Chinese Products There are so many things we import from China which are necessary to our health, defense and our lives in general. One is rare earth minerals. Did you ever wonder what rare earth minerals are, I know I did? It turns out they are in many different things such as all sorts of electronics, clean energy devices and throughout the military. If China decided to stop selling them to us, we would really be in trouble because we have not sufficiently explored this country to find enough of them here. It has been said the most important of the rare earth minerals is neodymium. Other rare earth minerals which are very important are europium, Terbium, and dysprosium to mention some. Cerium is the most abundant of rare earth elements. There are said to be 17 rare earth elements, the following is the list: The United States has only one rare earth mine and it is the Mountain Pass mine in the Mojave Desert, in California. It supplies about 16 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals. I won’t bore you by listing what each mineral is used for. Many of our legal drugs come from China. Drug companies seem to have put profit above patriotism. This started long before China became such a huge threat. Now that the threat is known, and the fact realized we could be cut off from many legal drugs people need, it is time for more drug companies to open factories in this country. The problem seems no company wants to take the economic hit because our companies sell the drugs all over the world and it would become cheaper for China to sell directly to them if it cost us more to make the drugs. It seems to be the only way this would work is if the government subsidized these companies. The drugs are so important to all of us, this could make it worthwhile. While we were talking about the China threat, an American auto company made the announcement they were opening another factory in China. Here is one of the main reasons why. Foreign auto companies have shown us it is profitable for them to build factories in this country. Take Honda, Hyundai, Toyota, BMW, Subaru and Fiat Chrysler for some examples. Knowing it works, the reason they are building in China is to get better access to the Chinese market. At least this is not depriving us of anything. Still, every dollar China makes on the deal is used to build their military which is being used to threaten much of the rest of the world including us. One thing about China, they are a very patient country. They have a plan and it seems to be world domination. They don’t seem to want war if it can be avoided, they want to conquer the world using several tools, with the last tool being military conquest. The first tool designed for most third world countries is projects which they need. The Chinese will go into a country and build them, things like roads, and different facilities and in return maybe get a base or get the country to support their moves in the United Nations. The second tool is loans and grants. When they are dealing with countries which have claims on the same areas which China wants, such as the South China Sea and some of the islands, the Chinese pull out their navy and threaten those countries. In the case of countries like India, there are many border skirmishers where the Chinese are trying to push into parts of India. The Chinese were involved in conflicts for about 12 years with Vietnam and even though they deny it, it seems the Vietnamese pushed them out. The idea of pushing against people and nations to get their way seems to be the Chinese agenda, if we believe what we read in the news. It amazes me how the Chinese began to build their economy. They started small with things like housewares. Since the money they paid workers was so little the prices could be kept very low. Some of the products had no labor costs at all, because they had prisoners make the products. I remember when I worked for the state, we used to get our furniture from prison factories. I was sitting on a reclining chair in my office when the back snapped and I almost fell on the floor. I believe prisoners here made extra wages working in those factories. Immediately a tariff should have been placed on the Chinese goods to make the prices comparative with the things we manufactured. If we would have done this, we would still have many of the factories we lost in this country. Now that robotics is being used widely in manufacturing, wage disparity is not such a problem anymore. Look at the auto industry. When we look at the factory floor where hundreds of cars are being put together, we see only a few people on that floor. I remember seeing the assembly area in a huge factory and in the entire factory was three people. In the old days there would have been many hundreds. The same is true for many other industries. One of the biggest pushes is for electric cars and that means China will make a fortune on this being the world’s biggest supplier of everything needed for this to happen, not only with the cars, but with the entire supply chain for green energy. This is ironic. I say that because China is one of the world’s biggest polluters. I read a report which claimed China has half of all the coal powered plants in the world and it claimed they had well over 1,000 of them. The other ironic part of this is the car companies don’t seem to be happy about making electric cars and are being forced into it. One report said no car company is making any real profit off electric cars except to Tesla. The number of electric cars being sold is only a tiny fraction of all cars. We don’t have enough power in the grid for everyone to have an electric car, and not enough charging stations. One article stated this is just all a ploy, because the government forcing electric cars will mean many won’t be able to afford them anyway since they are more expensive and these people will have to move to cities and use public transportation. This means this is one area China might ultimately fail to make that financial killing in.
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