Chinese and American flags flying together.
So, it’s been a long time since the last recession and indicators are turning negative. While this is never a science, odds are good for a recession in 2020 or early 2021 in the United States.
This is not due to the China/US trade war, but that conflict will make things worse. There is an argument for what Trump is doing. However, even if this has overall good effects for the US, in the long run there are significant dislocation costs when moving production back to the US and there are always going to be losers, because the US does sell a lot to China even if it has a trade deficit, and those people will lose markets. (Hello, soybean farmers!)
Meanwhile the Chinese are ratcheting up their rhetoric. Multiple newspapers have suggested embargoing rare-earths to the United States and this seems like a near certainty if there isn’t a deal soon.
Rare earths exist other places than China, but China has been able to mine them more cheaply than anywhere else, so no one has bothered to create significant production, as it isn’t profitable. China produces 80 percent of rare earths. So, if there is an embargo, other sources can be developed, but that will take time: again, dislocation costs.
The last time a rare-earth embargo happened, I noted that it was insane to have only one country producing all rare-earths and that sensible policy would subsidize production somewhere else just to avoid this scenario. But modern trade rules make subsidizing production of most items (except agriculture and defense) essentially illegal, so we have to wait for a crisis to do the sensible thing.
“We advise the U.S. side not to underestimate the Chinese side’s ability to safeguard its development rights and interests. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!”
…The expression “Don’t say we didn’t warn you!” is generally only used by official Chinese media to warn rivals over major areas of disagreement, for example during a border dispute with India in 2017 and in 1978 before China invaded Vietnam.
I’m going to discuss the oncoming new trade-era more in the future. For now, note that this isn’t just about Trump. Moves in this direction had already started under Obama (the Trans-Pacific Partnership was meant to isolate China).
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)
What is different about Trump is that he prefers unilateral negotiations to multilateral (WTO) or plurilateral (a few countries).
This is not stupid. Out of anyone in a singular deal, the US will always be the stronger partner. It prevents other nations from ganging up on the giant, and trying to use numbers to make up for their weakness.
The US can almost always inflict more damage on any one other nation than that nation can on the US.
Again, not stupid; entirely rational and good negotiating tactics.The larger issue is that the US is, itself, dismantling a trade order created, largely, by the US. That trade order had significant disadvantages for the US working and middle classes, but it also was to their advantage geopolitically. The US chose who could industrialize or re-industrialize (its allies – Taiwan, Japan, Germany, South Korea), and so on.
This worked well for the US (not so much most other people) until the Americans got stupid and greedy under neoliberalism. Then, the US corporate class, looking at China, lost their heads: Especially as China went out of its way to make sure that various Americans made a lot of money helping China industrialize.
The difference, of course, is that China is the world’s natural leading power. Has been for most of the last two thousand years. China would be an actual competitor with the US, if it was allowed to get back onto its feet.
And it was.
As a Canadian, I have a dog in this fight. Canada is an American subject state, and we’ll be on the US’s side, because we won’t have a choice. Nor am I particularly a fan of how China is run.
But this is the cycle of great powers. There is always a new challenger, and the old Hegemon always resists (and is virtually always in a late Imperial stage of incompetence and corruption).
When giants clash, ants (you and me) are advised to beware.
Make money now, before the recession, if you can. If your income or wealth is tied to trade, try and mitigate your exposure.
Meanwhile, we may as well enjoy the show.
bruce wilder
the US is, itself, dismantling a trade order created, largely, by the US. That trade order had significant disadvantages for the US working and middle classes, but it also was to America’s advantage geopolitically.
The U.S. had accumulated enormous advantages in wealth and the advanced state of its economic development by the end of WWII and it leveraged those advantages, that surplus if you like, in order to act as a benign hegemon — benign at least to its allies. An Order requires some party to absorb the losses associated with maintaining that order. The American surplus or edge has been eroding steadily as other countries have risen, catching up. In the past, major regime shifts have been instituted by the American elite to allow the U.S. to remain at the center of and in control of that geopolitical order, but those shifts have also contributed to changes in the nature of the order. Neoliberalism, with its Washington Consensus, was an ideological rationalization of the order as it has evolved since 1975 or so. Neoliberalism has been running out of steam because the U.S. can no longer afford the costs of its role as hegemon now that China is the dominant manufacturing power. China is no longer saving and investing the huge proportion of its national income that allowed China to essentially bribe American financial elites with profits from shifting production to China from the U.S.
