in World News The stunning truth about China and the Panama Canal
By David Kupelian
As Trump boldly takes back control of vital U.S.-built waterway, media decry president’s ‘expansionist agenda,’ ‘land grab’ obsession and ‘new U.S. imperialism’
Democrats in Congress hate it.
“It’s bananas. It’s insane,” U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D.-Conn., told CNN. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D.-Fla., agrees: “It is utterly preposterous to suggest that we are going to send our military into Panama to, quote, ‘take back the Panama Canal.'” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., speaks for virtually all his congressional peers when he insists, “House Democrats believe that we are not sent to Washington to invade Greenland, rename the Gulf of Mexico or seize the Panama Canal by force!”
But as President Donald Trump stated explicitly during his March 4 speech to Congress, the nation and the world: “My administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal – and we’ve already started doing it. Just today, a large American company announced they are buying both ports around the Panama Canal and lots of other things having to do with the Panama Canal and a couple of other canals.”
The Panama Canal, Trump pointed out, “was built at tremendous cost of American blood and treasure. 38,000 workers died building the Panama Canal. They died of malaria, they died of snakebites and mosquitoes. Not a nice place to work. They paid them very highly to go there, knowing there was a 25% chance that they would die – the most expensive project also that was ever built in our country’s history.”
Trump’s inaugural address: ‘China is operating the Panama Canal, and we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.’
Concluded the 47th president: “It was given away by the Carter administration for $1. But that agreement has been violated very severely. We didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.”