As tensions escalate between China and Japan in the East China Sea, Japan continues to plan for the deterrence of Chinese aggression in and around the waters of the Senkaku Island region. Strategies for defending the East China Sea, a place notoriously wrought with antagonistic behavior by bad actors, necessitate greater maritime awareness. HawkEye 360’s […]
They don’t just call Democrats “communists” and “Marxists” in order to attack Democrats, they do it to disappear the entire giant expanse of political spectrum that exists to the left of the capitalist imperialist Democratic Party. They want you to think that’s as far left as it gets.
Democrats refer to themselves as “the left” for the same reason. Both mainstream factions work to shrink the Overton window into a tug-o-war between Republican capitalist imperialists and Democrat capitalist imperialists. Between two opposing factions of neoliberal neocons.
❖
The problem with the belief that we must start new social media companies because the US government keeps infiltrating the popular social media companies is that it does nothing to confront the huge problem that the US government keeps infiltrating popular social media companies. Until we turn and squarely address the problem that the world’s most powerful government keeps infiltrating the popular online platforms we use to communicate with each other in order to interfere in our communications, they’re just going to keep doing it. Their actions need to be stopped.
Sure you can keep starting new social media companies in response to this problem, but they’ll either remain small platforms without any meaningful influence or they’ll be overpowered by the US government and made to facilitate US information interests. That’s the real issue. To accept that we can only have unrestricted political speech on small platforms is to accept that we can have free speech so long as no one hears us. That we can say whatever we want as long as we speak it into a hole in the ground.
Starting new platforms isn’t the solution to this problem. The solution to this problem is loud, forceful, aggressive opposition to the US government interfering with the way people communicate with each other on the internet until they stop. This is actually very possible to do, because the US government needs to preserve its image as an upholder of liberal values. If that image starts to deteriorate as public awareness grows that they’re working to censor worldwide political speech, their behavior will need to change. So what we can do is work to grow public awareness and opposition to the US government’s increasingly intrusive operations in Silicon Valley.
That’s a much better use of our energy than self-isolating our dissident speech in small online platforms that have no mainstream impact. US government agencies would love it if we’d all self-quarantine ourselves in the obscure margins of the internet where we can’t infect the mainstream herd with wrongthink. We’d be doing their work for them. It’s better to stay on the largest platforms and work to open some eyes.
❖
“China’s going to invade Taiwan!”
“What? How do you know?”
“Well we’re pouring tons of weapons into Taiwan, and we know we’d definitely invade if the Chinese were doing that in Cuba.”
“Ahh. So you’ve got some solid intelligence then.”
❖
I’m often accused of “praising” or “supporting” Russia or China, which is funny because I never actually do. People are just so accustomed to being told the US and its allies are pure good and its enemies are pure evil that anything outside this looks wildly imbalanced to them.
It’s possible to saturate a civilization so thoroughly with propaganda that the entirely normal baseline act of focusing one’s criticisms on the world’s most powerful and destructive power center looks freakish and suspicious in contrast to what you’re accustomed to consuming. In reality, criticizing the US-centralized empire with appropriate and proportional forcefulness and focus looks like treasonous support for enemy nations for the same reason sunlight would seem shocking and abrasive to someone who’s lived their whole life in a cave.
❖
We do not live in a free society, we live in a highly controlled society where we are psychologically manipulated into mental homogeneity in service of the powerful. Criticizing foreign countries for not having freedom like ours helps make our own society even more tightly controlled.
We’re told we’re freer than other countries so that we won’t see how unfree we are. You can’t look down your nose at countries like China or North Korea and still clearly see how controlled and homogenized your own country is. You can’t celebrate your freedom while still lucidly understanding your oppression.
The illusion of freedom is precisely where the reality of our imprisonment hides. We’ve been conditioned to mistake being able to choose between two fake political factions for political freedom. To mistake being able to regurgitate what we’ve been propagandized into saying for free speech.
People say “I’m free because where I live I can say, do and experience anything I want!” But that’s not true; you can’t. You can only say, do and experience what you’ve been conditioned to want to say, do and experience by the mass-scale psychological manipulation you’ve been marinating in since birth. You can do what you want, but they control what it is that you want.
There’s no better illustration of how unfree we are than the way westerners all think the same thoughts about how unfree people are in countries the western empire just so happens to disapprove of. We bleat in unison, “I’m so glad I don’t live in a tyrannical homogenized country like China where people aren’t free to be individuals.”
We won’t be free until our minds are free. Until all of us (not just the lucky few who happen to stumble outside the narrative matrix) are able to shape their own perspectives based on truth rather than on what benefits the powerful. Until we’re able to become true individuals.
___________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
• End of peak cases of COVID-19
• U.S. boycott affects energy transition
• Huawei makes progress in 10nm microchip manufacturing
• World’s largest national park system
The Indian Army on 2 January 2023 released a Request for Proposals (RfP) for three-hundred Rough Terrain Vehicles which are to be acquired using fast track emergency procedures. The tender requires an indigenous product based on an existing design which must be fully delivered within twelve months of contract award. The LgsRV (Logistics Rough-Terrain Vehicle) […]
It’s a truism that the world is in a dismal state; indeed, there are too many great challenges facing our world and the planet is in fact at a breaking point, as Noam Chomsky elaborates on an exclusive interview below for Truthout. What’s less widely recognized is that another world is possible because the present one is simply not sustainable, says one of the world’s greatest public intellectuals.
The first post-cold war assault on Russia by the West began in the early 1990s well before the expansion of NATO. It took the form of a U.S.-induced economic depression in Russia that was deeper and more disastrous than the Great Depression that devastated the U.S. in the 1930s. And it came at a time when Russians were naively talking of a “Common European Home” and a common European security structure that would include Russia.
The Disastrous Russian Depression Resulting from Western supervised “Shock Therapy.”
The magnitude of this economic catastrophe was spelled out tersely in a recent essay by Paul Krugman who wondered whether many Americans are aware of the enormous disaster it was for Russia. Krugman is quite accurate in describing it – but not in identifying its cause.
The graph below shows what happened to Russia beginning in the early 1990s as a result of the economic policies that were put in place under the guidance of U.S. advisors, the economist Jeffrey Sachs, perhaps the foremost among them. Sachs describes his contribution here. These policies drive an economy abruptly from a centrally planned economy with price controls to an economy where prices are determined by the market. This process is often described as “shock therapy.”
The plot shows that, upon the onset of “shock therapy” in 1991, the economy of Russia crumbled to 57% of its level in 1989, a decline of 43%! By comparison the U.S. economy in the Great Depression of the 1930s fell to 70% of its pre-Depression level, a decline of 30%. The life expectancy dropped by roughly 4 years in Russia during that period. Poverty and hopelessness became the norm. From my experience, few Americans know of this, and fewer still understand its magnitude.
“Shock Therapy” Applied to Poland Did Not Result in Prolonged Depression. Why?
The data for Poland are also shown for comparison in the chart above. Why? Because “shock therapy” was also carried out in Poland beginning two years earlier than Russia, in 1989. A glance at the graph above shows the striking difference between the two and the graph below reinforces that view. Below the real GDP’s for both Russia and Poland normalized to a value of 100 for the first year of their transitions to a market economy are shown in a 2001 IMF staff paper by Gerard Roland, “Ten Years After…Transition and Economics.” (China is also included by Roland. One lesson is that China moved to a market economy without “shock therapy,” did so with astonishing success and without putting itself at the mercy of the largesse of the U.S.)
Roland, Gérard. “Ten Years after … Transition and Economics.” IMF Staff Papers 48 (2001): 29–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4621689. Figure 1. Cited by Krugman here.
It is immediately clear that Poland went through a brief downturn lasting two years but recovered quickly, unlike Russia which continued in a slump for 16 years. Why the difference between the two? A big part of the answer is provided by economist Jeffrey Sachs who was in the forefront of advisors for the transitions in both countries and hence is a man who knows whereof he speaks. As Sachs put it in an interview here on DemocracyNow!, he was present during a “controlled experiment” where he could observe what led to such different outcomes. He says:
I had a controlled experiment, because I was economic adviser both to Poland and to the Soviet Union in the last year of President Gorbachev and to President Yeltsin in the first two years of Russian independence, 1992, ’93. My job was finance, to actually help Russia find a way to address, as you (the interviewer, Juan Gonzalez) described it, a massive financial crisis. And my basic recommendation in Poland, and then in Soviet Union and in Russia, was: To avoid a societal crisis and a geopolitical crisis, the rich Western world should help to tamp down this extraordinary financial crisis that was taking place with the breakdown of the former Soviet Union.
Well, interestingly, in the case of Poland, I made a series of very specific recommendations, and they were all accepted by the U.S. government — creating a stabilization fund, canceling part of Poland’s debts, allowing many financial maneuvers to get Poland out of the difficulty. And, you know, I patted myself on the back. ‘Oh, look at this!’
I make a recommendation, and one of them, for a billion dollars, stabilization fund, was accepted within eight hours by the White House. So, I thought, ‘Pretty good.’
Then came the analogous appeal on behalf of, first, Gorbachev, in the final days, and then President Yeltsin. Everything I recommended, which was on the same basis of economic dynamics, was rejected flat out by the White House. I didn’t understand it, I have to tell you, at the time. I said, ‘But it worked in Poland.’ And they’d stare at me blankly. In fact, an acting secretary of state in 1992 said, ‘Professor Sachs, it doesn’t even matter whether I agree with you or not. It’s not going to happen.’
And it took me, actually, quite a while to understand the underlying geopolitics. Those were exactly the days of Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and what became the Project for the New American Century, meaning for the continuation of American hegemony. I didn’t see it at the moment, because I was thinking as an economist, how to help overcome a financial crisis. But the unipolar politics was taking shape, and it was devastating. Of course, it left Russia in a massive financial crisis that led to a lot of instability that had its own implications for years to come.
But even more than that, what these people were planning, early on, despite explicit promises to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was the expansion of NATO. And Clinton started the expansion of NATO with the three countries of Central Europe — Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic — and then George W. Bush Jr. added seven countries — Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic states — but right up against Russia…
The Neocons at Work, Carrying Out “The Wolfowitz Doctrine,” the Latest Expression of the Post-WWII U.S. Drive for Total Global Domination.
It is quite clear that the goal of the United States was not to help Russia but to bring it down, and Sachs correctly links that to the US quest for global hegemony first set forth in the months before Pearl Harbor and reiterated by the neocons who are now its champions. Among them Sachs mentions Paul Wolfowitz whose “doctrine” sums up the goals of the post-Soviet era with the words:
Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.
We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.
What better way to achieve this goal than to reduce the economy of Russia to a basket case? Sachs draws a direct line from the Great Russian Depression of the 1990’s and early 2000’s to the expansion of NATO, the U.S. backed coup of a duly elected President in Ukraine in 2014 and on to the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, also designed to “weaken” Russia. The hand of the US was at work every step of the way.
NYT’s Krugman Fails to Discuss the Hand of the US in the Great Russian Depression – not part of the Narrative That’s Fit to Print.
In his article Krugman describes the difference in outcomes between Poland and Russia but he does not describe different factors that distinguish the two countries and might serve as causes of the different outcomes. Sachs points out one such cause which he witnessed firsthand.
Krugman makes no mention of Sachs’s experience which Sachs himself has discussed repeatedly in interviews (like the one quoted for example, here) and in various written accounts going back to 1993 and a lengthy account in 2012 wherein he describes the lack of aid from the West as his “greatest frustration.” Sachs’s account is no secret and certainly a competent economist would know of it.
Certainly there were other factors contributing to this tragedy which Sachs himself discusses here. But there is no doubt that the actions of the US and the West were critical factors in the Great Russian Depression. An understanding of this goes a long way in making sense of events leading up to the present moment of U.S. proxy war in Ukraine and the brutal sanctions imposed on Russia. This understanding, however, does not fit the narrative to which the NYT confines itself – and its readers.
Over a dozen countries have introduced new coronavirus (Covid-19) measures for travellers from China. This comes after cases of infection have surged across the country. However, the Chinese state has described the measures as “unacceptable”.
The United States, Japan, France, Canada, and the UK are among the countries that now require airline passengers from China to confirm a negative pre-departure Covid test. The countries are also carrying out the random sampling of arriving passengers.
Rising cases
There has been a steep rise in infections after Beijing abruptly lifted years of hardline restrictions in December 2022, with hospitals and crematoriums quickly overwhelmed. Nonetheless, the state pushed ahead with re-opening. It announced an end to mandatory quarantines for inbound flights, which prompted Chinese people to plan trips abroad. However, countries across the world are concerned with what this means for a virus that has killed an estimated 6.6 million people.
Mao Ning, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, said:
Some countries have taken entry restrictions targeting only Chinese travellers… This lacks scientific basis and some practices are unacceptable.
However, the imposed measures – including those by British and French governments – state that all travellers from China, regardless of nationality, must conform.
Reasons for concern
Global concerns over China’s handling of its surging Covid cases are based on uncertainty about how the government is recording and sharing data.
Firstly, Beijing has stated that the scale of the outbreak has become “impossible” to track following the end of mandatory mass testing in December. It has stopped publishing daily infection and death statistics. Instead, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention will only publish figures once a month. As a result, China has only reported 15 Covid deaths since it began unwinding restrictions on 7 December.
Secondly, localised estimates for infections are providing only a piecemeal picture of China’s Covid surge. For example, officials in the wealthy coastal province Zheijang said “the epidemic is expected to enter a peak plateau in January”. Meanwhile, senior health official Wu Zunyou said that the peak had passed in the cities of Beijing, Chengdu and Tianjin. Leaked notes from a meeting of health officials last month revealed that they believed 250 million people had been infected across China in the first 20 days of December.
Co-ordinating a response
Countries are, at present, introducing their own measures. The UK, for example, only requires a negative pre-departure test, while France not only requires a negative test but for inbound travellers to wear a mask as well. Meanwhile, Germany has not introduced any measures.
However, the EU is working on a co-ordinated response. Al-Jazeerareported on 3 Jan that:
officials from the member states will hold an Integrated Political Crisis Response meeting on Wednesday to see if entry requirements throughout the bloc are necessary for visitors from China.
The Independentreported on 3 January that the UK government may undermine its own measures by only making testing on arrival voluntary.
It seems bold to be so optimistic, but lets not forget that the assertion starts from a very low base: 2022 was probably one of the worst years with the Ukrainian war, further repression in Russia, death sentences for protesters in Iran and no let up in China.
I think we have to start with where we are with the world and we are at a very peculiar moment. We have all lived through these multiple crises. We have seen the geopolitics, the divisions, the fragmentation, and all these things that have preoccupied us at a time when you would hope that the international community would come together and craft something that would respond to the big challenges that we face.
So for me, human rights is the force that comes in and unifies us. Because it brings us back to human dignity and to what makes us all connected with each other. Let’s not forget that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights emerged out of the ashes of the Second World War. It provided the inspiration and the motivation that the world needed at that time. So, I think we need to almost counter intuitively go back to the basics of what this unifying force – this concentration on the human being – was. We need to regain the universality and the indivisibility of the human rights regime.
Secondly, we also need to look at human rights in the 21st century, for example in the digital transformation that we’re seeing. Take the letter I wrote to Twitter’s Elon Musk, for instance. Social media platforms play a very important role. We know the role Facebook played in Myanmar, for example, when the Rohinga crisis happened, in allowing disinformation and hatred to spread. So, human rights needs to look at the type of issues that we face today.
And the third area that I hope we can achieve next year, is we have to look at the human rights ecosystem as a whole. So, what is the role of the treaty bodies, of the special procedures mandate-holders, of the Human Rights Council, Universal Periodic Review process, and of my own office too – and how do we strategically deal with different situations?