The socio-economic class that administers the neoliberal order of financialized multinational business and trade, not to mention the perpetual war machine, are unhappy to see that order pass.
Trump’s Trade War will be blamed for the disruption attending the coming collapse of the financial superstructure of this order. Because it can be blamed and because it is not in the interest of the class of people who have been running and rationalizing this system to face squarely the necessity of finding some new basis for an order appropriate to a multipolar world.
The U.S. could well benefit in this collapse, if the American population could be freed from bearing the costs of maintaining various elements of the hegemonic order. But, that is unlikely because of the lack of economic insight in the shadow of collapsing neoliberal ideology.
StewartM
There is an argument for what Trump is doing, but even if it has overall good effects for America in the long run there are significant dislocation costs when moving production back to the US and there are always going to be losers, because the US does sell a lot to China even if it has a trade deficit, and those people will lose markets (hello soybean farmers).
I concur with this, which is why ideally it would have been wiser to pull off this exit by degrees; say, by starting out with a 5 % tariff and ramping it up at a fixed rate every year to the target instead of threatening a 25 % or all-at-once whamo! That way, businesses will have time to start re-planting manufacturing in the US.
Hmm, although everyone sheds tears for the
agribusiness industry giants“the farmers”, I am not sure that having the oil-intensive US agribusiness industry drive out more sustainable competitors overseas is a good thing. We need to be practicing more sustainable agriculture ourselves, and subsidizing over-production of that despite the screeches of the libertarian crowd (because, as one more saner libertarian admitted to me years ago, ‘food isn’t Rolex watches’).ponderer
When I asked my Chinese friend what they thought about this “new” trade rift they responded “The Chinese have hated Americans for 40 years.” It’s really just a matter of pride. Their pride often called “face” is just as stupid as American pride and based on the same ignorance you might find at a NASCAR race. Like Americans, the Chinese are inundated with propaganda, but theirs is much more tightly controlled. When I visited China in the early 2000’s our tour guide pointed out the nondescript white vans constantly trolling around Tienanmen Square. Any protesters are quickly wrapped up and taken elsewhere so the tourists aren’t offended. It’s hard to know on both sides what the truth is. Yes, they have probably harvested organs from political prisoners. Is it a few thousand, or hundreds of thousands that has been suggested? Only the Chinese Party and CIA knows for sure. My friend showed me a you tube video in Chinese that claimed that Trump cried so hard in the White House when he heard that soybean prices where going to drop that he almost passed out from the effort. It’s alarming that another countries citizens might even be more myopic, ignorant, and bellicose than Americans are. We may find that to be the case though.
What should concern Westerners most though are the effects of the one child policy that has generated a surplus of millions of males that will only burden the government at some point. These are angry young men who have been given a list of villains for their woes i.e. us. I’m not sure how China will deal with them but we know what Europe did with their second son’s during the crusades. Almost makes one thankful for nuclear weapons.
Manufacturing wise, we can hope, but wage suppression is a central component of our inequality and I don’t see the Elites here giving that up easily. A lot of that know-how has disappeared and there has been very little effort to improve things on that front. It’s much easier to grift off financialization than actually making things. We are still about 1.2 million manufacturing jobs short of 2007.
ponderer
@StewartM
The last thing any sane person would want is Chinese food.
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2014/07/chinas-food-safety-issues-are-worse-than-you-thought/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety_incidents_in_China
The Environmental catastrophe in China is hardly kept quiet either. When all those jobs were moved overseas how do you think they saved money? It wasn’t just labor. Labor is a small fractional cost of manufacturing (maybe 10% at most). The safety and environmental controls is a large cost. There are tons of video’s of Chinese operators being sucked into and torn apart by machines without any of the basic safety controls that would be required in the West. That’s not to say we are great, just that we have some basic standards that OSHA has to be bribed to ignore.
The 5% plan wouldn’t work. It would get overturned in a new administration. Even the 25% doesn’t work. Notice we are 1 million jobs short compared to 2007 in manufacturing. It will take more than tariffs. An investment in infrastructure that Congress will never pass would be a good start.
S Brennan
Largest problem with “rare” earth mining in the US is the “disposal” of Thorium byproduct*.
