Adam at PRD takes Marjorie Taylor Greene to task for a spectacularly…well, just plain stupid post:
Having any of it, Adam? No sir, Adam most certainly is not.
This was on Gab. Check out the number of likes and comments. If you have any familiarity with Gab, those sort of numbers are about the highest an individual can generate on that platform. So a lot of people are in agreement with this nonsense.
And nonsense it most certainly is. Let’s examine each sentence in turn.
The Taliban have already felt the full force of the US military for the last twenty years. And they delivered it a resounding defeat. This is so obtuse that it makes Biden look like a certified genius. What sort of nation feels the right to make demands of this sort to another government of whom it has only just run away from with its tail firmly between its legs? Perhaps the Japs could have said something similar at the end of the Second World War.
The second sentence is even better, which is hard to believe is possible. The Taliban must stand down? After they just won the war, kicked you out and captured all of your military hardware which you left behind in your undignified rush for the exits? What planet are these people on? Do the Americans even realise that they have just lost a twenty year war against tribal insurgents? Again?? Tone deaf doesn’t even begin to cover this blather.
Sentence number three is the icing on the cake. Have you heard that, you Taliban naughty persons? This is NOT a negotiation. You have been told by the great school marm herself. Why, those Taliban dudes must be shaking in their boots so hard that the movement of their beards is causing all the wind turbines in the world to actually be cost efficient.
Listen America – you’re not the biggest and the bestest and the greatest and the invinciblest anymore. Your shock and awe is just a distant memory. Now it’s more like cock and bore. Your exuberant self-belief in your own righteousness and superiority just makes you look ridiculous and weak. America is Will Farrell running down the race circuit convinced that he won the race when he actually lost. It is Ben Stiller as Zoolander making an acceptance speech for a modeling award that he also just lost.
America has become its own parody.
That’s about the size of it, yeah. Up till now, I’ve had no real problem with MTG at all, and in fact kinda liked her. After this thunderous self-beclownment, though, a reconsideration of my position might be in order. Her heart might be in the right place, but the sentiment is, ohh, about eighteen years too late.
Sorry, Marge, but we all need to get our heads firmly around the essential fact that countries which LOSE wars don’t get to go around threatening the winners. Doing so can only make the loser-nation look even more foolish and ineffectual than it already did. When your massive, hi-tech military machine has just been sent packing in humiliating disarray by a bunch of stone-age, cave-dwelling goatherds riding mules, a bit of humility and introspection might be more in order.
Not that I consider it to be the fault of grunt-level US soldiers, mind. They, too, have been abused, manipulated, and betrayed by the most hideous “leadership” class in human history. But still. Until such time as the pus-nutted filthwads who ARE reponsible have received the full dose of retributive justice that’s their due and proper, we’ll all be better off if we just eschew any more fist-waving and empty windbaggery.
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I suspect this will be the first of many, many, many examples to come of DC beltway bubble dwellers demonstrating that they did not get the memo about the US’ place in the world order having slipped a few notches. These people are still living in the late 90s or early aughts, viewing the world through the ‘US is the world’s sole hyper-power’ lens. Such people are in for a very nasty shock — or five, or ten — when US threats and bluster no longer get a respectful hearing but instead draw scornful laughter. And it won’t be long after that when they also find lots of people refusing to accept the US dollar for purchases. You want steel, or cars, or computer chips? Pay in hard currency only, please. Yuan preferred.
The Yuan is about as hard as Biteme’s brain matter. Mush.
The biggest issue around the world is EVERY currency is still worse foundationally than the US$.
How do you think Europe and Japan have negative bond interest rates? The only way to get there is to flood the market with Euros and Yen.
How do you think the ChiCom Banking System stays solvent when they’re riddled with bad loans given out to chosen entities by Xi and the CCP to keep them propped up. Absent massive money printing in the PRC which is laundered through the State Owned and Controlled Banks (the CCP Government are still the largest single shareholders with 40-49% stakes in their Big Four) those entities cannot pay back their loans. It’s the old lend new money to pay back the old loans plus interest or else they’ll go bad scam. Once banks are lending new money to cover loans that can’t be paid back the “throwing good money after bad” strategy signals an insolvent banking system.
Even the Swiss Franc money supply is skyrocketing.
Name any country you think might have a shot at replacing the US$ and I’ll go through the data and find its own currency sham.
