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Infrastructure Bill Should Benefit America—Not China
Townhall.com ^ | April 25, 2021 | Will Coggin

Posted on 04/25/2021 5:15:50 AM PDT by Kaslin

The $2 trillion infrastructure plan may be the mother of all spending bills. And without changes, the major winner is set to be China. 

China has huge market shares of the raw materials we will need to repair and rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, from bridges to pipes. China had a 51 percent share of the global steel market in 2018. The US, Canada, and Mexico combined only produced 6 percent. China also controls more than half of the global cement market. 

As things stand, much of the $2 trillion in U.S. taxpayer dollars will wind up lining the pockets of China’s big businesses, all of which are part of the Chinese Communist Party’s apparatus. 

Instead of transferring a huge amount of wealth from the US to China, lawmakers have an opportunity with this bill to support American manufacturing.

There’s good reason to be skeptical of the quality of Chinese-made materials. Chinese drywall made with cancer-causing chemicals was put into an estimated 100,000 homes between 2001 and 2009, exposing American families to deadly health risks. In the Lumber Liquidators scandal in 2015, Chinese-made laminate flooring exposed Americans to high levels of formaldehyde, another cancer-causing substance. 

Chinese-made steel is infamous for being cheap and full of defects. Cutting corners on steel puts the integrity of bridges and other structures at risk of catastrophic failure, which could have deadly results for pedestrians and drivers. 

Toys with lead paint, shoddy car tires, deadly contaminated pet food--the list of Chinese products with harmful defects is long. 

China’s gains in its share of the global steel market and other areas have been driven by government subsidies and dumping--the deliberate flooding of a market with cheap goods to undercut competition. It’s an issue we’ve seen hit our supply chain in another, even more important area: medicine.

It may shock you to learn that you are almost entirely at the mercy of China to get medicine. According to a federal analysis, China controls 97 percent of our antibiotics and about 80 percent of our generic drugs.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we discovered that much of our personal protective equipment (PPE) is also made in China. And in a global emergency, the Chinese government wasn’t afraid to hold up shipments of masks to other countries, even PPE made by U.S. firms operating in China. China sent defective masks to other countries.

China accounts for about 80 percent of our mined rare earth metals. These are needed to make lithium batteries for electric cars and for the functioning of electronic devices--including military equipment.

In 2018, the Trump administration slapped tariffs on Chinese steel to breathe some life into American steel production. The Biden administration has acknowledged their effectiveness

Now, the infrastructure bill provides a bigger, $2 trillion opportunity to make more gains on this front. Congress must look at securing more supply chains of goods ranging from cement to medicine to rare earth materials. If we are redefining infrastructure, then manufacturing is a key part of that new definition.

Overreliance on China is a threat to our national security and independence. As one Chinese professor remarked of China’s control over medicine: “Should we reduce the exports, the medical systems of some western countries will not run well.” Given the Chinese government puts its citizens in concentration camps, we shouldn’t risk finding out the hard way.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: china; infrastructure; steel

1 posted on 04/25/2021 5:15:50 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: All
What will Biden do if the CCP invades Taiwan?

Nothing. Biden's close relationship w/ China always come first.
Biden and the Biden Crime Family have lucrative financial ties to China.

"Xi, old buddy, ol' pal, together we will make China great again."

2 posted on 04/25/2021 5:26:53 AM PDT by Liz (Our side has 8 trillion bullets; the other side doesn't know which bathroom to use. )
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To: All
CIRCA 2020 Timeline: Allegations and evidence surrounding the Biden Crime Family's
China business dealings; Hunter Biden reportedly has a direct phone line to the Politburo

WJLA ^ | 10/26/2020 | Stephen Loiaconi / FR Posted on 10/26/2020, 5:41:29 PM by marcusmaximus

Documents released in the final weeks of the 2020 presidential race have shed some new light on the business dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son and other relatives, but many questions remain about both the sources of the records and their relevance to Biden’s bid for the presidency.

“I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life,” Biden said during a debate with President Donald Trump.

Biden’s denials have not stopped Trump from demanding the Justice Department investigate his opponent for unspecified crimes or asserting that Biden is “COMPROMISED” by his family’s financial ties to China and other countries.

Earlier this month, emails allegedly recovered from a laptop that once belonged to Biden’s son Hunter were obtained by The New York Post. Subsequently, a former business partner of Hunter Biden, Tony Bobulinski, came forward to verify some of those emails and lodge his own accusations against the Bidens.-snip-

Here is what we know about Hunter Biden’s business activities and how they became intertwined with his father’s tenure as vice president and his presidential campaign.

Beginning in 2013
Dec. 2013 Hunter Biden flew to Beijing with his then-VP father, and his daughter Finnegan, on Air Force Two on official US business in China.

During the visit, Hunter met with one of his business partners, a Chinese banker named Jonathan Li. Hunter and Li were both involved with Bohai Harvest RST (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Co., an investment firm that was officially registered less than two weeks after Hunter’s visit.

As VP of the USA, Joe Biden later wrote a letter of recommendation for the son of Hunter's business partner, CCP banker, Jonathan Li, according to Hunter Biden laptop emails.

Journos and other US officials on the trip say they had no idea Hunter was conducting personal business in China.)

Hunter held a position on BHR’s board of directors while his father was VP and Obamas point man in China, and became a shareholder with a 10% stake in the CCP company in Oct. 2017. (NOTE That investment is now worth some $50 million.) (Excerpt) Read more at wjla.com ...

3 posted on 04/25/2021 5:30:02 AM PDT by Liz (Our side has 8 trillion bullets; the other side doesn't know which bathroom to use. )
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To: All
How China Has Infiltrated the U.S. And how we should fight back
spectator.org ^ | December 16, 2020 | Steve Postal / FR Posted on 3/25/2021, 5:18:08 AM by ransomnote

SNIP People in China are gloating about how far they have infiltrated our ruling class. Di Dongsheng, vice dean of the School of International Relations at Renmin U, boasted in a recent lecture that the Chinese Communist Party has people “at the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence,” and that “for the past 30 years, 40 years, we have been utilizing the core power of the United States.”

Di also implied that Hunter Biden was compromised as well: “Trump has been saying that Biden’s son has some sort of global foundation. Who helped [Hunter] build the foundations? There are a lot of deals inside all these. This is timely, given that the Department of Justice is currently subpoenaing Hunter Biden for, among other things, documents relating to his business dealings in China.

Embassies. A leaked database of 1.95 million members of the CCP revealed that at least 10 consulates in Shanghai contain members of the CCP, including three employees of the U.S. consulate, a senior official in the British consulate, and at least one employee of the Australian consulate. While stories about this leak do not explicitly accusing these CCP members of spying, the threat that this could be happening is obvious.

Defense apparatus. The CCP has infiltrated our defenses. CCP members are working in our defense supply chains in China, according to the above-mentioned database. These include 516 CCP members who either work in Qualcomm or Boeing, and “dozens” of CCP members in Airbus, Rolls-Royce, and Thales.

Hollywood ---- the moguls tailor their output to suit CCP's standards...the CCP films are also shown in the US. (Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ..

4 posted on 04/25/2021 5:34:35 AM PDT by Liz (Our side has 8 trillion bullets; the other side doesn't know which bathroom to use. )
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To: All
Hunter's abandoned laptop has evidence far worse/darker than you even thought
Hunter Biden had business ties with CCP president Xi Jinping himself, bombshell email reveals;
Laptop emails link the Bidens to possible Chinese espionage and illegal CCP-backed business arrangements.

https://www.lifesitenews.com ^ | Fri Mar 19, 2021 - 8:26 pm EST | By Raymond Wolfe
Posted on 3/24/2021, 3:41:48 PM by Red Badger

March 19, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) -- Stunning revelations about Hunter Biden and his family’s notorious business dealings came to light in this week’s episode of the John-Henry Westen Show during an interview with Jack Maxey, one of the first people to go through the contents of Biden’s abandoned laptop last October.

Maxey revealed that Hunter Biden may have had business ties to China’s Xi Jinping, based on emails from the laptop. Correspondence also links the Bidens to possible Chinese espionage and illegal Beijing-backed business arrangements. As the Biden family’s China dealings went south, Hunter may have gone so far as to try to purposefully incriminate his own his father, now the President of the United States, Maxey said.

The contents of Hunter's notorious “laptop from hell,” first discovered in 2019 at a computer shop near the Bidens’ home in Delaware, have been corroborated by former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinksi. At least one key email was validated by cybersecurity experts, and law enforcement officials also have signaled that the laptop is authentic.

Maxey reiterated that the Hunter Biden laptop data is indeed “100 percent real.” “Well, for example, I had several retired CIA agents look at it, a former contractor from the NSA, cybersecurity experts. Everybody who has looked at this confirms that it is 100 percent real,” he said. “As one person said to me, if we devoted all the resources of (the CIA) for a decade, we couldn’t recreate this because there’s so much metadata connecting everything together,” Maxey added. Meetings with Xi Jinping “It seems almost as if every time I chase down a rabbit hole, I find something more horrible each and every time,” Maxey said about the laptop files. He mentioned Bohai Harvest RST Partners (BHR), an equity firm that Hunter Biden and Devon Archer, a convicted criminal and family friend of Secretary of State John Kerry, founded with top Chinese investment companies in 2014. Biden had had little previous success in the financial industry before launching BHR with backing from the Bank of China.

“Now, Hunter and these other guys knew nothing about private equity. Storied Financial institutions like Goldman Sachs were NOT able to ever cut deals like that. So you have to question, was the Hunter deal strictly to get access to US politicians.......notably his father?”

“I believe it was,” Maxey said. Maxey revealed that Biden and Archer’s work with BHR reached the highest levels of Chinese government. According to an email provided by Maxey, BHR consulted with Biden and Archer to arrange a meeting between Chairman Xi Jinping and potential business partners during Xi’s state visit to America in 2015. “Further to your conversation with Jonathan regarding a possible arrangement for President Xi to visit LeTV’s facilities in Los Angeles during his upcoming trip to the U.S. in September/October 2015, Jonathan and I had an interesting meeting with LeTV’s founders,” the email sent to Biden and Archer in July 2015, purportedly from a BHR associate, reads. The message appears to be copied to Jonathan Li, an BHR executive who had met with Joe Biden during the then-vice president’s official trip to China two years prior. That meeting was set up by Hunter Biden, who accompanied his father on the trip, the New Yorker reported.

Again during his vice presidency, Joe Biden later wrote a letter of recommendation for Li’s son....at US taxpayers' expense.....according to Hunter Biden's laptop emails.

“President Xi will be making a stop in L.A. during his visit where LeTV has recently acquired a R&D center committing to invest between US$3-5 billlion towards the research and design of electrical cars and intelligent vehicles,” the 2015 email to Biden and Archer says.

“LeTV has enlisted our help to arrange for President Xi to visit their facilities, or, if that cannot be arranged, for (LeTV founder) Mr. Jia Yueting to speak at any of the meet-and-greet functions to be attended by President Xi,” Joe Biden adds.

The email also notes a “one-time advisory fee payable to BHR” and an “opportunity to co-invest with LeTV and Beijing Automotive Group (BAIC)” in exchange for orchestrating the “meet-and-greet.” “More importantly, this would mark the beginning of a long-term and comprehensive cooperation with LeTV and an opportunity to participate in all of its future activities.”

--SNIP--

5 posted on 04/25/2021 5:37:02 AM PDT by Liz (Our side has 8 trillion bullets; the other side doesn't know which bathroom to use. )
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To: Kaslin

Almost all solar cells are also made in China!


6 posted on 04/25/2021 5:37:42 AM PDT by AZJeep (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0AHQkryIIs)
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To: Kaslin

Won’t Biden do the “American Made Only” thing regarding resources used for the infrastructure renewal? No.


7 posted on 04/25/2021 5:46:11 AM PDT by Richard Axtell ( )
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To: Richard Axtell

The author is a moron. Any infrastructure project using Federal money is subject to “Buy America” requirements. Getting a waiver from these provisions is almost impossible, and can’t be done as a cost-saving measure.


8 posted on 04/25/2021 6:27:22 AM PDT by Alberta's Child ("And once in a night I dreamed you were there; I canceled my flight from going nowhere.")
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To: Kaslin

The China issue is an important point, but the total spending of the bill alone is the primary reason it should be rejected, and the second major reason for rejecting the bill is more than half the bill has zero to do with infrastructure. Those two things are huge reasons, so huge that the China factor is a distant third.

If the only thing that amendments did was cure the China problem with the bill, it still would be far too big, far too wasteful and contain far too much that has zero to do with infrastructure.

I think the China factor is a diversion from the huge basic problems with the bill. I can see GOP figures somehow managing to get amendments in the bill that might appear to address the China issue, and then proclaiming that as such a great improvement that the bill should be passed - with its huge expense, its huge waste, its huge amounts having nothing to do with infrastructure.

The real RINOs will identify themselves by what we see them say and do on this bill.


9 posted on 04/25/2021 6:55:18 AM PDT by Wuli
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To: Kaslin

He is a bought president that china helped put into office. Who do you think is going to benefit.


10 posted on 04/25/2021 7:30:40 AM PDT by glimmerman70
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To: Kaslin

But Biden was installed to benefit China—not America. Everybody knows that. The honest acknowledge it.


11 posted on 04/25/2021 8:00:55 AM PDT by Savage Beast ("A nation of sheep will be controlled by wolves.")
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To: AdmSmith; AnonymousConservative; Arthur Wildfire! March; Berosus; Bockscar; cardinal4; ColdOne; ...
...

12 posted on 04/25/2021 9:56:13 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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