Dear Editor,
If we survive this global pandemic, we may witness the most consequential U.S. Presidential elections for that nation ─ and for the world ─ since the election of President Reagan and his team of Republicans 40 years ago, in November 1980. That is when democracy, self-government, Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, for the people” was reclaimed and retrieved from a looming hellish utopia of Soviet world communism.
After much upheaval, social redress and progress in the ’60s, followed by economic depression and hopelessness in the ’70s, the U.S.A. was rescued from impending disaster. The nation was retrieved from the ash-heap of history and Soviet-style world communism where the stewardship of so-called Liberals (Republicans and Democrats) of that era was leading it and its people.
President Nixon’s “rapprochement” with China had led to the Republic of China (Taiwan) being ejected from the United Nations (UN) and Communist China being included as a member state. “Détente” under Presidents Nixon and Carter had led to the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis in 1979.
In 1980, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan was vilified by the defeatists, appeasers and sympathizers of the Soviets and their program of world communism. But the American people elected Ronald Reagan, an ex-movie actor and union leader and his team of enthusiastic reformers. Their governance, with support from the Iron Lady, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the UK, and a few others elsewhere, led to the implosion of the USSR and to the demise of Soviet-style world communism.
Twenty years later, in October 2000, at the very end of his second term in office, President Clinton, a Democrat, granted China normal trade relations with the U.S. He could never have succeeded in enacting the “U.S.A.-China Relation Act of 2000” into law without the strong backing of the Republicans who controlled the Congress: House and Senate.
Business interest was strongly in support of the bill; opponents to it argued that it rewarded a repressive communist state and undermined US labor and environmental protection. The bill pitted corporate and farming groups against organized labor, human rights groups, veterans’ organizations and religious leaders. 164 Republicans and Democrats voted for; 138 Democrats and 2 Independents voted against. The agreement was a triumph for the Republicans and for President Clinton ─ a Democrat!
But the broader context of this legislation is worth noting: the Clinton administration was under a sturdy, stealthy assault by the forces of global governance in the US, at the United Nations (UN) and at the European Union (EU).
“From 1980 to 2005, the World Bank’s loans to China totaled about $40 billion” (most of it US funded), the highest loan on record at the World Bank. (Online Pieter Bottelier, China and the World Bank, April 2006).
Politicians in Europe and in the U.S.A. and the technocrats at the UN and the EU were not concerned with democracy ─ to the contrary ─ they were undermining self-governance by promoting the UN’s “Global Neighborhood” and “Global Governance” (UN Report: Our Global Neighborhood, 1995, chap.2).
On May 19, 2000, the EU agreed to China becoming a member of the WTO; five months later, on October 10, President Clinton signed the “United States-China Relations Act of 2000” into law; the following year, on December 21, 2001, China was welcomed into the World Trade Organization. Without the consent of the U.S.A, China would have remained outside of the WTO which might have forced its leaders to clean up their act. In their numerous signed agreements with the EU, the US and the WTO, Chinese officials promised all sorts of incremental reforms which Europeans and Americans, and the WTO are still awaiting patiently today – twenty years later.
The “U.S.A.-China Relation Act of 2000” decimated American industries and their workers. President Clinton’s successors, Republican President Bush W., and Democrat President Obama stood by and allowed their nation to be stripped of its manufacturing, industrial and military might to the benefit of a ruthless communist nation hell-bent on exporting, on spreading its model of tyrannical government: its repressive Maoist brand of communism throughout the world. The 20-year rape of America by Communist China, the so-called People’s Republic of China, was a consensual affair; it occurred with the consent of America; of Americans; of most of their media; and of their corporate leaders and politicians: Republicans and Democrats.
That is why, like with Ronald Reagan in 1980, it took an outsider, someone who was neither Republican nor Democrat, to address the neglect inflicted on the people, on the working classes of the nation by their politicians, their intellectuals: their corporate and globalist elites. It took an informed outsider to address and to try to redress the exploitation that resulted from that dismal trade agreement with China in 2000. In 2016, it took the TV star businessman Donald J. Trump to tackle the issue of “China!” as he refers to it, and to undertake the most worthy effort of rescuing and restoring his nation’s industrial, commercial and military might. He was wrestling that mighty dragon with very promising results.
And then, with the New Year, while the U.S. Senate was debating the impeachment of the President on trumped-up charges, seemingly out of Communist China, like H1N1 and some other earlier pandemics, coronavirus COVID-19 came to America and to the world: an invisible enemy; centillions of silent, spiked crown killers!
If my information is correct, to date, the virus has taken the lives of 280,000 human beings worldwide including some 79,773 in the US; 5,440 in the Netherlands, 26,310 in France and 18 individuals on “Sweet St. Martin” (French and Dutch). It has crushed the US economy, wiped away everything President Trump and his team had accomplished, everything except the President’s will of steel, his determination to start all over again in a second mandate. Will the American people indulge him?
Gérard M. Hunt
