMO
Who Knows?

• 1985 Dunlop Rubber Company is acquired by British multinational industrial conglomerate company originally founded in 1924 as the British Goodrich Rubber Co. Ltd a subsidiary of US rubber specialist B.F. Goodrich Company (BTR headquartered in London, England, now nonexistent). Sumitomo, without acquiring Dunlop company, acquires rights to manufacture and market Dunlop branded road tyres. Dunlop Ltd then becomes a brand operated by different companies worldwide.

• 1997 Sumitomo completes agreement to use the Dunlop name in its corporate name, changes name of its UK subsidiary to “Dunlop Tyres Ltd”

• 1998 BTR sells … Dunlop Aviation and Dunlop Precision Rubber (among others) to Doughty Hanson & Co to form Dunlop Standard.

• 1999 Sumitomo Rubber Industries and Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company form joint venture (Sumitomo continuing to manufacture all Japanese-made tyres under the Dunlop name and Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company buying three quarters of Sumitomo’s European and North American tyre businesses. (Since 1999, the Dunlop brand has been part of Goodyear’s North American and European portfolio) Goodyear obtains Dunlop tire assets in Europe; US and Sumitomo Rubber Industries continue selling Dunlop tires in other countries

• 2004 Dunlop Standard is sold to London based Meggitt plc (or Ltd)

• 2006 India’s multinational Apollo Tyres Limited (tyre manufacturing company) acquires Dunlop Tyres International

• 2008 Goodyear Dunlop Tires North America Inc (Tonawanda plant) reduces production and cuts 150 jobs

• 2013 Sumitomo Rubber Industries acquire Dunlop Tyre trademark rights in Africa from Apollo Tyres; and Sumitomo Rubber Industries in 2014 changes its name to Sumitomo Rubber South Africa (Pty) Ltd.

• 2014 Goodyear accuses Sumitomo of “anticompetitive conduct in violation of applicable antitrust law”

• 2015 Sumitomo reclaims ownership of Tonawanda Dunlop plant

• 2024 Sumitomo Rubber in Tonawanda, New York eliminates “all 1,550 union and salaried jobs” and shuts down plant operations.

USA 

CONDITIONS, OUTLOOK

BLEAK

• Recession Probability by December 2025: 45 percent

DISCARDED: Poverty in the United States of America

• Thirty-eight million (more than 11 percent of) Americans live in poverty.

• Half a Million-plus People are Homeless, i.e., living temporary shelter or transitional housing or sleeping in places not meant for human habitation (under bridges or viaducts, along sidewalks, in doorways or abandoned buildings).

Homelessness numbers by State
At or Above 10,000 Homeless
(13 States)

California 171,521	New York 74,178	Florida 25,959	Washington 25,211
Texas 24,432	Oregon 17,959	Massachusetts 15,507	Arizona 13,553
Pennsylvania 12,691	Georgia 10,689	Ohio 10,654	Tennessee 10,567	Colorado 10,397

Homelessness Percentages

District of Columbia 65.8	California 43.7	Vermont 43.1	Oregon      42.3	Hawaii 41.4
New York 37.7	Washington 32.6	Maine 32.1	Alaska 31.7	Nevada 24.2

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/homeless-population-by-state

2024 US elections PAID out or Wasted

Projections by OpenSecrets

Congressional Races $10,286,346,287

Presidential Race $5,514,721,998

Total Cost of Election $15,901,068, 285 BILLION

2024 Presidential Election Cycle
https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/cost-of-election

Waste Fraud Abuse - US Monetary Costs of War (estimates) 2024

October 7, 2023-September 30, 2024
United States Spending on Israel’s Military Operations and
Related U.S. Operations in the West Asia Region

• Includes “approved security assistance funding since October 7, 2023, supplemental funding for regional operations, and an estimated additional cost of operations”

• Excludes “any other economic costs” https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/USspendingIsrael

