The writing was already on the wall for Hong Kong on the day of the handover, for anyone to see who wasn't willingly blinded by the promises of the CCP, in spite if its unbroken record of deception.
Hong Kong is a Chinese city. The West isn't even in a position to help Lhasa, a conquered capital where genocide is an active policy; we can no more help, or justify an attempt to help, Hong Kong than we can Shanghai.
The best that we can do is to learn the lessons of Hong Kong, and support Taiwan as best we can, as long as they choose to resist. Now, at least, there should be no question for even the most idealistic that "two systems one country" is a cynical lie, and always has been.
When you are losing your communist grip from Hong Kong protests, release a pandemic and then collude with the billionaire globalists that own the media and the American Democrat party to put your Manchurian candidate in office. Then with that health crisis and media, political cover... crack down on both Hong Kong and Singapore.
Hong Kong freedom died with the election of Joe Biden.
Your ignorance is breathtaking. Trump was the one explicitly encouraging Xi Xinping in his crackdown on Hong Kong. He mouthed Chinese propaganda on COVID in order to protect his pathetic trade negotiations, after he had already given China the greatest economic gift imaginable by killing the TPP. He only went negative on China when it was politically convenient in order to distract from his own failures on COVID. Hong Kong lost its freedom under Trump, who made zero effort to oppose it and ultimately strengthened China's position.
By the time Biden was elected, Hong Kong was irretrievably gone. Biden is the one who has taken the threat of China seriously from the start and pivoted our foreign policy in that direction. If there is a mistake Biden has made, it's not trying hard enough to undo Trump's damage, eliminate tariffs, and restore a trade policy we spent almost a decade crafting in order to blunt China's economic influence.
I note "acted sooner" is not spelled out at all. I'll take a shot: we could have not turned the totalitarian state from an impoverished backwater into one of the most powerful countries in the world. Instead neoliberal, globalist greed carried the day, and now here we are. We can't even admit they just killed millions of people around the world- in fact we were censoring everyone who even suggested it.
Many would say the prospect of lifting a billion people from poverty and possibly reforming China's government in the process was worth attempting. Obviously the second part didn't work out as planned.
But the "neoliberal globalists" responded correctly by organizing a trade pact to open up alternate trade paths in the Southeast and blunt China's economic influence. Instead it was killed by short-sighted protectionists and "America First" populists obsessed with dying industries and lousy jobs.
It's easy to criticize in hindsight, but exactly what is the alternative proposed by the anti-globalists? Turn and look the other way? Even if you want to argue that was the best choice in the 1990's, the anti-globalists now apparently want us to do this while China's powerful influence is growing. While they continue to court favor with African countries through their Belt and Road Initiative.
"Globalism" isn't a choice - it's a reality that we all need to accept. The world is inevitably connected, and the prosperity and safety of individual nations is dependent on that of other nations. Today, that prosperity and safety - for many in this world - are greater than human civilization has ever known precisely because powerful nations have accepted the challenge of leading a world community.
And a healthy world community features healthy trade and sound leadership. The world leadership of the United States has been significantly flawed at times, but it's hard to argue the world would be better without it. And yet the "anti-globalists" are still fighting yesterday's battles, as if we can simply load an old save file in a video game and make a different choice.
We didn't have to give them no-strings attached membership to the WTO, most favored nation atrade status, etc. We didn't try "possibly reforming China's government in the process" -- we just went with wishful thinking that it would magically happen.
If you are referring to TARP, trade deals are one thing, but not if they come at the expense of our national sovereignty, including our abilty to legislate our own national labor rights and environental protections.
Powerful nations--mainly the US--have created a neoliberal trade regime that benefits and furthers oligarchy in the West and empowers a totalitarian regime in China. Some amount of globalisation was certainly inevitable but not the version we have.
I was referring to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), which I imagine is what you meant (TARP was the domestic industry bailout program from the "Great Recession"). The TPP did indeed place enforceable requirements on a wide array of policy, including environmental protections, labor standards, human rights, good governance, etc. The kind of things that progressives generally support.
While this hardly restricts our sovereignty in the general sense (trade pacts can always be renegotiated or even withdrawn from if absolutely necessary), I fail to see how it benefits progressive goals to leave such things to the whims of US legislators - particularly given how broken our legislature is today. Congress is biased toward Republicans (by virtue of gerrymandered House districts and a Senate that favors small states) who generally regard environmental protections, labor rights (and these days, good governance) as bothersome irritants that unduly restrict their untrammeled wielding of power. It's ironic, to say the least, that the supposedly "progressive" wing of the Democratic Party were some of the TPP's most adamant opponents.
