Time to Get Tough (6 page)

American corporations and entrepreneurs are masters of technological and business innovation, but the Chinese are equally expert at stealing our trade secrets and technology. American investors and companies can pour millions of dollars into creating and developing a new product, only to have the Chinese, through industrial espionage, steal all that information for nothing. The Chinese laugh at how weak and pathetic our government is in combating intellectual property theft. That would be bad enough, but our government also stands by and does nothing while China demands that any American company that wants to enter the Chinese market has to transfer its technology to China. Such forced technology transfers are
actually banned by the World Trade Organization as an unfair trade practice, but Obama lets China get away with it.
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Josh Kraushaar of the
National Journal
has noted that Obama's economic cluelessness has hurt him with blue collar workers. While Obama is obsessed with “green collar jobs,” blue collar workers aren't buying it. “Clean-energy jobs may be the future, but they're not seen by displaced workers as a panacea.”
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The reason why blue collar workers dismiss Obama's happy-talk rhetoric is because they're smart. They know that anytime you hear this guy talk about how innovations in green technology are going to spark huge job opportunities, it's all meaningless, because Obama lacks the spine and the guts to take on China's wholesale thievery of U.S. technology and trade secrets.

And it could easily get worse, threatening not only our economy but our national security. China is a major aggressor in the field of cyber espionage and cyber warfare. It has the capacity not only to steal highly classified U.S. military technology, but to unleash crippling computer viruses on our networks. About twelve years ago, I wrote a book called
The America We Deserve
. As somebody who has written many bestsellers, including many #1 bestsellers, it was probably my least successful book. The fact is, people didn't want to hear from Donald Trump about politics but about business. That's why when I wrote
The Art of the Deal
and many of my other books, they were huge successes. In fact,
The Art of the Deal
is said to be the biggest-selling business book of all time. Nevertheless, I was proud of
The America We Deserve
for a number of reasons. First, I strongly predicted terrorism in this country, something which happened, unfortunately, and which could have been avoided or minimized. I even included
Osama bin Laden by name. Second, I predicted the crash of the economy. There were too many signs, too many signals, too many factors that I thought made the coming crash obvious. So while it was probably my least successful because it didn't discuss business, I have been given great credit for the book's powerful and accurate predictions. In this book, I'm not looking to make predictions, I'm looking to make a difference and warn about other potential threats.

I fear that a similar but different type of long-term threat exists with China's rapidly expanding military technology developments. According to the Pentagon, China's military has also made “steady progress” in developing online warfare tactics.
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For a country like China, being able to steal our military designs represents hundreds of billions in savings on research and development costs. After all, why spend trillions building and testing complex weapons systems when you can just poach the blueprints for free with a click of a mouse?

Just look at what's already happening right now. In 2009, the
Wall Street Journal
reported that cyber-intruders successfully copied several terabytes of highly classified data on our $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project, which would make it far easier to defeat the new fighter, the F-35 Lightning II.
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Not surprisingly, U.S. officials have concluded with a “high level of certainty” that the attack came from—you guessed it—China.
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We also now know that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) has adopted a new doctrine known as the Integrated Network Electronic Warfare (INEW). The Communist government's new plan involves “training and equipping its force to use a variety of IW [Information Warfare] tools
for intelligence gathering and to establish information dominance over its adversaries during a conflict.”
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In a congressional commission, General James Cartwright testified that China is actively engaging in “cyber reconnaissance” and is penetrating the computer networks of American government agencies as well as private companies.
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For those China apologists who might claim that these cyber attacks may have been carried out by Chinese hackers and are operating independent from the Communist government, RAND's extensive study proved exactly the opposite:
The military threat from China is gigantic—and it's no surprise that the Communist Chinese government lies about how big its military budget is.
The Chinese claim that it's $553 billion a year, which is about one-fifth the size of our own. But regional security experts believe that China's real military budget is much higher. One way the Chinese hide their military spending is by assigning it to other departments of government. That way their rapid military expansion can be kept secret from other nations, which, if they knew China's true military budget, might feel alarmed enough to ramp up their own spending.
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As leaked 2009 cables revealed, Beijing's tactic of deception follows the grandfather of modern China Deng Xiaoping's admonition that China hide its capabilities while biding its time.
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Look, when it comes to China, America better stop messing around. China sees us as a naïve, gullible, foolish enemy. And every day Obama remains in office, they take huge strides to overtake us economically. They manipulate their currency in a way that steals a million American jobs and inflates an utterly unfair trade imbalance by $300 billion. They rip off our business's trade secrets so they can save billions in research and development costs and shave years off the time it takes to get a new product to market. And to top it all off, China is leading the way in developing advanced new cyber warfare techniques to serve as a force multiplier of their already massive military, which currently stands at 2,285,000 active troops with another 800,000 reserves. But remember one thing when we go to the negotiating table with China: Japan, a much smaller country with far fewer people and soldiers, kicked China's ass in war—not a good sign for China's warrior-like future.

