#tend to develop a ‘pecking order’ of who’s more asian than who

[shoot-i-messed-up]

I imagine that in the Do I Look Like Him-verse future, Jill ends up befriending both Tai Pham and Artemis Crock, and I can’t help but think about how those two would interact

[cha-d]

Early in the formidable new essay collection “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning,” the poet Cathy Park Hong delivers a fatalistic state-of-the-race survey. “In the popular imagination,” she writes, “Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status . . . distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down.” Asians, she observes, are perceived to be emotionless functionaries, and yet she is always “frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy.” Not enough has been said, Hong thinks, about the self-hatred that Asian-Americans experience. It becomes “a comfort,” she writes, “to peck yourself to death. You don’t like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head.”

Hong, who teaches at Rutgers, is the author of three poetry collections, including “Dance Dance Revolution,” which was published in 2007, and is set in a surreal fictional waystation called the Desert, where the inhabitants speak a constantly evolving creole. (“Me fadder sees dis y decide to learn Engrish righteo dere,” the narrator says.) “Minor Feelings” consists of seven essays; Hong explains the book’s title in an essay called “Stand Up” that centers on Richard Pryor’s “Live in Concert.” Minor feelings are “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic.” One such minor feeling: the deadening sensation of seeing an Asian face on a movie screen and bracing for the ching-chong joke. Another: eating lunch with white schoolmates and perceiving the social tableaux as a frieze in which “everyone else was a relief, while I felt recessed, the declivity that gave everyone else shape.” Minor feelings involve a sense of lack, the knowledge that this lack is a social construction, and resentment of those who constructed it.

In “The End of White Innocence,” Hong describes her childhood home as “tense and petless, with sharp witchy stenches.” Her father drank; her mother, she writes, “beat my sister and me with a fury intended for my father.” Her parents grew up in postwar poverty in Korea—as a child, her father caught sparrows to eat. In order to get a visa to immigrate to the United States, he pretended to be a mechanic, and ended up working for Ryder trucks in Pennsylvania, where he was injured, and fired. He moved to Los Angeles and found a job selling life insurance in Koreatown, then bought a dry-cleaning supply warehouse, and became successful enough to send Hong to private high school and college. He recognized that Americans valued emotional forthrightness in business and developed a particular way of speaking at work. “Thanks for getting those orders in,” Hong remembers him saying on the phone. “Oh, and Kirby, I love you.”

Hong feels ashamed, but not of her proximity to awkward English, or her features, or witchy domestic stenches. “My shame is not cultural but political,” she writes. She is ashamed of the conflicted position of Asian-Americans in the racial and capital hierarchy—the way that subjugation mingles with promise. “If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering,” Hong writes. “The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject.” She becomes a “dog cone of shame,” a “urinal cake of shame.” Hong’s metaphors are crafted with stinging care. To be Asian-American, she suggests, is to be tasked with making an injury inaccessible to the body that has been injured. It is to be pissed on at regular intervals while dutifully minimizing the odor of piss.

For a long time, Hong recounts in the book’s first essay, she did not want to write about her Asian identity. By the time she began studying for her M.F.A., at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she had concluded that doing so was “juvenile”—and she couldn’t find the right form, anyway. The confessional lyric felt too operatic, and realist fiction wasn’t right, either: “I didn’t care to injection-mold my thoughts into an anthropological experience where the reader, after reading my novel, would think, The life of Koreans is so heartbreaking!” In “Stand Up,” she asks, “Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain?” The predicament of the Asian-American writer, as Hong articulates it, is to fear that both your existence and your interpretation of that existence will always be read the wrong way. At Iowa, Hong noticed other writers of color stripping out markers of race from their poems and stories to avoid being “branded as identitarians.” It was only later that Hong realized that all of the writers she had noticed doing this were Asian-American.