Freedom House took the occasion to consider that Political prisoners and the victims of human rights abuses have taken a back seat when global summits and events occur. But it is exactly because of those events that we should be giving the victims of such abuses our full attention...
Symbolic dates like International Human Rights Day offer space to reflect on and advocate for the rights of the brave people who have been imprisoned or experienced retaliation for standing up to repressive, authoritarian rule. But political prisoners and others fighting for freedom deserve our attention for more than one day of the year. We cannot allow their plight to be sidelined because it is inconvenient to think about them during an event like the World Cup.
The World Cup is one of several events in recent months that has drawn criticism for the human rights controversies surrounding it. In what was meant to be a historic summit to discuss the imminent threats posed by climate change, the latest United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), held in Egypt in early November, instead became a spotlight on the host country’s abysmal human rights record. The large number of human rights defenders and activists currently detained or imprisoned in Egypt was difficult to ignore, and one case in particular stood out for its perilously high stakes. British-Egyptian democracy activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, imprisoned for his activism, endured a six-month hunger strike, now over, which resulted in the Egyptian authorities denying his family the ability to contact him as the conference took place. They desperately pleaded with the authorities for proof he was alive, and his sister Sanaa took the stage at official summit events to advocate for her brother’s release. She faced threats from Egyptian officials who accused her of calling on foreign entities to intervene in the country’s internal affairs.
Participating governments could have added to this pressure and set the stage for the release of Abdel Fattah and numerous other political prisoners, by conditioning Egypt’s hosting role on freeing political prisoners ahead of COP27. Instead, the conference’s setting appeared hypocritical, as climate justice depends in large part on respect for democracy and human rights.
Similarly, this fall’s G20 summit saw leaders of multiple countries that hold political prisoners convene for strategic discussions. The lives and freedoms of imprisoned human rights defenders, journalists, and prodemocracy activists in Saudi Arabia, China, Turkey, Russia, Mexico, India, and even the host state Indonesia, were superseded by “other priorities.” In Indonesia, human rights defender Victor Yeimo, who has spoken out on the rights abuses occurring in West Papua, was arrested in May 2021, reportedly due to his involvement in antiracism and self-determination protests two years prior. Charged with crimes including treason, he remained in detention while the G20 met. His case and others across the various member states should have been highlighted, as respect for international human rights principles and commitment to strong democracies are key to long-term national and global security and economic stability.
Scott Walker, a Researcher at the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law, a and a Research Assistant within the Faculty of Law, Monash University.decided to draw attention to an important case concerning climate justice; On 10 December 2022 the world marks Human Rights Day commemorating the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights(UDHR) in 1948. This year’s theme is dignity, freedom, and justice for all, in anticipation of the 75thanniversary of the UDHR in 2023. It gives us cause to reflect on the mobilising force that the UDHR has become in the struggle for human rights across the world. Yet, there is always more work to be done to truly achieve a world in which dignity, freedom, and justice is a lived reality for all. To do so we must utilise human rights both as a guidepost for advocacy and a tool for concrete, on the ground change to address some of the most pressing and ongoing challenges facing our world; including the immediate and catastrophic impacts of climate change.
Here in Australia, the path to domestic enshrinement of human rights has been a meandering one: only two States (Victoria and Queensland) and one Territory (the Australian Capital Territory) have Human Rights Acts. Yet, the capacity of these Human Rights Acts to achieve real and meaningful change in people’s lives is profound. Increasingly, people on the frontline of the climate crisis are also turning towards human rights to achieve justice. The potential impact of human rights-based climate litigation was recently demonstrated in the decision of the Land Court of Queensland in Warratah Coal Pty Ltd v Youth Verdict Ltd. In this case, the Court recommend against the grant of a mining lease and environmental authority to allow Warratah Coal to mine thermal coal in Queensland’s Gallilee Basin. This case deserves closer examination to illustrate the way in which human rights enshrined in law can be mobilised in claims for climate justice.
On 10 December 2022, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation (HRCF), the educational arm of the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) civil rights organization, announced this year’s recipients of 20 Global Innovation Small Grants as a part of the organization’s Global Partnerships Program. The grants range from $1,000 to $5,000 and are awarded to organizations around the world working to improve the lives of LGBTQ+ people in these countries. This announcement coincides with International Human Rights Day, which is celebrated annually around the world, marks the December 10 anniversary of the United Nations adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The declaration was the first of its kind and recognized that “every human being is born free and equal in rights and dignity.” The grants support members of of HRC’s growing global alumni network, which now consists of some 200 LGBTQ+ advocates in close to 100 countries. All of them have participated in one of the HRC Foundation’s global programs, including the flagship annual Innovative Advocacy Summit.
The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, December 9, 2022 Ahead of International Human Rights Day on December 10, CHRD celebrated the courage and bravery of human rights advocates and calls on the Chinese government to stop violating its obligations to protect human rights and free those detained for exercising their human rights. We urge the international community to keep hope alive and continue supporting defenders on the forefront.
In recent years. Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, has suffocated civil society and space for free expression, jailed COVID whistleblowers, journalists, lawyers, labor organizers and feminists, LGBTQ+ activists and religious practitioners. Yet we are encouraged by the glimmers of hope that have emerged in the recent protests. The protests demanding political changes began with spontaneous gatherings to pay tribute to Uyghur victims in the Urumqi Fire. The rapidly spreading protests, led by youth, likely proved to be the last straw in forcing the Chinese Party-State to reverse course on its draconian “zero-COVID” measures.
Reasons for hope: Young people have brought new vitality to the fight for human rights
The scope of this short-lived wave of protests in cities across China was enormous, comparatively speaking. Thus far, there have been at least 68 protests across 31 cities since November 25, according to the Australia Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). And it has largely been young people who have led the protests. The Urumqi apartment complex fire, which took the lives of at least ten Uyghur women and children, as rescue was obstructed by barriers thought to be erected for COVID lockdown but likely for “counter-terror” measures, brought people into the streets to mourn the loss of lives, to assemble and speak out against the devastating zero-COVID control and the political system that made such control possible.
I’m often criticized as being “anti-west”, but I am not anti-west, I am pro-west. I am so pro-west that I want our values of peace, freedom, democracy, truth and justice to be real life things that exist in actual western civilization and not just a fiction that is taught to western schoolchildren.
I am so pro-west that I want the west to embody the actual western values it pretends to embody. I am so pro-west that I support the practice of spreading western values to the west. I’m a western cultural imperialist, except I want to do western cultural imperialism to the west. I’m like a conquistador, a western colonialist setting sail to spread the wonders of western civilization to these godless western savages. Except instead of actually just bringing them murder, slavery, theft and disease I really am trying to bring them western civilization.
I am so pro-west that I want the western values that were sold to me as a child to be actual things that actually exist. And because I support western values much more than the actual west does, I get called “anti-west” and told to move to China. Shit, they should move to China.
A guy I follow on Twitter named David Gondek put it very nicely: “There is nothing wrong with western civilization that living up to its own professed principles wouldn’t fix.”
It’s not “anti-west” to want the west to end warmongering, militarism, censorship, propaganda, government secrecy, oligarchy, injustice, oppression and exploitation, it is pro-west. The “western values” of peace, justice, equality, democracy, freedom and accountability that we were taught in school are very good things. The only problem is that the west doesn’t actually value them.
❖
To be clear, the US empire is getting everything it wants out of the war in Ukraine. It claims out of one side of its mouth that this was an unprovoked invasion that it never wanted, while admitting this war is giving it everything it ever wanted out the other side. The US did not just luckily stumble into a happy coincidence that just happens to advance all of its longstanding geostrategic agendas against a longtime geopolitical target. It deliberately created this situation, and only a baby-brained idiot would believe otherwise.
Putin isn’t waging this war because he thought it would be a nice idea to grab a bit more land, he’s waging it because he assessed that he’d need to fight off NATO aggressions in Ukraine at some point and it would be easier to do it now than later. People say “Hurr hurr, if the US provoked this war to advance its own interests then Putin’s an idiot for falling for it,” but anyone who’s ever played chess knows strategy is often about forcing your opponent to choose between two bad options, either of which benefit you.
There’s still this notion in some anti-imperialist factions that Putin is a brilliant strategic wizard who is outfoxing the empire in a game of 5D chess, but really he’s just fighting on the back foot against a far wealthier, far more powerful foe, and it’s costing his nation dearly.
Whether Ukraine “wins” this war or not is irrelevant to the fact that the US empire was for relatively little cost able to create a massive sinkhole for Moscow to pour its energy and attention into, freeing up the imperial machine to focus on turning the screws on China.
❖
Friendly reminder that China poses a threat solely to the US empire and its agendas of planetary domination, not to the US as a country. Empire architects are intentionally confusing Americans and other westerners by conflating these two issues in a massive propaganda campaign.
❖
Being a child of wealthy parents is like being born into a cult whose entire focus is reinforcing class solidarity for the ruling class. Their social culture, academic culture, family culture etc are all dedicated to building an elite commonality that excludes the common riff raff.
That’s why the ruling class have such vastly superior class solidarity to the working class. Most of us aren’t raised with an acute awareness that we are very different from the ruling class and that their interests conflict with our own, but everyone in the ruling class is. By the time they’re mature enough to take the reins, members of the ruling class have been run through an entire cultural processing system dedicated to forming solidarity with their class, while the rest of us have been focused on keeping our heads above water.
❖
One of the dopiest beliefs on the “populist right” currently is that the ruling elites care about normalizing wokeism and social justice. Our rulers don’t give a fuck about trans rights or whatever, they only care about fanning the flames of culture war to prevent a class war. Our rulers would happily incinerate every trans person in the world if it meant cementing their rule. The instant Black Lives Matter sloganeering ceases to be politically useful it will be flushed down the toilet. They don’t care about marginalized groups, they just use them.
It’s so stupid. Like yeah, powerful plutocrats and secretive government agencies are scheming to normalize LGBT rights because they stopped caring about power and domination and just love wokeness now. Good thinking, dipshit.
In reality, marginalized groups pose no threat to you in any way whatsoever. You are meant to view them as the enemy so that you don’t view your rulers (who don’t care about either of you) as the enemy.
❖
Rightists who think of themselves as anti-establishment rebels while clapping along with Trump, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk are exactly the same as Democrats who called themselves The Resistance for clapping along with Mueller and Rachel Maddow. They’re the same kind of mainstream dupes, just with different narratives.
“Resistance” liberals thought they were fighting the man because they were trying to get the president arrested. MAGA rightists think they’re fighting the man because something something deep state. But in reality they’re both just mainstream partisans who fully support the imperial uniparty.
At least Democrats are honest about being Democrats. Rightists will clap along with mainstream Republican politicians and mainstream Republican pundits and then call other people mainstream partisan NPCs. Really they’re exactly the same. They’re Republicans LARPing as nonpartisan free thinkers.
❖
I don’t dismiss mainstream politicians and media because it’s inherently bad to be mainstream, I do it because right now we live in a highly controlled civilization wherein the only things permitted to go mainstream are those that help (or at least do not hinder) our rulers. Right now the ruling class which controls all means of mainstream elevation only elevates things which either (A) actively advance their interests or (B) normalize the status quo we live in with things like shows and movies that depict people thriving under our current systems.
So right now there’s a wisdom in rejection of the mainstream. But we shouldn’t confuse that with the idea that being mainstream is always bad. Our goal should be to have our own healthy values of peace, equality and justice be the mainstream one day.
It’s a sign of toxicity to be elevated to the mainstream under the current status quo. But we should keep in mind that if we are successful in changing the status quo, the shifting of what becomes mainstream will one day be a sign of health.
______________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Can you imagine walking downtown in Seattle, Vancouver, New York, Toronto, or any other burg in Canada or the United States and not seeing any panhandlers? This homelessness, begging, and dumpster diving is not confined to major urban centers. Last week, I was in Yellowknife, the capital of Denedeh (Home of the People; colonially designated as Northwest Territories), home to about 20,000 souls, where the temperatures ranged from -30° Celsius to -40° Celsius. Despite this, the homeless were out in the frigid temperatures asking change for a cup of coffee. There are shelters in Yellowknife. The take-away point, however, is that some people struggle with penury despite Canada being a signatory to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose preamble recognizes “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family…”
Specifically, Article 23(1) of the UNDHR holds,
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
Article 25(1) of the UNDHR states,
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
If Canada and the US honored their signatures on the UNDHR and abided by its articles, then absolute poverty should not exist.
While poverty is an important story for people to be cognizant of, and while it may not receive the media coverage and government prioritization that it deserves, the marginalized story that so many people seem unaware of is that there is a country that made it through 2022 having lifted its citizenry out of absolute poverty.
China declared victory against poverty in 2021. And it is not just China lauding its victory. UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres commended China on its fight against poverty. The World Bank noted that China has lifted 770 million out of poverty over the last 40 years. Michelle Bachelet, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said, “Poverty alleviation and the eradication of extreme poverty, 10 years ahead of its target date, are tremendous achievements of China.” Citing China’s eradication of absolute poverty, even the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, was moved to praise China’s amazing economic development.
This achievement was by the nominally communist China. Being aware of the victory over poverty is great, but this awareness ought also to be kept in mind before unthinkingly criticizing socialism or communism. The intellectual poverty of the criticism is such that many people consider it sufficient to just remark, “That’s communism/socialism,” as if providing a label for a political-economic system should evoke fear and invalidate it. Thus, in the US, Barack Obama was risibly derided as a socialist; he, nonetheless, sought to distance himself from such a descriptor.
Donald Trump declared his scorn for the bugaboo of socialism (apparently ignorant of what spending on the military; police; border security; highway, airport, train stations, railways, port facilities, bridge construction and maintenance; education; etc represent) and communism. He unsuccessfully tried to paint his presidential challenger in 2020, Joe Biden, as a socialist (again risibly).
Even university professors, such a Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, would add their ill-contrived opinions to the anti-socialist, anti-communist chorus.1
What Obama, Trump, Biden, Peterson, Justin Trudeau and other western-aligned personalities beholden to capitalism cannot tolerate is that a developing nation in the earliest stage of socialism (one with Chinese characteristics) has done something that the longtime capitalist-butt kissing nations have never, despite any lip service, come close to achieving: the elimination of absolute poverty.
What’s Next for Chinese Society?
China has identified a metric: “Human rights are an achievement of humanity and a symbol of progress.” Now China has set its eyes on achieving xiaokang (moderate prosperity), defined as “a status of moderate prosperity whereby people are neither rich nor poor but free from want and toil.” Xiaokang is to benefit all Chinese and benefit the world.
Meanwhile, the poor masses in capitalist countries languish while the middle classes, in the US and Canada, fall behind.
Why isn’t this war on poverty covered regularly and widely in capitalist media? Why doesn’t everyone know that the Chinese have conquered poverty and are embarked upon creating a prosperous society for all Chinese? Shouldn’t this be something all nations sincerely and actively aspire to?
Travellers from China to Australia will be required to have a negative pre-departure covid-19 test from January 5 — and New Zealand says it is now assessing the health risks.
“I’ve been informed today that Australia has announced pre-departure testing for travellers arriving from China. This measure is being taken in response to the rapidly unfolding situation in China,” he said.
“New Zealand has a public health risk assessment under way which will be completed in the next 24 hours.
“Our response will remain proportionate to the potential risks posed by travellers and in the context of the international situation.”
New Zealand, to date, had said it has no plans to introduce testing for Chinese visitors, the Ministry of Health said last week.
An ‘abundance of caution’
Australia’s Health Minister Mark Butler said this decision was taken out of an “abundance of caution” and a temporary measure due to the lack of detailed information about the epidemiological situation in China.
“That lack of comprehensive information has led a number of countries in recent days to put in place various measures — not to restrict travel from China, it’s important to say — but to gather better information about what is happening epidemiologically in that country,” he said.
Butler said the government warmly welcomed visitors from China, and Australia was “well positioned right now in the fight against covid”.
