Don’t Underestimate China
No one would argue that one of our most complex trading relationships — and a totally one-sided one at that — is our relationship with China. To get a first-person feel for that relationship, I decided to get a reality check with a pre-Christmas trip to China’s principal American retail outlet, Walmart.
I knew I’d find Chinese-made products there, but I wasn’t prepared for the sheer number of them. Looking only for well known name brands, I charted a course to the housewares, sporting goods, and hardware departments and made these observations: Oneida silverware (Indonesia), Mr. Coffee coffeemakers and Hamilton Beach toasters (China), Master Lock padlocks (assembled in Mexico), GE room air-conditioner, Stanley tools, Pennzoil multi-use pumps, Coleman tents, Daisy air rifles, and Head tennis rackets (China). Most clothing was made outside the U.S., like Wrangler cargo pants (Nicaragua), but the prize of the day went to those famous Danish Lego toys, made in Denmark, Hungary, Mexico, and China.
I could have stayed for hours and ticked off product after product that bore a “Made Elsewhere” label, but it got too depressing. Nearly the entire assortment of the electronic goods we buy for our homes are manufactured or assembled overseas — products like computers and peripherals, stereo equipment, wide-screen televisions, and mobile phones — most from Southeast Asia and China. It’s also astonishing how many Chinese-made products populate the lower value end of the price spectrum. They range from plastic extruded items to drop-forged tools, all made at factories employing low- or no-skilled labor.
Many of these jobs were once the province of American workers, but no more. They’ve been exported to countries paying bargain-basement wages that offer borderline if not deplorable working conditions.
In the mid-eighties, I helped American companies set up offshore garment production in the Caribbean Basin under the Caribbean Basin Initiative after the invasion of Grenada. (The CBI was designed to help improve the economies of the region and prevent any further flirtations with communism.) U.S. executives were ecstatic when they learned they could make large profits by paying less for local labor. Several were also glad that OSHA wasn’t lurking around every corner until I reminded them that the U.S. government support they were getting came at a price: treating the foreign workers as if they were in the USA, with the same kind of workplace protection that we enjoy here. It was a tough sell because countries in the Far East, Asia, and South America were offering better incentives in the form of lower wages and relief from U.S. workplace regulations.
Is further American job loss and independence blood-letting on the horizon?
The answer to that question may very well be “yes,” and the next target may be the only viable sector we have left: services.
Several years ago, a Chinese manufacturing devotee, Steve Jobs, died, but the lure of big profits made in China by Apple’s offshoring did not die with him. And Apple is not alone by any means. American companies’ eastward push has continued unabated, and with that outsourcing and foreign investment, we have lost more than we have gained. We have lost our flexibility, our independence and our control.
And while Jobs’s computers have empowered our world, his company’s investments have ceded that power to the PRC. Because of super-low wages and the computer-driven modernization of third-world (formerly uncompetitive) countries’ factories, the Chinese have won U.S. manufacturing contracts at unprecedented levels.
“Okay, that’s just manufacturing; we still dominate the services sector,” say the enlightened among us. “That couldn’t happen with all America’s thousands of service companies.” Anyone who tells you that is spreading pure propaganda. Truth is, we are taking the last lap on the service sector equivalent of the Indy 500.
The proof of the service sector decline lies not only in the expansion of overseas call centers — largely a phenomenon of the ’80s and ’90s — but more so in the outsourcing of accounting services, medical records posting, product support, etc. While you won’t send your rug to a dry cleaner in Pakistan or get your hair cut in Thailand, you might be getting your taxes done in India via computer or get help setting up that new computer by somebody in Malaysia or the Philippines — or China.
The digitalization of the world, coupled with low Chinese wages and the enormous Chinese-held American debt and our growing trade deficit with them ($64 billion/year according to BEA: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis) are further evidence of our addiction to foreign-made goods, and if this situation is left unchecked, it will lead to a heightened state of trade subjugation and a soft occupation of the USA by the Chinese.