I read “Minor Feelings” in a fugue of enveloping recognition and distancing flinch. I have tended to interpret my own acquiescence to and resentment of capitalism in generational terms rather than racial ones; many people my age seem to accept economic structures that we find humiliating because we reached adulthood when the margins of resistance appeared to be shrinking. I know, too, that my desire to attain financial stability is connected with a hope, bordering on practical obligation, to protect my parents, as they grow older, from the worst of the country that they immigrated to for my benefit. But, for some reason, I haven’t written very much about that. Was I, like Hong’s grad-school classmates, afraid of being branded as an identitarian? Had I considered the possibility of being positioned as a proxy for an entire ethnic group, and, unlike Hong, turned away?The term “Asian-American” was invented by student activists in California, in the late sixties, who were inspired by the civil-rights movement and dreamed of activating a coalition of people from immigrant backgrounds who might organize against structural inequality. This is not what happened; for years, Asian-Americans were predominantly conservative, though that began changing, gradually, during the Obama years, then sharply under Trump. Today, “Asian-American” mainly signifies people with East Asian ancestry: most Americans, Hong writes, think “Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues.” The term, for many people—and for Hollywood—seems to conjure upper-middle-class images: doctors, bankers. (We are imagined as the human equivalent of stainless-steel countertops: serviceable and interchangeable and blandly high-end.) But, although rich Asians earn more money than any other group of people in America, income inequality is also more extreme among Asians than it is within any other racial category. In New York, Asians are the poorest immigrant group.Hong describes a visit to a nail salon, where a surly Vietnamese teen-age boy gives her a painful pedicure. She imagines him and herself as “two negative ions repelling each other,” united and then divided by their discomfort in their own particular Asian positions. Then she pauses. “What evidence do I have that he hated himself?” she wonders. “I wished I had the confidence to bludgeon the public with we like a thousand trumpets against them,” she writes elsewhere. “But I feared the weight of my experiences—as East Asian, professional class, cis female, atheist, contrarian—tipped the scales of a racial group that remains so nonspecific that I wondered if there was any shared language between us. And so, like a snail’s antenna that’s been touched, I retracted the first person plural.” Hong doesn’t fully retract it—“we” appears fairly often in the book—but she favors the second person, deploying a “you” that really means “I,” in the hope that her experience might carry shards of the Asian-American universal.

Throughout the book, Hong at once presumes and doesn’t presume to speak for people whose families come from India, say, or Sri Lanka, or Thailand, or Laos—or the Philippines, where my parents were born. The Philippines were under Spanish control from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and under American control until the middle of the twentieth. Many Filipinos have Spanish last names and come to the States speaking English; many have dark skin. In his book “The Latinos of Asia,” the sociologist Anthony Christian Ocampo argues that Filipinos tend to manifest a sort of ethnic flexibility, feeling more at home, compared with members of other Asian ethnic groups, with whites, African-Americans, Latinos, and other Asians. The experience of translating for one’s parents is often framed as definitive for Asian-Americans, but it’s not one that many Filipinos of my generation share; my parents came to North America listening to James Taylor and the Allman Brothers, speaking Tagalog only when they didn’t want their kids to listen. I grew up in a mixed extended family, with uncles who are black and Mexican and Chinese and white. Ocampo cites a study which found that less than half of Filipino-Americans checked “Asian” on forms that asked for racial background—a significant portion of them checked “Pacific Islander,” for no real reason. It denoted proximity to Asian-Americanness, perhaps, without indicating a direct claim to it. (About a month ago, at a doctor’s appointment, an East Asian nurse checked “Pacific Islander” when filling out a form for me.)

“Koreans are self-hating,” one of Hong’s Filipino friends tell her. “Filipinos, not so much.” My experience of racism has been different than Hong’s, as has my response to it. Much of the discourse around Asian-American identity centers on racist images associated with the stereotypical East Asian face: single-lidded eyes, yellow-toned skin, a supposed air of placid impassivity. I don’t have that face, exactly, and I’m not sure that I’ve confronted quite the same assumptions; when I hear people perform gross imitations of “Chinese” accents, I don’t know if it hurts the way it does because I’m an Asian person or because I come from a family of immigrants or simply because racism is embarrassing and foul.

If you escape the dominant experience of Asian-American marginalization, have you necessarily done so by way of avoidance, or denial, or conformity? What can you do when colonization is embedded in your family’s history, in your genetic background, in your very face? If I feel comforted in a room full of Asian people rather than alarmed at the possibility that my inner racial anxieties have been cloned all around me, is this another effect of the psychic freedom I’ve been granted with double eyelids and an ambiguously Western last name, or does it mark progress in the form of a meaningful generational shift? In the decade that separates me from Hong, the currency of whiteness has lost some of its inflated cultural value; one now sees Asian artists and chefs and skateboarders and dirtbags and novelists on the Internet, in the newspaper, and on TV. Is this freedom, or is it the latest form of assimilation? For Asian-Americans, can the two ever be fully distinct?

“Minor Feelings” bled a dormant discomfort out of me with surgical precision. Hong is deeply wary of living and writing to earn the favor of white institutions; like many of us, she has been raised and educated to earn white approval, and the book is an attempt to both acknowledge and excise such tendencies in real time. “Even to declare that I’m writing for myself would still mean I’m writing to a part of me that wants to please white people,” she explains. She’s circling the edges of a trap that often appears in Asian-American consciousness, in which love is suspicious and being unloved is even worse. The editors of “Aiiieeeee!,” one of the first anthologies of Asian-American literature—it was published in 1974—argued that “euphemized white racist love” had combined with legislative racism to mire the Asian-American psyche in a swamp of “self-contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration.” A quarter century later, in her book “The Melancholy of Race,” the literary theorist Anne Anlin Cheng described “the double bind that fetters the racially and ethnically denigrated subject: How is one to love oneself and the other when the very movement toward love is conditioned by the anticipation of denial and failure?” In the introduction to his essay collection “The Souls of Yellow Folk,” published in 2018, Wesley Yang writes about a realization that he regards as “unspeakable precisely because it need never be spoken: that as the bearer of an Asian face in America, you paid some incremental penalty, never absolute, but always omnipresent, that meant that you were default unlovable and unloved.”

