Killing the Goose that Lays Golden Eggs

I am mean when I talk about personalities for whom I hold in great contempt: people like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Antony Blinken, Llyod Austin, Katherine Tai, Nicholas Burns and last but not least Gina Raimondo. The entire echelon of Biden’s team!

Harris, Raimondo, and Tai belong to the fairer sex but do they justify the connotation of the term 'fairer sex'? Certainly not to me! And do they have good brains? 

I should leave them to readers to judge since we have seen these two characters in action often. But we often hear that Harris is quite dumb and has long been sidelined to play an inconsequential role in the White House. As for the other two, Tai wants to show her peers that she is more anti-China than them. We have many such Chinese around.

And last but not least: Raimondo…

I love to hate Raimondo’s physiognomy; she looks so witchy! (How unkind of me! She had no say in the matter at all, right? But I always believe one's face will be slowly shaped by his or true true character. An evil person will carry a kind of sinister look; a con-man will also wear a certain fake note on his face. Cannot run, lah!)

I have written about Raimondo’s background before – born 1971 of Italian descent, earlier career as a lawyer venture capitalist, later governor of Rhode Island from 2015 to 2021, and became Biden’s commerce secretary when the latter become the US president. There is no doubt that she was academically a high achiever. She did her undergraduate Arts at Harvard College and qualified with a JD degree from Yale in 1998. She also won a Rhode scholarship to Oxford where she received her PhD in Sociology in 2002. Apparently, her father spent his entire his career at the Bulova watch factory and when the company decamped operations to China, he lost his job at 56. This might explain her hatred for China.

Great academic credentials do not mean she has got a good brain.

We all heard that several of the big American IT companies are making representations to the Commerce Department to remove the restrictions placed on the export of their wares to China. What shocks Jeffrey Sachs – in an interview on the subject I recently watched on video – is the department’s close-to-zero understanding of the ABC of business, i.e., to make money. The strength or competitiveness of these American firms lies basically in their ability to stay ahead in technology. To stay ahead, you need to spend money on R&D. And the money must come from profits. Where can you make great profits? China of course! No country can replace China in terms of appetite!

And Chinese are hell of an innovative people. With America’s wares, they make products that consumers all over the world want and can afford to pay. Remove this basic linkage, everybody cries!

Lesson 101 in International Economics, Period. Yet, according to Sachs, this ABC is something they do not seem to understand.

I do not believe these bureaucrats do not understand such basics. I contend that they have a boss who simply hates China, and she wants to outdo everyone in their zeal to make China pay. Of course, this Lesson 101 is too much of a fuss for Sleepy Joe to care.

Yet, she is waiting for her invitation to go to China. She thinks she can outsmart China. 

Let’s see.