Everyone else has trouble too — this is certainly true. But the US dollar has been the world reserve currency largely because of the quasi-imperial position of the US as world policeman. The US owns and operates the monetary systems, and the US has been the ‘big stick’ for imposing financial sanctions and backing them up with force. The credibility keeping that stable just took a serious hit.
There was also the legacy of the petro dollar system, with established money flows from the period when the US was the world’s biggest oil importer. Hmmm, could the left be trying (intentionally or by accident) to revive the petro dollar by destroying American oil production? That would be so stupid it might almost qualify as mad genius.
Anyway, the key point I was trying to make is that anyone who wants real goods is going to have pay in a form China will accept, since they have the manufacturing base. Maybe that will be yuan, maybe it will IMF SDRs, maybe it will be gold, maybe it will be food. But it will have to be something China wants, and Joe’s Big Kabul Adventure has made it a lot easier for the Chinese to demand something other than dollars.
I get what you’re saying Haz. I don’t think the dollar is done as world currency though. It’s not just because we were the world police; we bought the goods. China can insist on payment in dog doo. If we don’t agree then china is the one that doesn’t sell. So, it works two ways and the consumer is sometimes king. Much of the shit coming from china is junk we can do without. I don’t know the ratio of junk to required but I’d bet it’s not very high on the required end.
There is no other currency to consider, dollar or yuan. I’m not seeing the strength of the yuan.
We’re not dead, not yet anyway. We’re still the greatest economy on earth.
Otherwise known as the RenMinBi.
In terms of end products purchased by consumers, you’re right, it’s mostly stuff we don’t need. But the PRC produces a lot of components and industrial equipment. I think the disruption of stuff we need would be major if we completely stopped traffic. Of course, they’d be hurt at least as bad as we would.
There are certainly items that we need and stopping the flow would be painful. But as you point out, that works both ways.
And we can make what we need or source it from somewhere else should the absolute need arise.
For quite a lot of things, there are no other sources than China these days. Alternatives could be found (or created, as would be necessary in many cases) but it would take significant time to do so. During that gap, we pay what China demands or do without.
Rare earth elements are one thing that is often mentioned in this category. While they are not truly rare, most of them are environmentally messy to produce and refine. So production was outsourced to China to make our greens feel good about themselves, even as the ‘green tech’ they demand we use more of requires ever greater amounts of these materials. Which means more pollution in China and running down the rivers into the Pacific Ocean, not that the greens care about that. It is an article of leftist faith that only America pollutes.
A lot of basic industrial materials and equipment is only made in China these days. I know people who used to work in these sectors, and the companies that used to make them in the US don’t exist anymore. The Chinese bought up or stole the IP, under cut on prices, and now it just is not done in the US. More critically, the knowledge of how to make them is no longer available in the US. The companies are gone, the machine tools and dies and such are gone, the people with the operational knowledge of how to run them are retired or dead. Rebuilding that base of knowledge would take a LOT of time and money, even if we wanted/needed to do so.
This problem affects tons of stuff. Computer chips is the example that has gotten a lot of attention recently, but it is all over the place in many industries that are not thought of as being especially high tech.
Like computer chips, many of these things were invented and developed in the US but are no longer made here. And if we had to recreate the knowledge base and operational processes and tooling for them, it would take years and a whole lot of money. It could be done, with sufficient determination, but we would be starting generations behind the current state of the art.
Could we find workarounds if we absolutely had to? Yes, in most cases. But it would be a lot lower tech than people have gotten used to using. Do you really need a dashboard touchscreen run by a 2 nm computer chip in your new pickup truck to change the radio station? Of course not; ergonomically some buttons or dials are almost certainly better and safer. But every new vehicle is loaded with chips these days…IF the auto makers can find some.
The modern world and modern military hardware being what they are, I don’t think the US would have the several years required to retool and rebuild our industries should we find outselves in open conflict with China. We had best hope that does not happen. However bad it might be for China, it would certainly be very, very bad for the US.
I work as an engineer in industry so I am aware of what you say. There is no way to untangle ourselves from china on the cheap, without pain, or quickly.
And it will never be done without it being a crisis. Trump started the process and did it in a way that created the least amount of pain. The crisis was in china…
Military? Any war between the USA and China will be nuclear, otherwise it doesn’t happen. That’s with sane people at the helm of the US of course, ones that haven’t sold out to the CCP. The nuke systems are hardened and from what I gather, rely on 100% verified hardware platforms.