The question of lovability, and desirability, is freighted for Asian men and Asian women in very different ways—and “Minor Feelings” serves as a case study in how a feminist point of view can both deepen an inquiry and widen its resonances to something like universality. Essays and articles about Asian-American consciousness often invoke issues of dominance and submission, and they often frame these issues according to the experiences of disenfranchised men. The editors of “Aiiieeeee!” call the stereotypical Asian-American “contemptible because he is womanly”; Yang often identifies the Asian-American condition with male rejection and disaffection. Hong reframes the quandary of negotiating dominance and submission—of desiring dominance, of hating the terms of that dominance, of submitting in the hopes of achieving some facsimile of dominance anyway—as a capitalist dilemma. I found myself thinking about how the interest and favor of white people, white men in particular, both professionally and personally, have insulated me from the feeling of being sidelined by America while compromising my instincts at a level I can barely access. Hong writes, “My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country’s gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish.”

I hate my Asian self the way I worry about being written off as a woman writer—which is to say, not at all. Hong concedes that the self-hating Asian may be “on its way out” with her generation: for me, the formulation still has weight, but does not capture the efflorescence of the present. The question, then, is whether the movement toward love, as Anne Anlin Cheng put it, can be made outside the grasp of coercion. Is there a future of Asian-American identity that’s fundamentally expansive—that can encompass the divergent economic and cultural experiences of Asians in the United States, and form a bridge to the experiences of other marginalized groups?The answer depends on whom Asian-Americans choose to feel affinity and loyalty toward—whether we direct our sympathies to those with more power than us or less, not just outside our jerry-rigged ethnic coalition but within it. The history of Asian-Americans has involved repression and assimilation; it has also, to a degree that is often forgotten, involved radicalism and invention. “Aiiieeeee!” was published by Howard University Press, partly as a result of the friendship that one of its editors, Frank Chin, formed with the radical black writer Ishmael Reed. Gidra, an Asian-American zine that was published in Los Angeles in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, called for the “birth of a new Asian—one who will recognize and deal with injustices.” (Gidra reported on cases of local discrimination and profiled activists such as Yuri Kochiyama; it’s now back in print.) To occupy a conflicted position is also to inhabit a continual opportunity—the chance, to borrow Hong’s words, to “do better, be better,” but in moral and political rather than economic terms.In one of the essays in “Minor Feelings,” called “An Education,” Hong looks back on her friendships in college with two other Asian-American girls—brash, unstable hellions named Erin and Helen. They made art together, they traded poetry, they got drunk and fought and made up. “We had the confidence of white men,” Hong recalls, “which was swiftly cut down after graduation, upon our separation, when each of us had to prove ourselves again and again, because we were, at every stage of our career, underestimated.” The story of their friendship is a story about the way that loving others is often a less complex and more worthy act than loving ourselves—and the way that love can blunt the psychological force of marginalization. If structural oppression is the denial of justice, and if justice is what love looks like in public, then love demonstrated in private sometimes provides what the world doesn’t. Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn’t look white—a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness—and the result feels like what she was waiting for. Her book is a reminder that we can be, and maybe have to be, what others are waiting for, too.

[ntrending]

Today’s exotic pets are tomorrow’s invasive pests

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/todays-exotic-pets-are-tomorrows-invasive-pests/

Today’s exotic pets are tomorrow’s invasive pests

Escaped pet parakeets have led to feral populations in cities from New Jersey to San Francisco. (Deposit Photos/)

This past April, researchers captured and killed a record-breaking, 17-foot-long Burmese python in Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve. She weighed 140 pounds and contained 73 developing eggs. The species can grow up to 23 feet in length and weigh 200 pounds, but this was the largest one ever removed from the area. It took four people to hold her up for a picture.

Until her death, she was one of the tens of thousands of invasive Burmese pythons in South Florida, according to estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey. The species, which is native to Southeast Asia and invasive in the United States, is decimating Floridian populations of furry mammals, wading birds and “even the occasional alligator.”

Ecologists suspect the Everglades’ first Burmese pythons were former pets released into the wild by their owners. That’s also how another invasive species, the spiny reef-predating Lionfish, was introduced to Florida waters. In fact, research suggests pet trade accounts for nearly 85 percent of the Sunshine State’s about 140 non‐native reptilian and amphibian invaders.

