Will Loony Biden Show Up with China Deal?

Biden must enforce the 2020 Trump trade deal with China to keep Beijing in check

By Robert Romano at Daily Torch:

China increased purchases of U.S. goods in 2020 by 17.1 percent to $124.7 billion, U.S. Census data shows, the highest since 2017, following the U.S.-China trade deal that was brokered by former President Donald Trump in Jan. 2020 right before the Covid outbreak.

After a slow start amid the pandemic in early 2020, the second half of the year saw China allowing more imports from the U.S. than ever at $75 billion from July to Dec. 2020, compared to the previous high of July to Dec. 2017 at $71.7 billion.

Additionally, October, November and December of 2020 were all records for the most amount of U.S. goods ever exported to China at $14.7 billion, $14.2 billion and $14.6 billion, respectively.

Into 2021, the Chinese increased purchases have continued at a combined $22.7 billion in January and February, the largest ever purchases of U.S. goods by China in those two months.

Moreover, another element of the U.S.-China trade deal was an agreement on currency for no more competitive devaluations. Beginning in the summer, the Chinese yuan strengthened dramatically against the dollar, from 7.16 yuan per dollar in June 2020 down to 6.45 per dollar in late January 2021, as Trump left office.

Overall, the U.S. dollar finally weakened from its historically high levels of strength over the same period, leading to a massive jobs rebound from the Covid recession as more than 17.4 million of the 25.3 million jobs lost have already been recovered.

And Trump did it, securing the phase one trade agreement with China, even by leaving the existing tariffs of 25 percent on $250 billion of goods and 7.5 percent on the remaining $300 billion of goods in place.

Both of those things were supposed to have been impossible, per Trump’s critics. Tariffs were supposed to cause a trade war, instead Trump used them to force through a fair and reciprocal trade agreement.

At the time the deal was finalized, China was definitely feeling the pain. Chinese exports to the U.S. dropped 16 percent in 2019, from $539 billion to $451 billion, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2020, they fell another 3.5 percent to $435.5 billion.

China was never supposed to negotiate under duress and would certainly never agree to a deal that left the tariffs in place. Instead, even with the tariffs, China carried on the negotiation and ultimately followed through on phase one.

In other words, the trade pressure by Trump, especially the tariffs but also threatened sanctions, his art of the deal to use his leverage, worked.

And even after the deal, despite Covid and the economic wreckage that had been wrought in 2020 — and the damage is still quite considerable — the Trump-engineered trade deal with China has actually been a policy success. China has increased purchases, and seemingly allowed the yuan to strengthen — both to the benefit of the U.S.

Trump did that. And he did it without giving up any that leverage.

In Dec. 2020, then-President Elect Joe Biden told columnist Thomas Friedman he would not immediately remove the Trump tariffs: “I’m not going to make any immediate moves, and the same applies to the tariffs. I’m not going to prejudice my options.”

Even today, the tariffs remain in place. As well they should.

Despite all that has already been accomplished in terms of opening China up to U.S. goods, China is still well short of what it had promised in the 2020 deal. In 2020, China imported $100 billion of the U.S. goods agreed to in the deal, only 58 percent of the promised $173 billion, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Additionally, after strengthening against the dollar for the second half of 2020, the yuan has once again begun weakening against the dollar again, just as soon as Biden entered office, with 6.55 yuan per dollar instead of 6.45 yuan per dollar. Similarly, the U.S. dollar as a whole has begun strengthening slightly again the first quarter of 2021, threatening the recovery.

Here, Beijing could be testing Biden to see how he’ll respond. Is it still the same trade policy or not? Will Biden defend the dollar against the yuan weakening?

President Biden has an opportunity to expand on the success of the Trump administration’s trade policies, but he has to start by unequivocally saying he is leaving the tariffs on China in place, and consider even increasing them in light of the yuan’s recent weakening. The tariffs worked.

China has not yet fully implemented the agreement from 2020, and with Trump waiting in the wings to potentially run again in 2024, Biden cannot afford to unilaterally roll back the popular Trump policy on China — and certainly not without key concessions from Beijing. Biden has everything to lose — and not much to gain — if he now throws the Trump trade policy by the wayside.

Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.   

Vatican Invites Abortion Advocate, Chelsea Clinton, To Talk About ‘Health’ And The ‘Soul’

 By Evita Duffy…at the Federalist:

The Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture is set to host Chelsea Clinton, Anthony Fauci, Deepak Chopra, and others for a May conference to explore the “mind, body, and soul” and its role in health care.

The Vatican Council for Culture and the Cura Foundation and the Science and Faith (STOQ) Foundation are partnering together to host “the world’s leading physicians, scientists, leaders of faith, ethicists, patient advocates, policymakers, philanthropists and influencers to engage in powerful conversations on the latest breakthroughs in medicine, health care delivery and prevention.”

Speakers for the virtual conference are the world’s elites. Those picked to lecture on health and the soul include CEOs of large pharmaceutical companies, including Moderna and Pfizer, and former supermodel Cindy Crawford, English primatologist Jane Goodall, Aerosmith lead guitarist Joe Perry, and CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Speaker Chelsea Clinton is a high-profile abortion advocate, like her mother and father, Hillary and Bill Clinton. Chelsea labels the pro-life movement as an “anti-choice movement,” and is an outspoken supporter of Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the U.S.

In 2018, Chelsea spoke at a “Rise up for Roe” event in New York City, a meeting organized by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood to oppose Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. During her address, she glowingly credited legal abortion for adding trillions of dollars to the U.S. economy.

“American women entering the labor force from 1973 to 2009 added three and a half trillion dollars to our economy,” Clinton stated. “The net, new entrance of women — that is not disconnected from the fact that Roe became the law of the land in January of 1973.”

Chelsea is also Vice President of the Clinton Foundation, an organization riddled with controversy and corruption, and a supporter of global pro-abortion initiatives.

The Catholic Church publicly professes that life begins at conception and “abortion is a case of direct killing of an innocent human being — a violation of the rights of the youngest members of our society and the human family.”

In fact, the Catholic Church has been a leading advocate for the right to life for hundreds of years. “Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law,” reads the Catholic Catechism.

There is no mention of Clinton’s anti-life stance on the Vatican’s website, she is simply identified as “vice chair, Clinton Foundation.” The Church is actively elevating Clinton, who vocally advocates for a practice that harms mothers and kills innocent children, as an authority on the “mind, body, and soul.”

The conference will take place May 6-8, and “will be moderated by renowned journalists, who will explore the role of religion, faith and spirituality, and the interplay of the mind, body, and soul – and, ultimately, search for areas of convergence between the humanities and the natural sciences.”

The “renowned” journalists include Katie Couric, Richard Lui, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Amy Robach, Robin Roberts, and Meredith Vieira.

“Together we will focus on advances in medical innovation and the creation of healthier communities and seek to catalyze new, interdisciplinary approaches and partnerships to improve health and wellbeing, as well as understand human uniqueness,” the Vatican said. Evita Duffy is an intern at The Federalist and a junior at the University of Chicago, where she studies American History. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, & her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1

When Did Lefty Feminists Begin to Dictate Their Fascism in American Schools?

K-12: The Comintern Gave Us a Century of Ruthless Meddling

By Bruce Deitrick Price at American Thinker:

The Communist International started its worldwide campaign of subversion and sabotage circa 1920.  The goal was always the same: wage a disciplined, low-budget attack on soft targets such as foundations, unions, universities, education, and media.  The M.O. was the Fabian three-step: take a job, work up to higher management, overthrow the country.

Globalsecurity.org, a think-tank concerned with international security, concludes:

The Communist International was a tool or weapon such as no other country possessed, and the Soviet Union never hesitated to use it when the occasion demanded. Masquerading as a political party in a country permitting it to operate openly, a communist party was in fact a fifth column as much as any Bund group, except that the latter were crude and ineffective in comparison with Communists.

People who joined the Comintern were expected to be subservient to Moscow and fiercely committed to communism’s first principle: the ends justify the means.  The name “Comintern” is no longer in use, but this aggressive, amoral mentality lives on.  The same sort of militants continue their warfare against the world.  They are the reason for many of the intractable problems in the U.S.

Their particular brand of fanaticism, unmodified by any of the Anglo-Saxon traditions of compromise, was too fierce and too jealous to envisage any permanent sharing of power.  From the Russian-Asiatic world out of which they had emerged they carried with them a skepticism as to the possibilities of permanent and peaceful coexistence of rival forces.  Easily persuaded of their own doctrinaire “rightness,” they insisted on the submission or destruction of all competing power.

So these are the fanatics who descended on our society in 1920.  John Dewey and his Progressives softened up the battlefield in the preceding decades.  But the heavy hitters, the ideological demolition teams, fought under the banner of the Comintern.
The Bolshevik triumph in Russia was really a powerful stimulant to the ‘”world revolution,” because it proved the ability of a determined, ruthless minority to impose its will upon a disorganized society devoid of capable leaders, and thus encouraged revolutionary minorities everywhere to hope that they might do the same thing[.]
Point is, the Comintern brought an unprecedented sort of aggression to civil society in the United States.  Is there anything, no matter how vicious, these extremists would not do?  Not that I can see.
For example, if you wanted to make American citizens weak and unpatriotic, who gets this assignment?  If you want children to be illiterate and without ambition, whom are you going to call?  If you hope to make children ignorant, almost devoid of cultural knowledge, who is just right for that project?
Clearly, all these things come back to education.  And wherever you look in K–12, you will find strange artifacts and an agenda put in play by a cunning opponent.
“A Nation at Risk,” a report published in 1983, honored this heritage when it proclaimed: “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people[.] … If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
It was a foreign power, and it was an act of war.
The paradigm for a wide array of educational sabotage was the relentless plot to eliminate phonics and instead make children memorize sight-words.  Soon American literacy was in free fall.
The professors of education knew that sight-words do not work.  Dr. Samuel Orton conducted elaborate research and concluded in 1927 that this method was counterproductive and would permanently damage children.  But the communists were on a roll, around the world.  When the stock market crashed in 1929, these anti-capitalists felt vindicated.  They eliminated phonics from one public school after another, starting in 1930.  This project continues unabated.  As fast as a school dares to prefer phonics, the cult fights back.
The war against phonics was just one of many hostile projects. The pattern is always the same.  Discredit and dismiss any methods known to work.  Replace them with shoddy contrivances.  But the reading saga is particularly illustrative because the victims suffer so greatly.  Imagine that you are a ten-year-old boy who still cannot read, and you have no idea why.  They give you drugs to keep you quiet, and you watch the other children advance into a smarter world.  Now imagine the cold hearts needed to impose this torture on children.  Year after year, you have to withhold from students any knowledge of what works and force them to learn what does not work.  Only someone who believes that the ends justifies the means could perform such sadism.
Everything runs parallel in math, where the professors came up with New Math, Reform Math, and now Common Core Math, all much the same designed-to-fail curricula.  Content courses such as history, geography, and science are taught in ways that guarantee that children learn little history, geography, and science.  You have to be a vicious Pavlovian to concoct this dreck.  But the true Comintern spirit is shown in the perennial infliction of psychopathic nonsense on defenseless children. 
The media should be telling parents how to defend themselves.  But as noted, the media were also infected by the Comintern.  How can parents find out what to do when schools and newspapers are aligned against them?
The key insight to understanding the last hundred years is that the communists were always on offense.  Anything that might be a threat needed to be neutralized.  The Nazis had their concentration camps and their ovens.  The communists had something perhaps more powerful: thousands of lifelong fanatics, toiling every day on tiny assignments in order to bring about the downfall of America. 
This elaborate obsessiveness became the marching orders for our Education Establishment.  Even the tiniest success must be expunged.  The stupidest ideas in the history of education were brought into the schools and made to seem normal.
Bruce Deitrick Price’s new book is Saving K–12: What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?

Image via Pexels.
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