“The resumption of travel between China and Australia poses no immediate public health threat to Australians,” he said.
Butler said universities and the tourism industry would also welcome the resumption of travel from China, as would people who had long been separated from their family and friends.
“We know there are many many hundreds of thousands of Chinese Australians who have been unable to see family and friends for months — and, in some cases, years — and their ability to do that over the coming period will be a matter of considerable joy for them, particularly as we head into the Lunar New Year period,” he said.
Butler said that, although the subvariant that appeared to be driving the wave in China was already present in Australia, the situation was “developing very quickly”.
Concerns over new variant
“There are concerns, in an environment of cases spreading so quickly, about the possibility of the emergence of a new variant,” he said.
“Now there’s no evidence of that right now.
“This is a measure taken out of an abundance of caution to provide Australians and the Australian government with the best possible information about a fast-evolving situation.”
Butler said the Chinese government was informed about the measures this morning.
“It won’t come as any surprise to the Chinese government that Australia is putting this arrangement in place, I don’t think, given the broad range of countries that have taken similar steps over the last 48 to 72 hours,” he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
In another 50 years China will be stronger, and by that time the Chinese Communist Party will be a hundred years old. The United States will surely be envious and ill-intentioned, but it doesn’t dare attack China, not even with a single bullet. It will research germ contamination. That is immoral. After it finishes with this unconscionable deed, imperialism will self-destruct.
— Mao Zedong, 毛主席50年前的预言 (Chairman Mao’s 50 Years Ago Prophecy), 1 July 1971, p 520
In Britain, 26 December is Boxing Day. However far more importantly it is the birthday of Mao Zedong, who would have been 129 years old. Mao was a brilliant leader, a poet, a military talent (although trained as a teacher not a soldier), and a keen observer and analyst of world affairs although he practically never left China. Comrade Mao’s selected works comprise a mere five volumes (much of his writing was lost during more than thirty years of war in China. However, there is much to amaze when one considers the almost universal defamation to which he has been subjected in the West. Reading Mao’s writing1 is particularly instructive because this work is also an astute lesson in how to read politics. That is a skill rarely exhibited in the Anglo-American Empire. Regardless of rank or station ignorance, mendacity and insincerity prevail on the plantation.
On one hand the field still seems at the mercy of those “house negroes” described in part 3. On the other the city never sleeps. New disappointments and embarrassments (putting it mildly) are reported by the hour (or however often the news cycle repeats these days).
So are we surprised that the P*OTUS (there are other words besides president that come to mind) declines to declassify records pertaining to the murder of John F Kennedy? What basis was there for great expectations to the contrary? At some point, maybe not in my lifetime, expectations might be replaced by unconditional demands.
As I suggested in numerous articles previously, any progress in the effort to obtain something like full disclosure would require adoption of a critical patriotism that recognises the nearly three centuries of bad faith that have driven the American Empire and takes responsibility for ending it. Until today only foreigners have spent their lives for America. Hardly any Americans have. Is that cynicism, ignorance or cowardice? The civil rights movement was only possible because the regime could not fight independence movements abroad without the complacency at home.
Now when the US is potentially at its most vulnerable — when pushing back against the oligarchy might actually achieve something the 4th Great Awakening (aka Wokism)2 has the nominally educated attacking the last scraps of liberty that made the US more than just another rich white man’s country. Ignorantly and cynically they claim to oppose white supremacy (or global warming) while defending the most stridently racist politicians and oligarchs the US has ever spawned.
I had to read the Scarlet Letter in school. Our teachers had no clue how to read (and today they still don’t). However Hawthorne captured the essence of American political culture, infused with the religious fanaticism that fueled the Thirty Years War. Pupils are taught to admire Mark Twain but not to read him, let alone understand what he wrote.
Mr Biden, a DuPont lackey3 and petty gangster, obviously did not decide anything with what little is left between his ears. (Give me Nixon any day!) Agnew had to quit for what amounted to parking tickets in comparison. It is frankly disgusting that anyone should even admit having actually cast a vote for this pedophile. He cannot even claim he is just a priest.
The Kennedy file (what there is of it) will only be declassified when the regime that controls those archives is no more.
Another burner which is still being used to torch the traces of pluralism still floating where the wreckage of ancient immigrant optimism sank in 1947 is the blow torch of parochialism that passes for political philosophy.
While it is attractive to draw on the literature analysing the NS-era. It is rare that someone in the English-speaking world is sufficiently versed in history or political-economy to adequately place the NS regime (a militarised form of Fabianism4) in the proper historical context not merely in the terms of poorly understood Marxism.
I say that because the chimeric Left — the pwogs young and old — perpetuate this practice often with copious citations from real and unreal Marxists. This is possible because unlike Europe before 1947, the US neutralised all its popular Marxist intellectuals and popular organisations where ordinary people actually learned to read Marx and others.
The easiest place to begin is with the absurd discussions about Antifa. One author recently called this US gang a military response to fascism.
If the writers in the Alt-Media were better informed they would know the roots of Antifa. This armed propaganda element is modelled on a group formed in Germany during the 80s, most likely with the same funding as that provided to the so-called Neo-Nazis they pretended to fight. The German neo-Nazi groups were found to be composed almost entirely of off-duty political police whose job it was to agitate with the unwitting help of mainly unemployed youth and workers. Like various Gladio5 actions these Neo-Nazi/ Antifa shows served to promote de-politicisation and to bait both nationalists opposed to US occupation and leftists opposed to the real Nazis that the US installed and maintained behind Konrad Adenauer’s reactionary screen (and whose progeny form the cadre of the Green, SPD and CDU parties today).6
In other words “antifa” is not nor was it ever “antifascist”, despite its name. Just as so many American “Maoists” and “Trots” were never even communists but pseudo-sectarians whose activities were coordinated by intellectual gangsters like Irving Kristol.7 These pseudo-extremists divided the Left and discredited serious political activity. This was one of the main criticisms raised by Malcolm as well as the BPP — this style of extremist infiltration by academically trained intelligence (red squad) assets.
The current Antifa (they did not even bother to change the German brand name) is an armed propaganda element based on the counter-terror program in the CIA’s Phoenix system.8 It is an asset of the fascist intelligence organisation that constitutes the core of the US executive branch (executive in the literal sense).
So many writers suffer from a failure to appreciate the differences while grasping too readily at apparent similarities. These comparisons with the NS era are not unwarranted but they only make sense when one places the NSDAP in the context of British and American anti-communism, British antagonism toward Russia (and Germany) in any form, and the determination of the Allies to use the Anti-Comintern Pact9 to crush nationalism and socialism in Russia and China, as they had in Spain.10
They are misguided or insincere. If they were sincere they might recognise that by attacking the patriotic working class- many of whom are veterans- they are pulling the only teeth the American people have with which to bite their exploiters.
One can only conclude that they want to attack the American working class using paramilitary propaganda like Antifa (really Klan style) and psychological warfare to “wham”11 the very people whose contradictory patriotism and piety is probably the last bastion of the good that Jefferson intended when he wrote the 1776 declaration.
Mao Zedong, Selected Works (1926-1957), Vols. 1-5, Foreign Languages Press/People’s Publishing House (1965).
In Anglo-American Protestantism the equivalent of the Roman Catholic Crusades was the series of so-called Awakenings. These are usually presented as mere religious revivals without any political context. However each of these Awakenings gave rise to politico-religious movements of varying degrees of fanaticism. The current use of the term “woke” is a mendacious abuse of what was called in the 1970s “non-standard black English”, e.g. “I be woke” instead of “I am awake.” Like a lot of other slogans, the pattern follows that outlined in Gene Sharp’s original proposal for co-opting popular protest and revolutionary language to create astro-turf movements, aka known as colour revolutions. See National Security through Civilian-based Defence (1970). This is virtually Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare reverse engineered for counter-insurgency.
Joseph Biden, represented Delaware prior to his elevation first tot he Vice Presidency and then somnambulously into the White House. It is hardly a secret that Delaware is the Duchy of DuPont.
The Fabian Society founded in England in 1884 is an elite organisation, which became strongly associated with the university-educated and upper-middle class faction of the British Labour Party pursued an infiltration strategy. Its aim was to prevent revolution by the lower classes by imposing social policies from the top down which would ostensibly benefit them but in fact pacify them to preserve the Empire. Many of the Fabians were convinced eugenicists and supporters of policies that were comparable to continental fascism but naturally British.
Gladio can probably be seen in hindsight as the predecessor of Phoenix. While presented officially (after it was exposed) as part of a so-called “stay behind network” to organise resistance in the event of an imagined Soviet invasion, it was in fact a terror organisation aimed at the “infrastructure” of the European Left, whether in or out of government. Although it is impossible to say for sure, the eponymous BBC Timeline documentary interviews an operative in Belgium who names a CIA case officer as his contact. Coincidentally the name is the same as an officer who had primary responsibility for Phoenix in Vietnam.
Here it would be useful to read the work of Bernt Engelmann, e.g. Grosses Bundesverdienstkreuz (1974) and Schwarzbuch: Strauss, Kohl und Co. (1976). Engelmann documented not only the Nazi patrons of Helmut Kohl and others in the FRG; he exposed Franz Josef Strauss for the Nazi he had been and how the US occupation forces concealed all this in order to restore the NS without Hitler or Himmler as weapons against the European Left and the Soviet Union. At first Engelmann was sued for libel but when discovery proved far too embarrassing for the plaintiff’s the suit was withdrawn to avoid more publicity. Whoever wants to know this in a more entertaining way should look for the GDR TV series Das Unsichtbare Revier in which almost all the CIA operations in West Germany were presented in GDR prime time while those in the West were told nothing or the opposite.
At first sight it seems peculiar that many people later identified as “neo-conservatives” claim to have been Trotskyists in their “youth”. The point missed by casual or inattentive observers is that claiming to be a Trotskyist was a way of suggesting that one was a communist who had become disillusioned by the Bolsheviki (Lenin and Stalin). The popular presentation of the so-called “show trials” in which Trotsky was the unindicted co-conspirator having fled the country obscures the overall political war waged against the Soviet Union at the time by focussing on factionalism. Trotskyist—and after the Sino-Soviet split, Maoist—became convenient labels for groups of no particular ideological commitment in the service of anti-communism. The supposed “conversions” of Trots was particularly insidious in the purging of the Left from academia.
For a detailed discussion of armed propaganda operations in Vietnam within the Phoenix program see Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (1990) (2014 as e-book).
Commonly known as the “Axis” because the original signatories were Italy and Germany, Japan joined subsequently.
The official representation of the Spanish Civil War is that Hitler was the driving force to support Franco against the Popular Front government in Madrid. This is inaccurate. Since the Peninsular Wars against Napoleon Britain had established itself as the dominant investor in Spain. The non-intervention policy Britain pursued was intended to prevent undue damage to that investment. Britain provided the transport and cover for the sealift of Franco’s forces from Morocco to Spain. Its non-intervention policy was intended to block any meaningful aid from France or other sympathetic countries (the Soviet Union was blocked by the Italian Navy) and to leave space for Hitler’s Legion Condor to do Britain’s dirty work by attacking the republic as a proxy. That Franco knew this was at least one major reason why he refused to support Hitler’s attack against Britain when the two met in Hendaye.
“WHAM” is an acronym fort he political warfare objective known as “winning hearts and minds”, the objective of civic action and civil affairs teams in the various armed services both in and out of uniform.
It’s been an extraordinary year in foreign policy, dominated by an ongoing, brutal war following the February Russian invasion of Ukraine. NATO, struggling with its mission before 2022, appearsmore emboldened and unified than ever.
Meanwhile, tensions have continued to roil between the U.S. and China on a number of fronts, not the least, the fate of Taiwan.
In the Middle East, Biden’s post-Russian outreach to Saudi Arabia and inabilityto stop assistance to Riyadh in the Yemen war underscores the problematic nature of Washington’s relations with despotic governments there, while trying to maintain an“autocracies vs. democracies” approach to geopolitics in other parts of the world.
After two years in office, the Iran nuclear deal looks“dead,” while the U.S. slaps more sanctions on Tehran in the wake of crackdowns on protesters and reported drone transfers to Russia.
Phew.
With so much going on, we asked our own Quincy Institute experts to weigh in on the following prompt: what needs to happen almost immediately in 2023 for U.S foreign policy to start out on the right foot for the year? Why?
The Biden administration should start the year by stemming the tide of ever rising Pentagon budgets. The current budget is one of the highest since World War II, and the increase from FY2022 to FY2023 alone is higher than the entire military budget of every other country in the world except China.Large portions of these funds are wasted on price gouging, cost overruns, and weapons that aren’t useful for the current challenges we face. We can provide a more effective defense for less by cutting waste, eliminating dysfunctional and unnecessary weapons programs, and pursuing a more restrained, non-interventionist foreign policy that truly puts diplomacy first.
Congress and the president must, finally, enact meaningful reforms to curb foreign influence in the U.S. Behind most U.S. foreign policy decisions are agents working on behalf of foreign powers—in both illicit and legal influence operations—that often push U.S. foreign policy in a decidedly more interventionist and militarized direction. This is usually in theinterests of these foreign governments, not the U.S. national interest.
To thwart this malign influence or, at the very least, to increase the public’s awareness of it, a number of reforms are needed. This includes improvements to the Foreign Agents Registration Act, requiring think tanks to disclose all foreign funding (particularly when those think tank’s scholars are testifying before Congress), and providing more resources to the Department of Justice and other government agencies investigating illicit election interference operations like those launched by Russia and the UAE.
The first priority for the Biden administration in 2023 should be to seek a ceasefire in Ukraine, leading to peace negotiations. The longer the war continues, the greater the damage to the world economy and to key U.S. allies in Europe.
Ukraine has preserved its independence and saved or reconquered the great majority of its lands and has little more of real importance to gain in this war. Further major Ukrainian advances would threaten Russian control of Crimea and risk nuclear war. They would also take Ukraine into territories whose populations are in fact loyal to Russia.
In the meantime, Russian bombardments are causing great harm to the Ukrainian population and economy, and the exigencies of wartime are increasing authoritarianism in Ukraine. Only when the fighting ends can Ukraine begin the process of reconstruction, political reform, and moves to join the European Union.
While continuing to support Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression, the Biden Administration, with the help of the international community, must start encouraging a feasible end to the war through the use of diplomacy. Concomitantly, a long-term security agreement for the future of Europe should be reached to ensure lasting peace on the continent. Through the use of political pragmatism, Washington must help open a path to a peace that would ensure Ukrainian sovereignty, end the ongoing suffering, uphold international law, create lasting peace in Europe, and ease current ripple effects on the world economy
The United States should do two things to start off the new year. First, return, through concrete actions, to the One China policy that has been a solid foundation for peace and stability in Asia for decades. Thecurrent drip-drip undermining of this policy is a dangerous, slippery slope that is generating a major risk of great power war. Second, discard counterproductive tropes that stretch credibility such as “democracy v. autocracy” and “rules-based order”when engaging the Global South. Instead, begin the hard work of finding intersections of interests and fashioning new bargains that retain or expand non-militarized U.S. influence in the region.
The Biden administration should end all U.S. support for Saudi military actions in Yemen. If the administration fails to take action,Senator Bernie Sanders should reintroduce the Yemen War Powers Resolution to end U.S. involvement in that devastating conflict. Biden could transform U.S. policy towards the Middle East overall by rethinking America’s support for dictators by reducing arms sales to these governments, and instead prioritize partnership in the realms of economic development, education, and technology.
The U.S. should declare a renewed focus on climate change and international public health challenges, especially early warning systems; schedule a major address on the administration’s trade and diplomatic initiatives, especially in Asia and Africa. A policy is emerging but a statement would be useful for Congress and in foreign capitals. In the State of the Union address in January, broach the topic of a national security budget that would allocate resources to agencies and departments outside of the Pentagon; and, hearkening back to days of old, declare a renewed commitment to science education and research funded out of DoD resources.