We tend to think of invasive species as interlopers that hitchhike to new places on ships or airplanes—but the exotic pet trade is a significant source of non-natives, according to a paper published this month in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. And as pet snakes, lizards, birds, and fish grow in popularity, an uptick in invasive animals could follow.

“The Lionfish, the Burmese python, were probably the tip of the iceberg,” says Julie Lockwood, an ecologist at Rutgers University and one of the paper’s 16 co-authors. She says that the market for invasive pets has increased tremendously in the past few decades.

Florida alone abounds with examples of pets turned pests. In Coconut Grove, Fla., peacocks initially intended to ornament residential properties have multiplied—and, as the Miami Herald reported in 2017, the animals have gone on to peck, shriek, poop, and parade all over the now-divided neighborhood. In Florida’s Silver Springs State Park, an initial release of a half-dozen rhesus macaque monkeys by a tour boat operator in 1938 has grown into a current park population of 300 monkeys (which researchers estimate will double by 2022 if left unchecked). State officials are also concerned about Tegu and Nile monitor lizards, both of which are often kept as pets.

But it’s not just a Florida problem—nor is it a recent one, either. Around 1890, a group of American Shakespeare fans dedicated to bringing all the species mentioned in the Bard’s works to the U.S. released some 100 European starlings, a type of perching bird, in Central Park. By the early 21st century, that initial release had ballooned to more than 200 million starlings across North America, where they are supposed to have damaged billions of dollars-worth of agricultural crops and have occasionally snagged on airplane jet engines.

Escaped pet parakeets have also established feral populations from New Jersey to Chicago and San Francisco. Red-eared Slider Turtles, a popular pet turtle species, now exists in Hawaii and in Central Park, also where last year’s famed Mandarin duck was suspected of being an escaped or released pet.

“The public perception of this issue is small,” says Julian Olden, a freshwater ecologist at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study. “But there’s a proven history of invasive species that have stemmed from the pet pathway.”

In the study, Lockwood and a team of ecologists and environmental economists describe how certain species are pulled into the exotic pet trade, and in turn, how some of those end up becoming problematic ecological invaders when enough owners let them loose intentionally or accidentally.

“It doesn’t take that many people,” Lockwood explains, “then bam, you have an invasive population.”

In the study, researchers noted exotic pet ownership has surged in recent decades. Today, about half of pets in the U.S. are considered exotic (not your typical pet dog, cat, guinea pig, rabbit, or hamster), according to the American Pet Products Association. Ownership of reptiles and amphibians more than doubled from 2.4 million U.S. households in 1994 to 5.6 million in 2012. The U.S. is also the largest importer of marine aquarium fishes; every year, it intakes more than 11 million individual fish representing more than 2,300 species, according to Lockwood’s paper.

Non-traditional marketplaces like expos and web traders have totally expanded the exotic pet trade’s reach, says Oliver Stringham, a co-author and post-doc researcher at the University of Adelaide in Australia. Your very own mail-order turtle, snake, or lizard is just a click away, he says, although that doesn’t change the fact that the animal could still grow to be 50 pounds heavier or 50 years old.

“You don’t have to go out of your way to get them,” Stringham says. “But just because acquiring a pet is very easy and accessible, that doesn’t mean all these animals make good pets.”

Researchers also noted that the most popular pet species tend to be the ones that establish new wild populations.

Take, for example, the green iguana. Between 1996 and 2012 it accounted for almost half of the U.S.’s total reptile trade. They start out small, but the green iguana can grow to be up to six feet long and they can be ornery (prone to biting and tail-lashing) which can lead owners to release them. Green iguanas have now established populations in a handful of states where they are not native. Previous studies have similarly documented that the most highly imported marine and freshwater fish species disproportionately contribute to non‐native fish populations in the U.S.

“The more commonly sold they are, apparently, the more likely they are to establish a non-native population,” Lockwood says.

Last week’s paper also identified cities and suburbs in warmer climates as hotspots for the pet-to-pest pipeline (like metropolitan areas in Florida, Louisiana, southern California, and parts of Texas).

While the recent study pulled together current research on the exotic pet trade’s invasive impact, invasion ecologists agree there are still major gaps in knowledge.

Scientists have not yet investigated the burgeoning popularity of pet���keeping in Brazil, China, and Southeast Asian countries where ecological invasion is also a possible threat. Around the world, records of imported pet species are not standard, and many are incomplete or incorrect. And ecologists can’t always predict which species, if released, are capable of finding food, mates, and suitable habitats where they can reproduce and establish self‐sustaining non-native populations.

“The whole challenge around the exotic pet trade is it’s been understudied,” Olden says. “This is super gnarly and super complicated—we’ve really been chewing around the edges of it.”

Above all, human motivation remains a major mystery of the exotic pet trade. Scientists don’t fully understand the psychology of why owners decide to buy exotic pets, or why they might go on to release them into the wild.

