Acquiescence

You never know which match is going to start the fire.

Take China. If there's one thing I liked about Donald Trump (and there was only one, trust me), it was his willingness to call out China.

Long the manipulator of its citizenry, ignorer of trademarks and an all-star violator of human rights, China has an astonishing ability to hypnotize its trading partners into believing it is a trustworthy and egalitarian one.

China is the con man who can bedazzle the world into believing, well, practically anything. Like all successful cons, it uses the greed of its marks to compromise them.

And when hypnosis doesn't work, there is always the bludgeon of cheap labor and those 1.3 billion potential consumers.

We pretended Google wasn't kowtowing to China's oppressive leadership and constructing search engines that prevented Chinese citizens from reading anything their government didn't want them to read, making Google one of the world's most powerful and wealthiest corporations in the process.

We ignored it when Beijing suppressed Olympic coverage it didn't deem consistent with its public relations campaigns, and pretended that Beijing's air quality was great, its citizenry free to express any degree of dissatisfaction with their government they wished and that Tiananmen Square never, ever happened because, after all, no one could find proof of it on a Google search.

Gosh. I could go on and on and on.

In our corporation's desire to make ever-greater amounts of money, and in our own unfortunate acceptance of it, we have shown our true colors. Yeah, democracy is nice and everything, but more than that we prize abundant and inexpensive labor. Corpulent profit margins. Expanding market share. Wealth creation with ceilings like the Sistine Chapel.

That's what we really want.

And China is only too happy to supply it—as long as we turn a blind eye to things like currency manipulation, intellectual property abuses and the Muslim internment camps in western China.

The very corporations who have gone hand-in-hand with Republican policies that diminished the American worker (and subsequently, their ability to consume) now turn to China to keep those bonus checks rolling into the executive suite.

And so it goes.

In our greed, we have ceded the manufacture of practically everything to China. This includes our prescription drugs and the weaponry which constitutes our national defense. The geniuses in the corporate penthouse have eagerly unzipped their flys and allowed China to grab their testes and give them a good twist in exchange for ever larger stacks o' cash.

And who doesn't think that's a good thing?

But every now and then there's someone who didn't read the memo.

I have only to point to Houston Rocket's GM Daryl Morey, whose earnest tweet in support of the Hong Kong demonstrations upset the apple cart. Instead of following protocol and politely ignoring the fart in the elevator, Morey essentially asked “who farted?”

And after so many years of blind obedience, China is upset with us. Is America discovering its conscience?

NBA commissioner Adam Silver, caught between the NBA's expanding business and defending a core value of the United States, wisely choose the latter, further exacerbating the Chinese.

They are burning NBA jerseys and pulling the plug on NBA telecasts and all sorts of horrible things.

Bad America! Bad!

Perhaps. But I'm fine with it. The NBA needs money like I need an elevated cholesterol count. As a radicalized socialist (per our president), it is my opinion that our relationship with China stinks. It is nothing but a museum-worthy exhibit of our hypocrisy.

I am both shamed and highly-concerned by it.

And speaking of shame, I only wish LeBron James had an ounce or two. 

Despite his highly-publicized Twitter exchanges with President Petulant, James is as complicit as any other businessman. When faced with re-thinking his relationship with a plainly amoral government or sustaining his already-exorbitant revenue stream, he chose the latter.

You sure you're anti-Trump LeBron? 

The season doesn't start for another six days. Like James, many of us should take some time off and get a clue and calculate exactly what those low prices and our relationship with China costs.