Aiding And Abetting The Enemy

Since the Republican debates just won't go away--not unlike a particularly nasty venereal disease--and since the level of the debates has been, to be kind, abysmally low, I thought I'd help them out by coming up with a line of questions that should liven things up a little.

I think we can all agree that money is our one true God here in the good old USA. And the Walton family (of Wal Mart fame) has been the biggest capitalist success story of the past 40 years. (If old Sam Walton were still alive he would be worth 3 or 4 times as much as Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. As it is, his immediate heirs are all worth $20 billion or more each.)

The Walton's business strategy has been a ridiculously simple one: continue to demand that your suppliers lower their costs year after year. That means breaking unions, cutting workers, and ultimately shipping millions of jobs overseas. Until everything is made in China. Along the way, the Wal Mart economics of scale drive their competition to either do the same or go out of business.

It's the kind of unfettered free market approach that makes guys at business schools go all giddy and weak in the knees and Republicans everywhere break into spontaneous applause. Break the unions? Yeah! Drive down labor costs? Yeah!! Move all manufacturing off-shore to a place without any environmental regulations, and a billion cheap, disposable workers with no rights? Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!!!

So here's my first question for Newt and Rick and Michelle and Willard Mitt and Ron and other Rick (and you too Jeb, hiding in the bushes): as red blooded American patriots, how can you defend the end result of the Walton's highly successful business strategy, which has been to transfer enormous amounts of America's wealth directly to the Chinese Communists?

'Cause that's where it ends up. Oh sure, there are a handful of Chinese millionaires and I'm sure that they're enjoying the fruits of capitalism to the fullest. Private jets, and Bentley's, and shopping sprees in Paris and New York. But the wealth of these new Chinese "capitalists" is just a tiny, tiny fraction of the amount in question.

And more importantly, they can only continue to prosper with the permission and under the guidance of their government. And that government is still a Communist one. A Communist one that is starting to flex its muscles around the world--usually in direct competition to American interests. They need oil and minerals--we need oil and minerals. And these are finite things. We continue to send billions and billions of dollars to our fiercest competitor. As a nation we get weaker while the Walton's get richer.

Here's my second question for our distinguished panel of Republican worthies: if you all truly love this country as much as you profess to, what are you prepared to do about this?