For a study published earlier this year, researchers from the University of Florida interviewed 29 exotic pet owners, sellers, breeders, trappers, and ecologists or conservationists involved in exotic pet trade research. They found respondents agreed pet owners should be better informed about the realities of their exotic companions—as well as the consequences of releasing them.

In both Florida and Long Island, New York, state officials host Exotic Pet Amnesty Days where people can surrender these pets free of charge with no penalties. Several states—among them Oregon, California, Alaska, and Wyoming—operate “Don’t Let it Loose” campaigns to help support pet owners who are trying to figure out what to do with unwanted pets.

Based on past research, Lockwood says, there’s a decades-long lag time between upticks in the exotic pet market and the transformation of a species into a pest. “We probably haven’t seen the last of this,” she says.

Written By Marion Renault

[therightnewsnetwork]

The Upper Hand Remains Ours

Thanks to President Trump, China appears to be trying to reign in the insane North Korean man-child Kim Jong-un for China’s President Xi Jinping understands well that the U.S. could and most likely will take unilateral action against the North Korean dictator if he keeps up his saber rattling and rocket launching.

And with President Xi saying that China “is committed to the target of de-nuclearization on the peninsula, safeguarding peace and stability on the peninsula, and advocates resolving problems through peaceful means,” it becomes apparent that Xi knows that to do so would benefit China’s economic pocketbook…but is there actually more to his words and even more at stake than seen at first glance.

And yes…there is more at stake…much more…what with Kim Jong-un now threatening not just South Korea and Japan but threatening also to do a “mighty pre-emptive strike against the U.S.”…that is if his rockets do not keep falling into the sea. And these recent threats have seen China moving its military towards their shared border because Xi is wise enough to know that first, a war on the Korean peninsula would not serve China’s said pocketbook nor its pecking order on the world stage well and second, he also knows that a loony man-child like Kim Jung-un could just as easily turn on China… the very country that made and still finances his dictatorial bed.

In other words, while both China’s government and her people know they would suffer and suffer greatly on the economic front if war did indeed break out, they also know that both prestige and regional influence not only comes into play, but that sometimes those two factors trump even the economic scenario. And that is why President Trump tried to put the ball back in our court when he told President Xi in a recent telephone conversation that “a trade deal with the U.S. will be far better for them (China) if they solve the North Korean problem!”

Translation: Trump made it clear that China must, no matter the cost to them, reign in Kim Jong-un for China not only needs bi-lateral trade deals and investments with the U.S., but with us now flexing our military muscle the dynamics in both the Middle East and the Far East have changed…as in the U.S. is now leading from the front having replaced Obama’s leading from behind.

And that particular dynamic has common sense dictating that if China was smart they would switch sides in the North Korean standoff or at least call for the man-child to stand down…something they now seem somewhat to be doing.

But if truth be told an actual outward switching of sides will not be that simple for China to do what with China being a big brother, a mother, a father, and an overseer all rolled into one in regards to North Korea. And this is but a symbiotic relationship that started when China’s Chairman Mao sent more than a million Chinese troops to fight in the Korean War, and that very act directly afforded Kim Jong-un’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, the ability to keep control of the northern half of the Korean peninsula. But as the years have unfolded, China ever so slowly has started to see and digest the reality that the current regime of Kim Jong-un has done absolutely nothing to benefit China’s growing national interests nor for its growing economy…in fact the man-child has actually harmed China’s long-coveted super-power status in certain key ways.

How so…with North Korea having the nuclear bomb…albeit at this time minus a successful delivery system…which in time please know they will get…and with North Korea lying on China’s eastern border…they can and do try to pretend that they are a major power broker. And as such with both threats and accusations they have held the true power brokers at bay…power brokers including China, Russia, and until just recently these United States.

Thankfully, that scenario changed for the U.S. when President Trump recently ordered U.S. warships and aircraft carriers to the waters off North Korea’s coast.

So, if an actual switching of sides by China might not be realistically feasible at this given point in time what with Chinese so-called ‘saving face’ also coming into play…know that in the near future it just might happen. And why…because China can ill-afford having a loon next door going ‘rogue’ without warning, and because the Chinese know that the U.S. dollar is mightier than North Korea’s saber rattling sword.

And how so…first let’s look at a few key number facts* about both China’s and our U.S. economy and see who, if anybody, actually holds the much needed upper hand and why they do so.

Fact: China, thanks to rapid industrialization, is the world’s largest economy with $21.27 trillion in 2016 (with the allowing for adjusted purchasing power parity which is simply the exchange rate between two currencies equaling the ratio of the currencies’ respective purchasing power); the European Union is second at $19.1 trillion; and the United States, thanks to Obama’s total economic disasters, is now in third place at $18.5 trillion. But even with this China’s economic growth slowed to 7.7% last year, it continues to show some signs of decelerating further. This has certain trading partners worried, especially those that export a lot of resources to China…trading partners like Brazil and Australia.

