Idaho - FTZ Update

Chinese company eyes Boise
http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/12/31/1472023/chinese-company-eyes-boise.html

Foreign Trade Zones, Inland Ports and Trojan Triangles
http://www.channelingreality.com/Idx_trojan_triangles.htm

Yesterday, I saw an article about a new "airline" starting service in Idaho Falls. 

Significant excerpts:

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho -- There was good news on Monday for anyone fed up with the four-hour drive to Boise.

A Pacific northwest airline carrier is interested in relaunching nonstop flights from Idaho Falls to Boise as early as this summer.

Seaport Airlines President Rob McKinney said it's still early in the process, but it would likely offer four round trips a day, six days a week.

In the setup article that was printed in July 2010, the reporter wrote:
http://www.localnews8.com/news/24442478/detail.html

Anyone who flies to Boise or makes a connecting flight through it will be affected, that's about 25,000 passengers a year...

While there are nearly 200,000 airline passengers from the region that fly every year, more than 40 percent of them travel to another airport.

Since that's home turf for me, the misrepresentations are obvious.  First... 25,000 passengers per year flying out of Boise to connect - wrong. 

• People drive to Salt Lake City from Idaho Falls - not Boise.  The reason is because SLC is about a 3 hour drive drive and Boise is about a 4 hour drive and there are more options for flights out of SLC. 
• Next, Idaho Falls has a population of barely 50,000 people.  The population of the surrounding towns - if you go out 100 miles in all directions is probably 100,000 thousand people - but one of those towns, Pocatello has a population of about 45,000 of that 100,000 and they are 40 miles closer to SLC and Boise - in fact, they are at the crossroads for the decision for direction and they have their own airport because they are a college town and for years and years, they were bigger than Idaho Falls.
• Third, most people who fly out of Idaho Falls are people who work for INEL, or government people associated with INEL.  Some of them might have a Boise destination but probably not the majority of them. The price of tickets out of Idaho Falls were always very expensive because the government (and government contractor - INEL) comprised most of the flying passengers so even local government people going to Boise would be more likely to drive because of the cost.   

Anyway... enough of that.  It's BS and that's that.  There is not enough normal flight traffic between Idaho Falls and Boise to justify a new - even though small air carrier, for 4 round trips a day, 6 days a week.  That's absurd.  In fact, it is "rolling on the floor, laughing my ass off"  absurd. But it's only the article that is funny.  What they are doing is not funny.  They are setting up a transportation system for people coming from China and they are doing it surreptitiously.  Idaho State University is forty miles down the road.  The modus operandi for importing the revolution is under the cover of foreign "students" - an unlimited number of foreign students. 

What came to mind was, gee... I wonder if that's what that guy, David Koresh was involved in at the compound at Waco.  He was living near a small airport and he had over a hundred people there - a lot of them were British subjects.  Hmmm.  That made me think of the Venice Airport in Florida and Wally Hilliard training pilots from the Middle East to fly small airplanes.  I see a pattern:  Foreign Trade Zones, airports with Customs and Border Protection officers and international flights, connections to small airports with unusual volumes of activity and the U.S. government selling American citizenship for $500k to $1 million a pop - and the moral hazard for the hard-working civil servants making peanuts who are charged with the responsibility for carrying out the policy - covertly so as not to alert the American people that their government was selling them out. 

For whatever reason, I remembered Britain's problem with British citizenship being given to the quislings that managed the colonies for them.  It wasn't a problem until they had to turn Hong Kong back to the Chinese government in 1997.  

Sino-British Joint Declaration
 

1. On 26 September 1984 representatives of the Governments of the United Kingdom and of the People's Republic of China initialled the draft text of an agreement on the future of Hong Kong. The agreement, contained in the second part of this White Paper, consists of a Joint Declaration and three Annexes. There is an associated Exchange of Memoranda. These documents are the outcome of two years of negotiations between the two Governments, undertaken with the common aim of maintaining the stability and prosperity of Hong Kong.

2. The purpose of this White Paper is to explain the background to the last two years' negotiations and their course, and to present the documents in their proper context. The text of this White Paper is also being published in Hong Kong by the Hong Kong Government, and the people of Hong Kong are being invited to comment on the overall acceptability of the arrangements which it describes. Thereafter the matter will be debated in Parliament.


History

3. During the nineteenth century Britain concluded three treaties with the then Chinese Government relating to Hong Kong: the Treaty of Nanking, signed in 1842 and ratified in 1843 under which Hong Kong Island was ceded in perpetuity; the Convention of Peking in 1860 under which the southern part of the Kowloon peninsula and Stonecutters Island were ceded in perpetuity; the Convention of 1898 under which the New Territories (comprising 92 per cent of the total land area of the territory) were leased to Britain for 99 years from 1 July 1898. It was the fact that the New Territories are subject to a lease with a fixed expiry date which lay behind the decision by Her Majesty's Government to seek to enter negotiations with the Government of the People's Republic of China (referred to hereafter as "the Chinese Government") on Hong Kong's future.

