U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley Challenges Nike, NBA: ‘Will You Pledge You Are Slave Free?’
2:57
U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R, MO) took to Twitter on Tuesday to challenge Nike and its business partner, the NBA, to end its association with the companies that use Chinese slave labor to manufacture their products.
On Tuesday, Sen. Hawley tweeted out a challenge to both the NBA and Nike to pledge that they are “#slavefree.”
.@Nike will you pledge you are #slavefree?— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) July 21, 2020
.@NBA Adam Silver will you pledge your corporation is #slavefree?— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) July 21, 2020
The Senator is urging corporate leaders and high-profile athletes including LeBron James to eliminate the products that they endorse that are made with slave labor:
Executives build woke, progressive brands for US consumers, but happily outsource labor to Chinese concentration campsSen. Hawley is calling on American businesses making products overseas to pledge they are #SlaveFree – that they DO NOT and WILL NOT rely on forced slave labor pic.twitter.com/DKAwuHTzXy— Senator Hawley Press Office (@SenHawleyPress) July 21, 2020
.@NBA Adam Silver will you pledge your corporation is #slavefree?— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) July 21, 2020
Hawley was spurred to his questions by the many reports that Nike and the NBA use Chinese slave labor to produce their shoes, jerseys, and other products that they earn billions from by selling to American sports fans and athletes.
Only months ago, for instance, the Washington Post reported that Nike shoes are made in factories in Qingdao, China, where Chinese authorities imprison its ethnic Muslim Uyghur and force them to work in the factories that make Nike products.
Last year, activists also revealed a shocking video that showed hundreds of young men in prison uniforms, bound and blindfolded, and sitting cross-legged on the ground near a railroad depot as armed guards in black watched over them.
Analysis of the video lends credence to its veracity and finds that the video was recorded in mid-August of last year near the factory sector of Xinjiang, China.
4 days ago a video showing 3-400 detainees handcuffed & blindfolded at a train station in Xinjiang was uploaded to YouTube (https://t.co/GpEaZ7YkIK)
In this thread I'll share how I've verified that this video was filmed at 库尔勒西站 (41.8202, 86.0176) on or around August 18th. pic.twitter.com/hr5xd8nahM— Nathan Ruser (@Nrg8000) September 21, 2019
It has been reported that many of the prisoners in this region are comprised of China’s Uyghur ethnic minority. The use of Uyghurs as a forced labor force was recently chronicled in an extensive report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
The reports says that between 2017 and 2019, the Chinese government relocated a minimum 80,000 Uighurs from Xinjiang in western China to factories across the country where they work “under conditions that strongly suggest forced labor.” The government is reportedly using the slave labor for manufacturing items ordered by some 83 international companies making everything from footwear to electronics.
“The Chinese government has facilitated the mass transfer of Uighur and other ethnic minority citizens from the far west region of Xinjiang to factories across the country,” the ASPI report revealed. “Under conditions that strongly suggest forced labor, Uighurs are working in factories that are in the supply chains of at least 83 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing, and automotive sectors, including Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony, and Volkswagen.”
In the end, Sen. Hawley wants to know if Nike and the NBA have stopped using this slave labor to make their products.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston.
Pinkerton:
Josh Hawley Explains How to Take on China and Save America
23 May 2020213
9:33
On May 20, speaking
from the Senate floor, Josh Hawley, the youngest member of the chamber, laid
out his plan for fixing international trade, taking on the People’s Republic of
China, and thereby, too, saving America.
In so doing, Hawley, populist firebrand that he is, showed that
he was willing to overturn the stale orthodoxies that have mildewed our economy
and undermined our security.
In his speech, Hawley
laid out the core problem: The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has taken
advantage of the flaws built into the current international economic system,
embodied in the World Trade Organization (WTO), that agglomeration of unelected
globalcrats. As Hawley put
it, “We must recognize that the economic system designed by Western policy
makers at the end of the Cold War does not serve our purposes in this new era.” He added, “And we should admit
that multiple of its founding premises were in error.”
Those founding premises, Hawley
continued, trace back to the save-the-world utopianism of our 28th president,
Woodrow Wilson. Having
entered World War One in 1917, Wilson had some strange ideas; for one thing, it
would be “a war to end all war,” and, he added, we must strive for “peace
without victory.” Yes, such concepts might seem a bit, well, unrealistic; you
know, like the musings of an ivory-tower professor. In fact, Wilson had been a
professor and subsequently, in fact, he held presidency of Princeton University
before winning the White House. So
maybe now we can see the origins of his vaulting but vacuous phrasemaking.
Indeed, without a doubt, Wilson was
a great talker; he wove webs of words and theories that have bewitched many
politicians since, inspiring them to be wannabe Wilsonians.
For instance, there was George W.
Bush, who said he heard “a
calling from beyond the stars,” summoning America to wars of choice, aimed at
“ending tyranny in our world.” Well,
we know how that worked out.
As Hawley said, “During the past two
decades, as we fought war after war in the Middle East, the Chinese government
systematically built its military on the backs of our middle class.” Exactly. While we were liberating Fallujah for
the third or fourth time, the Chinese were hollowing out our economy.
Of course, Bush wasn’t our only
warlike president in the past two decades; we also had Bill Clinton and Barack
Obama, both of whom launched foreign interventions as well, even as they were
welcoming Chinese products and influence into the U.S. Indeed, as an aside, one wonders
what Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, thinks of all this: Has he learned the
lesson of Iraq and other quagmires? Has
he rethought trade with China? Those
are certainly good questions to be answered during the remainder of the 2020
campaign season.