TPP, yes. It's not ironic at all that prominent leftists didn't support it - it was a trade deal negotiated in secret. If it really had protected labor rights and so forth as you suggest, the AFL-CIO would not have opposed it. It followed the usual neoliberal globalist template of funneling all of the benfefits to the investor class at the expense of working men and women.
I believe it's fairly common - the norm actually - for trade deals to be negotiated behind closed doors. They would be difficult to finish otherwise - interest groups would raise hell over every putative clause making the deal politically toxic for almost anyone to get behind. The TPP got an unusual amount of scrutiny for its bizarre seeming security measures, but it was a massive, multilateral deal that had taken about a decade to complete.
As for the AFL-CIO, you apparently place a great deal of faith in the judgement of organized labor. I'd be surprised to see them not opposed to such a massive trade deal. Admittedly, labor rights protections in trade deals generally don't have much benefit for American workers. American labor is so expensive precisely because we have higher standards of labor rights than most countries, so trade deals typically involve bringing the standards of other countries closer to ours - which does still work in our favor since it reduces the advantages of shipping factory jobs overseas. However, any trade deal that opens up new markets will have some effect on US factory jobs - some will be lost and others gained, and that makes labor unions nervous.
Organized labor in the US almost reflexively opposes new trade agreements in much the same way that some factions of the political right oppose immigration - they are wedded to a zero-sum mentality that only reactively frets over what can be lost instead of proactively considering what is to be gained. They see the job pool as a fixed entity that can only get smaller due to worker influx and job export - instead of something that grows as the economy grows. This lends itself nicely to the idea that something which benefits big business can't simultaneously be advantageous to small business and the middle and working classes. Indeed, most economic analyses concurred that the benefits would accrue across the socioeconomic spectrum, and would actually have a small advantage in favor of poorer Americans.
Corporate business interests did have access to the negotiations. It was just labor, environmental etc that had no seat at the table.
The neoliberal globalists have been pushing that line about US jobs evening out for 40 years - no one believes it anymore. We see the effects all around out - devastated middle and working classes and ever more extreme concentrations of wealth at the top. Even many economists are wising up.
There is no help for Hong Kong.
The writing was already on the wall for Hong Kong on the day of the handover, for anyone to see who wasn't willingly blinded by the promises of the CCP, in spite if its unbroken record of deception.
Hong Kong is a Chinese city. The West isn't even in a position to help Lhasa, a conquered capital where genocide is an active policy; we can no more help, or justify an attempt to help, Hong Kong than we can Shanghai.
The best that we can do is to learn the lessons of Hong Kong, and support Taiwan as best we can, as long as they choose to resist. Now, at least, there should be no question for even the most idealistic that "two systems one country" is a cynical lie, and always has been.
Hong Kong is, reamins and will continue to be one of the most important places where the fight between democracy and dictatorship is taking place.
When you are losing your communist grip from Hong Kong protests, release a pandemic and then collude with the billionaire globalists that own the media and the American Democrat party to put your Manchurian candidate in office. Then with that health crisis and media, political cover... crack down on both Hong Kong and Singapore.
Hong Kong freedom died with the election of Joe Biden.
Your ignorance is breathtaking. Trump was the one explicitly encouraging Xi Xinping in his crackdown on Hong Kong. He mouthed Chinese propaganda on COVID in order to protect his pathetic trade negotiations, after he had already given China the greatest economic gift imaginable by killing the TPP. He only went negative on China when it was politically convenient in order to distract from his own failures on COVID. Hong Kong lost its freedom under Trump, who made zero effort to oppose it and ultimately strengthened China's position.
By the time Biden was elected, Hong Kong was irretrievably gone. Biden is the one who has taken the threat of China seriously from the start and pivoted our foreign policy in that direction. If there is a mistake Biden has made, it's not trying hard enough to undo Trump's damage, eliminate tariffs, and restore a trade policy we spent almost a decade crafting in order to blunt China's economic influence.
Sure sweetheart. Your CCP programming is complete.
Breathtaking propaganda ingestion. I am surprised you don't have regular digestive issues as a result.
A hackneyed piece of cynicism devoid of substance instead of an intelligent response. Unsurprising.
I note "acted sooner" is not spelled out at all. I'll take a shot: we could have not turned the totalitarian state from an impoverished backwater into one of the most powerful countries in the world. Instead neoliberal, globalist greed carried the day, and now here we are. We can't even admit they just killed millions of people around the world- in fact we were censoring everyone who even suggested it.
Many would say the prospect of lifting a billion people from poverty and possibly reforming China's government in the process was worth attempting. Obviously the second part didn't work out as planned.