In Asia, the United States needs to discard any remaining aspirations for regional dominance, listen more closely and respond more realistically to the concerns and needs of the middle powers, including key U.S. allies such as South Korea and Japan. Most of these powers want to work with both the U.S. and China to develop a more economically-oriented, inclusive, and positive-sum set of policy objectives that reverse the polarization of the region, lessen the securitization of virtually every policy sphere, and provide a revised set of regional norms and standards that most countries can support, including China. Many of these nations also want the Taiwan situation stabilized on the basis of a revived commitment by the U.S. and China to One China and peaceful unification, respectfully.
The U.S. could start this process by framing these efforts as a search, in consultation with other Asian nations, of a model for constructive, beneficial forms of peaceful coexistence among all political systems.
This is broad and aspirational, but as a first step, requires serious listening and the dropping of the usual political slogans.
Washington needs to recalibrate its engagement in parts of the world where U.S. military intervention and its side-effects dictated relations for decades, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and the greater Middle East. Drawdowns and reductions in U.S. troops should not spell diplomatic and economic disengagement. Military cooperation and force are occasionally useful tools to augment diplomacy, but for too long they have eclipsed it altogether. Traditional diplomacy was relegated to putting out fires for failed U.S. military interventions in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Our generals became reckless, while our diplomats grew risk averse.
Now what is needed is a creative rethink of how diplomacy, aid, and economic engagement is conducted. These tools are less blunt than military intervention, but their results are inherently more sustainable. Washington must possess the humility to accept the conditions it cannot positively influence, strategic patience and foresight to tackle what it can, and self-awareness to know the difference.
The Biden administration should prepare a hard pivot to U.S.–China cooperation on issues of global significance, to launch at Blinken’s upcoming visit to Beijing. The administration devoted its first two years to organizing the most powerful countries in the world against China, from steady condemnation of China’s system and its foreign policy, to initiatives countering China’s overseas endeavors and cutting off its economy from advanced technology, as well as increasing saber-rattling around Taiwan.
The Biden record signals that China cannot survive and prosper in the world the U.S. seeks to shape. If the administration devoted as much energy and resources to working with China on the truly existential threats facing humanity—including necessary revision of some of the most hostile and coercive policies of the last two years—then the relationship could be diverted from the current path of destructive conflict toward constructive coexistence.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Pathy Tshindele (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Untitled, 2016.
The United States government held the US-Africa Leaders Summit in mid-December, prompted in large part by its fears about Chinese and Russian influence on the African continent. Rather than routine diplomacy, Washington’s approach in the summit was guided by its broader New Cold War agenda, in which a growing focus of the US has been to disrupt relations that African nations hold with China and Russia. This hawkish stance is driven by US military planners, who view Africa as ‘NATO’s southern flank’ and consider China and Russia to be ‘near-peer threats’. At the summit, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin charged China and Russia with ‘destabilising’ Africa. Austin provided little evidence to support his accusations, apart from pointing to China’s substantial investments, trade, and infrastructure projects with many countries on the continent and maligning the presence in a handful of countries of several hundred mercenaries from the Russian private security firm, the Wagner Group.
The African heads of government left Washington with a promise from US President Joe Biden to make a continent-wide tour, a pledge that the United States will spend $55 billion in investments, and a high-minded but empty statement on US-Africa partnership. Unfortunately, given the US track record on the continent, until these words are backed up with constructive actions, they can only be considered empty gestures and geopolitical jockeying.
There was not one word in the summit’s final statement on the most pressing issue for the continent’s governments: the long-term debt crisis. The 2022 UN Conference on Trade and Development Report found that ‘60% of least developed and other low-income countries were at high risk of or already suffering in debt distress’, with sixteen African countries at high risk and another seven countries – Chad, Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, Somalia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe – already in debt distress. On top of this, thirty-three African countries are in dire need of external assistance for food, which exacerbates the already existing risk of social collapse. Most of the US-Africa Leaders Summit was spent pontificating on the abstract idea of democracy, with Biden farcically taking aside heads of state like President Muhammadu Buhari (Nigeria) and President Félix Tshisekedi (Democratic Republic of Congo) to lecture them on the need for ‘free, fair, and transparent’ elections in their countries while pledging to provide $165 million to ‘support elections and good governance’ in Africa in 2023.
Chéri Samba (DRC), Une vie non raté (‘A Successful Life’), 1995.
Most of the debt held by the African states is owed to wealthy bondholders in the Western states and was brokered by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These private creditors – who hold the debt of countries such as Ghana and Zambia – have refused to provide any debt relief to African states despite the great distress they are experiencing. Often left out of conversations about this issue is the fact that this long-term debt distress has been largely caused by the plunder of the continent’s wealth.
On the other hand, unlike the wealthy bondholders of the West, the largest government creditor to African states, China, decided in August 2022 to cancel twenty-three interest-free loans to seventeen countries and offer $10 billion of its IMF reserves for use by the African states. A fair and rational approach to the debt crisis on the African continent would suggest that much more of the debt owed to Western bondholders should be forgiven and that the IMF should allocate Special Drawing Rights to provide liquidity to countries suffering from the endemic debt crisis. None of this was on the agenda of the US-Africa Leaders Summit.
Instead, Washington combined bonhomie towards the African heads of government with a sinister attitude towards China and Russia. Is this friendliness from the US a sincere olive branch or a trojan horse with which it seeks to smuggle its New Cold War agenda onto the continent? The most recent US government white paper on Africa, published in August 2022, suggests that it is the latter. The document, purportedly focused on Africa, featured ten mentions of China and Russia combined, but no mention of the term ‘sovereignty’. The paper stated:
In line with the 2022 National Defense Strategy, the Department of Defense will engage with African partners to expose and highlight the risks of negative PRC [People’s Republic of China] and Russian activities in Africa. We will leverage civil-defense institutions and expand defense cooperation with strategic partners that share our values and our will to foster global peace and stability.
The document reflects the fact that the US has conceded that it cannot compete with what China offers as a commercial partner and will resort to military power and diplomatic pressure to muscle the Chinese off the continent. The massive expansion of the US military presence in Africa since the 2007 founding of the United States Africa Command – most recently with a new base in Ghana and manoeuvres in Zambia – illustrates this approach.
Kura Shomali (DRC), Miss Panda, 2018.
The United States government has built a discourse to tarnish China’s reputation in Africa, which it characterises as ‘new colonialism’, as former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a 2011 interview. Does this reflect reality? In 2017, the global corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Company published a major report on China’s role in Africa, noting after a full assessment, ‘On balance, we believe that China’s growing involvement is strongly positive for Africa’s economies, governments, and workers’. Evidence to support this conclusion includes the fact that since 2010, ‘a third of Africa’s power grid and infrastructure has been financed and constructed by Chinese state-owned companies’. In these Chinese-run projects, McKinsey found that ‘89 percent of employees were African, adding up to nearly 300,000 jobs for African workers’.
Certainly, there are many stresses and strains involved in these Chinese investments, including evidence of poor management and badly designed contracts, but these are neither unique to Chinese companies nor endemic to their approach. US accusations that China is practicing ‘debt trap diplomacy’ have also been widely debunked. The following observation, made in a 2007 report, remains insightful: ‘China is doing more to promote African development than any high-flying governance rhetoric’. This assessment is particularly noteworthy given that it came from the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental bloc dominated by the G7 countries.
What will be the outcome of the United States’ recent $55 billion pledge to African states? Will the funds, which are largely earmarked for private firms, support African development or merely subsidise US multinational corporations that dominate food production and distribution systems as well as health systems in Africa?
Mega Mingiedi Tunga (DRC), Transactor Code Rouge, 2021.
Here’s a telling example of the emptiness and absurdity of the US’s attempts to reassert its influence on the African continent. In May 2022, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia signed a deal to independently develop electric batteries. Together, the two countries are home to 80 percent of the minerals and metals needed for the battery value chain. The project was backed by the UN’s Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), whose representative Jean Luc Mastaki said, ‘Adding value to the battery minerals, through an inclusive and sustainable industrialisation, will definitely allow the two countries to pave the way to a robust, resilient, and inclusive growth pattern which creates jobs for millions of our population’. With an eye on increasing indigenous technical and scientific capacity, the agreement would have drawn from ‘a partnership between Congolese and Zambian schools of mines and polytechnics’.
Fast forward to the summit: after this agreement had already been reached, the DRC’s Foreign Minister Christophe Lutundula and Zambia’s Foreign Minister Stanley Kakubo joined US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in signing a memorandum of understanding that would allegedly ‘support’ the DRC and Zambia in creating an electric battery value chain. Lutundula called it ‘an important moment in the partnership between the US and Africa’.
The Socialist Party of Zambia responded with a strong statement: ‘The governments of Zambia and Congo have surrendered the copper and cobalt supply chain and production to American control. And with this capitulation, the hope of a Pan-African-owned and controlled electric car project is buried for generations to come’.
Pierre Bodo (DRC), Femme surchargée (‘Overworked Woman’), 2005.
It is with child labour, strangely called ‘artisanal mining’, that multinational corporations extract the raw materials to control electric battery production rather than allow these countries to process their own resources and make their own batteries. José Tshisungu wa Tshisungu of the Congo takes us to the heart of the sorrows of children in the DRC in his poem, ‘Inaudible’:
Listen to the lament of the orphan
Stamped with the seal of sincerity
He is a child from around here
The street is his home
The market his neighbourhood
The monotone of his plaintive voice
Runs from zone to zone
Inaudible.
French Polynesia’s pro-independence leader Oscar Temaru has accused the environment minister of defamation over seabed mining.
Last week, Environment Minister Heremoana Maamaatuaiahutapu claimed Temaru’s party Tavini Huiraatira did not support an assembly vote on a seabed mining moratorium because Temaru had signed a mining contract with China when he was president.
Temaru denied this, saying it had never been a policy of Tavini Huiraatira party to “sell off the country or its soul”.
The moratorium called for a block on any activity until more is known as there had to be evaluations to understand the risks seabed mining posed to the environment.
Temaru said his party did not support the assembly’s moratorium text because it did not tie mining rights to decolonisation.
The Tavini wants the moratorium linked to a 2016 UN resolution which urges the administering power to guarantee the permanent sovereignty of the people of French Polynesia over its natural resources, including marine resources and submarine minerals.
While Temaru’s party wants to formalise recognition of the property rights of French Polynesia, France considers the exclusive economic zone of French Polynesia to be a French national asset.
Huge economic zone
French Polynesia’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) is more than 4.7 million sq km and accounts for almost half of the water surface under French jurisdiction.
Temaru said the UN process called on France to respect the territory’s right to sovereignty over all resources, including those at sea.
He said under French law, the state could claim French Polynesia’s resources if they were declared of strategic value.
Paris believes it has the rights to the territory’s seabed and continental shelves, which are thought to be rich in rare earths.
Three years ago, France submitted a claim to extend the continental shelves in French Polynesia by almost a quarter of a million sq km.
The submission had been made in New York at the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf in the presence of Maamaatuaiahutapu.
Obligations to indigenous
In 2019, a lawyer of the group Blue Ocean Law Julian Aguon said that while France had designs to exploit seabed resources it also had fiduciary obligations as by law the indigenous people had permanent sovereignty over natural resources.
He said France was a party to both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which were binding treaties.
Aguon said a precedent was set by the International Court of Justice when it ruled in favour of Nauru which challenged Australia for breaching trusteeship obligations over phosphate mining.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Brazil’s President-elect Lula with indigenous activists at COP27 — Photo: COP27 Press Pool
With wars raging in Ukraine, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere, Roe v. Wade overturned and our resources being wasted on militarism instead of addressing the climate crisis, it can be hard to remember the hard-won progress being made. As we end a difficult year, let’s pause to remind ourselves of some of the positive changes that happened in 2022 that should inspire us to do more in the year to come. While some are only partial gains, they are all steps towards a more just, peaceful and sustainable world.
1. The growth of Latin America’s “Pink Tide.” Continuing the wave of progressive wins in 2021, Latin America saw two new critical electoral victories: Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil. When President Biden’s June Summit of the Americas excluded Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, several Latin American leaders declined to attend, while others used the opportunity to push the United States to respect the sovereignty of the countries in the region. (Stay tuned for CODEPINK’s spring forum “In Search of a New U.S. Policy for a New Latin America.”)
2. The U.S. labor movement caught fire. In 2022 we witnessed the brilliant organizing of Chris Smalls and the Amazon workers, Starbucks reached nearly 7,000 unionized workers and close to 300 unionized stores. Requests to the National Labor Relations Board to hold union elections were up 58% in the first eight months of 2022. Labor is back and fighting the good fight.
3. Despite assaults on our elections, people fought back and gained some notable wins.
Voters delivered victories for progressives in districts across the country, including in Texas, Illinois, Michigan, Florida, Hawaii, California, Pennsylvania and Vermont, and Democrats kept control of the Senate. Young people showed up at the polls in record numbers—one out of eight voters in the midterms was under the age of 30. Abortion rights won in states where it was on the ballot (California, Michigan and Vermont) and in the “red” state of Kentucky, voters rejected a proposed amendment to the Kentucky constitution that would declare there is no constitutional right to an abortion. Another plus: Every election denier running to oversee state elections lost.
4. Peace comes to Ethiopia. After a devastating two-year civil war that left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced and facing starvation, the federal government of Ethiopia and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) signed a peace treaty on November 2, 2022. The surprise deal came out of peace talks convened by the African Union. So far, the fighting has ceased, and both parties vowed that they are determined to make the peace deal last.
5. Mainstream media finally did right by Julian Assange, as his international support grew.
The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel–the media outlets that published WikiLeaks’ revelations 12 years ago—finally called on President Biden to free Assange. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (Assange is an Australian citizen) also finally said he has personally urged the U.S. government to end its pursuit of Assange. More enthusiastic has been his support in Latin America, with calls for his release coming from President Gustavo Petro in Colombia, Mexico’s President Lopez Obrador, Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega, Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, and Brazil’s President-elect Lula da Silva.
6. Indigenous and Global South voices were finally heard at the largest climate summit, COP27.
Thanks to the relentless work of Indigenous peoples and organizers from the Global South, marginalized communities not only got into COP27 this year but their voices were finally heard and a historic loss and damage fund was established to help vulnerable countries cope with the destructive impacts of climate change. The development marks an important achievement for civil society and collective action in the Global South that has been nearly three decades in the making. Now we have to push the wealthier countries to come through with the funds, and to finally get serious about our own transition to clean energy before it is too late to avoid global catastrophe.
7. Some 200 countries (minus the U.S. and the Vatican) commit to stemming the loss of nature worldwide. Another critical environmental gathering, the COP15 Biodiversity Summit in Canada, reached a watershed agreement pledging to protect nearly one-third of Earth’s land and oceans as a refuge for the planet’s remaining wild plants and animals by 2030–dubbed “30 by 30.” This agreement is critical to stemming the massive loss of diversity—about a million species are at risk of disappearing forever. But it will take constant grassroots pressure, and significant resources from the wealthier countries, to put this 30 by 30 goal into practice.
8. The passage of the Respect for Marriage Act. The U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015 but the court’s June decision overturning a right to abortion at the federal level raised concerns that federal protections for same-sex marriage might be in jeopardy. The Respect for Marriage Act was passed to address this by guaranteeing federal recognition of any marriage between two individuals if the union was valid in the state where it was performed. It won’t force states to issue same-sex marriage licenses should nationwide marriage equality be overturned by the Supreme Court but it will extend equality under the law to all same-sex couples, no matter which state they got married in. It also protects interracial marriages.