But for China this slowdown in growth is not necessarily a bad thing as a slowing down usually does happen after years of rapid growth. And China has had an eight-fold increase in living standards in a mere 30 years…an increase that took the U.S. 122 years and Japan about 80 years to achieve. Or as economist Barry Naughton states, “China’s growth is slowing in part because it has graduated early.”

Fact: as of this past February the U.S. debt to China stands at $1.059 trillion and climbing…as in 27.8% of the $3.8 trillion in Treasury bills, notes, and bonds held by foreign countries. The rest of the $19.9 trillion national debt is owned by either the American people or by the U.S. government itself, and that once thought unimaginable number of monies owed is again thanks to the free-for-all spending of one Barack HUSSEIN Obama.

Fact: China exported about $482 billion in goods to the U.S.in 2015 (the latest finalized numbers available), more than any other country who exported goods to the U.S., and that is according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative. However, we exported just $116 billion in goods to China during the same year, putting our goods trade deficit at $366 billion.

Fact: China buys U.S. debt to support the value of the dollar. And why…because China ties in its currency (the yuan) to the U.S. dollar, and devalues said currency when needed to keep its export prices competitive.

And much to the chagrin of so many, it appears on the surface that it is China who holds the upper hand in regards to the above facts for China’s role as America’s largest banker, if you will, gives her needed bargaining leverage no matter how the media tries to claim it does not. And China quite often, and not so quietly, states that it will sell off part of its U.S. holdings (and that includes its land holdings) if we continue to pressure her to raise the yuan’s value. In fact, since 2005, China raised the yuan’s value by 33% against the dollar, and between 2014 and 2015, the dollar’s strength increased by 25% causing China to allow the value of the yuan to decline. And why did they allow this…simply…this decline allowed China’s exports to remain competitive with Asian countries that did not tie their currency to the U.S. dollar.

So where exactly does our economic upper hand come in or do we actually have one at all? First, to outwardly gain the economic upper hand within a short period of time some say we can always place tariffs of up to 45% (remember President Trump spoke about that during the campaign) on goods coming into the U.S. from China. However, doing this would actually hurt both our countries as we are a prime export market for Chinese goods, and so in turn U.S. companies would lose access to China’s growing middle class.

And then China, a country who has now for all intents and purposes actually embraced capitalism, can always choose to rid itself of its U.S. Treasuries which would negatively affect U.S. financial markets by its causing so-called downward ‘shifts’ in the dollar or interest rates.

So where does our economic upper hand really lie…it lies with the fact that as China’s economy continues to develop no matter a temporary slowdown, they are now being forced to pay their workers more which in turn sees low-cost manufacturing jobs leaving China for even lower-cost countries like Vietnam, Bangladesh, and even (gasp) Mexico. And as per The Washington Post, China has also exhausted most of what economists call ‘catch-up’ growth from acquiring the technologies of more advanced markets for as countries catch up and get richer, their economic growth just tends to slow…and might I add while our economic growth is finally moving forward instead of just holding steady.

So how and why does all this affect China’s sudden cooperation in reigning in North Korea’s man-child Kim Jong-un…or at least their trying to. First, China is North Korea’s chief economic so-called ‘pipeline’ and that means they supply Kim Jong-un with the oil and coal needed to keep his country operational, meaning if said oil and coal is not supplied then the North Korean economy…no matter how unstable it already is…would totally collapse in full.

Second, if that collapse did happen the Kim family dynasty would obviously come to an end, which in turn could lead to a unified Korea (which by the way will eventually happen) led by the South, which is home to tens of thousands of American soldiers sitting right on China’s border. And lastly, that would be coupled with countless numbers of refugees from the north flooding into China which would negatively impact their economy…that is unless beneficial economic trade agreements were reached between Beijing and Washington…trade agreements that would bring into China enough cash to balance out all the new mouths they would now be forced to feed.

And how does this new cooperation in turn affect the U.S…it allows the U.S. to have leverage over both any new trade agreements reached as the Chinese now know they need the increased trade and resulting cash flow in case Kim Jong-un does the unthinkable…as in turn on the so-called Chinese hand that feeds them. And that possibility is now starting to loom large what with China now doing what Kim Jong-un never thought they would do…as in suspend all imports of North Korean coal for the rest of this year.

So in the end when push comes to shove, China does need us more than we need them for the dollar is indeed mightier than Kim Jong-un’s ever threatening sword.

By: Diane Sori / The Patriot Factor / Right Side Patriots           _________________________________                                                                        *Number facts cited from Real Money, The Washington Post, and The Balance

Copyright © 2017 Diane Sori / The Patriot Factor  _______________________________________________________

RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS…LIVE!