But the "neoliberal globalists" responded correctly by organizing a trade pact to open up alternate trade paths in the Southeast and blunt China's economic influence. Instead it was killed by short-sighted protectionists and "America First" populists obsessed with dying industries and lousy jobs.
It's easy to criticize in hindsight, but exactly what is the alternative proposed by the anti-globalists? Turn and look the other way? Even if you want to argue that was the best choice in the 1990's, the anti-globalists now apparently want us to do this while China's powerful influence is growing. While they continue to court favor with African countries through their Belt and Road Initiative.
"Globalism" isn't a choice - it's a reality that we all need to accept. The world is inevitably connected, and the prosperity and safety of individual nations is dependent on that of other nations. Today, that prosperity and safety - for many in this world - are greater than human civilization has ever known precisely because powerful nations have accepted the challenge of leading a world community.
And a healthy world community features healthy trade and sound leadership. The world leadership of the United States has been significantly flawed at times, but it's hard to argue the world would be better without it. And yet the "anti-globalists" are still fighting yesterday's battles, as if we can simply load an old save file in a video game and make a different choice.
We didn't have to give them no-strings attached membership to the WTO, most favored nation atrade status, etc. We didn't try "possibly reforming China's government in the process" -- we just went with wishful thinking that it would magically happen.
If you are referring to TARP, trade deals are one thing, but not if they come at the expense of our national sovereignty, including our abilty to legislate our own national labor rights and environental protections.
Powerful nations--mainly the US--have created a neoliberal trade regime that benefits and furthers oligarchy in the West and empowers a totalitarian regime in China. Some amount of globalisation was certainly inevitable but not the version we have.
I was referring to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), which I imagine is what you meant (TARP was the domestic industry bailout program from the "Great Recession"). The TPP did indeed place enforceable requirements on a wide array of policy, including environmental protections, labor standards, human rights, good governance, etc. The kind of things that progressives generally support.
While this hardly restricts our sovereignty in the general sense (trade pacts can always be renegotiated or even withdrawn from if absolutely necessary), I fail to see how it benefits progressive goals to leave such things to the whims of US legislators - particularly given how broken our legislature is today. Congress is biased toward Republicans (by virtue of gerrymandered House districts and a Senate that favors small states) who generally regard environmental protections, labor rights (and these days, good governance) as bothersome irritants that unduly restrict their untrammeled wielding of power. It's ironic, to say the least, that the supposedly "progressive" wing of the Democratic Party were some of the TPP's most adamant opponents.
TPP, yes. It's not ironic at all that prominent leftists didn't support it - it was a trade deal negotiated in secret. If it really had protected labor rights and so forth as you suggest, the AFL-CIO would not have opposed it. It followed the usual neoliberal globalist template of funneling all of the benfefits to the investor class at the expense of working men and women.
I believe it's fairly common - the norm actually - for trade deals to be negotiated behind closed doors. They would be difficult to finish otherwise - interest groups would raise hell over every putative clause making the deal politically toxic for almost anyone to get behind. The TPP got an unusual amount of scrutiny for its bizarre seeming security measures, but it was a massive, multilateral deal that had taken about a decade to complete.
As for the AFL-CIO, you apparently place a great deal of faith in the judgement of organized labor. I'd be surprised to see them not opposed to such a massive trade deal. Admittedly, labor rights protections in trade deals generally don't have much benefit for American workers. American labor is so expensive precisely because we have higher standards of labor rights than most countries, so trade deals typically involve bringing the standards of other countries closer to ours - which does still work in our favor since it reduces the advantages of shipping factory jobs overseas. However, any trade deal that opens up new markets will have some effect on US factory jobs - some will be lost and others gained, and that makes labor unions nervous.
Organized labor in the US almost reflexively opposes new trade agreements in much the same way that some factions of the political right oppose immigration - they are wedded to a zero-sum mentality that only reactively frets over what can be lost instead of proactively considering what is to be gained. They see the job pool as a fixed entity that can only get smaller due to worker influx and job export - instead of something that grows as the economy grows. This lends itself nicely to the idea that something which benefits big business can't simultaneously be advantageous to small business and the middle and working classes. Indeed, most economic analyses concurred that the benefits would accrue across the socioeconomic spectrum, and would actually have a small advantage in favor of poorer Americans.
Corporate business interests did have access to the negotiations. It was just labor, environmental etc that had no seat at the table.
The neoliberal globalists have been pushing that line about US jobs evening out for 40 years - no one believes it anymore. We see the effects all around out - devastated middle and working classes and ever more extreme concentrations of wealth at the top. Even many economists are wising up.