Daily Archives: 7 November 2024

A Victory

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Last Tuesday is shaping up to become a solid Republican electoral victory.

Former Republican President Donald Trump has won a solid Electoral College and popular vote win, and the Electoral College win may grow, with Arizona and Nevada still uncalled as I write Wednesday afternoon. If Trump gets them all, he’d have 312 Electoral College votes. His popular vote lead, 51% to 47.6%, or 4.8M votes, is unlikely to change much.

The Republicans have taken the majority in the Senate, with Senate races having been called for 52 Republicans. That margin could grow with 4 Senate races yet to be called. It’s unlikely to expand to 56 Republican Senators, though, as only 2 of the uncalled races currently have Republicans leading. Even so, the shift to the current solid majority is a major victory; a shift to 54 would be even more so.

The Republicans can still retain their House majority, given the number of uncalled races; however, it’ll remain a slim majority, which will allow the Republican Chaos Caucus to retain their outsized power. On the other hand, the Republicans are on the threshold of losing their majority to the Progressive-Democrats, which would render the Chaos Caucus irrelevant.

More importantly than a Republican victory, though, this is a victory for our nation. That’s not because the Republicans won or the Progressive-Democrats lost; rather it’s the solidity of the victory that creates the national victory. With that broad mandate—especially if the voters choose to keep the Republicans in the House majority—there now comes the possibility of putting the divisiveness of the last 16 years behind us. There now exists the possibility of our nation coming back together as a nation, and a culture, of Americans.

That possibility depends on how effectively the Republicans govern. It also depends on the Progressive-Democratic Party’s willingness to accept its defeat and work with Republicans on getting some things done and other things undone rather than being the knee-jerk obstructionist, anti anything Republican Party they have been (that the Republicans need to stop being similarly obstructionist is a part of their ability to govern objectively).

It also depends on the intrinsically mendacious press recognizing its own failures of the last several decades, made overtly manifest in the last couple of decades, and taking publicly and concretely measurable steps to rid itself of its dishonesty and return to its Fourth Estate role of objectively reporting all the news in its stories and all of the stories, while keeping its opinions out of that news reporting and in its opinion pages.

Gaslighting and Misapprehension

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The People’s Republic of China’s solar panel production industry is running into a glut problem that is seriously depressing prices, to the point that in the current shakeout, many of the PRC-domiciled companies may not survive.

One place where panel prices remain elevated is the United States (thank you, Federal regulations and continued dependence on overseas component supplies), and one PRC-domiciled company that’s likely to survive is LONGi Green Energy Technology Co, Ltd, headquartered in Xi’an, the provincial capital of Shaanxi. In an effort to get around US strictures on PRC companies, LONGi has become a 49% owner of the joint venture (with Invenergy, headquartered in Chicago) of Illuminate USA, and the venture has opened a factory in Pataskala, OH.

The good folks of Pataskala are concerned about LONGi’s connections with the Chinese Communist Party, and Congresswoman Carol Miller (R, WV) has proposed more general legislation that would seek to prevent PRC companies from getting clean-energy subsidies.

Naturally, Zhong Baoshen, LONGi’s Chairman, objects, and herein lies the gaslighting. He insists that LONGi is a private company, and he then tries to distract by pointing out that Illuminate USA is a private company.

That fact is, there is no such thing as a private company in the PRC. Under that nation’s 2017 National Intelligence law, all PRC-domiciled companies are at the beck of the government’s intelligence community to use all of a company’s resources to conduct espionage whenever and targeting whatever the intelligence community decides it wants.

That leads to the misapprehension: too many entities—private companies in the US, politicians at all of the several US governmental hierarchies—actually believe that blandishment that private PRC companies really are private and have no connection whatsoever with any arm of the PRC government.