Trump Bulls*** Empowers China
And dooms Taiwan. The invasion will happen this year.
Donald Trump does have a clear goal in mind while he wrecks the world’s economy. He wants to return to places like South Carolina, which, in the 1970s, was the textile capital of the world, “good jobs.” The state lost many of its “good” manufacturing jobs when cheaper sources of labor were found throughout Asia. “Sleep Joe’s” CHIPS deal was implemented to bring high-tech, high-paying jobs back to the U.S. Those jobs don’t scratch the nostalgia itch sufficiently enough for Trump. He wants to bring back t-shirt manufacturing.
Sure, it angers me, too, when I buy a T-shirt from Walmart and on the label I see “Made in China (Lesotho, Malaysia, etc.).” It really burns me up because I am thinking, “What, are we so subpar that we can’t make our own T-shirts anymore?” Remember when everything seemed to be “Made in the U.S.A.?” Now, the jobs around which dreams come true are all offshored. It would be so nice to get back all the low-skilled, low-paying labor that was lost over the past 50 years.
At least 77 million Americans are seeking such jobs. They, too, long for the days when David Geddes’ “Run, Joey, Run” was topping the charts and dishes were given away for each tank fill-up at the gas station. Those nostalgia-sick, Foxified people are in something similar to a union, only it’s called a cult and goes by the name MAGA.
When you get right down to it, though, those folks are sex-a-holics. They love to get f***** by the rich. They have an unhealthy affinity for sado masochism because they never feel so fulfilled as when they are degrading themselves to keep their overseers and the orange master tickled. Almost resembling self-flagellation, there is no pain too harsh, no loss too great, and no menial task too menial that the cultist won’t bear for their dear leader. So, the idea of making T-shirts in a stiflingly hot factory for $7.45 an hour with no overtime and no benefits would be a pleasure for most of them. As one MAGA woman said today, “tariffs and higher prices are acceptable because they will liberate all of us from income tax.”
Let’s say it together: “WTF?!”
Let me pump the brakes on this angry diatribe.
Now let me blow your mind a bit by telling you about why China will one day be our master and many Americans will be living like most of the Chinese did just 40 years ago: Bullet trains.
A bullet train can travel up to 220 mph. China runs 3,600 such trains daily. The United States’ top train runs on the Eastern Seaboard and goes at a maximum speed of 155 mph, but it often can’t maintain that speed because the tracks are so poor. 155 mph does not qualify it to be called a “bullet train.” The United States has zero bullet trains in use. China is currently testing a train that floats on a magnetic field. The train can travel up to 623 mph. It can cut a trip down from 3 1/2 hours to 37 minutes.
I have been to China multiple times for work. As much as I would never want to live there because of the air pollution and mass of bodies that seem to be everywhere, much of the country is new and geared toward the future. Everything the government does is done to make sure the Chinese people are working efficiently, and whatever they do is planned so that one day it will be the most efficient and dominant. Even the lack of creativity from which the country used to suffer is a hurdle the government is working on overcoming.
I will never say that China is a better society to live in simply because, as someone born in the West, my mentality is more geared to personal fulfillment. By being personally fulfilled, we in the West spread that to the society around us. In Asia and, to some extent, in Russia, there is a belief that the individual is nothing but a cog in the great machine, and his purpose in life is to make the state and its leader shine. In those societies, people expect to be taken care of by the government and the leader, and in return, they forgo pride and ego.
Nonetheless, what China has harnessed through the liberal use of the stick and nowadays lots of carrots is one of the greatest transitions of a nation in human history. Each Chinese citizen marches foward working their asses off, studying like fiends always to ensure that China will in some way, shape or form benefit from their hardwork. China began to consistently and openly use our free-trading system against us after it joined the World Trade Organization in 2000. It quickly rose to become the largest economy in the world, and China’s success was, in many ways, the West’s — especially the United States — loss.
