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.
 

The Battle of Hong Kong

I love protests. I love the idea of people leaving the comfort of their homes to peacefully congregate en masse to explicitly communicate their displeasure with the prevailing government, its leader or pending legislation.

Petitions are nice. But nothing beats the visceral impact of hundreds of thousands of people clogging the streets. It's the power of we the people, challenging those who frequently work so hard to subdue it.

Sadly, my fellow Americans rarely agree. Probably because they're jaded. Or because protesting is sweaty. And noisy. And inconvenient. I mean, have you ever tried to find a good parking place near a major demonstration?

We mostly congregate on social media, which isn't quite the same. Unless you're trying to disseminate misinformation about things like measles vaccinations. Or attempting to create panic over fake threats like pink slime or a presidential candidate running a pedophile sex ring out of a Washington DC pizza joint.

But in hi-tech Hong Kong, people understand the power of a good, old-fashioned public demonstration. They have successfully employed them twice in the last decade to beat back the oppressive hand of mainland China.

Most-recently, invasive extradition legislation was suspended after mass protests clarified citizen's feelings about China's would-be ability to pluck residents out of Hong Kong and deposit them in China for any reason the government deems appropriate.

Considering this is a government that has attempted to erase any trace of Tiananmen Square, blocks its citizens from accessing vast swaths of the Internet (aided and abetted by Google) and routinely tramples its citizen's human rights, the good people of Hong Kong decided this wasn't such a good idea and took to the streets in opposition.

Chief Executive of Hong Kong Carrie Lam backed down and suspended the offending bill. But suspending is different than cancelling. Translated, it means we'll wait until this cools down and then attempt to push it through again.

The Hong Kong Chinese get it. Which is why they're continuing their protests, demanding that the extradition legislation be ripped-up and thrown away.

Hong Kong occupies a unique place within the Chinese hierarchy.

If China were a car manufacturer, Hong Kong would be its halo car; the car it likes to point to when it wants to show off its design and engineering capabilities. China likes to use Hong Kong as proof of its benign treatment of its citizens. A gesture to the world that says “See? We're not such bad guys.”

But this is essentially public relations. And with increasing evidence that China (like Trump's United States) wants to move forward on a path of strident nationalism, public relations will likely be among the first of its political victims.

I salute the bravery of Hong Kong's citizens, and wish them every success. Tyranny is the weapon of the weak. Dissent the weapon of the strong.

Godspeed, Hong Kong.

Voodoo and the Businessman Sleight of Hand

President Petulant likes to crow about his roaring economy, even though it has its origins in Barack Obama's first term. Confronted with this fact, the Trump-whore would no doubt maintain he was in fact Obama's economic advisor.

Or something like that.

Has Hollywood has ever imagined a reboot of Forrest Gump, with dick-swinging Donald as the driving force of virtually every important moment in (revisionist) American history? You know, composing his own take on the Gettysburg Address ("A country of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy..."), leading the Confederacy to victory in the Civil War and subduing Hitler and Tojo via Twitter taunts? 

Okay. So I keep my ears peeled for the roar, but I'm having trouble hearing it. Oh, I know the one-percent are gobbling up historic amounts of global and domestic wealth, aided and abetted by the Trump-whore's tax-cut-slash-bribe.

But what of the 99%?

I'll admit we're a bunch of lazy, shiftless slobs unworthy of anything but the barest solvency, but where's the roar in our economy?

The gig economy, in which people work several jobs to make ends meet, is alive and well. Contract employee by day, Lyft operator by night. While the stagnant wages that earmarked the days of the early-recovery have technically disappeared, increases are curiously low for an economy reportedly firing on all cylinders.

In a report recently released by the Associated Press, raises for executives at Fortune 500 companies averaged seven-percent, as opposed to just three-percent for rank and file employees. Elsewhere, raises for wee folk were a bit higher—3.4%—still low for an economy with record-low levels of unemployment.

During the boom of the nineteen-nineties, desperate employers were offering raises of up to 5% (not to mention signing bonuses and other incentives) to retain and hire badly-needed employees.

Something has changed.

The business class likes to cite the incredible pressure wrought by online and international competition as the reason for these smaller raises. Strangely, those stressors don't seem to have the same effect on executive compensation.

I wonder why?

Another curious aspect of our roaring economy is that a record seven-million Americans are more than three months behind on their car payments. That is more than were behind in the dark days of 2009 and 2010.

Republicans would no doubt explain this as the unfortunate result of stupid, ignorant minorities unable to budget their money. But think about it: how critical is your car to your job? Are you telling me people voluntarily put their jobs at risk in favor of a new plasma TV?

Or is there something else going on?

With employers picking up less and less of their employee's health care costs, paychecks are stretched further still. Add the skyrocketing cost of even garden-variety prescription drugs and you can practically see them evaporate.

And if you're a contract employee, well, you don't have any healthcare benefits, do you? 

But not to worry, because Big Pharma assures us very few consumers pay list price for their prescriptions drugs, and low-cost alternatives are available everywhere. Plus Republicans continue to maintain they're working on the best healthcare package ever!

We at The Square Peg have made this point before, but none of this just "happened”. It is deliberate. On purpose. And by design. It is the result of decades of business-inspired, Republican-enabled greed.

Furious with the mounting power of labor unions and the minimum wages of American workers, business sought cheaper sources of labor. Ever-cheaper raw materials and methods of production and distribution. They wanted to make more money.

You and your job? They were standing in their way.

Did you even say you were sorry?

While we might be guilty of over-simplification, America essentially sold its soul to China in exchange for bigger profits. Our Republican-enabled corporate behemoths gave away our nation's manufacturing base so that its executives could receive bigger bonuses.

So much of what you see around you is the fallout from that shift. And now in the midst of his re-election campaign, the Trump-whore wants to put the genie back in the bottle. 

Ha. Ha.

So yes. We have a roaring economy. Sad thing is, ninety-nine percent of us have been fitted with noise-cancelling headphones.