China, Syria and Walmart

Editor@TheIndependentDaily.com

Following announcement of the House of Commons vote, column following below, Obama’s office released a statement indicating that he considers unilateral military action a likely event. "The president of the United States is elected with the duty to protect the national security interests in the United States of America," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

National Security Interests is a code phrase meaning either, 1) Oil, or, 2) Israel. It has nothing to do with anything else, and certainly neither with you nor I. It begs the question,

Which is it this time, Obama? More dead children and women for Oil or for Israel?

Always out-of-sorts, Hollande, France’s Head Fromage and Grande Bâton de Berger, has sided with Obama because they, too, visualize Syrian Oil being redirected to them rather than Russia and China.

Both Russia and China clearly indicate that if the US intervenes we will have Hell to pay. How? Probably not through Nuclear attack since that is not something either country would see as a viable approach at this point in time - at least not the Russians. Who knows about the Chinese... But there is another war that may be waged with substantial impact.

How might China reply to us? In any number of ways, all of which were made possible by the many Americans too lazy to seek out American-made products, preferring instead to buy Chinese and Vietnamese products imported to Walmart, Target and the notoriously ubiquitous Dollar Outlets, including the more budget minded 99 Cent Stores, that saturate every city in America today...

...and to which you flock to buy watered-down bleach and dish soap, brooms that collapse within two sweepings, towels that fray with the first wash, shirts the buttons of which break or fall off immediately after purchase, lounging pants that you insist on wearing to other discount stores, and so on.

China holds 7.2% of our US debt. As we speak, our debt is moving upward toward 16.920 Trillion US Dollars. It is not moving downward as has been inferable from Obama’s various statements: the correct interpretation is that the spiral upward has slowed...just a little bit; we’re still gaining in debt at a rate that is record-breaking, and we will continue to do so at an especially fast rate so long as the Fed funds the banking industry, who also own much of our debt. In debt alone, China holds about 1.2 Trillion US Dollars.

In Real Estate - commercial and residential, the Chinese government owns about 80 Billion US Dollars of property under today’s valuations, perhaps more.

US companies doing business in China - manufacturing product there while basing their operations here - number into the hundreds of the most well-known American brands, including, Acer Electronics, Apple Computer, Ashley Furniture, Avon, Belkin, Black & Decker, Cooper Tire, Fossil...I mean the list is seemingly  endless, and all of these companies represent billions - trillions actually - of US Dollars invested in China in the form of property leaseholds, improvements, and machinery, as well as a staggering dependency on these off-shored operations to maintain international competitiveness, even though most of their competitors manufacture right next door to them.

What most Americans fail to realize when they walk into a Walmart or 99 Cent Store and plunk down a few dollars for a plastic bag of really non-durable goods, aside from the fact that they’re likely throwing their money away on very poor products, is that China remains a Communist country. Their version of what we call, The American Way, is called, State Run Capitalism. The Chinese have not changed their collective mind about Chairman Mao: He has not been replaced by Warren Buffet and Buffet’s Little Red Book.

Nationalization

Aside from a short period of time during the Oil Embargo in the 1970s, Nationalization hasn’t been a word heard since the fall of Batista in Cuba. From 1960 onward Castro, et al., nationalized many American companies who had hitherto enjoyed a relationship much like our US companies currently do in China today. One proclamation later and US investment in those companies evaporated. Gone forever.

It’s an easy process and one with devastating effects. Of course if the Chinese government took that path, the consequences would be grave - for us all. So, the easiest and least painful Chinese response: Crash our markets - Stock and Housing.

Would they too suffer as a result? Yes, but not to the extent we would: They are swimming in wealth and have far more consumer markets to saturate with their goods: Walmarts are all over the world, in places you’d least expect them. So they would trundle onward while we would not.

On the bright side, we can freeze Chinese assets, which isn’t much in comparison to their overall wealth; and France will be at our side, although we won’t understand anything they say because we disdain foreign languages being highly ethnocentric, and the only thing we have to sell the French are weapons. And that doesn’t work because they prefer we use them.

Great...doesn’t anyone else remember why we started calling sliced and fried potatoes, Freedom Fries?