But it didn’t have to be that way. As U.S. politicians made it beneficial for companies to offshore jobs to Asia, the loss of employment was concealed by the ridiculously low prices in stores like Walmart, Target, K-Mart, etc. Americans shifted not into more innovative manufacturing like Bill Clinton and Al Gore envisioned, but into an economy oriented toward service. Thanks to the Clinton administration, though, the Internet revolution took off, creating countless jobs. Nonetheless, much of the new job creation over the past 30 years has been in Big Food, Big Retail, and in other industries that don’t require infrastructure upgrades. Health care is now the leading industry in job growth in the U.S. — and this is in a country where health care so tragically underserves the populace.
While China and much of Asia were making the low-skilled stuff like the coffee cups with logos on them, hats, T-shirts, etc., the U.S. government should have been implementing industrial policies that favored smart, sustainable jobs. The problem is, though, each time Republicans took over the government, they would stop all talk about climate change to take care of their overlords, Big Oil and Big Coal (Big Dirty Energy). They would gut programs that sought to bring infrastructure upgrades to the nation’s poorest communities. It was the Democrats who paved the high-speed internet highway into the red communities that now use that internet to join cults against our democracy — oh, the irony.
The United States had the manufacturing base to become the world’s leader in batteries, solar panels, and pretty much everything relating to alternative energy, but because Republicans were forbidden by their masters to support it, the U.S. would say stupid shit like, “Climate change is not man-made so let’s forget it about it and drill.”
Everything in the U.S. revolved around the low prices on the shit we don’t need. It revolved around ridiculously low gas prices, which spoiled Americans. The thing is, though, because the Republicans refused to do anything to create new industries and just wanted to cut taxes, drill more, and attack gays, lesbians, and minorities, they had to preserve the low prices because real wages were dropping like rocks from the sky. If prices started to go up, there would be widespread dissatisfaction, and the Party in power would suffer at the ballot box.
While we were wallowing like little piggies in our cheap shit at Walmart, shit that in real terms is not that cheap but actually expensive when you factor in all of the costs like crime, drugs, health care costs, hours works, child-care costs, etc., the Chinese were building the future. While we were linking education to right-wing causes and rewriting American history to downplay the effects of slavery and racism in the U.S., China’s army of doctoral students and engineers were returning home to manifest the future.
They have succeeded, and despite some of their economic problems, you don’t see the kind of inane, self-destructive cult-like behavior of the American right. Donald Trump’s gutting of everything that once made the United States a relatively prosperous, modern, and powerful nation is weakening us in ways that only thinking Americans can appreciate. Trump is a fascist leader, and the Republican Party is fascist. Trump has turned the United States into an oligarchy, and the billionaires are openly flaunting their access to power.
Because of Russia’s weak society and cult-like following of Putin, Russians are incapable of taking responsibility for anything. This part of their DNA has been nurtured since the days of the czars and was strengthened under communism. The average Russian will always opt to lie and avoid admitting a mistake rather than accept the potential consequences of the committed error. This is weak spot dooms Russia still, and because of Putin’s fascist repression during the war in Ukraine, it further guarantees the proliferation of this weak spot for many generations.
We are in a battle for our country and against an enemy never before seen. The Founding Fathers foresaw a lot of pitfalls when they crafted the documents that would set our nation a sail, but they couldn’t imagine that one branch of government would completely and totally give up its right to governance. Donald Trump is free to do as he wants because Republicans refuse to check his criminal, anti-Constitutional behavior. As we struggle to hold onto the fraying strands of our freedom to express ourselves against this fascist takeover, China is watching and readying itself.
As Trump pushes the world closer to economic ruin in the way he did with Atlantic City, New Jersey, and all of his businesses, an economically punished China is readying itself. While the world is distracted with trying to figure out how to deal with the chaos of Trump 2.0 and the implosion of the United States of America, China is setting a date for its seizure of Taiwan.
And when it happens, there won’t be a damn thing we or anyone else can do about it. The time-worn question of “Who lost China?” will quickly become “Trump lost Taiwan,” and his gold-pin-wearing cultists won’t care a bit. They, along with the entire right-wing propaganda machine, will announce gleefully: This was always Trump’s plan.