Guest Post by Ann Coulter
When the after-action report on the current pandemic is being prepared, I’m going to ask the guy with the notepad to write down: “China” and “globalists.”
Those words won’t be on Trump’s list. He can’t stop gushing about how much he respects China and the American companies that have outsourced jobs there. Even as China withholds vital medical supplies, he refuses to end our suicidal dependence on them.
His one slight annoyance with China is that it lied about the Wuhan virus, allowing the disease to explode across the globe.
I have a longer list of complaints, beginning with the fact that they eat bats. The resulting pandemic now raging through our country would be bad enough, but our new crisis is a shortage of medical equipment.
Too bad we shipped all our manufacturing to China! Not to worry, surely China wouldn’t disrupt the sacred “global supply chain.”
Oops. China is stockpiling masks and ventilators.
And there’s more good news! China makes more than 90% of our antibiotics, vitamin C, ibuprofen and hydrocortisone, 70% of acetaminophen, and 40% to 45% of heparin, according to The New York Times. The last American penicillin plant closed more than 15 years ago.
In early March, the Chinese government ominously warned that if China stopped exporting drugs, “the United States would sink into the hell of a novel coronavirus epidemic.”
For decades, people like Trump’s trade director Peter Navarro have warned us that something like this would happen someday. But we were condescendingly told, This is capital seeking the most efficient market! And, anyway, if China screws with us, we’ll just make it ourselves.
Really? With broken-down buildings, a dispossessed workforce and no machinery? Unfashionable working-class people in the industrial Midwest were discarded long ago. They may as well have had “obsolete” stamped on their foreheads.
But I notice that you, Wall Street, made a lot of money off of globalization.
Oh, did I? I didn’t notice!
What happened to your vaunted concern for China’s human rights violations — the Uyghurs, the Falun Gong, Tibet, child labor?
You should see my place in the Hamptons!
Even before China gave us this latest viral disease — not to be confused with H1N1, Asian flu, SARS and bird flu, also from China — one of the most frequent questions about Amazon products was: “Is this made in China?”
Obviously, a lot of consumers would happily pay more to know that something is made in the USA — or at least not in China. We’d like to support our fellow Americans. We also prefer products that don’t kill the family pet, instantly fall apart or risk being embargoed during a viral pandemic.
How about that search refinement, Amazon? “Made in USA — including constituent parts” or “0% Chinese.” I’d wager these would be more popular than the hundreds of other search parameters, such as star ratings, price, manufacturer, “prime,” calories, gluten-free and so on.
Not a chance. The globalists are making a lot of money selling us crappy products, manufactured in a culturally backward, totalitarian regime with zero quality control and absolutely no interest in the well-being of our country.
Why hasn’t Trump seized on this nightmare of the New World Order to fulfill a campaign promise and bring manufacturing home?
Where are the massive tariffs on Chinese goods and the “Buy American” programs?
How about telling Ivanka, No, you are not going to make it even more expensive for companies to hire Americans with this ridiculous Paid Family Medical Leave Act! In fact, we’re going to seek the repeal of all laws that create jobs only for trial lawyers.
Even a lot of the American companies we’re so proud of for stepping up to make masks in this crisis … are making them in China. (New York Times, March 13, 2020: “A General Motors joint venture in southwestern China built 20 of its own mask-making machines and began bulk production.”)
Trump’s reaction? Flatter China so they’ll keep buying our soybeans. Maybe they’ll throw Jared some business!
Nearly a month ago, The New York Times reported that Trump was “preparing an executive order, which could be released in the coming days,” requiring the federal government to buy American-made pharmaceuticals.
It apparently went into the same file as that executive order on anchor babies. We’re still waiting.
Navarro had the executive order ready to go, but then dozens of pharmaceutical companies lobbied against it, arguing that “a diverse pharmaceutical supply chain is precisely what enables the industry to respond quickly and make adjustments in its supply chain sourcing during natural emergencies and global public health crises.”
China: If we cut you off, America, you’ll be in hell.
The Big Pharma lobbyists also noted that Trump’s (idle) threat for America to make its own drugs “could run afoul of commitments it made under the WTO’s Government Procurement Agreement.”
NO! WE CAN’T VIOLATE THE WTO’S GOVERNMENT PROCUREMENT AGREEMENT!
Trump is the president of the United States. Either he is responsible for a monstrous virus arriving on our shores and destroying our economy — or China is. I expected the media to say, “Trump!” I didn’t expect Trump to agree.