9. The World Cup put the spotlight on Palestine. The World Cup was a spectacular event that created a sense of global solidarity and joy, with Argentina’s win lifting up all of Latin America. But the fans, especially from Muslim and Arab countries, put the spotlight on another place in the world: Palestine. Palestinian flags and chants popped up everywhere–on the field, in the bleachers, on the streets, while videos showing Israeli journalists being ostracized went viral. At least for the month of these games, the call to “Free Palestine” went global.
10. A multi-polar world is here. China’s enormously ambitious Belt and Road Initiative now encompasses over 80 countries. And with the U.S. abusing its economic power by imposing extraterritorial sanctions against countries all over the globe, the push for alternatives to the dollar has exploded. Over a dozen countries have asked to join BRICS (the alliance of the powerful economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), whose countries account for 40 percent of the global population and 25 percent of the world’s GDP. BRICS members are already transacting their bilateral trade in local currencies. And new or strengthened non-aligned movements have emerged in Latin America and Africa. A multi-polar world is already a reality for much of the world, and this is actually better for people everywhere–even for Americans–than one where the U.S. keeps using war, militarism and coercive financial sanctions to try to prolong its post-Cold War unipolar moment into our new century.
*****
Perhaps what we should be most thankful about in 2022 is that we are still alive, even as the conflict raging in Ukraine has brought the U.S. and Russia to the very brink of nuclear war. The civilians of Ukraine, the soldiers on both sides, and people all around the world are suffering from this brutal conflict, which is–in President Biden’s words–putting the world at risk of a nuclear Armageddon. Where there is life, there is hope, but if we hope to celebrate another holiday season in 2023, we had better find a way to bring all sides to the negotiating table. May peace prevail in 2023!
To encourage Congress to authorize the largest defense budget ever, the Pentagon just released its annual report on China, which dangerously misrepresents the country’s defense strategy. Such deliberate lies about China to drum up justification for more US war spending need to be urgently addressed.
Let’s debunk these lies:
On Nuclear Weapons: The Pentagon reports that China possesses around 400 nuclear warheads with no clear plan on how to use them. If this estimation of China’s arsenal is correct, it’s still trivial compared to the US’s almost 6,000 warheads. China is the only nuclear power with an unconditional “no first use” policy, and has been clear that it only intends to use its nuclear power for assurance and defense. Meanwhile, the United States is the only country to have used nuclear weapons in war and has also flirted with escalating tensions into a nuclear war with Russia this year. Who is preparing for war?
On Global Military Presence: The Pentagon reports that since China established its first overseas military base in Djibouti, it has ambitions to expand its military presence globally. At the same time, the United State has more than 750 military bases in around 80 countries. This includes more than 250 bases in the Asia-Pacific encircling China with 375,000 personnel in the Indo-Pacific Command, while China has no military presence in the Western Hemisphere. Who is preparing for war?
On International Order: The Pentagon reports that China may challenge the US in the international arena. It is true that China is taking the lead internationally in economic development, in technological innovation, and in fighting climate change. Other countries around the world are happy for its support in growing their capacities to be independent of United States hegemony in their regions. China builds relationships through economic cooperation and good diplomacy. In contrast, the United States asserts its global dominance through direct or proxy war, occupation, crippling sanctions, and regime-changing coups. The international order that the United States seeks to maintain is rooted in violence and destruction. Let’s invest in peace, not war!
While the United States is desperately pursuing its outdated policy of enforcing global hegemony, the rest of the world is already moving towards a multilateral sphere, which ensures the greatest chance for peace. Escalating tension with China was a mistake, and building a colossal military budget is doubling down on this mistake. We must be vigilant about the warmongering lies about China. “China is not our enemy” is not a hollow slogan but firm ground that peacemakers stand on.
On 9 December, China’s President Xi Jinping met with the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to discuss deepening ties between the Gulf countries and China. At the top of the agenda was increased trade between China and the GCC, with the former pledging to ‘import crude oil in a consistent manner and in large quantities from the GCC’ as well to increase imports of natural gas. In 1993, China became a net importer of oil, surpassing the United States as the largest importer of crude oil by 2017. Half of that oil comes from the Arabian Peninsula, and more than a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s oil exports go to China. Despite being a major importer of oil, China has reduced its carbon emissions.
A few days before he arrived in Riyadh, Xi published an article in al-Riyadh that announced greater strategic and commercial partnerships with the region, including ‘cooperation in high-tech sectors including 5G communications, new energy, space, and digital economy’. Saudi Arabia and China signed commercial deals worth $30 billion, including in areas that would strengthen the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Xi’s visit to Riyadh is only his second overseas trip since the COVID-19 pandemic; his first was to Central Asia for the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in September, where the nine member states (which represent 40% of the world’s population) agreed to increase trade with each other using their local currencies.
Manal Al Dowayan, (Saudi Arabia) I Am a Petroleum Engineer, 2005–07.
At this first China-GCC summit, Xi urged the Gulf monarchs to ‘make full use of the Shanghai Petrol and Gas Exchange as a platform to conduct oil and gas sales using Chinese currency’. Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia suggested that it might accept Chinese yuan rather than US dollars for the oil it sells to China. While no formal announcement was made at the GCC summit nor in the joint statement issued by China and Saudi Arabia, indications abound that these two countries will move closer toward using the Chinese yuan to denominate their trade. However, they will do so slowly, as they both remain exposed to the US economy (China, for instance, holds just under $1 trillion in US Treasury bonds).
Talk of conducting China-Saudi trade in yuan has raised eyebrows in the United States, which for fifty years has relied on the Saudis to stabilise the dollar. In 1971, the US government withdrew the dollar from the gold standard and began to rely on central banks around the world to hold monetary reserves in US Treasury securities and other US financial assets. When oil prices skyrocketed in 1973, the US government decided to create a system of dollar seigniorage through Saudi oil profits. In 1974, US Treasury Secretary William Simon – fresh off the trading desk at the investment bank Salomon Brothers – arrived in Riyadh with instructions from US President Richard Nixon to have a serious conversation with the Saudi oil minister, Ahmed Zaki Yamani.
Simon proposed that the US purchase large amounts of Saudi oil in dollars and that the Saudis use these dollars to buy US Treasury bonds and weaponry and invest in US banks as a way to recycle vast Saudi oil profits. And so the petrodollar was born, which anchored the new dollar-denominated world trade and investment system. If the Saudis even hinted towards withdrawing this arrangement, which would take at least a decade to implement, it would seriously challenge the monetary privilege afforded to the US. As Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for Analysis of Global Security, toldTheWall Street Journal, ‘The oil market, and by extension the entire global commodities market, is the insurance policy of the status of the dollar as reserve currency. If that block is taken out of the wall, the wall will begin to collapse’.
Ghada Al Rabea (Saudi Arabia), Al-Sahbajiea (‘Friendship’), 2016.
The petrodollar system received two serious sequential blows.
First, the 2007–08 financial crisis suggested that the Western banking system is not as stable as imagined. Many countries, including large developing nations, hurried to find other procedures for trade and investment. The establishment of BRICS by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa is an illustration of this urgency to ‘discuss the parameters for a new financial system’. A series of experiments have been conducted by BRICS countries, such as the creation of a BRICS payment system.
Second, as part of its hybrid war, the US has used its dollar power to sanction over 30 countries. Many of these countries, from Iran to Venezuela, have sought alternatives to the US-dominated financial system to conduct normal commerce. When the US began to sanction Russia in 2014 and deepen its trade war against China in 2018, the two powers accelerated upon processes of dollar-free trade that other sanctioned states had already begun forming out of necessity. At that time, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin called for the de-dollarisation of the oil trade. Moscow began to hurriedly reduce its dollar holdings and maintain its assets in gold and other currencies. In 2015, 90% of bilateral trade between China and Russia was conducted in dollars, but by 2020 it fell below 50%. When Western countries froze Russian central bank reserves held in their banks, this was tantamount to ‘crossing the Rubicon’, as economist Adam Tooze wrote. ‘It brings conflict in the heart of the international monetary system. If the central bank reserves of a G20 member entrusted to the accounts of another G20 central bank are not sacrosanct, nothing in the financial world is. We are at financial war’.
Abdulhalim Radwi (Saudi Arabia), Creation, 1989.
BRICS and sanctioned countries have begun to build new institutions that could circumvent their reliance on the dollar. Thus far, banks and governments have relied upon the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) network, which is run through the US Federal Reserve’s Clearing House Interbank Payment Services and its Fedwire Funds Service. Countries under unilateral US sanctions – such as Iran and Russia – were cut off from the SWIFT system, which connects 11,000 financial institutions across the globe. After the 2014 US sanctions, Russia created the System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS), which is mainly designed for domestic users but has attracted central banks from Central Asia, China, India, and Iran. In 2015, China created the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), run by the People’s Bank of China, which is gradually being used by other central banks.
Alongside these developments by Russia and China are a range of other options, such as payment networks rooted in new advances in financial technology (fintech) and central bank digital currencies. Although Visa and Mastercard are the largest companies in the industry, they face new rivals in China’s UnionPay and Russia’s Mir, as well as China’s private retail mechanisms such as Alipay and WeChat Pay. About half of the countries in the world are experimenting with forms of central bank digital currencies, with the digital yuan (e-CNY) as one of the more prominent monetary platforms that has already begun to side-line the dollar in the Digital Silk Roads established alongside the BRI.
As part of their concern over ‘currency power’, many countries in the Global South are eager to develop non-dollar trade and investment systems. Brazil’s new minister of finance from 1 January 2023, Fernando Haddad, has championed the creation of a South American digital currency called the sur (meaning ‘south’ in Spanish) in order to create stability in interregional trade and to establish ‘monetary sovereignty’. The sur would build upon a mechanism already used by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay called the Local Currency Payment System or SML.
Sarah Mohanna Al Abdali (Saudi Arabia), Kul Yoghani Ala Laylah (‘Each to Their Own’), 2017.
A March 2022 report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) entitled ‘The Stealth Erosion of Dollar Dominance’ showed that ‘the share of reserves held in US dollars by central banks dropped by 12 percentage points since the turn of the century, from 71 percent in 1999 to 59 percent in 2021’. The data shows that central bank reserve managers are diversifying their portfolios with Chinese renminbi (which accounts for a quarter of the shift) and to non-traditional reserve currencies (such as Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and Singaporean dollars, Danish and Norwegian kroner, Swedish krona, Swiss francs, and the Korean won). ‘If dollar dominance comes to an end’, concludes the IMF, ‘then the greenback could be felled not by the dollar’s main rivals but by a broad group of alternative currencies’.
Global currency exchange exhibits aspects of a network-effect monopoly. Historically, a universal medium emerged to increase efficiency and reduce risk, rather than a system in which each country trades with others using different currencies. For years, gold was the standard.
Any singular universal mechanism is hard to displace without force of some kind. For now, the US dollar remains the major global currency, accounting for just under 60% of official foreign exchange reserves. Under the prevailing conditions of the capitalist system, China would have to allow for the full convertibility of the yuan, end capital controls, and liberalise its financial markets in order for its currency to replace the dollar as the global currency. These are unlikely options, which means that there will be no imminent dethroning of dollar hegemony, and talk of a ‘petroyuan’ is premature.
Ramses Younane (Egypt), Untitled, 1939.
In 2004, the Chinese government and the GCC initiated talks over a Free Trade Agreement. The agreement, which stalled in 2009 due to tensions between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, is now back on the table as the Gulf finds itself drawn into the BRI. In 1973, the Saudis told the US that they wanted ‘to find ways to usefully invest the proceeds [of oil sales] in their own industrial diversification, and other investments that contributed something to their national future’. No real diversification was possible under the conditions of the petrodollar regime. Now, with the end of carbon as a possibility, the Gulf Arabs are eager for diversification, as exemplified by Saudi Vision 2030, which has been integrated into the BRI. China has three advantages which aid this diversification that the US does not: a complete industrial system, a new type of productive force (immense-scale infrastructure project management and development), and a vast growing consumer market.
Western media has been near silent on the region’s humiliating loss of economic prestige and dominance during Xi’s trip to Riyadh. China can now simultaneously navigate complex relations with Iran, the GCC, Russia, and Arab League states. Furthermore, the West cannot ignore the SCO’s expansion into West Asia and North Africa. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Qatar are either affiliated or in discussions with the SCO, whose role is evolving.
Five months ago, US President Joe Biden visited Riyadh with far less pomp and ceremony – and certainly with less on the table to strengthen weakened relations between the US and Saudi Arabia. When asked about Xi’s trip to Riyadh, the US State Department’s spokesperson said, ‘We are not telling countries around the world to choose between the United States and the PRC’. That statement itself is perhaps a sign of weakness.
Hong Kong police’s decision to ban a Tiananmen vigil last year was unlawful, a court ruled on 14 December. The statement came as it overturned the conviction of jailed democracy activist and lawyer Chow Hang-tung. The ruling is a rare rebuke against Chinese authorities, which has nearly eradicated public commemoration of the 1989 crackdown.
Jailed for remembering
Chow, a 37-year-old lawyer and one of Hong Kong’s most prominent democracy activists, led the now-disbanded group ‘Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China’. It used to organise the city’s annual candlelight vigils mourning those killed in Tiananmen Square.
Police have banned the last three vigils, citing the coronavirus and security fears. The courts have also jailed multiple activists who defied those bans, including Chow. The lawyer was jailed for 15 months in January for writing articles urging the public to “light candles to seek justice for the dead”, which a lower court said amounted to inciting others to defy the ban.
UK politicians remembered Chow earlier in December as part of Amnesty International’s annual Write for Rights campaign:
On 14 December, high court judge Judianna Barnes said police should have “proactively and seriously” considered ways to facilitate the vigil in 2021, as the law required. As the government failed to prove the ban was legally valid, Chow’s articles no longer constituted a crime. The court subsequently scrapped her conviction.
Despite her court victory, the Hong Kong lawyer has already served a majority of the 15-month sentence. She also remains in custody as she faces further prosecutions, including for national security charges that carry up to a decade in jail.
Forcing amnesia on Hong Kong
Hong Kong was formerly the only place in China where mass commemoration of Tiananmen was tolerated, but Beijing has been remoulding the city in its authoritarian image after an uprising in 2019. The protests were triggered by an extradition bill that enabled China to extradite Hong Kongers for prosecution.
Police said at the time of Chow’s arrest that the government had banned the vigil due to the pandemic. It made thousands of officers available to halt any “unlawful assemblies”. But judge Barnes said that police failed to fulfil their duty under the law to take reasonable measures to facilitate public gatherings, such as imposing conditions on social distancing:
Although the organisers expressed willingness to follow any reasonable demands by the police, the police only raised questions… and did not propose measures or conditions that could obviously be considered.
In mainland China, censors have long obscured what happened at Tiananmen Square, both online and in the real world. The Chinese state has largely driven commemoration of the Tiananmen crackdown in Hong Kong underground. Last year, multiple statues marking the historical event were removed from university campuses, and an activist-run museum was shut down.
Hang Lung Properties’ John Haffner and LVMH’s Nicolas Martin, talk to Green Queen about their new climate and sustainability partnership.
Last month, Chinese real estate leader Hang Lung Properties and French luxury giant LVMH group announced a ground-breaking three-year climate and sustainability partnership. The collaboration, the first of its kind globally, looks to redefine the relationship between landlords and retail tenants, and includes collaboration in five areas: Climate Resilience, Resource Management, Wellbeing, Sustainable Transactions, and Sustainability Communication, Events and Progress Reviews.
Hang Lung Properties’ John Haffner, the company’s General Manager – Sustainability, and Nicolas Martin, LVMH Sustainable Store Planning Manager talk to Green Queen’s Sonalie Figueiras to share thoughts about the partnership, highlights from their recent inaugural Real Estate & Climate Forum, and what’s next.
