90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, July 15, 2019

Trade War Winning! Companies Are Leaving China to Avoid the 25% Tariff

"CHEXIT"

It looks like China is losing the trade war and might consider dealing if they think they can’t wait it out.

China’s economy “expanded at the slowest rate in nearly 30 years in the 2nd quarter,” says Axios’ Courtenay Brown, and the reason behind the decline is “heightened U.S.-China trade tensions and weakening trade demand from other fragile economies.”

The Chinese government reported that its second-quarter GDP was just 6.2 percent, a .2 percentage point drop from the previous quarter and “the weakest pace of growth since the government started releasing quarterly data in 1992.”

The trade war is hurting China’s involvement with U.S. companies as well, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Companies that make Crocs shoes, Yeti beer coolers, Roomba vacuums, and GoPro cameras are producing goods in other countries to avoid U.S. tariffs [on imports] from China,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Countries like Vietnam, India, Taiwan, and Malaysia are all benefiting from China’s stumbles. The longer this U.S.-China battle drags on, the more manufacturing infrastructure becomes permanent in these other countries.

They may not be returning to the USA but they are leaving China for the long-term or forever. China’s bizarre form of capitalism isn’t all that enlightened if they think their approach will work.

Some believe the Democrats are encouraging them to wait it out but they could come up with this on their own. If they think the President will leave office in 2020, they can wait for Democrats to give them a deal that...

Chinese Admiral: Solve South China Sea Dispute By Sinking Navy Aircraft Carriers

Rear Admiral Lou Yuan, deputy head of the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, has told an audience in Shenzhen that the ongoing disputes over the ownership of the East and South China Seas could be resolved by sinking two U.S. Navy aircraft carriers.

Admiral Lou gave a wide-ranging speech on the state of Sino-U.S. relations. As reported by New Zealand Herald, the high-profile, hawkish military commentator reportedly declared the current trade spat was “definitely not simply friction over economics and trade,” but was instead a “prime strategic issue”.

His speech, delivered on Dec. 20 to the 2018 Military Industry List summit, declared that China’s new and highly capable anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles were more than capable of hitting U.S. Navy carriers, despite them being at the centre of a ‘bubble’ of defensive escorts.

“What the United States fears the most is taking casualties,” Admiral Lou declared.

He said the loss of one super carrier would cost the U.S. the lives of 5000 service men and women. Sinking two would double that toll.

“We’ll see how frightened America is.”

In his speech, he said there were ‘five cornerstones of the United States’ open to exploitation: their military, their money, their talent, their voting system — and their fear of adversaries.

Admiral Lou, who holds an academic military rank — not a service role — said China should “use its strength to attack the enemy’s shortcomings. Attack wherever the enemy is afraid of being hit. Wherever the enemy is weak …”

The U.S. Navy 10 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, USS Nimitz (CVN 68), USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69), USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70), USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71), USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72), USS George Washington (CVN 73), USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74), USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75), USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) and USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77), are the largest warships in the world, each designed for an approximately 50-year service life with just a single mid-life refueling. The next generation of aircraft carrier, the Gerald R. Ford-class (CVN 78) was ordered in September 2008 as the force structure replacement for USS Enterprise (CVN 65), which inactivated in 2012.

The typical air wing aboard a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier consists of:

Devin Nunes Has a Warning for AG Bill Barr: Without Prosecutions None “will trust the FBI or DOJ for generations”…

HPSCI ranking member Devin Nunes has a deliberate warning to U.S. Attorney Bill Barr, and the Department of Justice should take it very seriously.

In a 30 minute podcast interview last week [Listen Here] Representative Nunes rightly warns of massive political consequences if Justice Department officials don’t face jail time for their conduct during the Russia investigation. I strongly urge everyone to listen to the podcast.

[Podcast Interview Here]

Via Fox News – […] According to Nunes, the Russia investigation was an “obstruction of justice trap,” that started without evidence of collusion and ended in an “awful situation” that could only be fixed by jailing the people who “perpetuated this hoax.”

“These are all a bunch of dirty cops and I’ll tell you,” he told Fox News’ Bill Hemmer on the latest “Hemmer Time” podcast. “We’re going to go down in a spiral in this country because you will not have a Republican that will trust the FBI or the Department of Justice for generations to come.”

Nunes specifically mentioned Andrew Weissman, one of the Mueller team’s top prosecutors who briefed AP reporters in 2017, before Mueller’s team was assembled, on “something to do with the Trump-Russia investigation.”