Today, Tuesday, April 25th from 7 to 9pm EST on American Political Radio, RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS Craig Andresen and Diane Sori discuss who has the upper hand in regards to North Korea, misplaced indignation from both sides of the political isle, and important news of the week.

Hope you an tune in at: http://bit.ly/2cpXuRd

The post The Upper Hand Remains Ours appeared first on Tea Party Tribune.

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The Upper Hand Remains Ours

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The Upper Hand Remains Ours

Thanks to President Trump, China appears to be trying to reign in the insane North Korean man-child Kim Jong-un for China’s President Xi Jinping understands well that the U.S. could and most likely will take unilateral action against the North Korean dictator if he keeps up his saber rattling and rocket launching.

And with President Xi saying that China “is committed to the target of de-nuclearization on the peninsula, safeguarding peace and stability on the peninsula, and advocates resolving problems through peaceful means,” it becomes apparent that Xi knows that to do so would benefit China’s economic pocketbook…but is there actually more to his words and even more at stake than seen at first glance.

And yes…there is more at stake…much more…what with Kim Jong-un now threatening not just South Korea and Japan but threatening also to do a “mighty pre-emptive strike against the U.S.”…that is if his rockets do not keep falling into the sea. And these recent threats have seen China moving its military towards their shared border because Xi is wise enough to know that first, a war on the Korean peninsula would not serve China’s said pocketbook nor its pecking order on the world stage well and second, he also knows that a loony man-child like Kim Jung-un could just as easily turn on China… the very country that made and still finances his dictatorial bed.

In other words, while both China’s government and her people know they would suffer and suffer greatly on the economic front if war did indeed break out, they also know that both prestige and regional influence not only comes into play, but that sometimes those two factors trump even the economic scenario. And that is why President Trump tried to put the ball back in our court when he told President Xi in a recent telephone conversation that “a trade deal with the U.S. will be far better for them (China) if they solve the North Korean problem!”

Translation: Trump made it clear that China must, no matter the cost to them, reign in Kim Jong-un for China not only needs bi-lateral trade deals and investments with the U.S., but with us now flexing our military muscle the dynamics in both the Middle East and the Far East have changed…as in the U.S. is now leading from the front having replaced Obama’s leading from behind.

And that particular dynamic has common sense dictating that if China was smart they would switch sides in the North Korean standoff or at least call for the man-child to stand down…something they now seem somewhat to be doing.

But if truth be told an actual outward switching of sides will not be that simple for China to do what with China being a big brother, a mother, a father, and an overseer all rolled into one in regards to North Korea. And this is but a symbiotic relationship that started when China’s Chairman Mao sent more than a million Chinese troops to fight in the Korean War, and that very act directly afforded Kim Jong-un’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, the ability to keep control of the northern half of the Korean peninsula. But as the years have unfolded, China ever so slowly has started to see and digest the reality that the current regime of Kim Jong-un has done absolutely nothing to benefit China’s growing national interests nor for its growing economy…in fact the man-child has actually harmed China’s long-coveted super-power status in certain key ways.

How so…with North Korea having the nuclear bomb…albeit at this time minus a successful delivery system…which in time please know they will get…and with North Korea lying on China’s eastern border…they can and do try to pretend that they are a major power broker. And as such with both threats and accusations they have held the true power brokers at bay…power brokers including China, Russia, and until just recently these United States.

Thankfully, that scenario changed for the U.S. when President Trump recently ordered U.S. warships and aircraft carriers to the waters off North Korea’s coast.

So, if an actual switching of sides by China might not be realistically feasible at this given point in time what with Chinese so-called ‘saving face’ also coming into play…know that in the near future it just might happen. And why…because China can ill-afford having a loon next door going ‘rogue’ without warning, and because the Chinese know that the U.S. dollar is mightier than North Korea’s saber rattling sword.

And how so…first let’s look at a few key number facts* about both China’s and our U.S. economy and see who, if anybody, actually holds the much needed upper hand and why they do so.

Fact: China, thanks to rapid industrialization, is the world’s largest economy with $21.27 trillion in 2016 (with the allowing for adjusted purchasing power parity which is simply the exchange rate between two currencies equaling the ratio of the currencies’ respective purchasing power); the European Union is second at $19.1 trillion; and the United States, thanks to Obama’s total economic disasters, is now in third place at $18.5 trillion. But even with this China’s economic growth slowed to 7.7% last year, it continues to show some signs of decelerating further. This has certain trading partners worried, especially those that export a lot of resources to China…trading partners like Brazil and Australia.

But for China this slowdown in growth is not necessarily a bad thing as a slowing down usually does happen after years of rapid growth. And China has had an eight-fold increase in living standards in a mere 30 years…an increase that took the U.S. 122 years and Japan about 80 years to achieve. Or as economist Barry Naughton states, “China’s growth is slowing in part because it has graduated early.”

