Above the fold
Made in America?
On June 12, 1987, United States President Ronald Reagan delivered a speech in West Berlin. He was less than 100 yards from the Berlin Wall. Reagan called for the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to open the Berlin Wall, which had separated West and East Berlin since 1961. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Though it received relatively little media coverage at the time, it became widely known in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There is significant debate as to how much influence if any, the speech had on the wall coming down. But in 1989 down it came as did communist rule and/or occupation in several eastern European countries in addition to the then Soviet Union, now Russia.
There isn’t much debate at all about the influence Donald J. Trump has had in getting a taller and wider wall built on the southern border of the U.S. Over 125 miles are completed and by winter the guess is that nearly 500 miles will be hoisted.
Reagan wanted to unravel Soviet block countries. Trump wants to block illegal immigration. Both walls were or are steeped in controversy and divided opinions.
But the U.S. opinion should not be divided on two other walls. One is The Great Wall of China and the other is the virtual firewall of the world wide web.
As U.S. companies figuratively lept over the Great Wall to take advantage of cheap Chinese labor to make and eager Chinese consumers to, well, consume U.S. products a bad thing happened. We lost sight of right from wrong all because all we could see is the almighty dollar, and lots of them.
Forgetting for a minute of how horrifically the Chinese tyrants treat their people day in and day out, focus on the last 180 days.
China either leaked a virus out of a lab or didn’t. Investigations, in spite of the World Health Organization(WHO), are ongoing. Regardless, does anyone think that the virus didn’t start in China somehow? China is accused of asking the WHO in January to deny that human to human transmission could occur. Further, they restricted travel from the Wuhan Provence to other areas of China but not to the rest of the world as the virus spread rapidly around the globe.
They recently revised the cases and deaths in the country, increasing both totals by an even 50%. Oops, maybe a rounding error was uncovered. Some medial experts put the actual carnage at 5x to 10x their count.
Yesterday news broke that the FBI is now investigating China as it’s feared that they have continued their widespread hacking of virtual walls. Except this time it’s even worse. Now they are trying to hack into pharma company computers to steal the vaccination research being done on the very virus that they let out of the lab or the soup.
Like him or hate him(and apparently there is no in-between), Trump has been telling us over and over again that China manipulates their currency, profits unfairly on trade deals, and conducts cyber-attack after attack.
Perhaps it’s time we listen closely, learn fast, and plan accordingly.
We’re in far too deep with a country that is doing everything that others did that we hated just 30 years ago. Somehow we chose to close our eyes.
What are we going to do about it? And, when? Soon isn’t soon enough.
“Made in America” sounds good. “Not made in China” sounds essential.