Ultimately, TACO!
Harvard, Diversity, Qatari
747, S Africa White Genocide, Etc
I am sure many readers would know what TACO stands for. But let me hold you in suspense until you have done justice to my effort, i.e., read until the end!
And I am sure readers have also developed fatigue syndrome on the very mention of the word tariff. I will talk about the subjects in the subtitles, but not in any particular order.
Not content with punishing Harvard with (a) freezing over $2.65 billion of federal research grants, (b) terminating of some $100 million of federal contracts, and (c) threatening the revocation of tax-exempt status – over accusations of antisemitism, “race discrimination” in admissions, and “diversity” practices – Trump is now blocking its international student enrolment, citing concerns of national security risks. International students account for 27% of its student body. And existing students have also to transfer to other universities if they want to continue their education in the country.
The primary reason for Trump’s fury, however, is believed to be his propensity to inflict vengeance on those who have not given him what he wants. It is believed that his youngest son Barron was not given a place in Harvard, hence the price Harvard must pay. The second reason is the high percentage of Chinese students in Harvard; the rest are really incidental.
Of course, Harvard is now suing. It has – with some $53 billion of endowments – the financial clout and the best of America’s legal minds. Commonsense says they are likely to win, but one can never tell now. The US justice system is no longer the type we used to admire anymore.
Although a federal judge has temporarily blocked this move, the fear and uncertainty that Trump has created is causing great hardships to these foreign students. The average cost of studying for a first degree in Harvard is estimated to be about $85K a year and you must be a top student to enrol into Harvard in the first place. Trump with a stroke of a pen has shattered the dreams of these most promising young men and women.
State Secretary Marco Rubio, who is still on China's sanctions list, has ordered all US embassies to suspend interviews for new applicants of foreign students. This is likely to cause many students to shy away from going to the US for their studies. This will put paid to new intakes, and the US runs the risk of losing tens of billions not only in fees but also in the university towns’ economy. And on Wednesday, he specifically announced that US will start “aggressively” revoking visas issued to Chinese students and will “enhance scrutiny” of applications from mainland China and Hong Kong. This is the latest version of the Chinese Exclusion Act!
Michio Kaku, who frequently appears on television and film, is a theoretical physicist and futurist, reminds Americans that the secret weapon of the country’s hitherto supremacy in science and technology is H-1B which allows US employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations – people with specialized knowledge – and many of whom go on to obtain Green Card.
(The number of H-1B visas issued each fiscal year is capped at 65,000, with an additional 20,000 visas available for individuals who have earned a master’s degree or higher from a U.S. institution. Sponsorship by an employer is required for applicants. There are some 600,000 H-1B visa holders in the US in 2024. Ethnic Chinese account for between 50,000 and 60,000 of them.)
But more devastatingly impacted are the China-born scientists, engineers and technologists who have grown deep roots in the US soils. (I no longer want to use the term Americans to describe US nationals now, for doing so, I will be unfair to millions of Canadians and Mexicans, let alone the people in Latin America.) Many are in the cutting edge of the various fields they are respectively in.
Many of these Chinese are exiting the US. These are the brains that the US can least afford to lose. (Be that as it may, SCMP reports that many Chinese students are undeterred; they are determined to go to America to pursue their American university dreams regardless. However, one has always to take SCMP with a pinch of salt on such matters!)
During a recent meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Trump claimed that Black South Africans were conducting "white genocide" in South Africa. Trump brought up the issue of land seizures and farm murders, even producing a picture of an incident that was actually taken in Congo. Ramaphosa dismissed the notion of "white genocide," explaining that South Africa is addressing historical land injustices through legal means and that violent crime affects all racial groups.
Activists and “what-to-be-politically-correct” institutions champion “diversity” as a commitment to inclusion across race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, but In Trump's vocabulary, it means unfairness and must be expunged. Trump argues that diversity initiatives (especially in hiring or education) prioritize identity over qualifications or performance. He criticizes Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts in the military, corporations, and universities, often labelling them as “Marxist” or “un-American”.
