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Marxist demands no longer come from gauche leftists, but from the heights of C-suites

When US Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Donald Trump were compared to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis there was an air of empty name-calling from noisy leftists, who were people of no importance.

Today, the entire industrial sector, and the transport sector in particular, is afflicted by a similar phenomenon, but this time,  leftist protagonists are persons of great importance. People we take orders from.

At IBM, its CEO, while announcing its newly introduced highly discriminatory diversity, equity and inclusion policy, warned managers that they could no longer evade the new rules by hiring Asians as they were no longer on the Official Pity List.

This has resulted from the surprising and extraordinarily powerful sector that has accumulated vast fortunes in politically motivated, leftist pension funds of civil servants, teachers and trade unions. These increasingly influential bodies now make their investments on the basis of how closely recipients of these investment funds toe the DEI line.

Most revealing of this phenomenon was a conversation nominally rightist podcaster Patrick Bet-David had with nominally leftist TV comic and private podcaster Bill Maher.

Bill Maher's podcasting format is laidback and socially alcholic, a factor that may have contributed to unwittingly embarrasing moments that flashed by in one case, but in the other, lingered awkwardly, bringing the segment to an end with a clunk.

In the first case, Maher was approving of some blatantly unfair treatment of Donald Trump. When its unfairness was pointed out. He excused it, saying: "Oh come on, we're dealing with Donald Trump. . . " as if he were not entitled to fair treatment. This went unprotested and slithered by without comment.

The second case involved Maher's guest and fellow podcaster Patrick Bet-David, who found it hard to understand Maher's affection for California governor Gavin Newsom. After all, said Bet-David, he "wrecked the state". Not that Maher disputed this, or any other flaws Bet-David heaped on. Maher was only arguing what a nice guy Newsom was and that he would be good fit for the Democrats, being lumbered with two of the lamest of lame duck incumbents, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Thus Maher concluded that Newsom, charmer that he unquestionably is, would be a slam dunk winner in November.

This led Bet-David to splutter in protest. But look what Newsom did to California, he said. To which Maher replied to Bet-David's litany of screwups, high taxes, tent cities of the homeless, thieves who are caught, but go unpunished, affluent residents fleeing to Tennesee, Texas and Florida etc, etc, etc. Why would Maher wish Newsom on the entire United States?

To which Bill Maher, in a world-weary half-sozzled way, said with a dismissive wave of his hand: "Oh, I don't read the news."

Oddly, Maher gets himself into these highly predictable embarassing situations repeatedly. So much so one almost thinks it is deliberate. He voices his knee-jerk detestation of Trump and his similarly knee-jerk defence of all things Democrat, only to get egg on his face in these exchanges.

An attractive well-spoken white woman clobbered him defending Trump, at every turn, and a black man said he was undecided though obviously leaning Trumpward, said he was waiting for Biden's policy statements to see if they matched his opponent's.

"So you support Trump," Maher accused the fellow. To which the black man said he was awaiting Biden's policy statements before deciding. This won a surprisingly loud applause from his usually partisan Liberal studio audience.

Bill Maher cannot support Trump without doing himself severe injury. He has lambasted him for years. But Maher controls his show and is regularly wrong-footed voicing all the usual negative tropes and coming up the worse for it. One might question if this is deliberate, whether he is changing sides with his audience and suffering some egg on his face in the process.

As Maher faces his political navigation's dangerous reefs and shoals, so does the transport sector in and out of China. The problem in China and the western world is much the same. In one case, the establishment, that is the media, academic, bureaucratic complex, fight for its way of life against forces that insist on destroying it. In the other case, the very same bureaucratic forces are trying to energise an economy that wishes to return to a long ago spirit of the much revered and lamented leader Deng Xiaoping, who said "being rich is glorious".

Just as the English King Canute, during a period of extreme global warming, demonstrated the limits of state power when he could not hold back the tides, other potentates have been slow to learn that lesson.

A good example of this is the behaviour of the Hong Kong Stock Market before and after Beijing's takeover of the primary management of the former British colony. Before, the Hong Kong bourse tracked similar ups and downs that affected markets in London, New York and Tokyo, as they responded to normal day-to-day supply and demand pressure.

Not so in politically driven markets of Shanghai and Shenzhen, where what the "National Team" as the market authority is called, says is law.

Thus, the Shanghai stock index has a psychological impact, and is one of the numbers that are watched, just like the exchange rate for the yuan and the GDP number, as having a significance in terms of the perspective of investors, and as an indicator as to the overall state of the economy. These are politically adjusted numbers, not market reports.

"There has been a significant retreat of foreign money from China’s capital markets over the past six months and more, and there are other domestic players who seem interested in exiting their holdings in the market," said an editorial in the Hong Kong-based China Economic Review.

"So where will the Shanghai stock index be in three months, six months or one year? How long can the National Team continue to operate in this way? How much money do they have, and how much money wants out? Of course, there are many things that the system can do to offset the desire of private investors and foreign investors to exit the market," said the editorial.

In the US, the UK and the EU it is the same but different; governments order people about to do their bidding by building up the national debt and paying them to do what they want done. But being questioned now is the necessity of student loan forgiveness, taxes to mitigate climate change, or the utility of wars in which few care who wins or loses.

It's got to the point where the bureaucracy knows it is a boondoggle, and the people know it is a boondoggle and the bureaucrats know that we know that it is. How long can the charade continue?

One thing is clear, it is the international transport sector that will be the first to know because it is hard to conceal an intention when it crosses the docks for all to see.

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Visible & Strategic Logistics
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