Authorities, Nunes said, hid that fact from his committee — something he said was inappropriate given that Weissman was briefed on the Steele dossier in the summer of 2016.

At Mueller’s hearing, Nunes plans to ask him whether he knew that Weissmann had been briefed on the dossier. Weissmann’s early involvement with the chain of custody, according to legal advice Nunes received, effectively disqualified him from serving on Mueller’s team. (read more)

♦ Phase One – November 2015 through April 2016: The first phase leading into ‘Spygate’ is the period of time where opposition research of the republican candidate field was taking place. It is in this period where Fusion-GPS hired CIA Open Source researcher Nellie Ohr, wife of DOJ-NSD official Bruce Ohr, to do research.

In the background of this time period the FBI and NSA database was being exploited by unknown FBI contractors; it is highly suspected that Nellie Ohr and/or Fusion-GPS was one of those contracted agencies with access to the massive electronic and metadata files.

All of this is laid out inside a 99-page opinion from FISC Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer who also noted that none of this FISA abuse was accidental in a footnote on page 87: “deliberate decisionmaking“:

Summary: The FISA court identified and quantified tens-of-thousands of search queries of the NSA/FBI database using the FISA-702(16)(17) system. The database was repeatedly used by persons with contractor access who unlawfully searched and extracted the raw results without redacting the information and shared it with an unknown number of entities.

The outlined process certainly points toward a political spying and surveillance operation; and we are not the only one to think that’s what this system is being used for....

Omar Calls For Advertisers To Boycott Tucker Carlson After He Tells Her Immigration Story

Tlaib and Omar called out by imam for not condemning Palestinian rocket barrage on Israel

The New Hate Speech: Quote Harassment...

Poster Girl For The Hate America Leftist Narrative...

She Is A Shit Slinging Muck Dweller

A recently discovered video shows Ilhan Omar mocking Americans for their anxiety about al-Qaeda, equating US armed forces to al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.

OCASIO-CORTEZ: CRITICIZING ILHAN OMAR OVER 9/11 REMARKS ‘IS AN INCITEMENT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST PROGRESSIVE WOMEN OF COLOR’

A Woman the Dems Just Elected Has a History of Making Some Pretty Anti-Semitic Statements

HOW AND WHY HAMAS FOUNDED CAIR

Ilhan Omar's Greatest Hit...

Al-Arabiya slams Linda Sharia Sarsour as terror-tied Muslim Brotherhood extremist

Peter Thiel Slams "Treasonous" Google For Choosing China Over US Military

During a talk Sunday at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, Peter Thiel, perhaps the most visible tech entrepreneur to back President Donald Trump, earning the eternal enmity of his fellow Silicon Valley denizens (and necessitating a move to LA), had some harsh words for his one-time friends.

The billionaire investor singled out Google for agreeing to work closely with China, trying to get its search engine back into the Chinese market, while deciding to let a US defense department contract that gave the military access to its artificial intelligence tools lapse.

These actions by Google, Thiel suggested, were "seemingly treasonous," he said during the opening of his speech. Even going so far as to question whether Google parent Alphabet's AI research program had been "infiltrated" by foreign intelligence.

He asked whether Google parent Alphabet Inc.’s AI research program or senior management had been “infiltrated” by foreign intelligence agencies. "These questions need to be asked by the FBI and the CIA," Thiel said, "And I’d like them to be asked in a not excessively gentle manner."

This wouldn't be the first time suspicions of treasonous activity have dogged American tech companies. Who could forget CFUS's recent decision to force a Chinese company to sell its entire ownership in Grindr for security reeasows.

On a more positive note, Thiel praised Trump on Sunday for his efforts to win a trade deal with China, which he termed a "signature achievement" of the administration, along with the detente with North Korea.

By the standards of the event, Thiel was more mild than many of the tech bashers in attendance - unsurprisingly, Thiel doesn't support the breakup of big tech companies, given that he still sits on...

By: Jarrett Stepman
While you were enjoying your Fourth of July weekend, I was attending a national conference on socialism.

Why? Because socialism is having its moment on the left.

Since there’s often confusion as to what socialism really is, I decided to attend the Socialism 2019 conference at the Hyatt Hotel in Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend.

The conference, which had the tag line “No Borders, No Bosses, No Binaries,” contained a cross-section of the most pertinent hard-left thought in America. Among the sponsors were the Democratic Socialists of America and Jacobin, a quarterly socialist magazine.

The walls of the various conference rooms were adorned with posters of Karl Marx and various depictions of socialist thinkers and causes.