We need a president who will sign the bipartisan legislation to force a proper valuation of China's currency. We need a president who will slap the Chinese with a 25 percent tax on all their products entering America
if they don't stop undervaluing the yuan. We need a president who will crack down on China's massive and blatant intellectual property theft that allows China to pirate our products (maybe if Obama didn't view entrepreneurs and businesspeople as the enemy he'd be more aggressive about this). Most of all, we need a president who is smart and tough enough to recognize the national security threat China poses in the new frontier of cyber warfare.

It may seem to many that I speak very badly about China and its representatives. The truth is I have great respect for the people of China. I also have great respect for the people that represent China. What I don't respect is the way that we negotiate and deal with China. Over the years, I have done many deals and transactions with the Chinese. I have made a tremendous amount of money. I have sold apartments for $53 million, $33 million, and many at smaller numbers. I built one of the largest jobs in Manhattan with Chinese partners and made a great deal of money. So I know the Chinese, and understand and respect the Chinese.

Whenever I speak badly of what they are doing to us, I am not blaming them—I am blaming our leaders and representatives. If we could get away with it against them, I would strongly encourage us to do so. Unfortunately, they are too smart and our leaders are not smart enough.

I have many friends in China who cannot believe that their leaders are able to make such unbelievably favorable deals. I can understand it more easily than they can. Our leaders are rather, to put it succinctly, stupid. The amazing thing is, despite all of the hard rhetoric and strong words I use against China,
Bloomberg Businessweek
recently did an article about the thing the Chinese most want. Notable is a quote by real estate president
Asher Alcobi of his Chinese clients' preferences: “Anything that has the Trump name is good.”
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So, I speak badly of China, but I speak the truth and what do the consumers in China want? They want Trump. You know what that means? That means that they respect people who tell it like it is and speak the truth, even if that truth may not be so nice towards them. In fact, it is my respect for the Chinese that leads me to tell our leaders to be careful. The Chinese will take and take and take until we have nothing left—and who can blame them if they can get away with it?

China is our enemy. It's time we start acting like it . . . and if we do our job correctly, China will gain a whole new respect for the United States, and we can then happily travel the highway to the future with China as our friend.

 

 

 

 

T
he first sixteen hours of your forty-hour workweek you work for free. Put another way, the first four and a half months of the entire year, you work for absolutely nothing—the government confiscates every last penny of your hard-earned money in the form of taxes.

That's terrible. The economic robbery of it all is offensive enough, but equally infuriating is the amount of freedom and time the government is stealing from you as well. Imagine having sixteen hours more each week to spend with your family, or volunteering sixteen more hours every week at your favorite charity, or spending sixteen additional hours each week working
on your business or next entrepreneurial venture. Imagine your paycheck was 40 percent higher than it currently is. What could you do with 40 percent more wealth? How many jobs and opportunities for others could you create? The longer you really think about it the madder you will get, especially when you consider the waste, fraud, and abuse the federal government traffics in as it inflicts its self-defeating policies on hard-working Americans.

But does that stop Obama and his “progressive” pals? No. In fact, they think the real problem isn't that your taxes are too high but that they are too
low
.
If only those stingy wage-earners would cough up more cash
, the administration reasons,
benevolent government bureaucrats could redistribute it more fairly and wisely.

Look, paying taxes is a part of life, and we need to fund the things individuals can't do for themselves, like national defense and infrastructure, and yes, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's,” the Gospel of Matthew reminds us. But as one fellow Christian told me, “God only asks me to tithe 10 percent to do His good works. Obama wants far, far more.”

Judging from their actions, progressives don't even believe their own hype. Anyone who thinks they should pay higher taxes is free to send more money to the federal government. There's no law that says you can't pay additional taxes. In 1843 the Treasury Department established a special fund that remains to this day, called the “Gifts to the United States Government Fund” for “individuals wishing to express their patriotism to the United States.”
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Citizens can send in their checks at any time. But when
the average American already spends more in taxes than they do on food, shelter, and clothing combined, it's not hard to see why very few would do such a thing. Making mountains of money and creating millions of jobs would be a far more “patriotic” gesture than fattening an already morbidly obese federal government.

In 2002, at the state level, an enterprising Virginia Delegate, Republican Kirkland Cox, set up a “Tax Me More Fund” in Virginia to see if the people who scream loudest about wanting higher taxes would put their money where their mouths were. To date, over the last eight years, the fund has netted a laughable $12,887, an amount so tiny it can't even fund the salary of a single part-time state worker.
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Bottom line: if liberals really thought giving more of their hard-earned money to government was a great idea, they would do it. But they don't.