Keystone Today

Most government policies produce winners and losers. When it comes to his 30 years of acquiescence to China and our economic reliance on our communist rival, Joe Biden represented the winners. Black Americans were the losers.

I’ve now worked in business and finance for about twice as long as I played in the NFL. If there’s any development that cuts across industries, state lines, business size, and every other distinction in the American economy, it’s China. In the years since the People’s Republic entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, our trade deficit with them has quadrupled and 3.7 million American jobs have disappeared overseas, including almost 140,000 jobs in Pennsylvania alone. 

For decades, almost every major corporation in America has actively considered not only the possibility of replacing American workers with cheaper Chinese labor, but also how best to tailor their output for the rapidly-growing Chinese consumer market. The job losses, however, didn’t pile up on Wall Street. They happened at steel mills and factories in places such as the Allegheny Plateau, the Lehigh Valley, and the City of Philadelphia. And they happened disproportionately in the industries that long enabled black workers to join the ranks of the American middle class.

The deadly, economy-wrecking coronavirus that escaped from Wuhan, China has only made these developments clearer than ever to ordinary Americans. We were even reliant on China at the start of the global pandemic for much of our personal protective equipment and medical supplies needed to combat the virus in the United States. 

When I started my efforts to deliver life-saving face masks to hospitals across America at the height of the pandemic, I was frustrated to discover that I initially had to import them from China, rather than buying them from existing American factories and supporting precious American jobs.

Contrary to the globalist pablum that both sides of the political spectrum have spewed for decades, nothing about the current state of affairs was natural or inevitable.

Our country’s slow surrender to China — which handed a tremendous advantage to multinational corporations and financial institutions at the expense of American workers and the black community — was a decades-long course of action that establishment politicians deliberately embarked upon. And few played a larger role in those decisions than Joe Biden. Starting in the 1980s, he repeatedly voted in the U.S. Senate to allow more and more trade with China on a “most favored nation” basis. Ignoring China’s failure to actually reform and respect human and workers’ rights after 1989’s Tiananmen Square massacre, Biden voted to ratify President Bill Clinton’s move to make that preferential trade status permanent.

Shortly thereafter, we handed China its long-running goal of WTO membership, but Biden never even slowed down. As vice president, he advocated strongly for the NAFTA-like Trans-Pacific Partnership and cheered China’s rise.

One thing and one thing only reversed this disastrous course and delivered the lowest black unemployment rate in American history: President Donald J. Trump’s willingness to stand up to China. 

The American people are the winners from this President’s tough-on-China policies, and the Chinese communists are the losers. It would be a tragedy if we let Joe Biden snatch defeat from the jaws of such a monumental victory.

– Professor Jack Brewer is a former NFL player and a philanthropist. Jack lead efforts to deliver critically-needed face masks to hospitals across America at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic.