Question for the Right:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

How exactly do you square talk of liberty with George W Bush having sold the United States to a totalitarian state?

The People's Republic of China has enough US debt that it effectively controls us. You remember the People's Republic of China, right? 

They had this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong who happened to be responsible for the death of 75 million people, the most of any dictator in human history as their first leader. It was Richard Nixon, a paragon of the old Conservatism, who opened diplomatic relationships with this butchering tyrant.

And of course the PRC was responsible for these things:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989

The Smirking Chimp from Crawford sold our souls to these people, which now leaves us only 200 billion shy of a full 1 trillion dollars in debt. These guys are a bunch of Communists, y'know, the whole Red Insurgency that was to take over all the world and leave us all dying in carload lots. Yet Bush sells us 896 billion into debt to the Red Chinese, who are still as the suppression of the Uighur and Tibetan attempts to get their freedom show very capable of mass brutality and totalitarian rule. Freedom indeed.

How can people like Jonah Goldberg talk with a straight face about the USA bringing freedom when the USA owes its mere financial sovereignty to the bloodiest Communist regime of them all?

Comments

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

[The People's Republic of China has enough US debt that it effectively controls us. You remember the People's Republic of China, right?]

You know there is an old saw that is appropriate for this situation: If you owe a bank a million then the bank owns you. If you owe a bank a billion then you own the bank.

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

bahdabing.

The problem here is

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

to translate this into Chinese.

[merig00.livejournal.com]

WOW, Glenn Beck was saying the exact same thing for at least last 3 years.

[mcpreacher.livejournal.com]

underlankers uses glenn beck's space logic so this is not surprising

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

How exactly do you square talk of liberty with George W Bush having sold the United States to a totalitarian state?

Because he didn't? This link updates monthly (http://www.treas.gov/tic/mfh.txt), but I'm going to paste the top 5 as of January 2010:

China, Mainland 889.0
Japan 765.4
Oil Exporters 3/ 218.4
United Kingdom 2/ 206.0
Brazil 169.1

This, in billions, lists the top five holders of foreign debt. China does not even hold a majority of foreign debt, let alone all debt. Total debt for the United States is $12.8 trillion, of which $2.7 trillion is foriegn.

How can people like Jonah Goldberg talk with a straight face about the USA bringing freedom when the USA owes its mere financial sovereignty to the bloodiest Communist regime of them all?

How? Because the US does not owe its financial sovereignty to China, it owes singificantly less than 1/12th of its outstanding financial debts to China (read: not financial sovereignty), and that number is becoming lower, not higher.

Of all the debt arguments out there, this frustrates me more than most of them. China's debt holdings are a) small and b) optional, and in the highly unlikely situation that they wanted us to pay it back, we'd have no issue whatever with getting other nations or our own people (in which half the debt is owed) to cover that gap.

Oh, and by the way? China took on $150b of our debt between June and July 2009. I wonder what prompted that...

[mcpreacher.livejournal.com]

hahahaha i love your last line

"everything you say isn't true, but if it is, obama is literally responsible for all of it"

way to cover your bases

[mcpreacher.livejournal.com]

bolsheviks bolsheviks bolsheviks bolsheviks bolsheviks

bolsheviks

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Troll harder.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

When you rant angry your ability to use reason drops dramatically.

We're not owned by the Chinese. Economics on such a large scale don't work like that.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Xenophobia = bad, except when politically expedient.

[sgiffy.livejournal.com]

The People's Republic of China has enough US debt that it effectively controls us. You remember the People's Republic of China, right?

Other way around. Remember why they have all those dollars to buy our bonds. They sell us crap, which we buy in our on money, and they have to put that money somewhere and that somewhere is treasury debt. Its the same with the oil exporting countries.

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

Tell me again which nation's currency the Chinese value their currency against.

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

Honestly, since the U.S. loves to take gigantic steaming dumps on its constitution anyway, all we have to do is monetize the debt and make their reserves worth much less.

[mcpreacher.livejournal.com]

everyone's still scared shitless of communists for some reason so all we have to do is get a republican president again, nuke china, and then when we elect a democrat again we have the media pretend china never existed and the lost of all our cheap manufactured goods started the day the democrat took office. it's foolproof.

[summercomfort]

Somewhat off-topic, but do you also judge current-day Russia on the acts of Stalin? Why judge current-day China on the acts of Mao?

No, China is not democratic, and it has many issues, but it has changed quite a bit from the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. I do agree that their handling of Tibetans and Uighurs is very much "communist crack-down", and China has a growing disparity between the wealthy and the poor, as well as between the urban and the rural.

Certainly, Mao was only 50 years ago, and we feel comfortable talking about America from 50 years ago as something relatively similar to America today, but I'd argue that given the social, economic, and political changes in China in the last 50 years, it's almost like saying, "Well, look at the Wounded Knee Massacre. Americans are brutal and imperialistic."

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Contemporary Russia is not the Soviet Union anymore. If it was still the USSR that would be different, but the Soviet Union has been only a thing of the history books for almost 20 years.

And of course one could note that until the 1950s parts of the USA were dictatorships in all but name....

I definitely like it here.

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

"China is not democratic"
Indeed, there's no real need to dump all the cliches here.
I strongly recommend you spare some for yourself.
I feel like it's an adult's forum.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

You have to realize who you're responding to. He lives in the past.

[lady-oneiros.livejournal.com]

First of all, there's a difference between federal debt and public debt. The federal debt includes intergovernmental borrowing (e.g., agencies borrowing from other agencies), and a government cannot capitulate to itself. The current U.S. public debt, which is debt owed to other countries, is a smaller amount. When talking about U.S. debt, it's important to put it into context--so few people realize how utterly massive the American economy actually is. The current U.S. public debt is around 60% of our GDP, which is worth considering, but hardly worth having an aneurysm over. Japan currently operates with a debt that is 200% of its GDP, so if they can muddle along, I'm sure the U.S. can.

Debt holdings are not worth debate; what is worth debating is how to pay down the debt in the long term, such as whether the U.S. should install a Value-Added Tax.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

You're never going to scare people into voting for you with evidence and rational arguments.

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

Hey we can solve our debt problems in one day. Write China a great big check in US Dollars then switch to Euros before hyperinflation sets in. (not really)

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

News flash: China is communist only by name. For decades. I thought you knew. But I'd give you some benefit, after all it happened in the 21st century and I guess the history books don't cover that period.

[zebra24.livejournal.com]

*communist only by name* -- still not democratic, just no ideology, but still repressive.

[gillen.livejournal.com]

"These guys are a bunch of Communists"


Oh, if only this were true! Sadly, it hasn't been since shortly after Mao died.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

your icon made me laugh

[zebra24.livejournal.com]

Bush was wrong.
But I can't imagine any USA president which will not trade with China, which will not take their money.

[root-fu.livejournal.com]

USA, she works hard for her money.