While it is true that in the past America tended to get too apologetic over the DEI issues and acted in ways that defy good sense, Trump’s drive against DEI, in my opinion, is anchored on his personal and political prejudices. His core base basically consists of people who feel they have left behind by demographic and cultural shifts. By positioning himself as a defender of "traditional" American values and institutions, he galvanizes support by portraying diversity efforts as:
- A threat to the white, working-class
identity.
- A form of reverse discrimination.
- A distraction from issues like the
economy, national security, or immigration.
Qatar’s ruling family, the Al Thani family, has a long history of using its huge wealth to build strong relationships with influential global leaders. Qatar and Trump’s business interests were at play here. Qatar had investments in Trump’s real estate projects, such as the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., and the Boeing 747 gift was seen as a way to bolster their business dealings with the Trump Organization. Qatar is also home to a major US military base, which plays a critical role in operations across the Middle East.
U.S. law requires high-level government officials, including the president, to report and declare any gifts they receive from foreign governments. Trump is treating it as if it is a gift for him to keep personally.
Trump claimed he could stop the Ukraine war within 24 hours. What happened? Putin plays him like a Rubik’s cube, and with one hand for that matter. He told Trudeau that it was time that Canada became the US’s 51st state. Carney asks him to go and “fly kite”. Ditto the Greenlanders.
India and the Philippines are perhaps the only non-Anglo-Saxon countries that truly believe in Trump. (Modi and Marcos Jr share a common type of genetic disorder with Trump which, with the help of DeepSeek, I have come to know as DEL1 – a “delusional gene” which the world may have to adopt when my thesis of them is accepted! Die-hard DPP leaders of Taiwan are another, but Taiwan is not a country. It is a renegade province; hence it is out of this count.) Hitherto US supporters like Japan, Korea, the EU have grown tired of Trump.
Trump can bully the weak, even though they know his lies. But it is the fear of the liar that makes them yield willingly. In the Geneva meet between Chinese and American trade negotiators, it was obvious that the US had folded to China, notwithstanding, Trump still wanted the world to believe that he had scored a win. Another perversion of the Trump kind.
Back to TACO. The acronym stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out”. It was coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong in early May after observing that Trump would always announce aggressive tariff measures only to retreat or soften them after market backlash or political pressure.
TACO will always hold true for everything that Trump brags!!! It is also a characteristic of those who suffer from DEL1.
End
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ReplyDeleteIndeed, anyone can be excused for suffering from an overdose of tariffinitis since the tariff matter won't finish.
Just as the markets were about to sigh relief when the US international court of trade adjudged Trump's tariffs were illegal, his appeal against the ban was upheld to pause the ban.
In which country can one find judicial provision to pause the ban of something illegal where pausing means tariff collections may continue however illegal they have been deemed?
So, what is the business world to make of it? If the ban is later upheld, will the tariffs collected be refunded to the importers? If the importers had prevailed upon the sellers to absorb some of the tariffs, will the sellers be compensated? What about the buyers of the tariffed goods who are the customers of the importers or their brokers and commission agents? Will they be compensated and how is the validation to be made? What about jobs and businesses lost from the tariff imposition besides the costs of logistics and re-routings? How about manufacturers who had been thinking of reshoring to the US albeit forced to do so because of the tariffs? Are they now to ring bells, burn incense, make offerings that Taco Bell the burger won't last until 2026 let alone 2028?
Also consider those millions of small parcels now tariffed when before they weren't; can their recipients make claims to the US customs office? In fact, can Amazon put back tariff details in its customer receipts so that buyers can know who really pays for the damage done?
Yet, he can resurrect his tariffs by other channels as it has become too obvious he can't be using his emergency act anymore; after all, if the trade imbalance was an emergency, how could it have been left unattended by past presidents for so long, for that matter by his own prevarications using his on-off, delayed-extended-negotiable tactics of escalation-deescalation? When someone is admitted into an emergency ward, no one is going to say wait 75-90 days, innit?
So, if he uses other channels, he will have to go through the US congress in which case at most, the tariffs will be 15% max for no more than 150 days unless he flexes it using his sharpie twice a year and/or go chasing non-trade countermeasures. But then if he does so, other countries can retaliate by hitting his US on its services surplus or banning sales to the US of rare earth magnets and other exotics like labubu toys and paracetamol. What a humongous headache.
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ReplyDeleteThat all this is however lost on Taco's administration is shown by the US sanctioning Huawei's AI chips, and banning export to China of the US' electronic-data-automation (formerly called computer-assisted-design) software, both after some inkling of concord at Geneva (just like Biden shaking hands in Bali). One asks who is the US to sanction a chip not of its production and how is the US to prevent the cloud timesharing of EDA software processing.
Push-comes-to-shove and China may well be excused for doing whatever it takes to acquire those tools including ASML's EUV although Beijing has moved to dewesternize China's applications end-to-end. Which means mealy and moronic USA loses China's annual USD300 Billion microchip market and further stands to lose by having to pay for new IP and standards. Meanwhile the world has eyes to see how the US is bullying China. The world will buy China first, USA last.
The US is not only bullying China, it has also bullied its own ivy leagues and their international students, especially China's best scholars. Trump's attack on Harvard is that of a raging bull on a bastion not just of academic excellence but also social conscience. Trump and his ilk have neither otherwise he wouldn't have conflated anti-genocide with anti-semitism. Together with what was seen in the US congress under Biden, it is as plain as a canary in a coalmine that the United States of America is the 2nd state of Israel with its senators and lawmakers under the usurious control of the jewish lobby group AIPAC. With Jerusalem's lebensraum over Gaza, it thus hints why Trump wants Canada as his 51st.
It is not enough to victimize Chinese students who have already been given visas, have prepaid their tuition fees and room deposits, have bought their plane tickets, have worked out their research programs, have a thousand-and-one things on hopes and dreams now dashed on the crumbling city on the hillock. Keep it up and those thousand talents will all go back when they could otherwise have contributed albeit underpaid to research in the US' best labs. The arbitrary breakage of a social contract between the recipient country onto the innocent student is not lost on the world.
TACO should continue to do his worse. Everything he and his hawks do to China will strengthen her and weaken his. Then TACO will become TADO. Trump Always Ducks Out. What a quack, this orange outlier, a historical aberration once in a century.
3/3
ReplyDeleteThe earlier two blog posts are also eminently interesting. On Why Should We Fear China? it is written in such an easygoing but complete way it automatically suggests a luminous mind who has delved the subject for some time. Bravo and kudos. Please, some more....
The attacks on China are so virulent they show up the vapid deviousness and racist zealotry of the western hawks. A recent one said Beijing has moved the Ughurs out of Xinjiang into jobs in other provinces. One asks isn't that logical given how the west has boycotted their livelihood in Xinjiang. As was said by one diplomat, it is hypocritically odd how the westerner tend to hate the Chinese (Sino) and the Muslim (Ughur) but love the Ughur (Sino-Muslim). Today one wonders what Patten, the UK China Group, der Leyen and Baerbeck would say of US free speech in Harvard, given how glib they were about Lai and the rioters in HK.
What's happening in Trumpland is the confluence of at least four motive forces: the revival of anti-woke conservatism, the return of browncollar manufacturing, the centralization and supremacy of executive powers, and the transactionalization of foreign policy.
No thought is needed to say all four cannot work because of five factors: the new generations are more pro-diversity; shopfloor elbow greasing is passe; dictatorship in the hands of a moron is sure disaster; and backslapping deals with others will mean trust is eroded and all bets are temporary so that situations become more volatile in which case multilateralism is better than bilateral zero-sum's. The fifth factor is quality of the leadership; not one in Taco's cabinet fits the bill; they don't have the smarts to know what to do to make the transition work; as was predicted long ago, each will try to assay his/her own independence the more as Taco's focus on state matters declines but all will be impaled by the market, media and people; Musk and Waltz are examples. Even Leavitt the press secretary has overstepped her remits and is starting to hurl abuse and exercise cheap moral signalling.
Which comes to India. It wants to have face but falls short of the principles of integrity and trust. With neither, it may be the fourth biggest economy but that's just a number. Same too with the Philippines. What has it got from going to bed with the US marines? Seven base targets for incoming hypersonic missiles if it comes to that. No funds to pave roads, lay cables for electricity, set up contingencies for rescue operations. In both countries, the people suffer needlessly year after year under the inertia of the western democracy system which create castes and outcasts.