Help China, Destroy America

by Rabbi David Eidensohn

With the United State mired in Viet Nam, and Russia struggling with America for world domination, Richard Nixon played the "Chinese card." He went to Peking, and forged a mutually beneficial relationship. The Chinese were at that time having shooting battles with Russia, and its economy was in dire straits. Now America and China worked together, America extricated itself from Viet Nam, and American dollars and business flowed into China. Nixon then said, "Maybe I am creating a monster." Perhaps, at the time, he had to take a chance, and indeed, that chance brought many benefits. It was surely one of the reasons the Soviet Union threw in the towel and attempt at world domination. But Nixon was intelligent enough to realize that China was going to become a competitor with America, and would never become free and liberal. Thus, the time would come when China might be a "monster." Today, if we read the latest front page headlines in the New York Times, we realize that in economic terms, if in no other, China has become a competitor.

January 24, 2006, the New York Times tells us in a headline, "Ford Eliminating Up to 30,000 Job and 14 Factories." The article explained that America's car manufacturers were "hit hard by foreign competitors, who have taken more than 40 percent of the American market." Also, "The Big Three (automakers) are visibly shrinking." Thus, we in America spend fortunes on foreign cars. These foreign manufacturers then take our money and improve their plants, cut prices on cars, and resell them in America. American car manufacturers thus close down, firing tens of thousands of workers, who once made a good living, and who are now in big trouble. The loss to the local economies from the plants and workers sets off a ripple effect with more lost jobs and businesses. This process is not new, and it will only get worse. The Detroit News on January 26, 2006, announced "GM loses $4.8 billion in the fourth quarter." This follows the bankruptcy of former GM subsidiary Delphi Corp. But the New York Times on January 26, 2006 reported, "China Reports Another Year of Strong (or Even Better) Growth." The growth was about ten percent per year. For 25 years, Chinese exports have produced an economy with about 10 percent rise a year.

A clothing store owner told me the following. "We sell Spanish Blankets and British shirts. Both of them are manufactured in China." Textiles, once one of the most flourishing American industries, is now centered in China, and American simply cannot compete with the cheap or even slave labor available there. All over America, factories disappear as a result of Chinese and other foreign competition. Who created this economic terror? American business went to China to save a few dollars. They saved a few dollars, they made a few dollars, and they destroyed American manufacturing, and endangered its economy.

So what are we doing about it? Of course, the big economic players are simply rushing over to China to invest American dollars there to build huge factories to produce cheap goods to flood the American market and close down American manufacturing. Step two is for China to take this money and challenge America politically, even, as one recent Chinese general said, to consider nuclear war with America.

America is drunk with debt. The debt is so huge, in the trillions, that we cannot imagine it. In a few years, when the next generation retires, Social Security will have to find ten trillion dollars or so. This, on an economy that cannot even pay its present debts without borrowing by printing billions of dollars each year. An economy that must borrow billions of dollars each year to survive cannot pay ten trillion dollars of new debt.

So what does America do? More of the same. If you have money, take it to China. If you don't have money, well, do what the American government does, borrow.

Let us fear. Let us fear to lose our factories. Let us fear to lose thousands of jobs. Let us fear a government that keeps borrowing and doesn't do anything about the economic disaster awaiting us. By the way, where do we borrow the billions and trillions we need? Of course, from China. Indeed, China has so much of our debt, that if it wanted to call in its loans, America would be staggered mightily.

America is a country without fear. The politicians don't do anything about it because people are so busy saving three dollars buying a Chinese produced product that they don't worry about the future. One day, those who save three dollars will pay it back.