China is still a paper tiger. It has all kinds of weak spots. The CCP doesn’t care if a few million, or 100 million+ people die, but they do care if the aftermath leaves them dead or impoverished. If we had leadership that cared about our country china would be a much smaller problem.
Our problem isn’t china, it’s ourselves.
If we have to buy Yuan and sell dollars to buy their goods then the Yuan will soar in value and their products would become far too expensive and send manufacturing fleeing right back to the US.
Which is the point I make. For 30 years the ChiComs have had to keep the Yuan from rising in value by soaking up the dollars we paid because their own manufacturers needed to buy Yuan to cover their costs which are all in Yuan. To do this the ChiComs had to print massive amount of Yuan so their Central Bank can buy the US$ excess. This keeping their domestic money supply soaring but their Yuan exchange rate devalued to keep their good competitive. They in turn were buying US Treasury assets which kept our interest rates low. Part of the problem in 2008 as our deficits soared was the ChiComs began buying things in Africa and hard assets with their dollars. Thus the Fed had to step in and buy the US Treasury assets. I believe the ChiComs are still replacing their maturing UST with new issuance still.
It’s a Catch-22 for them now though. If they jump off they assure their own destruction. If they continue their bad loans and domestic money supply growth gets out of hand.
Trump saw this. We hold the cards here, not them. Just forcing the status quo to change forces them to jump one way or another which ends in their collapse.
Which is why it was imperative that Trump go. Which was why they had to release the WuFlu and run the Scamdemic to Steal The Election. The jig was up otherwise.
Kenny has it, good explanation.
There is no painless way for either of us to exit but under Trump we were taking advantage of our strengths to do it.
The “pain” was higher interest rates on our part.
Except higher interest rates also help Americans. Why? We have savings. We get more income from higher interest rates.
I used to read Grant’s Interest Rate Observer starting in the early 90’s when a trader mentoring me gave me the biweekly newsletter after he read it. In 1908-9 JP Morgan RAISED interest rates but lent only to solvent banks who had good portfolios with liquidity problems. In 1919, the first crisis the Fed faves they did the same. You let bad banks fail, lend to good banks but lend at high interest rates.
It was in the 1920’s when the Fed started playing low interest rates and foreign exchange games to try to solve “downturns”. Downturns are normal. The idea is to shake out the bad and RAISE interest rates to get capital flowing into the system.
When they started doing things differently in the 20’s until now we’ve ended up with gold standard failing, then Bretton Woods failing and ending the international gold standard and will soon end the fiat currency system.
Although I am still leery of the “bitcoin” standard.
How can one “mine” bitcoins. It makes a mockery of e-Currency. There should be a fixed amount of it and that’s all.
Yea, with you on bitcoins. It’s like the federal government mining dollars out of thin air.
We already have enough of that.
Financial history pre-Federal Reserve is fascinating to study — it is like an entirely different world from today. The economy had cycles of booms and busts, similar to today, but some of the busts were deflationary and some were inflationary. Since the Federal Reserve was created they have all been inflationary. Laws and policies have been permanently biased in favor of debtors, who benefit from inflation and are harmed by deflation, rather than in favor of savers, who are hurt by inflation and benefit from (or at least are much less harmed by) deflation.
Except for the Deflation of the Great Depression.
But the Fed was constricted back then by the Gold Standard. FDR fixed that and dropped the Domestic Gold Standard. But it wasn’t enough. Then we had a few years in the 50s that had consumer price deflation. Then LBJ wanted his Guns and Butter. It was Nixon though that ended the last vestiges of Gold money.
Since JFK I don’t think we’ve had one year without Inflation in consumer prices and certainly not in Money Supply Growth.
Agree, kennycan. Trump was trying to shift the incentive structure, so that our imbalances with China would start to correct themselves over time. Trying to just sever connections with China would have terrible fallout for both them and us, and if pushed too hard would almost certainly result in a war. But just continuing as things are is not sustainable either. There is going to be serious pain ahead no matter what.
I don’t know, I’m not seeing anything wrong with what she said –
The talibums have never felt the full force of the American military as it was never unleashed. In the few cases where it was uncorked a bit the local group of bums were devastated.
Will we unleash the military? No. That is clear.
I wouldn’t negotiate either.
I think her comment is directed at the biden regime, not the talibums..
I view it as setting up Obergroperdrüler for the fall when the Inevitable happens.
She knows they’ll never unleash the military because Stand Down and Fail The Mission is The Plan.