Yep, that’s right, Thorium. And because Nixon** killed the successful Liquid Thorium Reactor Program in favor of the Fast Breeder Program [which failed miserably] we must buy “rare earths” from foreign sources…and that’s also why we must burn coal. Oddly enough, the burning of coal actually releases Thorium alongside Mercury into the atmosphere and is the leading cause of Ocean Acidification but hell, as long as those coal “investments” are preserved, we can run the country off a cliff.
Just the “toxic” Thorium byproduct of rare earth mining is enough to fuel all the reactors required for 100% the USA’s electrical needs.
“Thorium, typically occurs in monazite, a mineral that contains 15 different rare earth elements. Companies that mine monazite for rare earths end up with thorium as a byproduct. At the moment this is a burden – there’s little they can do with the thorium, yet regulators force them to spend money to keep it safely tucked away because it’s radioactive, albeit low level radiation.”
Needless to say, the coal & oil industry, which likes things just as they are and…has traditionally funneled money to “ecology groups” to protest nuclear power plants has lobbied hard against funds for the development of LFTRs.
*https://e360.yale.edu/features/boom_in_mining_rare_earths_poses_mounting_toxic_risks
**Nixon, on tape, exclaimed to not understand
different clue
@ponderer,
I find it interesting to learn that ” the Chinese have hated Americans for fourty years”. Could it be that they have been selling us lead paint toys, chem-filthy “organic” food, dirty polluted honey, fentanyl, carfentanyl, various cheap fallapart crap, sheetrock with off-gassable sulfur in it which destroyed all air conditioners in the humid-zone houses it was installed in, etc. etc. deliberately on purpose with malice aforethought?
You have greatly strengthened the case for an eventual severance of ties between America and China. There should be ZERO trade of ANY KIND between the two countries.
Temporarily Sane
All the MSM “Trump’s tariffs are baad” articles never say what they would replace his trade policy with, so the implication is the policy was fine before Trump blundered in and messed it up. But was it? Maybe from the POV of the multinational corporations and Wall Street financial institutions making money hand over fist, but someone living in a rust belt town with few prospects for making a living might see it differently.
What the “omg Trump!” brigade don’t understand is that you can’t write off a chunk of the population as surplus deplorables and hope they’ll just go away and die quietly without bothering anyone.
That the ruling class, elites or whatever you want to call them still don’t get that running a country and treating the people that live in it as an annoying afterthought to be appeased with condescending platitudes and smoke and mirrors policy that offers them nothing is not a sustainable situation shows how out to lunch these venal fools are.
Temporarily Sane
On another note, watch for China be promoted to public enemy #1 and blamed for every ill under the sun. It’s already begun, as one can see on this very page. Steve Bannon, Trump’s original ideological adviser, came up with the courting Russia idea to prevent it from aligning with China, so while the Democrats are demonizing Russia, the other side is doing the same to China. But omg China! may become a bipartisan thing since a rising China is what the declining United States once was but can never be again.
Like all empires in their moribund phase, the US is busy panicking about hordes of conniving cartoon villain foreigners plotting to destroy it. That never works out well.
different clue
@Temporarily Sane,
I certainly wouldn’t want to promote China to public enemy #1 . . . . when everyone knows that America’s own Upper Class and Overclass is America’s public enemy #1. On the other hand, I see no need to stoop over forward in order to avoid looking like I am bending over backward . . . or something . . . on pretending that real problems with certain made-in-China items are not really real problems at all.
If you, on the other hand, wish to believe that Chinese “dirty honey laundering” and poison pet food and so-called “organic” food with pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics in it is not a real thing, and if you wish to support Chinese products against what you consider to be unfair baseless charges, then there is a very simple way for you to show your support for Chinese goods and services.
Look for “made in Cbina” on every food item before you buy it, and if it isn’t “made in China”, don’t buy it and eat it. That’s how you can show your support for “made in China”. Make sure everything you buy is from China and don’t buy a single thing from “not China”. Show your support. Maybe start using Chinese fentanyl and carfentanyl while you are at it. And if your doctor prescribes you any drugs, don’t buy them unless you can be sure they were made in China.
bruce wilder
presumably the one-child policy produced few second sons — the analogy seems far-fetched.
China, despite the success of the One-child policy in curbing population growth, remains an immensely over-populated country.
China’s median age is in the neighborhood of 37-38, basically the same as the U.S. — so not a particularly “young” country.
