(Townhall)
President Trump’s trade negotiations with China have revealed a great deal about American politics and the current psyche of far too many.
From a purely logical perspective, the move to rein in China’s rapacious practices of intellectual property theft, espionage, product dumping, forced technology transfer, industrial subsidies, and various barriers against American goods should be an across-the-board, nonpartisan, widely-supported move.
But clearly, that has not been the case. Personal gain through contacts with China (some legitimate, some corrupt) by elected officials, a warped understanding of the concept of free trade (how can trade be free if one side plays by the rules but the other does not?), a belief that some consumer pain may result from a clamp down on Beijing’s practices, a concern that China will cease to fund Washington’s out of control deficit spending, and, quite bluntly, a belief by some, exclusively on the Left, that somehow America has a moral obligation to disperse its prosperity throughout the world at the expense of the American worker, have all come together to limit enthusiasm for Trump’s initiative.
China’s contributions to the Democratic Party, particularly Bill Clinton’s presidential re-election campaign, (Clinton allowed the sale to Beijing the supercomputer that gave that nation’s military the chance to catch up to the U.S.; he also signed legislation allowed China open and continuous access to the U.S.) and suspected financial ties to the Clinton Foundation are only part of the story. Read more