Fact: as of this past February the U.S. debt to China stands at $1.059 trillion and climbing…as in 27.8% of the $3.8 trillion in Treasury bills, notes, and bonds held by foreign countries. The rest of the $19.9 trillion national debt is owned by either the American people or by the U.S. government itself, and that once thought unimaginable number of monies owed is again thanks to the free-for-all spending of one Barack HUSSEIN Obama.

Fact: China exported about $482 billion in goods to the U.S.in 2015 (the latest finalized numbers available), more than any other country who exported goods to the U.S., and that is according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative. However, we exported just $116 billion in goods to China during the same year, putting our goods trade deficit at $366 billion.

Fact: China buys U.S. debt to support the value of the dollar. And why…because China ties in its currency (the yuan) to the U.S. dollar, and devalues said currency when needed to keep its export prices competitive.

And much to the chagrin of so many, it appears on the surface that it is China who holds the upper hand in regards to the above facts for China’s role as America’s largest banker, if you will, gives her needed bargaining leverage no matter how the media tries to claim it does not. And China quite often, and not so quietly, states that it will sell off part of its U.S. holdings (and that includes its land holdings) if we continue to pressure her to raise the yuan’s value. In fact, since 2005, China raised the yuan’s value by 33% against the dollar, and between 2014 and 2015, the dollar’s strength increased by 25% causing China to allow the value of the yuan to decline. And why did they allow this…simply…this decline allowed China’s exports to remain competitive with Asian countries that did not tie their currency to the U.S. dollar.

So where exactly does our economic upper hand come in or do we actually have one at all? First, to outwardly gain the economic upper hand within a short period of time some say we can always place tariffs of up to 45% (remember President Trump spoke about that during the campaign) on goods coming into the U.S. from China. However, doing this would actually hurt both our countries as we are a prime export market for Chinese goods, and so in turn U.S. companies would lose access to China’s growing middle class.

And then China, a country who has now for all intents and purposes actually embraced capitalism, can always choose to rid itself of its U.S. Treasuries which would negatively affect U.S. financial markets by its causing so-called downward ‘shifts’ in the dollar or interest rates.

So where does our economic upper hand really lie…it lies with the fact that as China’s economy continues to develop no matter a temporary slowdown, they are now being forced to pay their workers more which in turn sees low-cost manufacturing jobs leaving China for even lower-cost countries like Vietnam, Bangladesh, and even (gasp) Mexico. And as per The Washington Post, China has also exhausted most of what economists call ‘catch-up’ growth from acquiring the technologies of more advanced markets for as countries catch up and get richer, their economic growth just tends to slow…and might I add while our economic growth is finally moving forward instead of just holding steady.

So how and why does all this affect China’s sudden cooperation in reigning in North Korea’s man-child Kim Jong-un…or at least their trying to. First, China is North Korea’s chief economic so-called ‘pipeline’ and that means they supply Kim Jong-un with the oil and coal needed to keep his country operational, meaning if said oil and coal is not supplied then the North Korean economy…no matter how unstable it already is…would totally collapse in full.

Second, if that collapse did happen the Kim family dynasty would obviously come to an end, which in turn could lead to a unified Korea (which by the way will eventually happen) led by the South, which is home to tens of thousands of American soldiers sitting right on China’s border. And lastly, that would be coupled with countless numbers of refugees from the north flooding into China which would negatively impact their economy…that is unless beneficial economic trade agreements were reached between Beijing and Washington…trade agreements that would bring into China enough cash to balance out all the new mouths they would now be forced to feed.

And how does this new cooperation in turn affect the U.S…it allows the U.S. to have leverage over both any new trade agreements reached as the Chinese now know they need the increased trade and resulting cash flow in case Kim Jong-un does the unthinkable…as in turn on the so-called Chinese hand that feeds them. And that possibility is now starting to loom large what with China now doing what Kim Jong-un never thought they would do…as in suspend all imports of North Korean coal for the rest of this year.

So in the end when push comes to shove, China does need us more than we need them for the dollar is indeed mightier than Kim Jong-un’s ever threatening sword.

By: Diane Sori / The Patriot Factor / Right Side Patriots           _________________________________                                                                        *Number facts cited from Real Money, The Washington Post, and The Balance

Copyright © 2017 Diane Sori / The Patriot Factor  _______________________________________________________

RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS…LIVE!

Today, Tuesday, April 25th from 7 to 9pm EST on American Political Radio, RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS Craig Andresen and Diane Sori discuss who has the upper hand in regards to North Korea, misplaced indignation from both sides of the political isle, and important news of the week.

Hope you an tune in at: http://bit.ly/2cpXuRd

The post The Upper Hand Remains Ours appeared first on Tea Party Tribune.

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