Ben

“China is, in Mark’s eyes, just the end of a to-do list, the last major project to tackle. Like he’s playing a game of Risk and he needs to occupy every territory.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“Chinese companies have been smuggling pill presses illegally into the United States, mislabeling them as machine tools or other items or sending them disassembled to avoid detection.69 The destination is drug dealers and criminal gangs70 for the “mass production” of street drugs.71 Now Chinese companies send large quantities of pill presses to Mexico, too, including the metal cast dies to imprint pills with counterfeit numbers such as “M523” and “10/352,” which are the markings of real oxycodone pills. In other words, these Chinese companies are helping dealers produce counterfeit and illegal street drugs.72 In April 2020, the DOJ sent out an alert to law enforcement agencies with a blunt headline: “Chinese Pill Presses Are Key Components for Illegally Manufactured Fentanyl.” In the document, which was obtained by the author, the DOJ noted the “relatively moderate pricing” of $1,000 per pill press—essentially at cost. Why are Chinese companies not charging a huge markup to sell the pill presses to the drug cartels? The DOJ also noted that the “ambiguous export regulations in China allow traffickers to use vague manifest descriptions to describe pill press machines to avoid scrutiny from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel.”73 Chinese pill press manufacturers are required by US law to alert the DEA when they ship pill presses to the United States so federal authorities can track those who might be illegally producing drugs.”
― Peter Schweizer, Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans

“The hero of one of my favite books, Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy, says, "Yes, the only suitable place for an honest man in Russia at the present time is prison.”
― Alexei Navalny, Patriot: A Memoir

“Tax work less. Tax wealth more.”
― Gary Stevenson