Okay, back to Hawley. Having raised serious questions about
the status quo, he offered three specific answers:
First, we should withdraw from the World Trade Organization. As Hawley put it, the WTO was
built on a false promise: the idea that the nations of the world would converge
around a fair and non-manipulated trading system; as the Missourian put it,
“they wanted a single liberal market to support a single, liberal international
order that would bring peace in our time.” Yet in the decades of the WTO’s existence,
the countries of the world haven’t come together on much of anything—except,
perhaps, to snooker Uncle Sucker.
And we might pause to note Hawley’s
slyly ironic use of the words, “peace in our time.” That’s an allusion to the
catastrophically mistaken statement of British prime minister Neville
Chamberlain; back in 1938, Chamberlain made a wrongheaded deal with Adolf
Hitler, which he said would bring “peace in our
time.” Wrong!
Yes, Hawley is saying, the stakes
today are potentially that high; we can’t stay in an organization that has “not
been kind to America.” He
added, “The WTO’s dispute resolution process has systemically disfavored the
United States”—and favored China.
Second, Hawley says that having left the WTO, the U.S. should
negotiate new trade deals on a more reciprocal and bilateral basis; that is,
the U.S. should make a trade deal with, say, the United Kingdom—and then on to
another deal with the next potential trading partner. As Hawley explained, “We must
replace an empire of lawyers with a confederation of truly mutual trade.”
Indeed, Hawley argues that a new
focus on win-win trade deals—as freely determined by the two countries actually
involved in the deal, as opposed supranational WTO-crats—deals that would offer
a new opportunity for the U.S. to put together better alliances, based on
mutually beneficial economic and strategic relationships:
We benefit if countries that share
our opposition to Chinese imperialism—countries like India and Japan, Vietnam,
Australia and Taiwan—are economically independent of China, and standing
shoulder to shoulder with us. So
we should actively pursue new networks of mutual trade with key Asian and
European partners, like the economic prosperity network recently mentioned by
Secretary Pompeo.
We might pause over one of the
countries Hawley mentioned above, Taiwan. Its formal name is the Republic of
China (ROC), an island nation whose capital is Taipei. In other words, the ROC
is separate and very much distinct from the People’s Republic
of China, whose capital, of course, is Beijing. The two nations split in 1949,
when Mao Zedong’s Soviet-backed communists took over the mainland. In the decades since, the ROC,
population 23 million, has become a prosperous and free country, while the PRC
is merely … prosperous. (And,
of course, menacing.)
So it’s notable that Hawley
has become a
strong champion of Taiwan, which stands not only as a bulwark against the PRC,
but also as proof that the Chinese people, if given a choice, will choose
freedom.
Third, Hawley wants to crack down on the ability of international
capital, including Wall Street, to hopscotch the world—and step all over the
people of the world. As Hawley explains about the current WTO dominion,
There is a reason why Wall Street
loves the status quo. There is a reason why they will object to leaving the WTO
and resist major reforms to our global economic system. That’s because they are on a
gravy train of foreign capital flows that keep their checkbooks fat.
Indeed, underneath all the
complexity of international finance, there’s a simple enough bottom line; Wall
Street, and global capital as a whole, profit from international arbitrage. This international “arb” is the
system of playing off one country’s tax-, regulatory- and wage-systems against
another country’s—and seeking to profit from both sides of the equation.
Indeed, here in the U.S., in the
last few decades, it’s been easy for financial companies to play this arbitrage
game. In effect, they have
issued the following ultimatum to American industrial companies: “You must outsource or relocate to China,
because the taxes/regulations/wages are lower there. If you do so, we’ll reward you by bidding
up your stock price here in the U.S. But if you don’t, maybe we’ll buy you,
replace the management, and then move to China. Or maybe we’ll buy your competitor, move it
overseas, where it can take advantage of the lower costs, undercut you—and put
you out of business.”
This ultimatum, repeated thousands
of times, reminds one of Marlon Brando’s famous line from The
Godfather: “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
Many millions of lost American jobs
later, we’ve learned how few companies have been able to refuse this sort of “offer.”
Hawley makes it clear: As a nation,
we’ve dug ourselves into a deep hole. And
in the meantime, the PRC is on the move: On May 21, the South China
Morning Post, a Hong Kong-based newspaper under the sway of the Beijing
government, reported on the
PRC’s plan to allocate an additional $1.4 trillion for technological
mobilization. So yes, we
face a clear and present danger.
Fortunately, a clear-eyed
understanding of a threat is not the same as a downcast bowing down to it. What we need to do is build on
our understanding—and turn that understanding into action.
Hawley is just one senator, and in
terms of seniority, a very junior one at that. And yet he thinks with a wise
historical sweep that could—and should—change the policy course of America. As he said:
We can build a future that looks
beyond pandemic to prosperity—a prosperity shared by all Americans, from our
rural towns to the urban core. We
can build a future that looks past a failed consensus to meet our national
security needs in this new century.
Yes, if we can build that future for
ourselves—reuniting the nation around a renewed appreciation of the common
good, as well as a newfound apprehension of the common threat—then
we have a fighting chance. And
if America can pull together an alliance of other like-minded nations, all
fearful of the Red Dragon, then we all have a strong prospect of success.
Because darn few people anywhere
wish to live in tyranny. And the
Chinese Communist Party is tyrannical.
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