$22.76 BILLION

And RISING

October 7, 2023 – October 7, 2024 U.S. spending on aid for Israeli military operations in Gaza and elsewhere exceeds $17.9 billion. Spending on related U.S. operations in the region exceeds $4.86 billion. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/USspendingIsrael

 

United States War Spending September 11, 2001-September 11, 2022

$8 Trillion

Veteran Care over 30-year period going forward: $2.2 Trillion

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/summary

DEBT

Federal Debt as of September 30, 2024
$35.5 trillion
UP $2.3 trillion from FY 2023

FY 2024 Interest on the debt $1,126.5 billion
INCREASE from FY 2023: $251.0 billion

FY 2024 budget deficit $1.8 trillion

US Government Accountability Office Financial Audit: Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s FY 2024 and FY 2023 Schedules of Federal Debt GAO-25-107138 Published: November 7, 2024; Publicly Released: November 7, 2024. (NOTED: “GAO has previously recommended that Congress consider developing a plan to place the government on a sustainable fiscal path and that the plan should include considering alternative approaches to the debt limit.”) https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107138

Accelerated Business and Industry Failures affecting Workers and Income

2024

2,000+ stores closing across United States of America

13 retail brands = 2,055 locations

UBS (formerly known as the Union Bank of Switzerland) UBS Group AG/UBS Group SA/UBS Group Inc analysts project over five-year period (- 2029) 

45000 US retail closures

Business Insider (Yahoo) by Dominick Reuter, Alex Bitter, October 24, 2024
https://www.pennlive.com/news/2024/10/more-than-2000-stores-are-closing-in-the-us-this-year-is-your-favorite-on-the-list.html

ABANDONMENT!

Betrayal of America

Never Ends

Shutdowns 
UK Independent, Graig Graziosi reporting June 10, 2024

“Store closures are rocking the US market. … Thousands of brick-and-mortar retail and dining storefronts are sitting empty in the wake of a tsunami of business closures across the US in recent months.

“Inflation has beaten down consumers, forcing Americans, whose salaries have largely not kept pace, to rethink how and when they shop. This has pushed some already-struggling retailers and restaurants to the brink, sparking a rash of bankruptcies and the closures of nearly 3,200 store locations in 2024.” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/store-closures-us-inflation-chains-b2559894.html

Commercial and Employment Sectors
Two Exclusivist Political Parties
Nearly Half Century 1980/1993 Through 2024

• Sell Offs
• Off Shoring
• Sellouts
• Downsizing
• Discouraging transferrable skills development
• Promoting causal-slippery-nonpermanent-easily disposal American work and workers
• Fielding and support of mercenaries and incompetents, malleable (bought and sold) panderers (patriots for hire masquerading as public officials)

US deciders have shown, repeatedly, their general contempt for life—though in disingenuousness, they profess otherwise. Up and down the spectrum of public office and endeavor (federal to local, and with their “partners”), people in US public office and positions of influence have demonstrated a cavalier dismissal and disavowal of the sacred duty of governance—governance which means, at its most fundamental:

• To Provide for America’s common defense (not command, commit, enable or arm aggression on American streets or against world nations and peoples) and

• To Promote Americans’ general welfare.

• To Embrace fully and put into practice the promise and principles inherent in the oath, ethic, and work ethic of public office: to serve and protect the United States of America and its people

• To Work toward a more perfect union.

Long time coming Crisis of Legitimacy
From the late Twentieth Century to the Present day

In 1973, the United States of America is “mired in a series of … economic, political, military crises… eroding US domestic confidence in government and thwarting US geopolitical ambitions US powers and influencers response to which is to expand US hegemony “through

• Conventional and hybrid warfare, often outsourced to non-state actors
• Financialization of the economy and
• Weaponization of the dollar…”

The middle twentieth century saw “the industrial corporation displace the banking system as the prime economic symbol of success”; and “late twentieth-century saw the “growth of derivatives and a novel banking model ushering “a new period of finance capitalism.”