But, the huge size of China’s population implies the emergence of a unified high-wage economy may not be possible. China has arrived at the end of its go-go years able to dominate the global economy, but paradoxically not able to provide high-productivity, high-wage employment for a significant part of the population. Manufacturing employment is bound to shrink even as manufacturing output continues to increase. 40% of the population is still living in rural areas.
China’s abrupt transition from a very, very high investment economy toward greater domestic consumption is in some ways a good problem to have, but it remains a crisis-prone situation, as a lot of financial claims really ought to be wiped out as “bad” loans or investments, but that would entail lots of bankruptcies and the loss of private savings.
For the U.S., which has financed a lot of its upward redistribution of income by means of systematic disinvestment, with low rates of private capital investment in business as well as low rates of investment in infrastructure and education, its “transition” (if there is to be such a change) to higher rates of investment and lower rates of “return” would seem to require a political revolution to accomplish.
Anonymous
I respect your opinion, your insightful and right when it comes to a lot of things.
You\’re wrong on China.
Why?
They steal everything, no innovation. In no way sustainable.
China\’s a leading power, bullshit.
Never was, never will be.
someofparts
Actually the idea of being nice to Russia so they won’t get too close to China came from Henry Kissinger when he was advising Nixon.
We won’t do that though, because the Democrats need the boogeyman of Russia to smear the left wing of their own party.
ponderer
@Bruce
It wasn’t an analogy about birth order, it was about a “surplus” population that could get into trouble. Yes, one child was effective, but if you know any Chinese then you know the importance sons have in their culture. Sons, specifically the first sons inherit everything and they also care for the parents. Daughters are married off. There are plenty of sources you can read to understand why that ended up in there being a significantly higher population of males who couldn’t get married and have sons of their own. The Chinese, that can afford it, are importing women from other countries so that they can have families. It places a lot of stress on the young men, the ones who can’t afford a family the most of course. There is a lot of emphasis placed on making money, the food and corruption problems are all about that.
I don’t think they are that different from Amercian’s in most respects. The transition from rural to urban has a similar impact on their morals, stress levels and overall well being. The reasons we should be concerned about them is that they are so much like us.
StewartM
@ponderer
The 5% plan wouldn’t work. It would get overturned in a new administration. Even the 25% doesn’t work. Notice we are 1 million jobs short compared to 2007 in manufacturing. It will take more than tariffs. An investment in infrastructure that Congress will never pass would be a good start.
I agree in that none of these things do the trick in isolation (you also need to ramp up taxes on the rich and re-regulate markets and redo the capital gains tax to punish everything but long-term profits, the shorter-term the profit-taking the more punished it should be, plus more). But a 25 % tariff all-at-once that spikes consumer prices and coincides with a recession (whether it’s an actual causal agent to the recession is irrelevant) will make it even easier to repeal by a future administration, plus give the neoliberals an argument against any future tariff hikes as the they will blame the tariffs. The US wasn’t de-industrialized in a year and won’t be re-industrialized in a year.
Hmm, the Chinese people I know (quite a few, and I count a number of close friends among them, and with some we discuss Chinese politics) aren’t like that at all. I detect a mixture of envy and disdain. A US or European diploma, for instance is ‘the golden ticket’ to a good job in either overseas or back in China. However many do seem to take pride in China’s ascension and they also see us as a bunch of irresponsible spendthrifts and hopelessly incapable of strategic thinking (I agree on the latter). One of my friends in particular was quick to point out to me any star Chinese athlete or any Chinese achievement. But I don’t detect any hatred of us.
I was talking with one (the same guy who took pride in Chinese accomplishments) about retirement planning, and I mentioned how much I had saved away in my retirement savings (more than most; but not spectacularly large–like, I can’t afford to retire now by a long shot and won’t be until after 65 if things go well; when I hired in my company years ago with my first ‘good job’ having lived for years hand-to-mouth I continued to drive old junkers and live in cheap apartments, and started saving as much as I could). His reply was “wow, StewartM, if all Americans were like you the US would have no debt”–as if he thought the US’s public debt was the result of all Americans being spendthrifts, maxing out their credit cards and such, whereas I told him “no, it’s because we don’t tax rich people anymore”. I also added that Americans used to save more when their real median incomes were higher, and also deregulation added to their burden (TV used to be *free* once you bought the set at the cost of sitting through commercials; now you have to fork over $$$ and *STILL* have to endure the commercials–what’s with that?)