Twenty twenty-four is an election year. Along with all the domestic issues that cause agita among our voting class, we ought to be focusing on geopolitics, and especially trade geopolitics, rather than spending our waking hours on social media. The U.S. must reassess its global presence and learn to make better longer-term decisions that do not negatively impact our ability to compete or severely weaken an economy that was once the envy of the world. Underestimating China is a mistake we make at our own peril.
And the strategies we use should be...?
First: We must reject any notions that China is not interested in dominating the world’s currency markets, dominating industrial manufacturing, hoarding precious metals, minerals, and commodities, or imposing its values on the rest of us. Second: We must be aware that China has a long-term strategy to achieve its goals and that it has a history of patiently waiting until the moment is right to strike. Third: We must also realize that China employs circles the wagons. Fourth: China has territorial ambitions vis-à-vis Taiwan and the South China Sea. If we need proof of how wrong everything can go, we need only look to Hong Kong for the answer.
In the 1980s, we experienced what some called a “Japanese takeover of Manhattan.” Japan was investing heavily in that city (and elsewhere), and many Americans were worried about Japan suddenly owning our prime real estate market. I was more worried about nations that held our financial “promissory notes” and could be persuaded to sell off our securities, leaving us holding an empty bag and a mountain of worthless debt. Those were the worst of times...until now.
While Japan still holds the lion’s share of America’s debt, the Chinese are number two with $859 billion. That should worry everybody, but what is even more worrisome is how badly we are handling our relationship with the Chinese. The Biden administration reminds me of a timid lamb sitting in the shadow of a dangerous predator, believing that the shadow is just night closing in. Night is closing in on us, but not in a safety-making way. More dependency will only make things worse. It’s as simple as that.
Stephan Helgesen is a retired career U.S. diplomat who lived and worked in 30 countries for 25 years during the Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, and G.W. Bush administrations. He is the author of fourteen books, six of which are on American politics and has written over 1,300 articles on politics, economics, and social trends. He operates a political news story aggregator website: www.projectpushback.com. He can be reached at stephan@stephanhelgesen.com.
Image via Pxfuel.
The Biden’s administration’s agents in social media censored his political opponents before the 2020 election, including censoring the true Hunter Biden laptop story. The Biden administration has still been working with social media to censor Americans after the election.
Biden’s Campaign Message 2024
President [from 1857-1861] Buchanan would not confront the evil of slavery. … [He] sat in the Executive Mansion doing nothing [leading to the Civil War].
President Biden's mandate is to solve difficult problems like illegal immigration and racial animus [but] has made [them] far worse, just as Buchanan did with the slave issue.
[The Biden] administration says there is no crisis at the border and in [Biden’s] clouded mind, there isn't. Like Buchanan, Biden … will not even try … to confront the problem.
Buchanan was a dangerous incompetent whose apathy led to massive death and destruction.
So is President Biden.
--Bill O’Reilly, The Two Worst Presidents, April 23, 2023
Joe Biden’s poll numbers are now in the toilet (36% approve and 54% disapprove).
His DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has been insulting the American people by lying under oath to Congress and the American people for years that the border is secure even as Americans can see the people and drugs streaming across the border on their television screens. But since he is a Democrat, there will be no charges.
Even Biden’s protectors at CNN and NBC have now been forced to admit that the southern border is a mess, and that there were record number of deaths (853) at the southern border in 2022, placing an immense cost on the American people.
The Biden’s administration’s agents in social media censored his political opponents before the 2020 election, including censoring the true Hunter Biden laptop story. The Biden administration has still been working with social media to censor Americans after the election.
Biden was sold as the most experienced foreign policy candidate ever [laugh track here] but has presided over the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal in which 13 U.S. military personnel were needlessly blown to bits, hundreds more injured, and hundreds of Afghans killed, some of them even falling from airplanes as they tried desperately to escape from Afghanistan.
It was under the great foreign policy expert Biden’s watch that the bloody wars in Ukraine and in Israel erupted, while Venezuela is threating to invade its tiny neighboring country of Guyana, while, by contrast, the allegedly inexperienced Trump (Putin’s puppet according to Democrat partisans and buffoonish comedians), was the only one of the last four presidents on whose watch Putin did not invade one of its neighboring countries. Biden has insulted the American people by claiming that his Afghanistan withdrawal was an “extraordinary success,” a view not shared by the families of all the people needlessly killed and injured that day.