What the powers that be termed “‘solutions’”— Financialization of the U.S. economy PLUS movement of American capital abroad PLUS relentless de-industrialization in the United States—created even “more intractable problems” culminating in today’s “crisis of legitimacy” pervading the United States of America.

Financialization, Rentiers Rule
Government is Held Hostage

Finance is “‘liberated’ from any functional connection to the real economy, becoming a source of great wealth from speculation (and) the grand destabilizer of both the domestic and global economy.”

“Export of capital … isolates the rentiers”—those living on income from property or securities—from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labor of several overseas countries.”

“Shareholder capitalism” is king, “deregulation and privatization its handmaidens.”

“… Large multinational companies and financial capital organized a takeover of political power, and labor and middle-class interests were pushed to the side-lines.”

“… Production of profit from the manipulation and global expansion of financial capital … (becomes) the biggest and most profitable sector of the economy; … (and holds) government hostage to its interests.

For the parasitic financier “crises are just an opportunity to increase their power and line their pockets. Hedge funds profit from geopolitical instability and stock market volatility. Political chaos, boom and bust cycles are their bread and butter because when investors are worried, they want to be hedged.”

Despite the appearance of wealth (fueled by money-printing and unsustainable debt) the United States of America, as a nation and a people, “is actually teetering on the edge.”

“Under the cover of ‘boom and bust’, rot and decay have set in.” The “parasitic rentier class has weakened its host….” “The global balance of power has already shifted.”

Loss of Legitimacy
Self-inflicted Crisis, Chaos, National Weakness

The Executive Branch of US government, from the early second-half of the twentieth century, “encouraged the outsourcing of non-inherently governmental functions” to private entities. And, as if deliberately shirking duty and proper governmental responsibilities, elected officials increased and accelerated outsourcing practices through the 1990s into the present day.

Powerful US and US-allied entities and individuals within and outside the United States of America succeed in “blurring the lines” between public and private sectors and interests. They move in and out of the official US government, operating “in the gray zone between Hard and Soft Power” — a calculated arrangement “no longer juxtaposed but conceptualized as a continuum integrated into a single framework” wherein nongovernmental entities are permitted to receive “tax-deductible donations from corporate-financier groups (often indirectly through the think-tanks they control”) and receive “state funding”— and empowered “to shape domestic and foreign policy.”

This surrender and disestablishment of standards, official duty and responsibility of Government and Governance of the United States not only have threatened the sovereignty of other nations of the world; but this manufactured, exclusivist, self-interested arrangement has destroyed the essential interior fabric and operations (work, labor, earning, human rights, multi-level physical, health, education, welfare, banking services, structures and infrastructures) together with the citizenry’s presumed “democratic” (of-by-for-the-people) Constitutional institution of Government of the United States of America.

America’s crisis of legitimacy, in 2024, far exceeds the economic, political, military crises of the previous century. “The impact will be acutely felt” by the nation and people of these United States.

Excerpted and adapted from Laura Ruggeri’s “Unleashing Chaos: The responses to the first crisis of U.S. hegemony unleashed forces that ultimately eroded its power.” November 4, 2024, https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/11/04/unleashing-chaos/

Researcher and geopolitical analyst, former academic Laura RUGGERI investigates “colour revolutions and hybrid warfare.” Her work appears in at least four languages English, Chinese, Italian and Russian

Those who would pen their hopes or hitch their wagons 

to the prevailing, intermingled narcissists and swindlers spread throughout public and private sectors are partners in crime. Americans who would embrace or acquiesce to the current breed, the prevailing characters and manifestations, arrayed against the public good, become partners—whether intentionally or not—in America’s downfall: the aiding and abetting in the great loss and enormous costs being suffered by the United States of America and its people.

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Prolific Southern-Born American Writer Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett focuses on People, Press, Politics USA; Domestic and Foreign Affairs (no copyright claimed in direct quotes and individual image)

Latest book: Are There No Champions? Yes and No

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