There is no mystery why China's big banks have run from Russia: These behemoths — the four largest banks in the world ranked by assets are Chinese — know the U.S. can effectively impose a death sentence. The Secretary of the Treasury, for instance, can designate, pursuant to Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act, Chinese banks to be of "primary money laundering concern." Designated banks can no longer clear dollar transactions through New York, where every dollar transaction clears.

Because the dollar reigns supreme in international transactions, Section 311 designations would put the Chinese state banks out of business most everywhere outside China and even reduce their business inside that country. The Treasury Department, to great effect, imposed Section 311 on Bank of Dandong, a small Chinese bank, in 2017 for participating in prohibited transactions with North Korea.

Moreover, Washington has other tools to hit Chinese banks. In 2012, Treasury also cut China's Bank of Kunlun off from the U.S. financial system by invoking the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010.

"Transactions between China and Russia will increasingly go through underground channels." The underground channels include cryptocurrency, generally banned in China. -- "[T]he head of a trade body in a southeastern province that represents Chinese businesses with Russian interests" to Reuters.

China's regime is playing Americans for fools. It is time for Washington to sanction all Chinese banks, all other Chinese financial institutions, and all Chinese corporates, treating them as one single organization.

Sanctions will work... if they are immediately applied against all Chinese entities to produce maximum shock.

There is no point in imposing sanctions that never have a chance of stopping offending behavior.

Every leftist cause is founded on empathy.

Somewhere there is an oppressed group to be liberated. And he, she or they is the one to fight for their liberation.

And then people die. Sometimes it's those he considers the oppressed or the oppressors. Usually both. The humanitarians become terrorists and their revolutions lead to tyranny.

Leftists genuinely do care a lot. They care about rising oceans, polar bears, women in hijabs, men in dresses, drug dealers in the ghetto and eco-terrorists in prison, racist highways and dead terrorists, and if you think of something that they don't care about yet, they will soon.

As long as it fits the larger agenda of asserting their will over society from a moral high ground.

That is why they also don't care about the horrifying death toll among young black men from crime, how many Muslims are being killed by Muslim governments or the state of the gay rights movement in Marxist dictatorships. If the state of oppression does not conform to the narrative of external social oppression to be overthrown by a liberation movement it is useless to the political movement and to the individual ego of the aspiring freedom fighter.

To a genuine humanitarian, the oppressed are an end, but to a leftist they are a means. A leftist cares a great deal about a coal miner until he votes for Trump or a black man until he runs as a Republican. Or until, even through no fault of his own, like the coal miners and steelworkers for whom leftists once bled, he is replaced by a new pathway to the ultimate revolution.

Really fixing anything robs him of his motivation. That is why the standard leftist position is that black people are as oppressed today as they were under segregation. If they were to admit that black people were equal and free, what would they do with their time?

Given a large enough palette, the leftist can vandalize art, bomb events and assault people because he's trying to save millions, billions and the entire planet.