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DEFAULT (Thank God for the Federal Reserve)
Cats carry the CV. So be careful when choosing your dinner.
Does one use ketchup or mustard for cat?
Never ketchup. I don’t care how fast you are, if you are chasing a cat…you will never ketchup.
A dishonest tirade because it leaves out inconvenient issues.
Everything went to China and elsewhere because costs are too high in the US compared with other locales. The most obvious reason for this is because the Fed Gov sucks too much money out of the economy for murderous wars and social programs (free stuff) for voting constituents not inclined to work for a living.
It is the disparity between what a dollar’s worth of labor buys in the US versus what it buys elsewhere. The Fed Gov’s solution is tariff’s to artificially raise foreign prices instead of dismantling the Fed Gov entirely and lowering our cost of living.
Get rid of the Fed Gov and the costs it imposes and the US labor rate would compete with the rest of the world on a fairly even footing. Couple that with innovation and the US would once again lead the world.
MAGA by unloading the damned Fed Gov.
And Americans are schizophrenic. They want cheap. But (mob) unionize. They want quality. But outsource to China. They want. They want. They want. On the cheap. At the ready. In Gross amounts. Overnight delivery. But they want to save the planet. You can’t square that circle. (h/t hsf)
When you’re right, you’re right and you’re right.
SAO is a great addition to TBP. No one agrees with everyone all the time so he takes lots of flak.
They let China into the WTO knowing that the peasant workforce were little more than slaves. No one can compete on price with slaves. Here’s a recent article discussing what happens if you try to form a labor union in China:
https://www.labornotes.org/2018/09/effort-form-union-china-meets-ferocious-repression
This isn’t just about a free market in labor costs. It’s more akin to placing a gun in the hand of your (f*ing communist) adversary, pressing your forehead against the barrel and telling him, “Hold me up.”
A Zero Hedge article this AM said that over 700k Chinese nationals fled China to the US at the height of the Wuhan epidemic. First, does that sound like a bunch of content worker bees, “happy in their work,” to coin a phrase, competing with the lazy, drunk, drug-addicted, working-class American? Second, how many of those people were given the task of purposefully spreading the virus here?
The fact that our drugs come from China burns my ass daily. A category of med that my family member depends upon for survival was subject to multiple recalls for adulteration last year. Yet those factories are allowed to continue producing mission-critical goods for the United States, after clearing their once-a-year, pleanty-of-advance-warning site inspections. This arrangement is unacceptable. It must be changed.
I think we’re on the verge of the dollar losing its reserve status. When that happens, things will get really honest really fast.
I watched a video a few days ago where the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) has just resolved to skip using the dollar and trade in their respective currencies.
The SCO represents a significant portion of the worlds economy and is certainly not good news for the toilet paper dollar.
There won’t be any sound of trumpets at some definable instant when the dollar’s reserve currency status disappears as that status is fluid. As more and more countries stop or restrict dollar usage, dollar demand wanes and unneeded dollars will find their way back to the US which will just add to price inflation for US residents with more dollars chasing goods and service. Couple that with the Fed creating more junk dollars and hyperinflation is a guarantee in the not too distant future.
Down votes for that comment? Pfft, kudoes to SAO, he nailed it.
Guess what? China holds a bunch of our T bills, when they come due it’s time to tell them Fuck You, you created this nightmare, you don’t get paid.
That would be good, but the globalists will let them sell them and drive interest rates higher.
Ann, I would have never expected that to happen, but your article is so stupid that I couldn’t finish reading it.
A mix of strawmanning and scapegoating.
So this vapid woman curses China for putting their interests first. Fuck me silly and call me smart.
First and foremost a certain cohort of western world citizens put their interests first at the expense of their own countrymen. They lobby (a George Carlin euphemism for bribe) the people who are paid handsomely, to represent the interests of the community and voila get what they wanted. Capitalism in action.
Now those representatives, they should be the ones in the sights of people like Coulter et al. These writers are playing the man and not the ball. If the representatives were held to a higher account (physical, mental and financial) a great chunk of the shit that has fucked the western world wouldn’t have happened. The cohort would then be forced to show their hand to the public, with no one to hide behind. Their greed is exposed.
Coulter is now a never Trumper who blames Trump for all the ills of the world. Maybe Ann should do some research on why things are the way they are here in Americka….start way back and work forward in time.