The central pillar of the corrupt new order is the American elite’s relationship with China. . . .The Russia, Russia, Russia hysteria is fake. The notion that Russia is "expansionist" is ludicrous. More like it, it's hated by the oligarchs and corporate giants because it demonstrates what a firm, reasonable, restrained, nationalist foreign policy looks like in contrast to the U.S. and its stupidity in wasting gargantuan amounts of money and good will to vindicate airy fairy notions of "responsibility to protect," America's "leadership" of the world (demanded by no one), and the "exceptional" nature of Yanitedstates.What matters now are platforms. And for the purposes of information warfare, what’s important is not the content but rather the availability and reach of the platforms, whose job is to protect the American ruling elite’s wealth and preferences by spreading whatever propaganda the elite sees as beneficial. By threatening to split the United States from China, Trump earned the enmity of America’s China Class, which is working hard to remove him from office, and replace him with someone more pliant.[1]
Applying the useful analytical principle that what is not being said or complained of is probably the key to understanding any particular problem or situation, we find that there is a raft of breast beating about Russia but none about China. Chinese intelligence had a connection to Mochtar Riady, the Indonesian version of Croesus, who saved Bill Clinton's primary campaign long ago with a timely donation of cash. And Mum was the word. Also, Johnny Chung made it a habit to show up with bags of cash for the Clintons. More silencio over the ensuing decades.
And good luck finding much of an explanation of why tens of thousands of U.S. factories HAD to be relocated to the Chinese mainland. The U.S. Dept. Commerce sounded no alarms on this amazing transfer of wealth and technology to a @#$% communist strategic competitor. Neither did the Dept. of Labor nor any industrial union. And where were the Dept. of Defense and the Intelligence Community when Chinese spies were flooding our universities and corporations stealing whatever wasn't nailed down?
No one was minding the store and that, sports fans, is par for the course in early 21st-c. America.
Since people don't generally sell out their core constituencies without some major incentives and, as the quote above suggests, those who today continue to benefit from such lucrative arrangements get very agitated when their rice bowl is threatened. That Trump did by generally questioning why we waste our blood and treasure on a bunch of free-loading, welfare-state Gutmenschenen and commited communists. What an astonishing thing to do. The idea that it's not America's Manifest Destiny to be everybody's bitch. Imagine that!
Call it basic Trumpism, this rude questioning of holy arrangements, and it's something that's not going away. Just maybe enough Americans have woken up to question (1) why millions of foreigners HAVE to be allowed to flood the country to take American jobs, drive down wage levels, and suck up welfare benefits and (2) why American factories HAVE to be shut down and moved to the shores of a communist country. What exactly was the quid for that quo? Somehow I think the secretive U.S. Chamber of Commerce has a pretty good idea of what it was.
Notes
[1] "America’s China Class Launches a New War Against Trump. The corporate, tech, and media elites will not allow the president to come between them and Chinese money." By Lee Smith, Tablet, 9/15/20.
The best thing I've read about this in many months. Kudos.
ReplyDeleteExcellent.
ReplyDeleteColonel, I'll email you a piece I wrote under my own name regarding the absolute folly of all this offshoring.
It's money, pure and simple.
At a former employer the Director of Operations was looking at moving factories inland from Shenzhen / Guangdong. Why? Because the labor rates there were getting too high.
The reason that China became the world's factory is really straightforward and requires no conspiracies. Because of labor costs, regulations (including environmental) and general ease of doing business (huilu), it was cheaper to make things in China and ship them home than to make them in Ohio. Why the choice of China rather than India is due to the general ineptness and corruption that vitiates everything Indian.
ReplyDeleteThank you kindly, Linda. That's high praise considering the source!
ReplyDeleteNitzakhon, thank you. I look forward to reading it. I think you may have sent me something earlier but I failed to respond. If so, kindly overlook my bad manners. These last few months have been a bit of a whirl as I try to make sense out of what's happening.
ReplyDeleteThat's ironic but sad about your former employer wanting to avoid that "high-price" Chinese labor closer to the coast. I get it that an employer might need to shave every expense possible if the survival of the firm is at stake but I don't get the impulse to drive employees to the wall by relentlessly seeking out cheaper and more desperate labor.
Mr. Sykes, I don't dispute the advantageous economics and freedom from burdensome regulation that inform the choice to relocate. Nancy Pelosi and her husband moved some factory they own to Guam to escape minimum wage laws. Epic hypocrisy. The same kind of hypocrisy about race and immigrants that drives people to live as far away from blacks and immigrants.
ReplyDeleteThe part that's reprehensible and incomprehensible is the failure of all here at home who are charged with advancing and safeguarding the interests of the American population. It is not hard to see that cheaper Chinese goods at Walmart do not make up for the loss of our industrial base and the transformation of a large part of our economy into a service economy. Vast amounts of American treasure flowed to China and we also lost valuable IP to Chinese extortion and theft on the part of Chinese nationals allowed to work and study in the US.
Free trade is a highly suspect thing as an absolute good and, for sure, no US officials exerted themselves even to work for some kind of "fair" trade. US trade deficits with Europe as well as China have been ludicrous but nothing was done. England, I believe, prospered behind tariffs yet our exit ramps and bank accounts were left wide open.
So Americans were sold out in the name of wider profit margins and places like Detroit were turned into rotting buildings and a range for coyotes. Immigration has done the same immense damage involving as it does job theft by the tens of millions of jobs, downward wage pressure from immigrant competition, and welfare parasitism.
Advantages of operation in China thus can't be looked at in isolation but as the result also of a criminal indifference if not actual malevolence.
As I suggest in my piece, the beneficiaries of this off-shoring are well aware of what they get from it and who is hurt by it. The amazing attack on Trump in this area (as in several other) is an indicator of a deliberate intent to destroy America.