U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley
Challenges Nike, NBA: ‘Will You Pledge You Are Slave Free?’
Al-Drago-Pool/Getty Images
21 Jul 2020 14
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 camps
Sen. 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 ) 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 2020 213
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.
China’s Champion Dianne Feinstein Longtime apologist now acts as PRC asset.
Tue Aug 25, 2020
Lloyd Billingsley
21
Back
in April, Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt, a Republican, filed a lawsuit
charging that Chinese Communist officials are “ responsible
for the enormous death , suffering, and economic losses they
inflicted on the world, including Missourians.” For Sen. Dianne
Feinstein, the Missouri lawsuit was the problem.
“We
launch a series of unknown events that could be very,
very dangerous ,” said Feinstein in a July 30, Senate Judiciary Committee
hearing. “I think this is a huge mistake.” As Feinstein doubtless knows,
the Chinese company Build Your Dreams (BYD) , which bagged a $1 billion mask
deal with California, is suing
Vice Media for a story charging that BYD had links to the Chinese
military and forced labor. Feinstein did not say if that lawsuit was a mistake,
and possibly launch unknown events that could be very dangerous. On the other
hand, she had only praise for the Chinese government.
“Where
I live, we hold China as a potential trading partner,” Feinstein said in the
hearing. “As a country that has pulled tens of millions of people out of
poverty in a short period of time. And as a country growing into a respectable
nation among other nations. And I deeply believe that. I’ve been to China a
number of times. I’ve studied the issues.” Much of that study, it turns out,
has been on location.
“I’ve
been coming to China for 31 years, so I’m not a newcomer,” Feinstein told James
Areddy of the Wall
Street Journal during a 2006 visit to Shanghai. In
Beijing, the U.S. Senator explained, “we spent time with Zhu Rongji, the former
premier who was a mayor of Shanghai” and “a good friend.”
In
2014, on the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Feinstein
issued a statement recalling “perhaps even thousands” of demonstrators killed.
“I know of no other country that has made as much economic and industrial
progress in the last 25 years than China,” Feinstein wrote. “But what this
anniversary reminds us is that progress still must be made in the areas of
human rights, rule of law and governance.”
The
senator has since been rather quiet about any human rights progress China might
have achieved, and expressed no second thoughts about China’s membership in the
World Trade Organization. That removed the annual congressional review of its
record on human rights and weapons proliferation records, a huge win for the
Communist regime.
As Rosemarie
Ho reported in The
Nation , Democrats in general and Feinstein in particular have kept
rather quiet about the democratic protesters in Hong Kong. As it happens,
Feinstein’s China issues go much deeper. The former San Francisco mayor had a
Chinese spy on her staff for some 20 years, and he was much more than her
“driver.” As the San
Francisco Chronicle noted , the spy even attended Chinese Consulate
functions for the senator.
As Ben
Weingarten noted in the Federalist in 2018, Feinstein’s
husband has “profited handsomely from the greatly expanded China trade she
supported.” And the senator “served as a key intermediary between China and the
U.S. government, while serving on committees whose work would be of keen
interest to the PRC.” All this, plus a spy on her staff through three election
cycles.
Feinstein
was one of the
first to cry “racism” over the Wuhan virus that has caused massive damage in the
United States and around the world. When one American state attempts to hold
China accountable losses in court, Sen. Feinstein calls it dangerous. She
“deeply believes” that one of the most repressive regimes in history is a
respectable nation.
By
contrast, as the San Francisco Democrat said in a June
2 statement , the United States is burdened with “systemic racism in areas
ranging from housing to employment to education,” all part of “institutional
racism.” Feinstein invoked “President Obama,” to lead the reform process. He
has been acting as though still in office.
“ Obama
Defends Mob Rule ,” reads the August 3 American Greatness headline. As Conrad Black
explains, the 44th president of the United States is uncritical of the violent
mobs now terrorizing the country. This “shows how terminally morally and
intellectually decayed the Obama-Clinton-Biden Democratic Party has become,”
and that is not a stretch.
From
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on down, not a single Democrat has offered the
slightest criticism of the Antifa-BLM axis. Instead they call federal officers
“stormtroopers” and “secret police,” and support the defunding of police
departments. Democrat support for violent mobs sends a signal to another group
out to take down the country.
As
recent attacks at military bases in Florida and Texas confirm, Islamic
terrorists continue their jihad against America and Americans. The death
sentence of Boston
Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has now been overturned.
That brought no statement from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who finds fault with a
Missouri lawsuit against China.
When
a predictable apologist becomes a positive asset for the Communist regime, that
could turn out very, very dangerous. If anybody thought the time has finally
come for a thorough investigation of California Senator Dianne Feinstein it
would be hard to blame them.
No comments:
Post a Comment