4. The Chinese Government has consistently taken the view that the whole of Hong Kong is Chinese territory. Its position for many years was that the question of Hong Kong came into the category of unequal treaties left over from history; that it should be settled peacefully through negotiations when conditions were ripe; and that pending a settlement the status quo should be maintained. The Chinese Government made its view of Hong Kong's status clear in a letter to the Chairman of the United Nations Special Committee on the Situation with regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in March 1972. This maintained that the settlement of the question of Hong Kong was a matter of China's sovereign right and that consequently Hong Kong should not be included in the list of colonial territories covered by the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.
 

At midnight on June 30, 1997, the United Kingdom's Union Jack will be lowered and the flag of the People's Republic of China will be rised over Hong Kong, marking the end of a century and a half of British rule.

1990 was the year that Edward Kennedy sponsored the Immigration Act of 1990 and George Herbert Walker Bush, then President Bush signed it.

The 1990 legislation is the one that authorized the EB-5 visa to sell American citizenship.

Probably because Britain couldn't make good on their promise of residency for all British subjects in their former colonies - and especially from Hong Kong, when COMMUNIST China didn't seem to be following through to honor the agreement to support "one country, two systems", the U.S. stepped in to help.  At least that's the implication of this Los Angeles Times article from 1992:

Hong Kong's Future, November 4, 1992

A 1997 article by Robert A. Manning on the Progressive Policy Institute explains a lot:     

"The Meaning of Hong Kong"

Hong Kong, a mere 420 square miles in size, also carries enormous economic weight. It is the eighth largest trading economy in the world (and 13th largest U.S. trading partner), with a GNP one-fifth the size of China's. It has been called a bridge between East and West and China's window to the world--and not without cause. Hong Kong is a leading commercial and financial center of the world's most economically dynamic region. It boasts one of the world's largest stock markets, holding $63 billion in foreign exchange reserves, and serving as regional headquarters for 85 of the world's top 100 banks. 2 It is also a telecommunications, media, and technology hub for Asia with over 700 newspapers and periodicals based there. Clearly, it is a vital artery in the global economic system.

Moreover, Hong Kong has been vital to China's economic takeoff, from which it has benefitted handsomely, while transforming itself from a manufacturing center into a service and financial hub. Roughly 60 percent of all foreign direct investment in China comes from Hong Kong--about $100 billion--and approximately $40 billion in stock of Chinese-backed firms. Eight of every 10 Hong Kong manufacturers operate in China, employing over five million mainland workers, most in neighboring Guangdong province. Hong Kong is also a major transhipment point: 42 percent of U.S. goods exported to China and 60 percent of China's exports to the United States (in 1995) passed through Hong Kong. 3 Over the past decade or so, a symbiotic relationship has taken shape. Some 1,800 mainland firms are officially registered in Hong Kong with assets worth over $42 billion. Chinese investments are growing at 25 percent a year, with 70 Chinese state-controlled companies, so-called "Red Chips," already listed on the Heng Seng index, Hong Kong's stock market. 4

For the United States, Hong Kong is not merely an entry point into China, but a nerve center for the American business presence in the entire Asia-Pacific region and a paradigm of a free market with its 15 percent flat tax, minimal regulation, and entrepreneurial genius. There are more American residents in Hong Kong (37,000) than British (22,000). More than 1,100 U.S. companies operate in Hong Kong, with 426 basing their regional headquarters in the territory. American firms have invested some $14 billion in Hong Kong and employ 250,000 workers, about 10 percent of its workforce. Nine U.S. states have offices in Hong Kong, more than 80 U.S. universities have alumni associations there, and last year 14,000 Hong Kong students were studying in the United States. In addition, Hong Kong is an important port of call for the U.S. Navy, which has averaged about 70 stops a year.

...The challenge to U.S. policy is to understand the limits and possibilities of American influence and to choose our issues carefully. The following are offered as guidelines for U.S. policy:

....Congress should avoid micromanaging policy which is likely to be counter-productive. The 1992 U.S.-Hong Kong Policy Act provides an adequate framework for monitoring China's takeover, equipping the President with the tools to respond with proportionate penalties to the extent that Chinese behavior violates One Country, Two Systems as codified in the Basic Law. The peculiar nature of the Hong Kong issue limits the degree and type of U.S. involvement likely to be effective.

United States - Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992

In 1989, President George H.W. Bush sent Robert Zoellick to represent the U.S. at the meeting in Canberra, Australia to form the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organization. 

The 1993 Blake Island meeting.... and the Communist Chinese setting up shop in Seattle, Washington.

1993 Blake Island Attendees

1993 Blake Island Leaders Declaration

1994 APEC Economic Leaders' Declaration of Common Resolve, Bogor, Indonesia

Oh... and this... for service to the queen:

December 1, 1993, George Herbert Walker Bush was knighted by the queen.

Vicky Davis
April 19, 2011