I should also add that I’m one of the rarer Americans with some insights about and appreciation of Chinese history, politics, and culture, so maybe I’m regarded differently. I have been invited to Lunar New Year’s celebrations at times, at a local restaurant some of the staff will come to my table and sit with me (you learn a bit about Chinese family drama that way!) and such. However, many of them will also be highly critical of things Chinese and of China’s leadership too–one friend told me “It’s good you know and appreciate Chinese culture as you do, but there are a a lot of very bad people in China” and go on about China’s problems (that can include dishonest businessmen, and, Chinese food!).
The last thing any sane person would want is Chinese food.
I wasn’t talking specifically about China; even some of the Chinese people I know buy rice or rice noodles from Thailand or elsewhere. But it is true that our current agriculture is unsustainable in many ways–from its oil usage to its aquifer drainage to its wastage of our precious antibiotics and more–and it is not good for anyone, long term, that we put more sustainable agriculture out of business to replace it our horrendous model.
different clue
@anonymous,
It is true that the Communist conquest and occupation of China saw the significant destruction of culture and knowledge throughout China from Mao to the present day. ( The Great Leap Famine is a case in point. The Great Cultural Devolution is another.) One hopes some of that legacy culture/knowledge is still preserved in some places, in case a future post-Maoist China ever emerges from the psycho-radioactive social slag heaps of today. It may be that as long as China remains under Communist occupation, it “never will be” in the long run.
But “never was?” Up till a few centuries ago, China was very groundbreaking in technosystem after technosystem after technosystem. Someone named Needham wrote a set of books about that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_China
KT Chong
Here is something being discussed by the Chinese netizen online, and people in America have not even thought of it. China has an effective short-term weapon in this trade war, possibly even more effective than restricting rare earths or dumping US treasuries: GENERIC DRUGS.
Almost all of generic drugs in the US are manufactured in China. Americans are a heavily medicated and drug-dependent people. If China cuts off cheap generic drug supplies to the US, then the drug prices in the US will explode. Many Americans will be priced out of the drugs that they need to stay alive, off pains, and/or sane. Controlling the exports of generic drugs will be a most effective – and a most painful – retaliatory weapon for China to inflict on the US population.
Of course the US will be able to switch suppliers over time, (just like they will be able to change suppliers for rare earths or any Chinese imports over time,) but not before a lot of Americans suffer, go bankrupt, and even die from the lack of access to cheap drugs. Many Chinese see this trade war as a war of attrition, of who can outlast the other one. Many Americans who are sick, in pains, and dying cannot wait out or try to outlast this trade war. If China is willing to resort to using this weapon, it will cause tremendous pains and suffering for Americans – and put tremendous pressures on the Trump administration.
That may seem like a cruel and ruthless weapon to fight the trade war, but if China is willing to pull out all the stops to fight this trade war, that is what China can do. And, based on what I’ve reading in the Chinese social media, Chinese online are calling for their government to restrict or raise prices of generic drug exports as a weapon in the trade war.
KT Chong
Actually, Trump can do one thing to counter if China actually restrict and levy taxes on generic drug exports: Trump can issue an executive order to force drug companies to lower the prices of branded drugs until the US can divert supplies of generic drugs. So, it\’s not entirely counter-proof.
different clue
@KT Chong,
If China tariffed or embargoed its generic drugs going to America, America could switch some of its bussiness to India, which also has generic drug makers. Does India have a big enough and talented enough generic drugmaking infrastructure to begin making more kinds of generic drugs . . . to replace the tariffed or embargoed generic drugs from China which India is not yet making at the time of onset of the tariffs or embargoes? If events unfold that way, we will find out.
In the meantime, and right straight along, would America be a coherent-enough society to be able to share the pain widely enough throughout American society that it would become inconvenience for everybody and death or disability for nobody? If not, would America be re-cohere-izable to be able to do that? If the current two Mainstream Parties and their social class patrons remain in power, the answer is “no”. If the “New Deal Wannacrats” could conquer the Catfood Clintocrat Party and purge, burn and exterminate all the millions and millions of Catfood Clintonites all the way out of the Party, then a disinfected and declintaminated New Dealocrat Party would be a useful weapon to try conquering American power structures with. If such a declintaminated “New Dealocrat Party” could conquer the American power structures and every level of government, then it could lead its supporters in imPOSing re-coherence upon an unwilling Upper Class and its unwilling Republican and Catfood Clintonite supporters.
