Chinese indicted for price-fixing; The end of Pax Americana? | Hour 2

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to vpetcleanershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. All Right, so let's shift gears here and focus on China. So this press release came down from the Department of Justice yesterday and or sorry, yeah, they had a press conference yesterday. I think it was yesterday. Seven Chinese executives and four of the world's largest shipping container manufacturing companies were indicted for conspiring to restrict the output of and fix the prices of nearly all of the world's standard unrefrigerated shipping containers. And they were doing this for over four years. Okay, so these are companies that make the big shipping containers. They started this apparently as early as November twenty nineteen. What was going on in late twenty nineteen in China? It was happening. What happened shortly after November twenty nineteen, something from China. I'm trying to remember. It seems really familiar. I really feel like there was something that happened China related end of twenty nineteen, maybe early twenty twenty. It'll come to me. This price fixing is what they're talking about. This is price fixing, okay, collusion, anti competitive business practices, Okay. So this lasted for over four years. This was a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The multi year conspiracy roughly doubled the prices of standard shipping containers between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty one. So over the course of two years, they doubled the cost of their shipping containers, and that increased the container manufacturer's profits approximately one hundredfold. During the COVID Oh that's what it was, right during the COVID nineteen pandemic and the global supply chain crisis, that's right. Oh yeah, late twenty nineteen, early twenty two. This is when you know, Nancy Pelosi was saying it's racist to call it the Wuhan flu and everybody should come to Chinatown and get infected. I mean celebrate the lunar New Year or whatever it is, the Chinese New Year, right, and it's racist to try to shut down travel from China despite an outbreak of some novel coronavirus. And at the same time, these four, the four largest manufacturers of shipping containers, had coincidentally entered into a price fixing scheme to drive up the costs of their shipping containers that all of these international companies purchase from China. It increased their profits approximately one hundredfold. One executive, vic Nam hing Ma aka vic Ma Vicma. He was arrested and his in France and his extradition to the United States is pending. Six executive co defendants remain at large, So you've got a total of eleven indictments. Four are to the companies and seven are to individuals at those companies. Vick Ba was employed by Singamas Container Holdings Limited. He was the marketing director. He was arrested on April fourteenth, twenty twenty six, in France and his extradition is pending. Singamas, the company he worked for, was engaged in the business of manufacturing dry shipping containers and selling them to customers in the United States and elsewhere. There's another company called China International Marine Containers Group Company Limited. You guys could have added a couple more words in there, right incorporated. Just off the top of my head. Another company Shanghai Universal Logistics Equipment Company Limited, which is referred to in the indictment as Dongfang. Yeah, I'm just gonna move on. Then there is CXIC Group Containers Company Limited. These we're all limited. This comment here from the Acting Assistant Attorney General, Ohmed Aseefi of the Justice Department's Anti Trust Division said, quote global price fixing cartels strike at the heart of our economic liberty. The defendants held hostage the world's supply of ocean shipping containers during the COVID pandemic when our supply chains needed it the most. They stole from everyday Americans who paid more and waited longer for vital goods as a result. So I will never forget when Christy and I were we were still in Ashville. This was late twenty nineteen or sorry, no late yeah, late twenty twenty, because we were locked down in Ashville in an apartment complex and they had closed like the fitness center, the pool which was outdoors, like you could be outdoors at the pool whatever. So they shut down all the stuff. But then they didn't reduce our rents. In fact, they tried to raise the rent. And I went down to them, I said, do you really think you guys earned a three percent increase in rent? You know, do you think you've earned this? You know? So we were like, you know what, forget this, Let's go find a house and move out of the apartment building. So we start looking around and we find a house that's in a neighborhood that's being built, and so we go in there and you know, you pick out the finish as you pick out the drawer pulls and what tiles you want and all that stuff. And luckily we had started that process early on enough because we were sort of the last house that we were the last ones to get in before the supply chain disruptions, and there were two houses on either side of us that they had not sold, and so we were further along in the process. And so when we were getting ready to move in, the houses next to us, they still didn't have windows. They had to come back in, the builders had to come back in and board up the windows because they could not get windows because of the supply chain disruptions. Then we moved in, and the day after closing, I got the job offer to come here. We never really even moved in. So, back to the DJ's press release, their illegal agreement to fix prices and limit supply of these shipping containers resulted in the American consumer paying more and waiting longer for critical goods, as alleged in the superseding indictment. As early as actually March of twenty nineteen, several of the conspirators began discussing a scheme to restrict the output and fix the prices of standard dry shipping containers. These people, at these four companies that they make basically all of the shipping containers, they agreed to restrict the output of their containers by several different mechanisms. Okay, so like this is classic trust behavior, right antitrust? Like this is classic cartel price fixing, robber baron, whatever you want to call it. Classic behavior. You get together with all of your competitors, you fix a price, you drive up the price, and nobody has any altimeternatives then, especially during the pandemic. Now, I don't know if these people knew the pandemic was coming. If it was a lablik accidental lablique, we don't know. But the timing is, as the kids would say, sus right, it's a little suspicious that the timing of their collusion begins just months before the outbreak. And far be it from me to suggest that a Chinese company, let alone four of them, would take any sort of direction from the communist Chinese Party, but it does seem to fit a global strategy that China has been engaged in. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video. 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We have eleven indictments from the DOJ against seven individuals from China and four companies that they were working at or owned that manufacture shipping containers. And these people with through their companies, all got together and engaged in a price fixing scheme. So they would limit their outputs in order to constrain the supply. Right while demand is a certain level, so you constrain the supply, and this way it drives up the price. And so they agreed to this, and then they also set up some mechanisms because you know, you can't really trust that the other guy's going to do it, so yeah, on no honor among thieves apparently, so they actually hammered out like a whole plan. They would limit the number of shifts and hours that each production line for standard dry containers could run every day. They installed eighty seven video surveillance cameras on all forty nine dry container production lines in order to ensure that the companies did not exceed the agreed upon limitations, so everybody could spy on each other's production line to make sure that they're not cranking out too many per day. They would not build any new container manufacturing factories, and they established a fund. Yeah, they put together like a bank account, and then they funded it, which included a mechanism to penalize financially any cheating on the agreement. The very they must have brought in some lawyers on this, I guess. By September twenty twenty, the conspirators agreed to restrict how many standard dry shipping containers they would manufacture for particular customers, including American shipping companies, and from at least as early as September twenty two until as late as November twenty three, the conspirators agreed to cap the total cargo volume of containers that the company conspirators produced, so they also would not make containers that were too big, right, So they capped the space the volume that a container could have the profits. At one of these companies, CIMC, their profits went from about nineteen point eight so call it nineteen million dollars in twenty nineteen, when they first started, they had profits of about nineteen million, and that went to a year later from nineteen million, it went to two hundred eighty eight million dollars and by twenty twenty one, so just two years later they were pulling in one point seventy five billion dollars. Another company, Singama, their net income increased from well, they were losing money actually when they entered into this deal, so you could see why it would behoove them to enter into the agreement right because they were having They had losses of one hundred ten million dollars a year in twenty nineteen. They then turned a profit. In the first year of the price fixing, they made about five million, and then the next year they were up to about one hundred and eighty seven million dollars. By the way, a violation of the Sherman Act carries a maximum penalty of ten years in prison and a one million dollar criminal fine for individuals, plus a maximum penalty of one hundred million dollars fine for corporations. There was a quote in here looking forward. Here it is Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said, this Department of Justice is ensuring that when American pocketbooks are Pilford, accountability will follow. And yet the last administration saw fit to prioritize the weaponization of the Department through novel criminal prosecution theories, rather than focus on criminal actors most responsible for manipulating markets to profit from a global pandemic. Thankfully, this Department has righted that wrong, eliminating the weaponization of government and prioritizing ensuring affordability for all Americans. This is, by the way, for all the people that are like, oh, Trump has destroyed all the norms. This was the norm. These kinds of press releases and denouncements from the DOJ, this was the norm. And I say, this is one who was a reporter for a decade, has been a host for longer, like this is what you normally get from the FBI, the DOJ. These are the things that they normally do in the past. Now there's a bit of a bigger picture here. This is but one example of the way China is engaged in what they call the smokeless battlefield. Okay, they are fighting us on all sorts of fronts. I've gone over this before. One of them, one of the fronts was to kill off military aged males without having to actually go to war. How do you do that? You flood the country with fentanyl. Right, that's one way, another way make people hate their country. And you do that via social media. I keep telling people, if you go online, you're on social media, you are in a psychological battle space. Right. There are foreign actors that are attempting to demoralize, as the Soviets laid out in their plant, they attempt to demoralize Americans, or as I call it, black pilling. Right, all is lost, nothing's worth saving. All the institutions are terrible, everybody is terrible. Burn it all down, right. If we do all of that for them, they can win without firing a shot. It's part of their strategy. And they've laid all of this out. By the way, John writes into the text line, who says about these Chinese companies, these manufacturing companies that have been indicted for price fixing. He says, so each company had a limited quantity that they could produce, they restricted the supply to drive up the price. They set an overall price per item. Are we talking about shipping containers or are we talking about OPEK both. Actually, yes, OPEC is a cartel too, and that's why when people keep talking about the price of gas, you got to always work OPEK into that answer, because the price of gas is determined by the price of a barrel of oil, and the barrels of oil that are produced by the OPEC nations. They limit their output in order to artificially constrain supply because Saudi Arabia needs the barrel of oil to cost no less than eighty dollars a barrel because they fund a lot of their social welfare and government programs off of that revenue. And if they start if the price of oil goes below eighty dollars a barrel, then they start running deficits. So they can't have that. So they enter into this cartel, you know, several decades ago, along with you know other Gulf Coast or Golf Cooperation countries, the GCC nations, and they entered into disagreement. They created a cartel and then they constrain the supply. And that's why it was such a big deal. A couple of weeks ago when the UAE United Arab Emirates when they left Opek, because they have the capacity and ability to drill and produce more oil, but OPEC says, you can't do anymore than I think it's three million barrels a day. I think, well, they can do five million a day. And their economy has diversified, so they don't really need the oil for all of their stuff because they've gone into finance and a lot of like you know, commodities trading, like futures markets and stuff, so they're more of a financial services kind of economy and they don't need the oil in order to prop up their budgets in the way that Saudi Arabia does. So they left Opek and by the way, you know else is part of Opek Venezuela. Yeah, things have changed down there too. Not sure if you heard about that. But see, I keep trying to bring you these little these dots so you can start connecting them. And to that point, I'm gonna I'm gonna give you an analysis. This is not my analysis, and I'll tell you who wrote it up afterwards, because I want you to just hear what this analysis and what this game theory or geopolitical theory is says, I don't know if you have noticed that Western Europe is falling and the Commonwealth UK and New Zealand, Australia. The Commonwealth is about as woke as it gets. Where does that leave the Western Alliance? How about the United States? What say? Ye? America firsters The long, general, though not total, period of peace that we have enjoyed since World War Two is broadly known as the Pax Americana, and it is effect actively a generally peaceful and secure world order, mostly managed under an international law agreement known as the US Navy. Anybody makes these appeals like international law right, mm hmm. Yeah. The only reason that anybody has places any kind of confidence in this concept because that's all this is. Right. This is like the police call themselves the thin blue line, and that is a reference to the very thing that international law is as well. It is the threat of force. It is chaos versus civilization, right, that's the line. And people pretend that this line is a lot thicker than it actually is. And so if you have countries that, let's say, want to claim dominion over a vital waterway like a strait like a choke point, and they want to say nobody gets to come through here unless we allow them. And they're going to take control over this waterway. That is a threat to every nation on the earth. And so this concept of international law is the US Navy is the US armed forces. That's what creates that stability. And look, that's what the European Union is as well. That created stability. NATO created stability. Although I mean, Europe seems they just cannot help themselves from destroying themselves, just like their history is just they just they always feel the need to destroy themselves. I don't know why anyway. That piece packs Americana was facilitated not merely by American peace through strength, but also through a network of Western allies throughout Western Europe and the British Commonwealth, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, plus some others who provided intelligence sharing and strategic military staging for the US military, seeing as they'd never really made real militaries of their own after World War II. For the most part. Right now in the twenty first century, the Commonwealth and Europe have gone woke and they're heavily infiltrated with Islamism. They're on the precipice of disaster. And even if they weren't, they're not particularly engaged with American interests anymore. In fact, they're mostly hostile to them since Trump upset the whole little Great Reset Agenda twenty thirty program back in twenty sixteen, right, because that was where they wanted to go. Trump comes in and says, no to that, We're going to look out for our interests first. Like basically, all these other countries do the competing doctrine to that post war consensus world in which Western Europe and the Commonwealth will mostly be slaves. The competing doctrine is called the multi polar world. And I have talked about this. A multipolar world means that America is no longer number one. That's what that means, packs Americana, right, Okay, So now in the twenty first century, the Commonwealth in Europe have gone woke. They're on the precipice of disaster. They're all mad at America, mad at Trump, who upset the Great Reset, upset the Agenda twenty thirty crowd. The competing doctrine to the post war consensus is the multipolar world. The idea is simple. The world won't be unipolar, as in US global hegemony, which has been the case since the the Union collapsed in nineteen ninety one. Gen Xers remember this, Boomers remember this. Okay, it won't be bipolar either, like my old girlfriend. That's I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I never had a bipular anyway. Bipolar was US versus USSR Right, there will