Green Queen: Can you share more about the Hang Lung x LVMH partnership you just embarked on? What is so unique about it?
John Haffner: Sure. I think the partnership is unique in its scope, scale and depth. First, regarding the scope, we are covering a wide range of topics. We want to improve energy efficiency (as might be expected). But we are also asking, for instance, how we can do learning and development better together? How can we do social impact more effectively together? How can we think about biodiversity differently in the built environment?
Nicolas Martin: We covered 12 topics in our Forum, meaning that we are looking at all aspects of our stores’ operations within Hang Lung buildings.
John Haffner: The second is the scale. We’ve got 26 LVMH brands involved and over 90 retail stores in seven cities in mainland China. We’re talking about a lettable floor area of more than 27,000 square meters.
Nicolas Martin: This is a huge surface of stores, a large proportion of our luxury business.
John Haffner: But I think the most important feature of what makes it unique is the depth of our collaboration. And what I mean by that is we’re really, to use the language of LVMH, we’re co-creating solutions. So it’s not about the landlord saying to the tenant, ‘would you work on ABC’ or vice versa. There are some elements of that. But for the most part, we are sitting together and saying: ‘okay, how can we advance this agenda together’? We’re having the landlord and retail come together in a way that hasn’t been done in the past.
Green Queen: Absolutely, it’s not just between landlords and tenants, it’s at a much higher level than that.
John Haffner: You bring up a fourth aspect to this, which allows for those other three things to be taking place, and that is the level of organizational support. The fact that it’s Group-to-Group collaboration means that it’s not a landlord asking a specific tenant in a specific property to work on something. It’s two Groups coming together at that scale, with support for that scope, with support for that depth of collaboration. We’re not aware of another agreement like this at the group level, and neither is LVMH.
A topic discussion at the inaugural Real Estate and Climate Forum, held on 24 and 25 November 2022.
Green Queen: It is indeed unique. This partnership is really a first globally for real estate and retail. How do you see the possible impacts for both your respective industries? Is the plan to create a standard across the industry, both in real estate and in luxury retail?
John Haffner: One of the things that made this partnership exciting and fun is that we’re learning by doing. So we started with a lot of momentum and energy wanting to get going together first. But always the thought is, we want to expand beyond the two Groups later on. So now we’re thinking, what do we do a year from now?
We want to be able to collaborate with other tenants, other retail brands, other types of tenants, and LVMH wants to collaborate with other landlords. And both of us recognize that the old way of doing things hasn’t been adequate; we need to accelerate progress. Business as usual hasn’t been working. So there’s a sense of wanting to collaborate, and we are both committed to transparency with each other, I think the direction will be over time to share with others what we’ve also learned together, so you’re right, that could lead to ideas around standards, it could lead to ideas around knowledge sharing, and it could lead to ideas around good practices.
Nicolas Martin: With John, we believe that this is the way to do our part to fight against climate change. The issue we are all facing today is a systemic problem. Everything is linked together. So we need a systemic approach to fix the future together. Outside the measurable impacts of our concrete actions, I think that the most important is the design of this interaction. Our “open source” state of mind.
I feel that we are partnering for the good, not only for the business to be profitable.
Green Queen: Forging landlord-tenant relationships can be a challenge because everybody has their own interests, and then if you add shared sustainability values, that can add complexity, especially at this scale. Can you speak more about this?
John Haffner: I think we’re lucky as we have a long-standing relationship with LVMH. So I think there’s long-standing trust, which makes it easier to have an undertaking of this kind. And there’s a lot of transparency and sharing back and forth around what we’re thinking. And so this is relationship-driven, it’s driven by good relationships at the top.
I think the challenge is that we don’t have a template for what we’re doing, so we’re having to figure it out as we go. And I think it takes two organizations that are comfortable with a certain amount of ambiguity, a certain amount of discomfort.
The two Groups wasted no time and completed our Real Estate and Climate Forum just one month after our signing of the sustainability partnership. So I’d say the speed of execution in terms of organizing the Forum has been another challenge. And it’s only been possible, again, because of the trust of the two organizations and the top management support for the mandate. Without those two things, we wouldn’t have been able to do it at this speed for certain.
Green Queen: The Real Estate and Climate Forum was also quite innovative. Can you share some highlights from the event? Any major wins?
John Haffner: The Forum involved about 100 changemakers, 96, to be precise. So we had people in groups of eight engaging in discussions on 12 topics. And for each topic, we had four from each side, in a dedicated room with a facilitator discussing that topic. We nominated people that we thought would be appropriate for each conversation.
We set up a customized website, produced specifically for this Forum, where we asked all the changemakers to read learning content in their dedicated areas such as energy efficiency, water management, biodiversity, etc. prior to joining the Forum. Each of the changemakers also had to do a quiz to confirm that they had read the content.
Everybody had to go through the same process. We had some very senior people joining, such as leaders of various organizations, and they still had to do the reading and the quiz. We said to them: ‘Look, we know that you’re already an expert in this area. But we want to create a common baseline for everyone to have the same conversation, so if you’ll ’indulge us, please do the work as well.’ It was by mixing seniority levels, organizational backgrounds, and areas of expertise that we created this chemistry leading up to the Forum. Through this process, we collected more than 200 ideas. Out of those, we identified 36 for discussion in the Forum, which we further categorized into three areas- ideas for impact, ideas for collaboration, and ideas for innovation.
Nicolas Martin: The other feature of the Forum was that we didn’t focus on ‘the why,’ we focused on ‘the what’ and ‘the how.’ In our view, ‘the why there’s a need for more action around climate sustainability” is already very well established.
Another challenge we have now is managing and making sense of the large number of ideas we generated at the Forum – more than 200 altogether. And we will need to keep the momentum we generated with our beloved changemakers who contributed to the Forum.
John Haffner: It’s really been an amazing process to go into that kind of depth with another organization and to have both sides willing to engage in that kind of problem-solving together.
John Haffner, Hang Lung Properties General Manager – Sustainability and Nicolas Martin, LVMH Sustainable Store Planning Manager speaking at the inaugural Real Estate and Climate Forum, courtesy Hang Lung Properties.
Green Queen: One of the topics property developers who are working on becoming more sustainable are exploring is this idea of a green lease. Is that part of this collaboration?
Nicolas Martin: Sure. A green lease is a set of obligations on sustainability for both sides, including not only targets, but an obligation of reporting and standardization of data.
The brands within LVMH may experience this as a kind of green lease at their level but the overall agreement is broader than that.
John Haffner: About a year ago, we started thinking in terms of green leases and we reached out to some of our strategic tenants and had exploratory conversations with them. And it just so happened that the counterpart that was most enthusiastic was from LVMH group. And by engaging with them at the Group level, it just went up a level from a specific lease – because they have multiple brands, and they’re trying to ensure common standards across their brands – to a wider scope.
The traditional green lease concept is based on the premise that maybe the landlord needs to motivate the tenant to do something on its side. This is a little bit different in that we’re really trying to shape solutions together. And we’re trying to figure out how to do things faster.
The accountability comes in by the fact that we’re sharing what we’re doing and learning, as in this interview.
So a year from now, we need to be able to show that we’ve made progress, that we’ve implemented certain actions against this effort together. We know that we’re going to need to be able to show data and results from this initiative.
Nicolas Martin: Without data, we cannot make any progress. So I think the green lease of the future sits also in data management.
Green Queen: Looking ahead, what’s next for this partnership? What are the big next steps?
John Haffner: We are going to be announcing the Common Charter in the first quarter of next year, which will be based on the 200 ideas we have received and the 36 ideas that were discussed in greater detail in the Forum.
We’re also going to think a year from now how we can repeat the success of the Forum and think about what worked well, what didn’t and what can we improve upon. The plan is to host the second edition of the Real Estate and Climate Forum in the fourth quarter of next year.
Nicolas Martin: I am looking forward to building our Common Charter with John. As I said this is a huge quantity of actions, and we will continue to refine our methods for managing these.
And we will look for ways through technology and events to maintain contact with our changemakers, our Maisons and suppliers, etc.
This is important to let them continue to feel a sense of ownership. Because they were authentically the authors of the good ideas that came out of our Forum!
Green Queen: Was there anything else that you wanted to add?
Nicolas Martin: Adriel Chan [Hang Lung’s Vice-Chair] spoke about the discomfort experienced by our changemakers as a good thing, and I loved that comment. It was the discomfort of trying a new approach. Because business-as-usual places us in danger, we have to be courageous.
John Haffner: We received a lot of good feedback from the participants as well, who commented on the depth of discussion and the substance, the focus on ideas and action in a way that they haven’t seen. So I think that’s quite exciting. And hopefully, we can model – with that example– a new approach that may help real estate and retail accelerate progress, because I think there’s this sense coming out of COP27 that we need to do things faster, we need to do things differently. So we’re kind of going through a ‘learning by doing’ process of figuring out how we can play our part to support that acceleration.
Nicolas Martin: Creating synergies like this will make truly exponential effects.
All images courtesy of Hang Lung Properties. Lead image:John Haffner, Hang Lung Properties General Manager – Sustainability and Nicolas Martin, LVMH Sustainable Store Planning Manager at the inaugural Real Estate and Climate Forum.
According to a December 6th report by the Congressional Research Service, the United States Government is, and since May has been, offering inducements to foreign countries that are not yet bases from which the U.S. is being allowed to position and launch missiles against Russia and/or China, to become such bases, which would make those nations become additional targets for Russian and/or Chinese missiles. The U.S. is seeking to spread Russia’s and China’s military targets to countries that aren’t yet such targets. Doing this would increase the amounts of weaponry that are being sold, and that would especially benefit American weapons-manufacturers because America is the world’s largest manufacturer of military weapons, and also because the second and third largest such manufacturers, Russia and China, have weapons-producers that are majority-owned by their Government itself, and therefore the weapons-makers there don’t respond primarily to investors, but instead to the nation’s actual and authentic national-defense needs (the Government’s needs). America’s ‘Defense’ firms, such as Lockheed Martin, fund the careers of and thereby control its politicians and Government and its ‘defense’-policies, in order to be able to control their own markets, which are mainly the U.S. Government but also the U.S.-allied Governments (which likewise are controlled largely by such private investors in military-related firms), but in both Russia and China, which still retain socialism regarding their military manufacturers, the Government controls its “Defense” firms; and, so, their defense-policies are strictly for defense (that national, instead of private, purpose), whereas in America and its allied countries, the ‘defense’-firms are for aggression (because producing wars is what benefits the investors in those firms, which control their own Government and its ‘allies’ or vassal-Governments).
Reportedly, in May 2022, the Secretary of the Army stated the Army did not yet have basing agreements for longrange systems but “discussions were ongoing” with a number of countries in the Indo-Pacific region. Given the importance of basing, Congress might examine ongoing efforts to secure Army long-range precision fires unit basing in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific region.
These Governments “in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific region” are close enough to Russia, and to China, so that if the United States goes to war against Russia and/or China directly (instead of, as now, indirectly — such as it does in both Ukraine on Russia’s border, and Taiwan on China’s border) to conquer Russia and/or China, then those missiles, which will be targeted against one or both of those two countries, will be within range of either Moscow or else Beijing, and will, therefore, become assets adding to America’s likelihood of entirely controlling a post-WW-III world. Largely because military weapons are, in the U.S. and its ‘allied’ countries, controlled by private investors (basically by U.S.-and-allied billionaires), the U.S. Government’s main objective is to control a post-WW-III world. In other words: that Government’s main objective is aggression (defense is actually only secondary). By contrast, in both Russia and China, the entire militaries are designed and function solely for the purpose of national defense, which means preventing, instead of winning, a WW III. In both Russia and China, the ONLY objective of the military, and the MAIN objective of all OTHER policies, is, in fact, defense of the nation. In the U.S. and its ‘allied’ nations, the MAIN objective of the entire Government is expansion of the U.S. empire for it to control ultimately every nation — which means the conquest of every nation that isn’t already part of it. Whereas the top objective of the U.S. Government is imperial — notto prevent but to win a WW III — the top objective of its targeted nations (or ‘enemies’) is instead national (actually to prevent a WW III). And this explains the respective foreign (including military and diplomatic) policies, on each of the two sides: imperialistic versus anti-imperialistic. That is how to interpret and understand each side: it is the difference in perspective — that of the predator (on America’s side), versus that of its prey (on the side of the predator’s intended victims).
A commonly expressed view by proponents of the predator’s side in international relations is that if its side becomes defeated or fades, then there will be no basic change except the identity of the predator. That viewpoint (everyone’s being psychopathic) might be universally true in the state of nature, but not necessarily in the state of civilization. Both Russia and China have repeatedly condemned, on a moral basis — an anti-imperialistic basis — the predatory perspective in international relations, the win-lose or “zero-sum-game” view, and have — at least verbally — promised that if and when the U.S. becomes defeated or simply fades-out, both Russia and China will move forward ONLY on a win-win (i.e., anti-imperialistic) basis regarding all other nations. America’s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passionately expressed, repeatedly, both in private and in public, the same commitment, to an only win-win future, that Russia and China now express: a repugnance and rejection of any and all imperialism. However, his immediate two successors, Truman and Eisenhower, despised FDR and promptly committed the U.S., on 25 July 1945, to America’s ultimately conquering the entire world. America has been on that path ever since (to win WW III), and the Biden Administration is especially obsessively so. (Perhaps Biden fears he’ll die soon and wants to be around to see America controlling the entire world, so is rushing things along; but, in any case, he is turning out to be a terrific performer for the people who invested in him, among the mega-donors, including, for example, a former Vice Chairman and top investor in Lockheed Martin who helped organize Biden’s billionaires, and — as a Democrat, which means hypocrite — had said publicly that “I frankly believe that both Democrats and Republicans [referring only to members of Congress — the people whom people such as he himself buy] … are overly influenced by the defense industry in this country.” Biden keeps his secret promises to his mega-donors, but ignores his public promises to his voters. That’s the way America’s ‘democracy’ works.)
In the imperial world of government-by-corruption, government is for sale always to the highest bidders, and in the vassal-nations it means that “ongoing efforts to secure Army long-range precision fires unit basing in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific region” will — since that will necessarily mean their own nation’s becoming targeted by the missiles of Russia and/or China — a “public/private partnership” or legal bribe being paid to the vassal-nation’s leaders in order for the U.S. Government to be able to win that ultimate sacrifice of the given vassal-nation. Of course, such bribes are private, not public, since those are vassal-nations and their ‘democracy’ is only a mockery of the real thing.
• China bids farewell to Jiang Zemin
• China expands social welfare
• New trends in Chinese literature
• Chinese tea, Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity
On 15 November 2022, during the G20 summit in Bali (Indonesia), Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told journalists that his country ‘seeks a stable relationship with China’. This is because, as Albanese pointed out, China is ‘Australia’s largest trading partner. They are worth more than Japan, the United States, and the Republic of Korea… combined’. Since 2009, China has also been Australia’s largest destination for exports as well as the largest single source of Australia’s imports.
For the past six years, China has largely ignored Australia’s requests for meetings due to the latter’s close military alignment with the US. Now, in Bali, China’s President Xi Jinping made it clear that the Chinese-Australian relationship is one to be ‘cherished’. When Albanese was asked if Xi raised the issue of Australia’s participation in several military pacts against China, he said that issues of strategic rivalry ‘[were] not raised, except for in general comments’.
Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd recently said that the impetus for the deep freeze between Australia and China six year ago was the ‘US doctrine of strategic competition’. This outlook is clarified in the 2022 US National Security Strategy, which asserts that China ‘is America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge’. In Bali, US President Joe Biden said that the US and China must ‘manage the competition responsibly’, which suggested that the US might take a less belligerent posture towards China by not pressuring them through US military pacts in Asia and by reducing the intensification of the crisis over Taiwan. Rudd suggests that Biden’s shift in tone might have given Albanese the opportunity to ‘reset’ relations between Australia and China.
Before Albanese left for Bali, however, news broke about a plan to station six US B-52 bombers, which have nuclear weapons capability, in northern Australia at the Tindal air force base. Additionally, Australia will build 11 large storage tanks for jet fuel, providing the US with refuelling capacity closer to China than its main fuel repository in the Pacific, Hawaii. Construction on this ‘squadron operations facility’ would start immediately and be completed by 2026. The $646 million upgrade includes new equipment and improvements to the US-Australian spy base at Pine Gap, where the neighbouring population in Alice Springs worries about being a nuclear target in a war that they simply do not want.
These announcements come as no surprise. US bombers, including B-52s, have visited the base since the 1980s and taken part in US-Australian training operations since 2005. In 2016, the US commander of its Pacific air forces, General Lori Robinson, said that the US would likely add the B-1 bomber – which has a longer range and a larger payload capacity – to these exercises. The US-Australian Enhanced Air Cooperation (2011) has already permitted these expansions, although this has routinely embarrassed Australian government officials who would prefer more discretion, in part due to the anti-nuclear sentiment in New Zealand and in many neighbouring Pacific island states who are signatories of the 1986 Treaty of Rarotonga that establishes the region as a nuclear-free zone.
Minnie Pwerle (Australia), Bush Melon Seed, 1999.
The expansion of the Tindal air base and the upgrades to Pine Gap spy base are part of the overall deepening of military and strategic ties between the US and Australia. These ties have a long history, but they were formalised by the Australia-New Zealand-United States (ANZUS) Security Treaty of 1951 and Australia’s entry into the Five Eyes intelligence network in 1956. Since then, the two countries have tightened their security linkages, such as by facilitating the transfer of military equipment from the US arms industry to Australia. In 2011, US President Barack Obama and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard agreed to position a few thousand US Marines in Darwin and Northern Australia and allow US bombers frequent flights to that base. This was part of Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’, which signalled the US pressure campaign against China’s economic advancement.
Two new security alignments – the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad, restarted in 2017) and AUKUS (2021) – further enhanced these ties. The Quad brought together India and Japan with Australia and the US. Since 1990, Australia has hosted Exercise Pitch Black at Tindal, a military war game on which it has collaborated with various countries. Since India’s air force joined in 2018 and Japan participated in 2022, all Quad and AUKUS members are now a part of this large airborne training mission. Australian officials say that after Tindal’s expansion, Exercise Pitch Black will increase in size. In October 2022, Prime Minister Albanese and Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida updated their 2007 bilateral security pact. The new ‘reciprocal access agreement’ was signed in response to ‘an increasingly severe strategic environment’, according to Kishida, and it allows the two countries to conduct joint military exercises.
China’s foreign ministry responded to news of the expansion of Tindal and Pine Gap by saying, ‘Such a move by the US and Australia escalates regional tensions, gravely undermines regional peace and security, and may trigger an arms race in the region’.
Qiu Zhi Jie (China), Map of Mythology, 2019.
Albanese walked into the meeting with Xi hoping to end China’s trade restrictions on Australia. He left with optimism that the $20 billion restrictions imposed in 2020 would be lifted soon. ‘It will take a while to see improvement in concrete terms going forward’, he said. However, there is no word from China about removing these restrictions, which limit the import of Australian barley, beef, coal, cotton, lobsters, timber, and wine.
These restrictions were triggered by then Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison’s insinuation that China was responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Even before that, in 2018, Australia’s government banned two Chinese telecommunications firms (Huawei and ZTE) from operating in its jurisdiction. This was not a trivial policy change, since it meant a drop from $19 billion in Australia’s trade with China in July 2021 to $13 billion in March 2022.
Fu Wenjun (China), Red Cherry, 2018.
During the meeting in Bali between Albanese and Xi, the Australian side presented a list of grievances, including Beijing’s restrictions on trade and Australia’s concerns about human rights and democracy in China. Australia seeks to normalise relations in terms of trade while maintaining its expanded military ties with the United States.
Xi did not put anything on the table. He merely listened, shook hands, and left with the assurance that the two sides would continue to talk. This is a great advance from the ugly rhetoric under Scott Morrison’s administration.
In October 2022, China’s ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, gave an address in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Australia and China, which will be celebrated on 21 December. During this talk, Ambassador Qian asked his Australian counterparts if they saw China as ‘a champion or a challenger’ of the international order. Australia’s government and press, he suggested, sees China as a ‘challenger’ of the UN Charter and the multilateral system. However, he said, China sees itself as a ‘champion’ of greater collaboration between countries to address common problems.
The list of concerns that Albanese placed before Xi signals that Australia, like the US, continues to treat China as a threat rather than a partner. This general outlook towards China makes any possibility of genuine normalisation difficult. That is why Ambassador Qian called for Australia to have ‘an objective and rational perception’ of China and for Canberra to develop ‘a positive and pragmatic policy towards China’.
Zeng Shanqing (China), Vigorous Horse, 2002.
Growing anti-Chinese sentiment within Australia poses a serious problem for any move towards normalisation. In July 2022, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that Australia would have to ‘correct’ several of its views on China before relations could advance. A recent poll shows that three-quarters of Australia’s population believes that China might be a military threat within the next two decades. The same survey showed that nearly 90% of those polled said that the US-Australia military alliance is either very or fairly important. At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore earlier this year, Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles said that countries must engage each other through dialogue and diplomacy. ‘China is not going anywhere. And we all need to live together and, hopefully, prosper together’, he noted.
That Albanese and Xi met in Bali is a sign of the importance of diplomacy and dialogue. Albanese will not be able to get the trade benefits that Australia would like unless there is a reversal of these attitudes and the US-Australia military posture towards China.
On December 6, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin hosted Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence Richard Marles. It was the 32nd occasion the countries had met in this setting.
The Australia-US Ministerial Consultations (AUSMIN) is really a chat fest held between Australian Ministers for Defence and Foreign Affairs along with the US Secretaries of State and Defense, accompanied by officials of touted seniority. Advertised as an occasion for the states “to discuss and share perspectives and approaches on major global and regional political issues, and to deepen bilateral foreign security and defence cooperation,” it is more accurately an occasion for Washington to keep an eye on its satellite.
The occasion would have been a disappointment for sceptics of the US-Australian alliance, one that has seen Australians join, with somnambulistic facility, failed distant, needless wars. Even with a change of government in Canberra, it is clear that the US security lobby remains ascendant, tranquilising Australian politicians with the virtues of the alliance.
The joint statement from Blinken, Austin, Wong and Marles was filled with the gruel of banality: rules-based order, as they understood it; the importance of the relationship to “regional peace and prosperity”, despite signs it is becoming increasingly dangerous to that cause; and utterances about human rights and fundamental freedoms.
For keen watchers of encroaching militarism, the following would have stood out: “The principals also decided to evolve their defense and security cooperation to ensure they are equipped to deter aggression, counter coercion, and make space for sovereign decision making.”
This could hardly be a reference to Australian sovereignty, given its whittling down over the years to the decisions of an increasingly more engaged US in the Indo-Pacific region. While Canberra decries any moves by Pacific Island neighbours to exercise their own rights of sovereignty to seal security arrangements with Beijing, it ignores its own subordinate, increasingly garrisoned role in the US imperium.
China comes in for a predictable mauling, given its actions in the South China Sea and the making of “excessive maritime claims that are inconsistent with international law.” Wishing to enrage the Yellow Devil further, the parties also reiterate “Taiwan’s role as a leading democracy in the Indo-Pacific region, an important regional economy, and a key contributor to critical supply chains.”
Strategic competition, as a concept, was fine in principle, but to be pursued “responsibly,” a word that has little meaning in the thuggery of international politics. The parties also agreed to “work together to ensure competition does not escalate into conflict” and looked to the PRC “to do the same and to engage Beijing on risk reduction and transparency measures.” More could be done on the issue of transparency and China’s nuclear arsenal, for instance.
The statement then goes on to raise the importance of cooperation with Beijing in some areas of mutual concern followed by a sharp backhanded serve. Cooperation with China on “issues of shared interest, including climate change, pandemic threats, non-proliferation, countering illicit and illegal narcotics, the global food crisis, and macroeconomic issues” was important, but so was “enhancing deterrence and resilience through coordinated efforts to offer Indo-Pacific nations support to resist subversion and coercion of any kind.”
There is also more poking with the expression of “serious concerns about severe human rights violations in Xinjiang, the human rights situation in Tibet, and the systematic erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy, democratic institutions, and processes undermining commitments made by the PRC before the handover.”
Australia’s promised submarines under the AUKUS security pact, almost as credible as the Loch Ness monster, receives an airing. Giving nothing away, the statement “commended the significant progress AUKUS partners have made on developing the optimal pathway for Australia to acquire a conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarine capability at the earliest possible date.” No date is provided, but a year on when that optimal pathway will be miraculously revealed is 2023. Best not wait up.
The joint statement does little to dissuade the idea that Australia is moving, inexorably, towards a satellite, garrison state to be disposed of and used by the US imperium. Under the “Forced Posture Initiatives” – the wording is telling – the US will further integrate Australia into its military operations via Enhanced Land Cooperation, Enhanced Maritime Cooperation, and the Combined, Logistics, Sustainment, and Maintenance Enterprise.
The US armed forces would continue its “rotational presence” in Australia across air, land and sea including “US Bomber Task Force rotations, fighters, and future rotations of US Navy and US Army capabilities.” The emphasis, in other words, is entirely US-centric, with Australia’s posture being rather supine, even as it aids “US force posture with associated infrastructure, including runway improvements, parking aprons, fuel infrastructure, explosive storage infrastructure, and facilities to support the workforce.”
What a wonderful list of targets for any future foe, and bound to become even juicier with Austin’s promise to “find ways to further integrate our defense industrial bases in the years ahead.”
While they do not tend to make regular appearances on uncritical mainstream news outlets, Australian civil society members have been alarmed by such moves. The 280 submissions to the Independent and Peaceful Australian Network (IPAN) addressing the high cost of Australia’s relationship with the United States attest to a very different narrative.
IPAN’s report drawn from its People’s Inquiry into “Exploring the Case for an Independent and Peaceful Australia,” informed by those submissions and released last month, should be mandatory reading for Canberra’s insular policy hacks. In his contribution to the report covering the defence and military aspects of the alliance, Vince Scappatura took note of the most pressing concern among the submissions: “that the alliance makes Australia an unnecessary target of America’s foes.”
The alliance has also seen Australia committed to “several needless and costly wars and is likely to do so again in the future, with especially grave consequences in the context of the great power rivalry between the US and China.” Unfortunately for the industrious Scappatura and those honourable souls determined to force a revision of the relationship, the sleepwalkers are in charge. And when that happens, wars are rarely far away.
A new report by Green Queen Media argues that while plant-based meat sales may be flat in the US and Europe, in Asia Pacific, the alternative protein industry is booming.
Green Queen Media has published the 2022 edition of its award-winning APAC Alternative Protein Industry Report today, titled The Future is Asian and presented by plant-based chicken leader TiNDLE. The 150-page report, now in its third year, is the result of over 14 months of original reporting and dozens of first-hand interviews, as well as featuring expertise and insights from over 30 ecosystem insiders and sector investors.
Both the 2020 and 2021 editions grabbed the top prize in the category of Special Awards for best Global Report at the Hallbars Sustainability Reports Awards in Sweden. Hallbars is an organization that recognizes the best climate-forward publications around the world.
Representation matters
It’s been a challenging year for alternative protein, particularly for plant-based meats, with flat sales in the US and some European markets, a challenging environment for public plant-based companies like Beyond Meat and Oatly, and constant media attacks by pro-meat and pro-dairy lobbies. However, these headlines belie the global picture. “Across the Asia Pacific region, alternative protein companies have been going from strength to strength, hitting major milestones, attracting significant government support and raising record funding rounds,” said Sonalie Figueiras, the report publisher and Green Queen Media’s founder and editor-in-chief, in a statement. “Our report illustrates the importance of reporting and media representation. Western-centric media would have you believe that alternative protein is an industry in trouble. In reality, the sector is headed for boom times in Asia and beyond.”
“What is perhaps obvious to some, but became incredibly clear upon writing the report and working with our industry experts, is just how differently the various countries within APAC approach alternative proteins, both in terms of technology and consumer behaviour,” said Nicola Spalding, the report author.
The future is Asian
Where the 2020 report focused on examining making the case for why alternative protein was necessary in a region that boasts 60% of the world’s population but only 20% of the world’s agricultural land, and the 2021 report provided an exhaustive look at the industry in APAC and dug deep into the three technology pillars, the 2022 edition highlights the 10 most important growth stories and historic firsts that the industry has achieved, as well as the unique products created to serve consumers with vastly different food traditions, culinary tastes and dining preferences.
On the funding front, record-breaking rounds made headlines across the globe, as APAC was home to both the largest cultivated meat Series A ever and the largest plant-based meat Series A ever. The report chronicles every round raised in 2022, with an emphasis on the 10 biggest.
In addition, precision fermentation, which in 2021 was a fledging sector in Asia, experienced real traction this past year, with China’s first animal-free dairy company coming out of stealth and the launch of the region’s first animal-free dairy milk onto supermarket shelves amongst many other announcements.
Several APAC cultivated meat players celebrated major product firsts, from the first cultivated pork belly to the first cultivated duck breast to the first cultivated fishball to the first cultivated Dokdo shrimp- huge leaps, especially given how young the sector is.
The Future is Asian features extensive interviews with 10 local ecosystem insiders from Japan to Taiwan to India, and spotlights the insights of the top venture capitalists investing in the region’s startups.
For the first time, the report authors provided recommendations aimed at the many players of the region’s ecosystem on the road ahead amidst a changing global landscape fraught with supply chain disruption, the ongoing Ukraine war, rising food inflation and the looming threat of a worldwide recession, on top of a worsening climate crisis.
In-depth: APAC’s alt protein pioneers
After years of ecosystem building, the region now boasts hundreds of startups working towards a future of food that promises to feed over three billion people sustainably, safely, and ethically.
The report showcases a range of in-depth case studies spotlighting some of the region’s most exciting players such as South Korean cultivated meat and seafood startup CellMEAT, Singaporean plant-based chicken and seafood player Growthwell Foods, US-Australian animal-free casein maker Change Foods, global fats leader AAK, specialty distributor Classic Fine Foods, Californian precision fermentation company Perfect Day and Hong Kong-based foodtech accelerator Brinc.
Also included are greater China-based plant-based pork and dumpling brand Plant Sifu, US whole-cut fermentation-based seafood pioneer Aqua Cultured Foods, Singaporean cultivated seafood startup Umami Meats and Swiss flavor manufacturer Givaudan.
The climate crisis presents a clear and present danger for Asian countries. The region will feel the brunt of many of the worst tolls of environmental degradation from worsening air pollution to mass climate migration to declining food security. As Figueiras writes in the report’s introduction, “Alternative protein is an important part of the future food toolbox if we are to build a stronger, more resilient regional food system that will face water shortages, land degradation, and more frequent climate-related weather events, amongst many other challenges.”
Download The APAC Alternative Protein Industry Report 2022 – The Future is Asian now.
Michael Parenti has said that “Poor countries are not ‘under-developed’, they are over-exploited.” The west tends to look down on the rest of the world for reasons that either directly or indirectly relate to the poverty in those nations, which is silly because that poverty comes largely from western theft and exploitation. It’s like mugging someone and then scorning them for their empty wallet.
If you boil it right down and get real about it, most of the pride in western civilization is ultimately pride in being better at killing and stealing than other people. We’re still morally at the level of invading and plundering nations while claiming it’s justified because we are stronger than them, it’s just procedurally a few clicks removed from doing that directly.