But that won’t happen on its inevitable own. History has no direction and no laws. History is just a bunch of stuff that happened. That is why so many of us “New Deal Wannacrats” out here have decided that the Catfood Democrat Party has to be exterminated from existence and wiped off the face of the earth if we are to have any hope of survival in the coming difficult circumstances. And the only way to exterminate the Catfood Democrats is to defeat and destroy every Catfood Candidate at every level, starting with the Presidential Election in 2020. If any Clintonites are reading this, all I can say is “cry little Clintonite”.
In the longer run, such a war of economic attrition would present the same sort of opportunity to America that the current anti-Russianitic sanctions against Russia have in fact presented to Russia. The anti-Russianitic sanctions are in fact a form of protectionism imposed from without. And Russia is taking advantage of this “protectionism-by-sanctions” to diversify its own economy and increase its thing-making, thing-growing and thing-doing potential.
Such a war of economic attrition would be an opportunity for a New Dealocrat Party in power to redevelope America’s own economy behind China’s “imposed-from-the-outside” Great Wall of Tariffs. But the only way the New Dealocrats could do such a thing is if all the millions of Free Trade Conspirators and Free Trade Conspiracy supporters could be driven out of power and influence and all their evil Free Trade Laws and Agreements abrogated and rejected. If the only way to do that would be to round up several million Free Trade Conspirators and supporters and mass-machine-gun them and bury the bodies in mass pits and trenches, then I suspect “re-protectionization” will never happen, no matter how high a Great Wall of Tariffs China were to surround America with.
different clue
@Ian Welsh,
If it makes you feel any better, Canada is able to impose its Imperial Colonial oil pipelines against America. Enbridge, Keystone XL, etc. So there is an area where our evil Canadian pipeline overlords are able to impose misery and suffering on large parts of America. As in this example . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalamazoo_River_oil_spill
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0geKYxMqvFc_zgAXZdXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTEyY3VucDBuBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDQjY4MjFfMQRzZWMDc2M-?p=enbridge+kalamazoo+oil+spill&fr=sfp
And of course Canada is still able to impose its global heat-death Tar Sands upon the whole world.
Surely that is a measure of power in which the Canadian patriot may take some measure of comfort.
StewartM
Oh, to further how our wonderful ‘freedom-loving’ capitalists, who promote an economic system so conducive to expanding freedom and liberty (hi Steven Pinker!), have helped China:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/us-money-funding-facial-recognition-sensetime-megvii?utm_source=pocket-newtab
KT Chong
Something that just came to my attention:
In 2003 Huawei tried to sell itself – the whole company – to Motorola for US$7.5 billion. Google it. The deal fell through because $7.5 billion seemed like a ridiculous price for a company that no one outside China knew about.
Just think about that for a moment, and you would realize that the US accusation against Huawei for being an affiliate/tool of the Chinese government does not make sense. The whole premise of the US accusation was based on Huawei’s founder-CEO being a former member of the Chinese Communist Party, and the CCP somehow seeded Huawei to be a long-term intelligence asset. If so, why would the “Chinese government” tried to sell its supposed “asset” to Motorola – and let a US company access all Huawei’s internal secrets?
alex in san jose AKA digital Detroit
Some insights may be gained by watching the feet-on-the-street videos by Serpentza and laowhy86 on YouTube. I swear those things are like potato chips …
Also, watch an excellent video called The Coming War With China. It shows, beautiful film BTW, how the US has been acting like Eric Cartman all over Asia and continues to do so.
We (US) are not liked because we are the opposite of likeable.
SSSS NNN
\”Oncoming Recession\”….Er…No…there is nothing \”oncoming\”
about it. We wage slaves/serfs on main street and the rapidly
disappearing middle class in the USA have been in a recession
verging on depression increasingly since 2008.. I speak as one
who is EXPERIENCING IT…right now… I am a skilled IT
person who would have little problem in growing economy
but that is NOT whats happening… The tariffs will put yet
more pressure on a threadbare and largely broke lower class
existence… If you read this article to the temp agency lady
I discussed finding ANY work in my are with this week
she would howl with laughter…. Some real stats below…
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts