The Chinese Communist Party is at war with us, and the primary front in that war is their attack on our economy.
Right now, thanks to the “leadership” of President Biden and compromised Republicans like my opponent, Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler, who takes millions in campaign contributions from Chinese-controlled companies, this is a war we are losing. The CCP-manufactured COVID-19 crisis makes this painfully clear.
The CCP has been able to capture the elites of our business sector by providing them with cheap, slave labor working at factories with no safety or environmental standards. Global corporations have gotten rich peddling Chinese goods to the US consumer markets, undercutting and destroying our ability to manufacture critical goods at home.
The Gospel of Free Trade with China – a country that forcefully defends its home market from imports that threaten domestic jobs – has robbed an entire generation of Americans of the jobs their fathers and grandfathers raised their families on. This threatens not only our national security due to depending on a hostile nation for critical goods but has harmed health of our people, killing off entire towns, driving our most vulnerable citizens to deadly opioid addictions, and crippling the growth of the American family.
The CCP is heavily involved in our capital markets and is the largest purchaser of our debt bonds. They are the key lender that keeps our non-producing, debt-based economy afloat. The CCP is also taking advantage of foolish US laws that allow foreign ownership of land; the CCP owns over 190,000 acres of prime American agriculture land.
The CCP is purchasing our land so it can be included in their “one road, one belt” initiative, their strategy of buying up critical land and port access to natural resources like minerals and water rights. With the CCP in control of global lines of manufacturing and production and in the process of acquiring land in the US, we are not far from paying the CCP for goods that were harvested on our own soil.
We need to take bold action now to defend our national sovereignty against Red China. This begins by taking reparations from the CCP for the carnage wrought upon the American people due to COVID: seize CCP owned land in the US, seize CCP assets in capital markets, and use tariffs to diminish the CCP’s hold on our economy.
To accomplish this, we will need to take on our own elite. Our top billionaires have shipped our manufacturing industries to China and use our pension funds on Wall Street to bankroll the CCP’s economic war against our nation. To fight back we must get on a war time footing to bring back manufacturing and revitalize our natural resources industry.
To re-establish our manufacturing base, we must offer corporations that have shipped their productions facilities overseas lucrative corporate tax cuts and free government land for their facilities if they are willing to rapidly onshore and hire an American workforce.
With this carrot there must also be a stick. Those corporations that do not onshore rapidly will be met with crippling tariffs. The message will be clear: if you don’t make it here, you don’t sell it here. We can no longer tolerate American corporations undercutting US workers and aiding a hostile power.
To aide in rebuilding our domestic industry, we must aggressively deregulate our natural resource industries starting with our energy sector. We must get the pipelines operating again and go back to exploring for new sources of fossil fuels, natural gas and coal. We must cut through regulation and short-sighted NIMBY obstacles to harness the power of the atom and develop the next generation of nuclear power.
The Biden regime killing off the Keystone XL pipeline has directly increased the cost at the pump and indirectly every aspect of our lives. This has been the cruelest tax on rural and suburban working-class Americans. There is no need for us to be held hostage by the OPEC cartel: we have what we need here to support our people and take money out of the hands of Middle Eastern and Russian oligarchs.
Deregulating our timber industry is also a must. The skyrocketing cost of lumber and building materials has inflamed the housing availability crisis. The lack of responsible logging has led to brutal wildfire seasons in the west. Turning over portions federally owned and controlled forests to US logging companies in exchange for the logging companies building lumber production mills and hiring all US employees would drastically lower the cost of lumber and create family-supporting jobs for working class Americans in our rural communities.
If our great nation is to endure and not just become another cog in the wheel of the CCP’s burgeoning global hegemony, we must bring about an economic America First revival that puts our national security and the working-class families of America’s heartland first. It is time to re-establish our national identity: America is not just an economy that exists to enrich the global elite, but a sovereign nation that cares deeply about our people.
Joe Kent is the Trump-endorsed candidate for Washington’s 3rd Congressional District. You can visit his campaign website, here.
