Doing business with evil always costs you more in the end, then you ever get...

DB some source material from ZH

"Faustian bargain, a pact whereby a person trades something of supreme moral or spiritual importance, such as personal values or the soul, for some worldly or material benefit, such as knowledge, power, or riches.”

Roughly forty years ago we and the Chinese entered into a true Faustian bargain.   We agreed to open our markets to Chinese goods, and the Chinese in exchange opened their nation to foreign investment and manufacturing. That's the surface lie at least. And that's what's taught in schools and by idiots.

We were motivated by greed.  Of course I mean bankers and government, not real Americans with families to support and dreams to make real. This wasn't our plan. Factories in China would have access to seemingly unlimited quantities of low cost workers - slaves working for ten cents a day with no bathroom breaks.  It did not hurt that those factories would be unencumbered by unions, workplace safety laws or environmental regulations and that the government of China was openly satanic and had a blood soaked history of killing off its own people should they even be caught with a bible. In fact, in the first 25 years of the CPP, Mao killed 60 million Chinese citizens for wrong think. If the didn't pass an exam, they and their families were taken out the front door and publicly executed. Satanic Wall Street ordered Nixon in to make the deal. He did. And here we are. If Satan ever wanted a more evil government on earth, he could do no better than China. And it is far worse now, than under Emperor Mao.


Also, it killed America.  With all the making stuff jobs disappearing by the tens of millions, so did our middle class vanish. So did a living wage. So did a single earner income to support a family. So did job supplied free medical and dental. It all went away with the China thing. This wasn't just a Faustian bargain, it was killing the good and true about the USA. Forever, man...forever.

The Chinese were motivated by a desire to see America destroyed and here was the rich and powerful seeking China's help in doing just that.  The Soviet Union was tottering toward extinction, destroyed not by American forces on the battlefield but by rot and inefficiency in its economy.  The Chinese would escape that fate by giving their people a higher standard of living and a more comfortable lifestyle in exchange for the continued acceptance of an oppressive, totalitarian regime that saw an average 2 million Chinese imprisoned each and every year for the slightest of offenses. Like showing up late for work. It's that  bad over there and we bury that information in the west. Because if the people's of the west knew what REALLY went on in that country, every single product made there would be boycotted and that's a fact.

The bargain was made.  As with all pacts with the devil the bill has come due, this time in the form of the coronavirus.

Well over two months ago the coronavirus began to explode in China.  The Chinese government did what it always does.  It lied.  It covered up the truth.  It killed those who claimed there was a serious problem and accused them of spreading disinformation and propaganda.  On the internet, the Chinese deployed an army of bots, similar to those it used to bury the truth about protests in Hong Kong last year. They have entire military units hunting anyone who dares breath a word of on the scene truth of the matter and executes them on the spot. sometimes, their family, too. As a vicious warning to others.

The Chinese had no choice.  The continued existence of the Chinese Communist Party’s dictatorship is predicated on perpetual, explosive growth.  Acknowledging the scope of what was happening would bring down the house of cards that had taken so long to construct.

Western observers, leaders and businessmen followed suit.  They too believed they had no choice.  They had bet everything on a system that made the entire global economy dependent on supply chains that seemingly all ran through mainland China. But this too, is a lie. They knew that with globalization, it would be easy to do a Great Depression by just destroying any one link in the  supply chain.

 Contemplating what would happen if those supply chains suddenly stopped working was too awful. There was nothing to do but hope for the best.
As they say, hope is not a plan.

Today the stock market fell more than 1000 points on concerns that the coronavirus has so shut down the Chinese economy that many companies around the world will be unable to continue to supply consumers with products.  Tech companies led the way, among them Apple, whose stock lost 5% of its value in a single day amid reports that the release of its new iPhone will have to be delayed due to virus related production problems in China.
The impact of factory shutdowns in China is already showing up here in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach – two of the busiest ports in the United States.  Last year during the February – March timeframe there were a total of 17 cancellations of ship arrivals, largely due to the Lunar New Year.  So far this year there have been 367 such cancellations.

The Port of Long Beach has seen cancellations skyrocket as well.  In a typical year there may be 20 to 30 cancelled sailings.  Already this year there have been 500.  Noel Hacegaba, Deputy Executive Director of Administration and Operations at the port is crystal clear about the reason. It is, he said, “100% due to the factory closures” in China.

A ship docked at Long Beach on Friday of last week was the last one expected to come in from China for nine days.

Long Beach and Los Angeles are not exceptional.  Many Chinese ports remain closed. The number of cargo containers coming out of China each week has fallen by 300,000 since the virus hit.  Worldwide the cost of shipping cargo is plummeting as ship owners compete for a rapidly diminishing amount of trade.

U.S. firms are already experiencing significant delays in getting shipments from China, but they are fortunate in the overall scheme of things. Given the distances involved, American companies have yet to experience the full force of shutdowns, because products were already in transit when the virus hit with full force. For a glimpse of the future, though, we need only look at South Korea.

South Korea’s giant Hyundai complex at Ulsan, the world’s biggest auto assembly facility, recently shut down. The complex, which includes five separate automobile plants and makes 1.4 million vehicles a year is offline, because it cannot get the critical parts it needs from China. Twenty-five thousand workers have been laid-off. Hyundai is not the only firm affected. Other major car companies in South Korea are either shutting down, limiting operations or considering doing so.

Here’s the real bad news. It is likely only going to get worse. The Chinese Communist Party has no choice. A citizenry out of work, out of money and faced with the truth that its government cannot combat the growing epidemic may finally revolt. The coronavirus is not just threatening lives. It is threatening the very existence of the regime. But  then, they have the army, brain washed and ready to kill their own kind without giving it a second thought.

So, in desperation, the Chinese government is forcing factories open and herding hundreds of millions of workers, many of whom were locked down and in isolation, back into the crowded dormitories where they live during the work year, half a dozen men or women to a room, using communal bathrooms and working on overcrowded factory floors. There could not possibly be a better petri dish environment to guarantee a disease – already defying all efforts to control it – explodes.

Wall street made a deal with the devil. Like Faust the price we the people will have to pay for allowing it through apathy will be a terrible one. We could of done the research (like I did), found out the truth, and boycotted every company that moved their production lines over to that evil country. But no, we didn't. And we've been paying ever since.

And dig this one. Almost 95% of all our medicine is made in Wuhan. Plague central. In two months time, simple aspirin will cost a fortune, given we no longer actually make any of even OTC meds here or anywhere, but China.

I hope you understand what I am saying to you. remember...think about the things in your life that you cannot do without. Guess what, they come from China. The China that is wiping out, when all said and done, probably 200 million plus souls, dead as Dillinger. And companies? The people who run them? Their banking system and stock market which is now joined at the hip with wall street?

Try and buy stuff from Amazon in another month. I've already, this week, run into Sooooooo many OUT OF STOCK signs on products at Amazon. Gone. And no news on when there is to be a restocking because the company making the thing has been closed for the better part of a month or so and even if they open, key workers are like as not to already be DEAD.

2+2 folks

Don Bradley