Most of the conference attendees appeared to be white, but identity politics were a major theme throughout—especially in regard to gender.

At the registration desk, attendees were given the option of attaching a “preferred pronoun” sticker on their name tags.

In addition, the multiple-occupancy men’s and women’s restrooms were relabeled as “gender neutral,” and men and women were using both. Interestingly enough, the signs above the doors were still labeled with the traditional “men’s” and “women’s” signs until they were covered over with home-made labels.

One of the paper labels read: “This bathroom has been liberated from the gender binary!”

While the panelists and attendees were certainly radical, and often expressed contempt for the Democratic Party establishment, it was nevertheless clear how seamlessly they blended traditional Marxist thought with the agenda of what’s becoming the mainstream left.

They did so by weaving their views with the identity politics that now dominate on college campuses and in the media and popular entertainment. The culture war is being used as a launching point for genuinely socialist ideas, many of which are re-emerging in the 21st century.

Here are six takeaways from the conference:

1. Serious About Socialism

A common line from those on the modern left is that they embrace “democratic socialism,” rather than the brutal, totalitarian socialism of the former Soviet Union or modern North Korea and Venezuela. Sweden is usually cited as their guide for what it means in practice, though the reality is that these best-case situations show the limits of socialism, not its success.

It’s odd, too, for those who insist that “diversity is our strength” to point to the culturally homogenous Nordic countries as ideal models anyway.

It’s clear, however, that while many socialists insist that their ideas don’t align with or condone authoritarian societies, their actual ideology—certainly that of those speaking at the conference—is in no sense distinct.

Of the panels I attended, all featured speakers who made paeans to traditional communist theories quoted Marx, and bought into the ideology that formed the basis of those regimes.

Mainstream politicians may dance around the meaning of the word “socialist,” but the intellectuals and activists who attended Socialism 2019 could have few doubts about the fact that Marxism formed the core of their beliefs.

Some sought to dodge the issue. One was David Duhalde, the former political director of Our Revolution, an activist group that supports Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and that was an offshoot of Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.

Duhalde said that Sanders is a creation of the socialist movement—having had direct ties to the Socialist Party of America in his youth—but hasn’t maintained an official connection to socialist political organizations throughout his political career.

Sanders’ position, according to Duhalde, is “anti-totalitarian” and that he favors a model based on “neither Moscow, nor the United States, at least in this formation.”

It’s a convenient way of condemning capitalist-oriented societies while avoiding connections to obviously tyrannical ones.

It was also difficult to mistake the sea of red shirts and posters of Marx that adorned the walls at the conference—or the occasional use of the word “comrades”—as anything other than an embrace of genuine socialism, but with a uniquely modern twist.

2. Gender and Identity Politics Are Ascendant

Transgenderism, gender nonconformity, and abolishing traditional family structures were huge issues at Socialism 2019.

One panel, “Social Reproduction Theory and Gender Liberation,” addressed how the traditional family structure reinforced capitalism and contended that the answer was to simply abolish families.

Corrie Westing, a self-described “queer socialist feminist activist based in Chicago working as a home-birth midwife,” argued that traditional family structures propped up oppression and that the modern transgender movement plays a critical part in achieving true “reproductive justice.”

Society is in a moment of “tremendous political crisis,” one that “really demands a Marxism that’s up to the par of explaining why our socialist project is leading to ending oppression,” she said, “and we need a Marxism that can win generations of folks that can be radicalized by this moment.”

That has broad implications for feminism, according to Westing, who said that it’s important to fight for transgender rights as essential to the whole feminist project—seemingly in a direct shot at transgender-exclusionary radical feminists, who at a Heritage Foundation event in January argued that sex is biological, not a societal construct, and that transgenderism is at odds with a genuine feminism.

She contended that economics is the basis of what she called “heteronormativity.”

Pregnancy becomes a tool of oppression, she said, as women who get pregnant and then engage in child rearing are taken out of the workforce at prime productive ages and then are taken care of by an economic provider.

Thus, the gender binary is reinforced, Westing said.

She insisted that the answer to such problems is to “abolish the family.” The way to get to that point, she said, is by “getting rid of capitalism” and reorganizing society around what she called “queer social reproduction.”

“When we’re talking about revolution, we’re really connecting the issues of gender justice as integral to economic and social justice,” Westing said.

She then quoted a writer, Sophie Lewis, who in a new book, “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family,” embraced “open-sourced, fully collaborative gestation.”

3. Open Borders Is Becoming a Litmus Test