Biden saw his inflation rate rise to a 40 year high of 10% in April of 2022 and the current inflation rate is 3.1%, more than double what it was (1.4%) at the end of the Trump administration. Biden passed the enormously expensive “Inflation Reduction Act” but now must admit that it failed to reduce inflation, perhaps because, as John Kerry admits, it was really about his climate obsession and had little to do with inflation.
Biden’s Secretary of State Blinken was humiliated by China on American soil and made no response to his Chinese masters.
Violent crime is exploding all across the U.S. and massive business destroying shoplifting is taking place in “blue” (Democrat) cities like San Francisco across the country while Biden’s occasional vice president, Kamala Harris, has in the past called to defund the police. (How about we start with Kamala’s security detail first?)
While calling Trump an authoritarian dictator, and while numerous distinguished liberal legal scholars like Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley and (other experts) again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again point out massive legal problems with the Trump prosecutions, Biden’s “Justice” Department is attempting to imprison Biden’s chief Republican political rival before the 2024 election. Biden promised his administration would be the “most open and transparent in history” but his mechanical White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, regularly insults the intelligence of the American people by refusing to answer questions, as apparently the peasants do not deserve answers.
Biden repeatedly releases many billions of dollars to America’s sworn enemy, Iran, even as Iranian proxies attack U.S. allies and interests and troops and ships in the Mideast with minimal pinprick responses by Biden.
After assuring us that he was going to unite the nation, Biden constantly uses divisive language dismissing 74 million American Trump-voters as “MAGA extremists.” We were told that Biden is a nice cuddly grandpa but he calls a young reporter a “stupid son of a b***h,” uses Veterans Day, which should be an apolitical tribute to veterans, to launch “disgusting” political attacks on Trump, yells at his staff for his dreadful poll numbers when these are the natural result of his absurd policies, and threatens to take Trump behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.
Biden engages in disturbing behavior towards children and little girls, even touching or sniffing them.
Biden ignores SCOTUS rulings, e.g., that forgiving student debt without congressional consent is unconstitutional, but repeatedly tries to do so anyway to buy votes of young people with taxpayer dollars.
Biden regularly speaks gibberish and needs to be led around like a baby, etc.
For these and for many other reasons, Biden will need an outrageous Orwellian strategy for his 2024 campaign.
Despite the fact that another 15,000-person caravan is heading for the southern border, Biden just departed for St. Croix Virgin Islands for some rest and relaxation.
The comical storyline Democrats have come up with is that Trump is Hitler, or, more precisely, that Trump is Hitler and a fascist authoritarian who is going to destroy our democracy, about which, allegedly, they care so much [laugh track here], even as they try, “banana republic”-style, to imprison Biden’s main political opponent (Donald Trump). One can be certain that the decibel level of Democrats' shouting will be directly proportional, not to Trump’s alleged sins but to the magnitude of the Biden’s disaster.
Biden 2024 campaign is, therefore, going to be based on a “hate Trump” message grounded largely on their comical January 6 insurrection myth, comical because the FBI said there was “scant evidence” the Capitol attack was an organized effort to overturn the 2020 election, which did not stop the Democrat’s media poodles from describing it as an “insurrection” for years.
Unfortunately, getting people to hate Trump does nothing to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. Unfortunately, the Democrats, once the party of the working man and the poor, has now become the party of rich elitists who despise ordinary Americans in favor of “the relentless pursuit of power and control.”
One would not think a campaign based on hate for one man can possibly succeed, but the Democrats know their stenographers in what passes for our “news media,” helped by banana republic “lawfare” in the courts, will push their destructive anti-American message. Given Biden’s disastrous record, what choice do they have?
Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License
MOST CORRUPT VII: Joe Biden - Part I - Forgotten History
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rejpzjsVb_0&t=6s
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