#Economic Recession and Partisan Rivalry

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US Urged To Have More Self-Reflection As Shadows Lingers Over Independence Day

— Wang Qi | July 05, 2023

Trapped. Illustration: Liu Rui/Global Times

With parades, fireworks and a White House Barbecue, the US celebrated its Independence Day holiday on Tuesday. However, beneath the glamorous events which are supposed to be filled with patriotism and joy, shadows like a spate of mass shootings, and economic recession and partisan rivalry still linger.

Since its independence in 1776, now 247-year-old, the US today has lost vitality from its early days, and in the case of the deteriorating domestic problems, Independence Day should become a "day of reflection" for Washington, Chinese experts said on Wednesday.

According to the VOA, the scheduled celebrative events included US President Joe Biden's speech, fireworks, an annual Independence Day concert as well as the traditional Independence Day parade down Constitution Avenue. But ahead of the holiday, 10 people were killed and 38 wounded in mass shootings so far this week in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Fort Worth, according to media reports.

Citing the Gun Violence Archive, the BBC reported that in each of the last three years, there have been more than 600 mass shootings in the US, almost twice a day on average. As of May 2023, there have been more than 200 mass shootings across the US.

On Independence Day 2022, seven people were killed during the Highland Park mass shooting in Illinois, during a July 4 parade. "This day of patriotic pride became a scene of pain and tragedy," Biden said in a statement to remember the event on Tuesday.

Besides the shadow of gun violence, The Washington Post described the US as being "in a funk," with "a tide of worry about a lack of civic cohesion, intense partisanship and, to some, a sense of hopelessness," one day ahead of the US Independence Day holiday.

According to a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll ahead of Independence Day, 7 out of 10 Americans agree with the statement that American democracy is "imperiled." Polls also show there is less excitement about the 2024 presidential election which would tear the nation further apart.

Against a backdrop of inflation, recession and rising unemployment, an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll last week shows that only 34 percent of Americans approve of Biden administration's economic leadership, or "Bidenomics" as it is touted.

"The US has lost the vitality of its early days as a nation and lost its role as an example and inspiration to the peoples of the world who are suffering from colonial oppression. On the contrary, the US is languid, stagnant and corrupt, and has become a force that hinders the trend of global progress and undermines globalization and cooperation among countries," Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

There is widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo in the US… Independence Day should be a "day of reflection," which may be more helpful to the US, Li said.

According to a new Gallup poll released on Monday, confidence in the US government has reached an all-time low of 31 percent. In 2020, 46 percent of US adults expressed faith in their government. Another Gallup poll found that just 39 percent of US adults say they are "extremely proud" to be an American, a sharp decline comparing with the 55 percent in 2001.

Sun Chenghao, a research fellow from the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University, told the Global Times on Wednesday that the US' disease exposes traumatic problems that involve the deep-seated political system, constitution and power structure of the US.

These problems cannot be fundamentally resolved in the short term, nor can they be changed by changing whoever is in power, Sun noted.

"The 'US' diseases,' such as racial problems and gun problems, are deeply rooted in its soil," Li said, "and there is still a lack of calm observation and sober reflection on its own policies and domestic social problems in the US."

It will not be surprising if the US' social problems worsen further by next year's Independence Day, Li said.

[thisdaynews]

Trump’s method to the madness on trade

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/trumps-method-to-the-madness-on-trade/

Trump’s method to the madness on trade

President Donald Trump said tariffs on Mexican goods will “likely” go into effect during a news conference in the United Kingdom. | Stefan Rousseau/Getty Images)

Global Translations

Lost in the tweets and partisan fights is a belief that a bet on freer trade has proved to be a loser.

Donald Trump is not winging it.

Or at least he’s not totally winging it.

Story Continued Below

However improvisational his daily machinations on trade — presenting publicly as motivated by a random mix of mood and twitches of the news cycle, including the latest threat of tariffs against Mexico — Trump and his team are acting on a well-developed theory of the case, one that has been decades in the making.

In Trump’s case, that strategy is intuitive. He’s been saying since the 1980s — and by all evidence genuinely believes — that the United States is letting itself be played for the fool by foreign adversaries, on trade specifically and global competition generally. Strong nations robustly protect domestic industries and keep foreign competitors at heel. Back in the ’80s his focus was more typically Japan; in recent years, but long before 2016, he’s been focused on China.

In the case of his advisers, the theory of the case is more intellectual. They believe that the big bet free trade advocates made in the 1990s — that welcoming China into the WTO would encourage it to integrate into a rules-based global economy — has proved to be a loser. China, by these lights, is happy to take advantage of the U.S. and other players’ commitment to free trade and rules but will continue to steal and subsidize to advance its own interests.

This method to the apparent madness has emerged in interviews for the new Global Translations podcast — which launched Thursday — with people who have worked for Presidents Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. And it helps explain why the Trump administration has made such a break from the strategy of previous administrations.

“I and many others had deceived ourselves that China wanted to be just like us,” said Michael Pillsbury, an influential adviser to the Trump administration on China and author of the book, “The Hundred Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.”

