Trump’s National Emergency Fraud
First of all, lets get my political views out of the way. In general, rulers become dictators by invoking emergency powers.
Trump now says that he can enforce his Decree by Tweet, that American businesses trading with China must go elsewhere, preferably to America. Trump is at G7 today. Are all of those countries and Europe afraid that they too might become the victim of Trump’s anger at not getting his way? The law being invoked is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. My guess is that Trump knew of this law before he tweeted, but left us in the dark to trip over ourselves in claiming that he didn’t have those powers. The court cases on it will probably outlast his term. The only American having an emergency is the President running for reelection who is behind in all the polls to every possible opponent.
Has Trump never heard of contracts, which can’t be broken? Has he never heard of setting up production lines, and the costs of doing so? Has he never heard of the costs of training workers, and building dorms for them? Has he never heard of scheduling parts to be present just when you need them for assembly? Has any President ever ordered Trump to close one of this International Towers or International Golf Courses, and move it back to the US?
Only about a quarter of the American trade with China is of the nature of having technological intellectual property, which they are forced to share to get Chinese manufacturing. So, out of the $550 billion now or about to be tariffed, that would be about $140 billion. Yet ALL US companies doing business with China were ORDERED by Trump to abandon all hope. In retaliation, China could force its $135 billion in imports from the US to go elsewhere, since it has nothing left to lose. Since the Chinese and American economies are about the same magnitude, this would only be 1/4 of the effect on Chinese imports as it is on the US. However, China would lose the full $550 billion in business to the US. If the US has to pay the costs of manufacturing at much higher US wages and much better working conditions, and finding workers for extremely tedious and repetitive jobs, we will price ourselves out of any international markets. This could result in regained business to China. It’s possible that Chinese firms are also running manufacturing in South-East Asia, so just switching countries would not hurt much of their overall business. Having the two greatest economies in the world not working with each other seems ridiculous, and probably disadvantages both.
Look, Trump is an expert at importing foreigners to make up his hotel beds and tend to his golfing greens. His knowledge of American industry is quite lacking.
Technologically speaking, I am going to speculate that China could get the plans for the products that they are manufacturing in many ways. They could reverse engineer them. They could study the patent filings. They could commit industrial espionage in the US and in China. They could form their own massive company to compete, and call it Huawei. They could educate many times the engineers and scientists that we do, and give them support, as they are already doing. They could send students to be educated in the best American universities, as they do. They could share in the international technology for the next communications level, 5G, as they are already doing. They could have well funded research in quantum computers and next generation computers, as they do. While their demands on our technology are bad, they are not the full picture of our technological competition with China, and Japan, and South Korea, and others.
Did I forget to mention that the trademark of the Republican Party is capitalism and free enterprise, who’s goal is to remove government regulations? They are already busy trying to label the Democratic Party as Socialists, with Government control of businesses. Yet no Republican has yet pointed out the hypocrisy of Trump’s taking control of all US businesses.
Trump is trying to convince North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un to give up or maybe just halt nuclear weapons development, in order to become an active trading member of the international community, and to have North Korea prosper. North Korea has been working on developing nuclear weapons and missiles for almost 75 years, and has now achieved those goals. Are they really going to destroy them or their nuclear and missile manufacturing plants for a treaty with Trump, who may be President another long five years, if he can cancel that trade with a single tweet when he is in a bad mood, because he can’t control the world?
Trump is trying to convince Iran and the leading UN countries that signed the non-proliferation treaty with them, to return to negotiations to put total control on Iran’s foreign influence, in order to remove trade sanctions. Yet, Trump could cancel that with a single snit tweet (tweet while in a snit).
Let’s not even speculate on a solution to Middle East peace, with Trump’s orders as to how American Jews must vote for him. Can Trump make all Americans vote for him by declaring a National Emergency? Back to my first paragraph of the article.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.