be at least three poles in the multipolar world, and maybe four That would be Russia, China, the Islamic World, and the Western slash US world. This is the fantasy of the Russian nut job Alexander Dugan. Okay, and this guy, he's on social media and this is his multipolarity fantasy and he keeps promoting this stuff. He's been doing it for like twenty years. He's got inroads in with Putin and apparently some with the podcast to Stan crowd as well. Here in America, the influencers on the horseshoe right, the World Economic Forum had fully bought into this idea as well. This multipolarity idea, it's meant essentially to let the People's Republic of China and the Islamic Frankenstein's monster rise with Russia getting better scraps and big revenge on the West that broke the Soviet Union. It's the quote New World Order program that we've all been running from. That's what multipolarity means. So for everybody that was so concerned twenty years ago about the New World Order, or actually thirty years ago when George H. W. Bush talked about the New World Order, right like, this is it, guys. This is multipolarity, the new World Order. Of course, a single new hedgemon will eventually arise from the multipolarity world, because it always does. It'll probably be China, the World Economic Forum slash un like. They have some different ambitions, but the same path as does the Islamist project. Right, So everybody's fine with this arrangement right now to advocate for multipolarity and to get the West to surrender its position, because they all think, if we can get the West to surrender, we knock them down multipolarity and then we become the dominant hedgemont. But what if you love America and the American way of life, Well you can't have that with the multipolar world model. Western Europe will be slaves to the Islamists. Eastern Europe will go to Russia. The Commonwealth outside of Britain will be split apart between Islamists and the Chinese. America will be isolated, divided, internally, shrunken, and eventually defeated. That's how that plays out. We can have the packs of Americana, we can have what we currently enjoy, we can continue that, but it's going to require a new alliance structure. And if you don't understand this, then you don't understand anything about what Trump is doing on the world stage. It isn't just about stopping China or the bricks nations, or securing against terrorism, or grabbing oil or controlling the shipping lanes. A whole new world alliance structure is in the works right now. That's what and I agree with this author. I agree that this is what is that these geopolitical moves are all seeming to indicate a reordering of alliances. You've got enemies of freedom and prosperity, and you have proponents of freedom and prosperity. And by the way, those other countries they seem to know what's going on too, and they're doing everything that they can to stop this realignment and this new alliance from forming number one. The first link in the chain, the author says, of allies is and Tucker Carlson fans, you're going to want to hold your ears for this one US Israel. Virtually the whole plan depends on that alliance staying strong and accomplishing its initial goals. That's why it's under such heavy attack. It's literally the key to Western values being strong in this century. In the next the alliance could be strengthened if it were to be joined by a free and restored Iran. It isn't just that the IRGC is awful evil and on the other side of all this, it's not just the oil, but that's really important. It's also that Iran sits geographically at the crucial crossroads of the entire Eastern Hemisphere and the trade circumstances of almost six billion people. Also could include countries like India if it were to get off the ground, and Japan. It could also include South Korea, but that's kind of dice here. In the last couple of years, Taiwan as well, maybe Australia New Zealand, they start rethinking some things the way they've been headed Eastern Europe. A lot of those countries might be interested in joining. They don't want to be gobbled up by Russia. Again, Western Europe, that's still a wild card. I don't know if they can save themselves, if they have the stomach for that. You also have a lot of Arabic Middle East countries. They want to modernize, but a lot of them are sick of backwards radicalism and they would very much like to participate in the twenty first century. They may not join in as strong allies, but they're likely to be solid partners in such a program unless some of those other countries like Russia or China or wherever like, if some of them are successful in bringing them into their orbit. He says, this is what we're really talking about, guys. This is what's really going on. This is what President Trump and Prime Minister and Benjamin and Yahoo are actually brokering in the world. If you care about freedom, prosperity, and peace, you're backing this. If you aren't backing this, you're backing evil empires like the People's Republic of China, the Islamist Crescent, and the revenge fantasies of post Soviet Russia. The first link is the US Israel alliance. That's the key to making the whole project work. That's why there's such a huge push to break that alliance now before it really gets solidified as the core of what will replace the faltering Western Alliance in the twenty first century. So we have a choice. You can support and help reinforce this first link in the chain of freedom, peace and prosperity for the next one hundred plus years, or you could be on the side that opposes this, not just in this moment, but in the future, not just for some people out there, but somewhere like here, most people in the world. Again, I tend to agree with this now. Who wrote this James Lindsey from New Discourses that some people on the Wolk right really don't like. Because he sees this and he has a large jar filled with a lot of money for every time that he says this stuff and it turns out to be right, you're supposed to put money in the jar, and he's become very wealthy. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecallanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.