“I finally woke up,” he said. “But I would not say everybody’s awakened even at this point.”

The Trump doctrine marks a repudiation of decades of U.S. trade orthodoxy — that reached its high point in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed, and capitalism and liberalism appeared on the march. This “End of History” euphoria culminated in Clinton pushing past his party’s populist instincts on trade and embracing the elite view that the world was becoming more integrated, more rules-based, and more prosperous, and that this meant good things both for American and the rest of humanity.

In 1993, he signed into law NAFTA, which had been negotiated by the Bush administration, and enabled China’s accession into the WTO, stating in a 2000 speech: “By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people — their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream, but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.” That democratic dream now appears dead — and with it American patience to wait for China to reform itself.

The China hawks in the White House believe now is the best — and perhaps last — moment for the U.S. to take dramatic economic action against China, even at the cost of roiling markets and upending a strong U.S. economy.

And they have tethered the rest of U.S. trade policy — demands of Canada, Mexico, Europe and Japan — to an aggressive agenda of increasingly squeezing China out of global supply chains while pressing for structural change in Beijing. When U.S. business leaders have warned, cajoled, and pleaded about the economic risks of a trade war, they have been rebuffed with the argument that it is precisely the strong economy that has wedged open a historic window of opportunity to make the move.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who has described China as an “existential problem,” wants to use U.S. economic leverage to demand serious structural changes in China — while the U.S. still has that leverage.

The urgency behind the strategy concerns technology: China’s attempts to supercharge the growth of nascent tech industries by subsidizing them and forcing the handover of U.S. intellectual property. The goal is to leapfrog from its past status as a developing nation exporting cheap plastic wares to a leader in strategic emerging technologies that will define the next technological age — such as 5G and the next-generation internet, artificial intelligence and renewable energy.

China has copied U.S. technology, sometimes by requiring joint ventures and the sharing of intellectual property and other times by outright theft. The end of these forced technological transfers is Lighthizer’s central aim — even if they mean that soybean farmers will pay the price. If America fails to do so and becomes “number two in technology,” he told a congressional hearing in February, “then the world is going to look very different for our children.”

Pillsbury, the Trump adviser, said the administration fears not only losing a commercial rivalry — but enabling an Orwellian future in which an authoritarian Beijing controls global surveillance, directs online speech and embeds government control into the very plumbing of the internet.

“Their idea is the whole world will have this combination of [surveillance] cameras, your shopping patterns, what magazines you subscribe to, who your friends are, where you go based on your cell phone being geolocated,” with the aim of creating a social credit score, he said. “To what degree do you support the Communist Party of China? Have you ever criticized anything? And then when you apply to get a loan or to go to college or to do anything, your social credit score will tell how the government’s going to treat you.”

“Everybody in the world will be under this kind of system,” Pillsbury said of the authoritarian vision of the future.

Increasingly, the U.S. military is concerned, too. The 2018 national security strategy, signed by former Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis, asserts that China seeks “regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future.”

This big picture explains in part why the Trump administration has been willing to wrest open trade relations with allies in order to remake the terms of global trade — it’s not just about a better bilateral deal for the U.S., but about a particular approach to China. Take the steel tariffs against Canada and Mexico that were aimed at “closing the back door” to subsidized steel from China, among other places; and the insertion of language in the new North American agreement that would expel a country from the agreement if it entered into a free trade agreement with a “non-market economy,” or new requirements aimed at reducing the share of Chinese parts in North America car production. Likewise, the administration will have China in mind as it opens talks with Japan and Europe.

In Trumpland, the long-term goals apparently outweigh the short-term chaos and pain.

Dan Ujczo, an Ohio-based trade lawyer with Dickinson Wright, recalled a meeting with senior Trump administration officials and groups representing industries affected by tariffs, who argued that the economic effects of Trump’s economic policies would be undone by a trade war. “It was really one of the most brilliant presentations I’ve ever seen — PowerPoint graphics, the whole thing — that said, ‘If you do this, administration, if you do what you’re talking about doing on trade,” he recalled, “you’re going to take back all the economic gains you’ve made from tax reform.”

“And everybody thought it was a mic drop moment, right? Aha! And everybody in the administration kind of looked at each other and said, ‘We know. You think we don’t know that?’”

Over two decades, 9/11, the wars in the Middle East and the financial crisis and recovery, made action too difficult, according to Ujczo — and the possibility of a next recession could close the window. “If we don’t do this now, when will we ever do this? It’s really, I think, in the eyes of this administration, a now-or-never moment — and they may be right.”

While Democrats don’t agree with all of Trump’s tactics, long-standing concerns about China have been bipartisan. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was an early opponent of China’s entry into the WTO. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer has long decried Chinese currency manipulation. Schumer recently tweeted, “Hang tough on China, President @realDonaldTrump. Don’t back down. Strength is the only way to win with China.”

The Obama administration shared concerns about Chinese subsidies and technological theft but attempted to address them by negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership — a new agreement with 11 other nations. The idea was to encircle China by creating a free-trade zone with its neighbors and set high standards that China would eventually have to accept in order to join. In trying to sell the deal to a skeptical public in 2015, Obama said China had been “putting out feelers” about eventually joining the pact.

But the agreement lacked public and Congressional support amid a backlash against globalization. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement after he was elected and has opted instead for an increasingly bilateral approach to confronting China — using threats, tariffs and negotiations with other nations as a way to influence China. In many ways, it was the administration’s firmest rebuke of the international coalition-building approach of Republican and Democratic administrations that preceded it.

While critics of the TPP said it wasn’t enough to force structural changes in China, supporters say Trump gave up a powerful tool.

“I think [it] is perhaps the most significant strategic blunder in recent American history,” said Michael Froman, the U.S. Trade Representative under Obama. “We’ve lost that position for the United States at least for now, and we have created a void, a vacuum that China is quite effectively filling at the moment.”

Trump’s agenda doesn’t necessarily mean an end to trade. But it does mean surrendering faith in gauzy principles and far-reaching trade protocols. Instead, go toe-to-toe with trade competitors at times and in sectors of one’s own choosing — and know that adversaries won’t respect you unless you prove on occasion that you are willing to inflict pain on others (and accept it yourself) to win a conflict.

And it leaves open the possibility that the confrontation with China could embolden hawks on both sides.

“Over the next year or two we’re going to find out — can we have a trade deal? Can we have some kind of reconciliation with China?” said Pillsbury. “Or… are we moving toward a new Cold War relationship?”

Read More

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China Releases Report Revealing US’ Striking Economic Polarization

— Global Times Staff Reporters | February 23, 2023

US economy Illustration: Liu Rui/Global Times

China released a report on the truth and facts behind the growing economic polarization in the US, revealing that the problem is so prominent that 1 percent of US households hold more than 20 percent of national household wealth. The problem has been exacerbated by COVID-19 and other factors, and continues to pull at the fabric of US society.

The report, Rising Economic Polarization in the US: Truth and Facts, was published by the Xinhua News Agency on Thursday, highlighting some striking facts behind the US' widening wealth gap. According to World Bank, the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality in income distribution, in the US has gone up from 0.353 in 1974 to 0.415 in 2019, exceeding the warning level of 0.4, which indicates a large income gap.

The problem was further exacerbated by the onslaught of COVID-19, when economic recession led to massive job losses and further deterioration in the economic situation of low-income earners. At the same time, excessive money supply and large-scale fiscal spending have driven up stock and housing prices, bringing enormous benefits to wealthier asset owners.

The Xinhua report cited a Fed report on household wealth, saying the total wealth of the richest 1 percent reached a record $45.9 trillion at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, and their fortunes increased by more than $12 trillion, or more than a third, during the course of the pandemic.

The widening wealth gap has also led to the middle class shrinking. Fortune magazine reported in November 2022 that 61 percent of US adults were considered middle class in 1971, a figure that dropped to just 50 percent in 2021, according to an analysis from Pew Research Center. Fewer Americans consider themselves to be middle class than before the Great Recession.

The shrinking of the middle class has also led to tense relations between different races in the US, as the middle class, which is mostly made up of white Americans, believe other races' improvement is based on sacrifices made by white Americans, thus fuelling their anger, Li Haidong, a professor at the Institute of International Relations at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times.

The problem has led to growing populism in the US, created antagonism between different race groups and thus given a platform to extreme politicians who advocate a toxic form of populism, and led to an increase in cases of extreme violence, according to Li.

The report from Xinhua also pointed out that the widening wealth gap is one of the main causes of the deepening social crisis in the US. Problems including growing ethnic conflicts, increasing homelessness, urban riots and violent crimes are all closely related to it.

Due to the increasing polarization between rich and poor, the US has witnessed frequent demonstrations in recent years. From the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 to the Black Lives Matter protests against police violence in the US in 2020, some demonstrations have even turned violent.

According to the US Census Bureau, 82 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds from high-income families have gone to college, compared with just 45 percent of those from low-income families. A report by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development showed that more than 580,000 people were homeless in 2020, with 226,000 sleeping outside, in cars or in abandoned buildings.

Despite facing such a dire situation, US politicians are doing very little to change their people's lives. Partisan conflict and constant changes in government have led to flip-flops in US policies.

While tax policy plays an important role in narrowing down the wealth gap, the rivalry between Democrats and Republicans on taxation has resulted in a failure to effectively tax the rich, who have tried every possible mean to "legally" avoid paying their dues.

According to a report by the news outlet ProPublica, the true tax rate of the richest Americans is only 3.4 percent, far lower than that of ordinary wage earners.

In general, the US is facing a "blackout" of its national identity, its economy is being hollowed out, its society thrown into chaos, and politics is going to extremes, said Li, noting that COVID-19 has also fueled the American crisis.

What makes the situation worse is that the hostility between the two main parties has grown sharper, and this antagonism will exist on the US political map for the long term, which means the crisis in the country will only be further exacerbated, and it will be very difficult for the country to go back to normal, said Li.