Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. And boy, oh, boy, we have an interesting show today. Now, it’s a little bit off the trail, off the beaten path because there’s a lot happening. There’s stuff happening with the January 6 defendants. There’s stuff happening with the border, a massive border question. Our old friend Todd Bensman is all over the news. He’s from the Center for Immigration Studies. Go to CIS.org and read up on him or go to ProAmericaReport.com, go to ProAmericaReport.com and you’ll see do a search. We’ve got tons of interviews with Todd Bensman over the last six months or a year. He’s one of the definitive guys on what’s happening at the border. And man, it’s a mess. What a mess. So a lot happening there. But today I want to speak with you, what you need to know about. And there’s stuff going on in Ukraine and Russia, lots of coverage there. There’s an election in France in two weeks where Le Pen, the center right, I guess more right than center right candidate is up against Macron, who is the incumbent, who is I think center left, sort of the corporate guy, too. And so that’s a head to head. Now, they had an election over the weekend, this past weekend. So got some stuff there, all that stuff. Lots to cover. I will cover some of it this week.
But I want to start today what you need to know and talk about China, because I recorded the upcoming interview on this program with the author and Mr. Kuhns, John D. Kuhns, K-U-H-N-S. He has written a book called They Call Me Ishmael, which is the account of a small island in the Papua New Guinea nation.
Papua New Guinea was a part of the British Empire. They were given their freedom. They are now Papua New Guinea as a nation.
And this small island, Bougainville, I might be mispronouncing. It is an island that wants to be independent and become an independent nation. Anyway, there’s a President of the island of this island state named Ishmael, who John Kuhns has assisted and helped and knows well. So he wrote this book. But here’s the interesting thing about this interview. When you hear it in that part of the world, the looming threat is China and the Communist Chinese regime who are dominating that part of the world.
So six months or a year ago, you may recall that the American people and the world was sort of fixated by the fact that Australia had sort of muscled up, decided to get some more submarines and sign some deals to strengthen themselves. And China was mad. Now, remember, I think I’ve talked about it on the air before I spent a year of my life right after college in Indonesia. And one of the things I do remember vividly was Indonesia is a massive country.I don’t know top six or seven in population and an island nation, thousands of Islands, but there are about 15 major Islands, including Java and Bali. You’ve heard of Bali, but Java is the largest in Sulawesii and North Sumatra. And in every one of those big cities, in every one of the big cities, in every one of those Island States, there are States like Texas. Java is like Texas, and North Sumatra is like California. They’re not as big as that, but they’re big Islands and they’re big States within the nation of Indonesia.
And in every one of those communities, there would be a conversation amongst the native, which is to say the ethnically native Indonesians, the Javanese, for example, the Sumatran people, about how there had been over the years, ethnic Chinese, Chinese nationals who moved to Indonesia, and they tended to have a lot of wealth. And especially more recently, that has happened and accelerated, which has happened all over the world, actually, but especially in Asia.
So in this conversation about Papua New Guinea, I was asking John Kuhns about the influence of the Communist regime in that community in Papua New Guinea. And he said, well, they don’t have much of a direct role there because of the dynamic that the local community wants.
But he said, right a few miles away in the Solomon Islands, missed by the American people. The media covered it briefly, was that the Solomon Islands signed a big deal, a big agreement, strategic agreement with the Chinese regime. And when you listen to John Kuhns, as we will in a few minutes, you’ll hear him say that the people in that part of the world see and feel the dominance of the Chinese regime really front and center. It’s not like, oh, maybe China will have an influence down the line. China is having an influence right now. China is having a massive influence right now in the communities there. And John Kuhns, I should have pointed out, John Kuhns is an American businessman who has worked in finance and investment for years and is now thinking by my read, he’s in his late 60s, early 70s, and he has written a bunch of books and he’s worked all over the world. And in these last years, he’s worked particularly in Asia. He’s written, I think, four books now, a couple of them on China and this one on again, the Papua New Guinea area.
Bougainville is the name of the island state. And John Kuhns has a perspective as an American. And he says, look, the Americans are not paying attention at all to what’s happening. Well, I shouldn’t say that. He says they’re not paying attention in a meaningful way.
We’re distracted by lots of things. We’re thinking about lots of things. And meanwhile, the Communist regime is on the march and the Straits of Malacca, if you know your geography, are strategically so important because we move so much oil through there and having control of that part of the world, the Chinese regime has made clear they intend to do that.
They intend to have control of the Pacific in a significant way and on a timetable that might surprise you.
So very interesting and very interesting to see the Solomon Islands throw in and remember, different than the conversations happening in the Ukraine, the Chinese regime does not appear to almost ever engage in military action. If they can use economics, if they canuse the economics and if they can use the power of money, that’s what they do.
So the Solomon Islands took the deal. All over Africa they take the deal. They take the Chinese deal, the Chinese money.In the short run, they’re flush with money. They’re building buildings. They’re building bridges. They’re building infrastructure. In the long run, it’s a problem. But I’m always reminded of the book, The Walmart Effect. In the book The Walmart Effect, they were describing how Walmart dramatically changed shopping and dramatically changed consumer consumption, dramatically changed retail. When you read that book, The Walmart Effect, however, one of the things that stuck out in me is a chapter that describes how American mayors in big cities in the ’60s could not afford to give raises. They didn’t have money, so instead they gave pension benefits, and they knew that they would come due after they were out of office. And so it would be somebody else’s problem. That was their way of putting off till later,someone else is going to have to deal with it. That happens in corporate America, too, where a CEO will make a decision that will become harder for the successor to have to deal with.
But the reality is here is that the Solomon Islands and parts of the world, the Chinese regime will go out and fund all kinds of things. They’ll take the deal because you take the deal early at this point and you’ve got lots of action and development now. And if you’re a politician, if you’re in your 50s, say, and
you get 20 years of lots of success, well, then you don’t have to worry about it as you go past that. So that’s one of the things you see anyway, you’ll be interested in this conversation with John Kuhns.
And I just want to return to this. Are we focused because of the Narrative Machine? Because of the Narrative Machine, big tech, big media,big government, which tells us to focus on Ukraine, which tells us to focus on inflation. Are we missing the major problem in the world, which is the rising influence, step by step of the Communist Chinese regime? They’re not slowing down. They’re accelerating, but they’re not accelerating in a way that in a certain sense makes you stand up and notice they haven’t moved on Taiwan, for example, although they’re probably looking at it saying, you know what? We can see what happened when Ukraine got moved on and doesn’t look like America did much except except sabre rattle.
So it’s going to be interesting to see what happens but it’s a great interview, it’s a great topic and I’ll put up on social media this deal that the Solomon Islands did, a strategic deal which the commentator that I was reading said that changes everything because the Solomon Islands are so key in that part of the world, their location and the influence that they have.
So there you have it. Okay. Don’t forget visit Proamericareport.com proamericareport.com. I hope that you’re signed up for the daily email. The daily WYNK, what you need to know because you get in your email box at 08:00 a.m. East coast time, 05:00 a.m. Pacific time, you’ll get an email that has a few key links, a key central point for the day what you need to know and usually a link to this program, this segment of the program each day when I talk about what you need to know. So what you need to know today the Chinese regime on the March in Asia while we are focused on other things, for good or bad, time will tell. We’ll take a break. Everybody be right back. It’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Back in a moment.
