I love the Fourth of July and the long weekend or week off it usually brings to many Americans. Sadly, as I type this, it is July 4 and I am sitting behind my desk here at the newspaper with my window blinds raised, watching the American flag hang limply on a pole set in the sidewalk outside.

Town seems full of people, more so than usual. I think the Old Fashioned celebration was a hit, with more people in town than I can remember.

Since the July 4 holiday typically is considered a part of the celebration of our nation’s independence from the control of foreign powers, I thought I might make mention of that.

Of course, our Declaration of Independence was made before our consumers decided it was time to buy most of our goods from China and other Asiatic peoples, leaving our country in bondage to those foreign powers. Since the federal government is indescriminate about who can buy bonds, we are also in debt bondage to foreign countries.

Not to mention the fact that we are well on the way to opening new doors for floods of imports with the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which passed through the Senate recently with hardly a problem. In case you didn’t know, free trade’ typically means we trade our jobs for cheap stuff from other countries, unless you’re in the sugar business. Then the country protects your interests, leaving the rest of us to pay exorbitant prices for ‘white gold.’ That’s why all of our soft drinks are sweetened with corn syrup, instead of sugar. Hispanics know the difference. Coca Cola in Mexico is sweetened with sugar. I’ve heard it tastes better.

However, if your trade was sewing, there’s no need to protect your interests. You don’t have an interest any more. All of those jobs are in Shanghai and Bangladesh, if they weren’t in Central America already. That marks the two extremes of our nation’s trade contradiction, with ‘free’ trade with one nation meaning one thing, while it means another somewhere else. It all really comes down to how many politicians you can afford to buy with campaign contributions.

Not to mention the laws in the pipes to help make all illegal aliens legal and the porous farce known as our southern border.

Welcome to our celebration of international dependence.

We didn’t even talk about oil, which almost exclusively comes to us via the Middle East, where they munch hamburgers and watch our movies while shouting slogans like, “Down with the great Satan.” In case you didn’t figure it out, that’s us.

If the pressures of war and the dependence of our nation on foreign oil and goods isn’t enough to concern you, we are also importing foods in record amounts. The breadbasket of the universe, these United States of America, importing food from less affluent nations. Popular items we can’t get enough of include shrimp, but we continue to import more and more food items. The U.S. imports $76,798,000 in fruit juice per year from China alone, up from $14,021 in 2001. I couldn’t get over that.

The United States is importing fruit juice in ever increasing amounts. We have states like Florida and California that can basically grow year round and plenty of manufacturing capacity, so why? Most likely because other countries can do it cheaper since they don’t face our environmental and labor minimum controls.

Most other big food imports show the same trend in information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Other items like feeds, prepared fruits and vegetables, honey and nuts also pour into our country in ever increasing amounts.

As is obvious, we have plenty of those items, but with China’s veritable slave labor market, they can produce the items cheaper. One of our biggest growth exports to the Chinese is strawberries. In looking at the other stats, likely means they are buying them from us, then juicing them and selling them back. That reminds me of a story about a barge load of trash that was on the ocean. No port would accept the garbage, which started in the U.S., as the story goes, but Japan asked for it. “We’ll just sell it back to you in six months,” they told us.

Our biggest exports seem to be the raw materials that helped make us a world power to start with. What good are raw materials without the factories? Maybe the other countries will grow strong enough to simply buy up all of our mineral rights and any significant land rights (not taken by the Supreme Court in the meanwhile) and take over the country without firing a shot.

It would appear that we are well on the way to becoming a second-rate nation if current trends continue. Left to fall into the pit of our own hedonistic passions for foods and leisure, left behind by a working world that sees us as little more than a place to dump their products on an ignorant and willing public.

That kind of makes it difficult to justify celebrating our independence, when we really are growing more and more dependent on foreign powers. As I sit here in my Chinese chair, wearing my Chinese T shirt and Korean tennis shoes, I look down at my Japanese watch and realize that it is nearly time to go to my American home full of foreign goods. Isn’t this country great?

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