❖
Here’s a good example of how empire managers try to make China’s government look like a weird alien invader who must be removed by constantly bleating “Chinese Communist Party” and “CCP” instead of just saying “China”, “Beijing”, or “the Chinese government” like they do with other countries:
The Chinese Communist Party doesn't represent the people of China.
Constantly repeating the word “Communist” evokes cold war fears from the past in older people, and saying “CCP” rather than the correct CPC (Communist Party of China) is designed to remind people of “CCCP”, Russia’s abbreviation for the USSR. The goal is to mentally uncouple the nation’s government from the nation in the minds of the public, so that removing it looks like an intervention to remove a strange outside force which doesn’t belong there instead of the obscenely intrusive imperialist agenda that it is.
❖
Attempts to address the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story censorship shenanigans will never gain sufficient traction, because the entire liberal political/media class believes any and all actions to hurt Trump’s re-election odds were justified. They would have supported a lot worse. As far as US liberals are concerned, “unethical things were done to hurt Trump’s re-election bid” is a moot point, because they would have supported far more unethical things to hurt Trump’s re-election; arguing about its morality will therefore never mean anything to them.
After 2016 a consensus was formed among liberal US media that they should have actively worked to manipulate the public into voting for Hillary Clinton, rather than reporting on her numerous scandals at the time. Killing the laptop story was the manifestation of that consensus.
The Hunter Biden laptop story will therefore never move from a partisan talking point into a nonpartisan discussion about political censorship and journalistic ethics. It is firmly locked in to the former category. They all universally believe that they did the right thing. Where the moral imperative to defeat Trump is viewed as superseding any other possible concern, nobody who does not share that view will have any inroad to talk about those other concerns. They will always be dismissed by those who viewed helping to defeat Trump as a sacred duty. It’s an intractable quasi-religious belief based on their own certainty of the superiority of their worldview.
The censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story is therefore doomed to remain another Republican partisan issue that never goes anywhere like Benghazi or Monica Lewinsky, even though its far-reaching implications for media and tech mean it really shouldn’t be categorized as such.
❖
One of the most under-discussed topics in the world right now is how governments are incrementally normalizing the use of police robots that can kill you and acting like it’s no big deal.
❖
Virtual reality is silly when we’ve barely begun exploring our normal reality. Transhumanism is silly when we’ve barely begun exploring our normal humanity. Pursuing space colonization is silly when we haven’t even learned to live on the planet we’re adapted for. What are being presented as means for facilitating greater human experience are actually means for running away from it.
If most of us haven’t even so much as mastered the ability to sit quietly for an hour and simply be still and content with what is, maybe it’s not yet time to start hanging a bunch of fancy bells and whistles on the human adventure as though we have taken this thing as far as it goes.
Most of the futuristic visions people hold for humanity are really just visions of humanity running away from itself. Leaving earth and colonizing space. Leaving reality and building virtual reality. Leaving humanity and becoming cybernetic. All before we’ve actually learned to just be here. Baked in to all of these visions for our future is the assumption that humanity must always be restless. Must always be discontented. Must always be flailing around grabbing for more. This will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, if believed. So it’s important not to believe it.
What if instead of looking outward for directions to take human exploration, we looked inward? What if we as a species spent a few centuries really getting to know ourselves and what we’re made of? Maybe we’re like someone leaving a solid gold house to go treasure hunting?
Maybe all of our problems as a species can be solved by simply awakening human consciousness to what’s really going on? Maybe all of our societal, geopolitical and ecosystemic problems would resolve themselves if we could become conscious of the forces within us that drive them?
What if there was a real societal push for practices like meditation and self-enquiry? What if facilities for psychedelic exploration were set up for public use around the world? What if we plunged in that direction, instead of trying to run off into space and virtual reality?
Ever known someone who’s always moving from relationship to relationship, job to job, city to city, but always running into the same problems because the real source of their discontentment sits between their ears? Maybe that’s humanity in general in our visions for the future.
This human adventure is going to keep unfolding for as long as it exists, but we do have control over what direction it unfolds in. Seems to me it would be best to start from where we’re at and get the hang of basic human experience before getting all fancy about it. You’ve got to walk before you can run, and as far as the exploration of our inner dimensions is concerned, most of us aren’t even crawling yet.
The adventure is right here. The journey is in you. You are your own unexplored universe. Take a breath, let the bliss rise in you, and see it for yourself, right this second. Do it now because there is only now to do it in. See? It’s all here.
________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
According to CBS News, there was a rally in the city on Sunday in solidarity with mass anti-government protests in China.
Dozens gathered in Washington Square Park calling on China to ease up on its strict COVID-19 lockdown measures.
Organized by China, Hong Kong, and Tibet activists, they’re demanding the government allow public vigils commemorating victims of the draconian lockdowns. They also want all arrested protesters released.
“We are here because we’re united in our collective effort to seek freedom, to seek human rights out from under the oppression of the communist Chinese party,” one demonstrator said.
Last week, widespread demonstrations broke out after 10 people died in an apartment fire because firefighters were not allowed access to the building due to positive COVID cases inside.
Three months after their extradition from Thailand to face bribery and money laundering charges in the United States, two naturalised Marshallese citizens pleaded guilty on Friday in a New York court to conspiring to violate the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in connection with a multi-year scheme to bribe government officials in the Marshall Islands to pass legislation to establish a special investment zone in this western Pacific nation.
Cary Yan and Gina Zhou had been charged with three counts each of violating the FCPA and two counts of money laundering.
They pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to violate the FCPA and the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York dismissed the other four charges. They are naturalised Marshall Islands citizens originally from the People’s Republic of China.
“As they have now admitted, the defendants sought to undermine the democratic processes of the Republic of the Marshall Islands through bribery in order to advance their own financial interests,” US Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement.
“I commend the career prosecutors of this Office and our law enforcement partners for bringing this corruption to light and ensuring that justice is done.”
The Marshall Islands Journal’s page one when the story broke in early September about Cary Yan and Gina Zhou being extradited to the US to face bribery and money laundering charges related to the Marshall Islands. Image: Marshall Islands Journal/RNZ Pacific
Yan, 51, and Zhou, 35, are awaiting sentencing. They have been held without bail pending final disposition of the case.
Yan faces a maximum five-year term in prison and a fine of up to US$200,000, while Zhou faces a maximum prison term of three years and 10 months and a fine of up to US$150,000, according to the plea agreement between their defence attorneys and the SDNY prosecutors.
“Beginning at least in 2016, Yan and Zhou began communicating and meeting with Marshall Islands officials in both New York City and the Marshall Islands concerning the development of a semi-autonomous region within a part of the Marshall Islands known as the Rongelap Atoll,” said the US indictment that was unsealed on September 2 on Yan and Zhou’s arrival in New York following extradition from Thailand.
‘Attracting investors’
“The creation of the proposed semi-autonomous region was intended by Yan, Zhou, and those associated with them to obtain business by, among other things, allowing Yan and Zhou to attract investors to participate in economic and social development projects that Yan, Zhou, and others promised would occur in the semi-autonomous region.”
Their aim was to establish the Rongelap Atoll Special Administrative Region (RASAR). But because it ran afoul of the Marshall Islands constitution and required exemption from multiple Marshall Islands legal oversight and enforcement provisions, President Hilda Heine’s administration refused to introduce the proposed RASAR legislation to Nitijela (parliament) for consideration in 2018.
Yan and leading Marshall Islands officials had officially launched the RASAR plan in Hong Kong in April 2018, but never met legal requirements to move the plan forward in the Marshall Islands.
Starting in early 2018 and “continuing until at least on or about November 1, 2018, Yan and Zhou offered and provided a series of cash bribes and other incentives to obtain the support of Marshall Islands legislators for the RASAR bill,” said the US indictment.
Heine’s administration held off the attempt to push RASAR legislation into parliament in late 2018 and survived an attempt to unseat Heine through a vote of no confidence in November.
After the national election a year later, when Nitijela reconvened in January 2020, Heine lost the presidency to David Kabua.
Shortly after the new government took office in 2020, “Yan and Zhou began emailing and meeting with certain Marshall Islands officials to continue their plan to create the RASAR,” said US prosecutors.
Law consideration
“In or about late February 2020, the Marshall Islands legislature began considering a resolution that would endorse the concept of the RASAR, a preliminary step that would allow the legislature to enact the more detailed RASAR Bill at a later date.”
US prosecutors said that in early March, “Yan and Zhou met with a close relative of a member of the Marshall Islands legislature in the Marshall Islands.
During the meeting, Yan and Zhou gave the relative $7000 in cash to pass on to the official, specifying that this money would be used to induce and influence other Marshall Islands legislators to support the RASAR Resolution.
“Yan and Zhou further stated, in sum, that they knew that the official needed more than $7000 for this purpose and that (they) would soon obtain additional cash for the official.”
US prosecutors said that at this meeting in early March 2020, Yan and Zhou “also discussed having previously brought larger sums of cash into the Marshall Islands through the United States and that they planned to do so again in the future”.
By the third week of March 2020, the Nitijela passed the RASAR Resolution “with the support of legislators to whom Zhou and Yan had provided bribes and other incentives,” said the prosecutors.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
More than 200 people from Aotearoa New Zealand’s Chinese community gathered for a vigil at Auckland’s Aotea Square last night to mourn the lives lost under China’s stringent covid-19 lockdowns and to call for an end to the country’s “Zero Covid” policy.
The unprecedented display of defiance by a crowd mainly made up of Chinese Kiwis from the mainland came after a lockdown building fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang, last week that killed 10 people.
The Urumqi fire has sparked nationwide protests across China and among overseas Chinese, with vigils and protests building up in major cities including New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Hong Kong and Tokyo.
More than 100 people at the event held up blank pieces of A4 paper as a symbol of defiance against China’s censorship of dissent, and chanted in Mandarin: “We don’t want leaders, we want votes — we don’t want dictatorship, we want citizens”.
“Without freedom, I’d rather die.
“Xi Jin Ping, step down, CCP step down.”
A similar vigil for the Urumqi fire victims was also held in Wellington last night.
Step up after seeing suffering
In an emotional speech, one of the organisers of the Auckland vigil said despite having no previous experience participating in social movements, she had decided to step up after seeing the recent tragedies of Chinese people suffering under the lockdowns.
“There were a series of suicides in Hohhot where I come from, I felt at that time that I can no longer say everything is fine — we can say that for New Zealand, but my family and friends are in China, so I can no longer be silent,” she said.
Members of the Uyghur Muslim community from Xinjiang — where the Urumqi fire happened — also attended, showing solidarity and protesting against human rights violations against Uyghurs.
Chinese protesters in Auckland’s Aotea Square hold white A4 paper as a symbol of defiance against censorship by the Chinese government. Image: Lucy Xia/RNZ
The protesters also called for the release of protesters arrested in China.
Like her, many at the gathering were first-time protesters emboldened by the recent protests in China.
Another protester said he was also inspired by the man on Sitong Bridge.
‘He gave us courage’
“He gave us a lot of courage. He was a person at the bottom of society, who did what he knew was forbidden, he sacrificed himself to awaken the Chinese people’s desire for a democratic society,” he said.
An international student who had just graduated from high school said she wanted to contribute to ending China’s lockdowns.
“If the protests could work and make all the cities stop the lockdown, I was so happy to come to come here today, hear everyone share their stories and using the A4 paper to show our anger.”
Another said he hoped the protests in China and abroad instilled a sense of what it meant to be a responsible citizen for Chinese people.
“If people want to live with dignity in a fair society, there needs to be a civil society,” he said.
‘Softer’ solidarity
Meanwhile, some at the gathering chose a softer way of showing solidarity with the victims of the Urumqi fire.
Chrysanthemums were laid and candles were lit in solidarity with the victims of the Urumqi fire. Image: Lucy Xia/RNZ
Chrysanthemums were laid and candles were lit, and a school aged child accompanied by his parents played “Do you hear the people sing” on his flute.
One attendee told RNZ he was glad that the people who gathered could find something in common regardless of where they were on the political spectrum.
“Some people want to see a revolution in China, others just want something small like for their residential area to come out of lockdown earlier, so that people can freely buy groceries,” he said.
“But people can easily find a common denominator, and that’s hoping things will move forward a little bit, and let friends and family living in China be safer and freer.”
This message in Mandarin reads: “I am the person who died in the bus that flipped, I am the sick person denied treatment, I am the person who walked a hundred miles, I am the person who jumped from a building out of desperation, I am the person trapped in the building fire. If these people are not me, then the next victim will be me.” Image: Lucy Xia/RNZ
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The US has long considered Latin America and the Caribbean to be its “backyard” under the anachronist 1823 Monroe Doctrine. And even though current US President Biden mistakenly thinks that upgrading the region to the “front yard” makes any difference, Yankee hemispheric hegemony is becoming increasingly volatile. A “Pink Tide” of left electoral victories since 2018 have swept Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Honduras, Chile, Columbia, and Brazil. At the same time, China has emerged as an economic presence while tumultuously inflationary winds blow in the world economy.
In this larger context, the socialist triad of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are addressed below along with the importance of Haiti.
Henry Kissinger once quipped: “To be an enemy of the US is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” He presciently encapsulated the perilously precarious situations in the “enemy” states targeted for regime change by the imperial power – Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua – as well as the critical consequences for Haiti of being “friended.”
Out-migration from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua
While accommodation and cooption by Washington may be in order for social democracies such as the new administrations in Colombia and Brazil, nothing but regime ruination is slated for the explicitly socialist states. Looking pretty in pink is begrudgingly tolerable for Washington but not red.
The Democratic Party speech writers may lack the rhetorical flourish of John Bolton’s “Troika of Tyranny,” but President Biden has continued his predecessor’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The result has been unprecedented out migration from the three states striving for socialism, although the majority of migrants entering the US are still from either the Northern Triangle (consisting of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras) or Mexico.
US immigration policy is cynically designed to exacerbate the situation. The Biden administration has dangled inconsistent political amnesties jerking Venezuelan and Nicaraguan immigrants around. The Cuban Adjustment Act, dating back to 1966, perversely encourages irregular immigration.
With Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, the pull of economic opportunities drives people to leave in the face of sanctions-fueled deteriorating conditions at home. These migrants differ from those from the Northern Triangle, who are also fleeing from the push of gang violence, extortion, femicide, and the ambiance of general criminal impunity.
Socialist states red-lined
US sanctions, which have literally red-lined Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, are more lethal than ever. The electronic technology for enforcing the coercive measures has far advanced since the days over six decades ago when JFK first visited what is called the “blockade” on Cuba. Further, the effect over time of sanctions is to corrode socialist solidarity and cooperation. And in recent times, cyber warfare using social media is effectively wielded by the imperialists.
Natural disasters have a synergistic effect aggravating and amplifying the pain of sanctions. An August lightning strike destroyed 40% of Cuba’s fuel reserves. Then Hurricane Ian hit both Cuba and Nicaragua in October, while Venezuela experienced unprecedented heavy rainfall, all with lethal consequences.
The Covid pandemic stressed these already sanctions-battered economies, presenting the unenviable choice of locking down or working and eating. Cuba was forced to suspend tourism, which was a major source of foreign income. Venezuela chose an innovative system of alternating periods of lockdown. Nicaragua, where three-quarters of the population work in small businesses and farms or the informal sector, implemented relatively successful public health measures while keeping the economy open.
Venezuela has made remarkable progress turning around a complete economic collapse deliberately caused by the US sanctions, but it still has a long, long way to recovery. For example, poor people are getting fat in Venezuela, not because there is too much food, but because there is not enough. Consequently, they are forced to subsist on high caloric arepas made of fried corn flour and cannot afford more nutritious vegetables and meats.
Nicaragua is bracing for more US sanctions, while the situation in Cuba is more desperate than ever. But with international support and solidarity, the explicitly socialist states have continued to successfully resist the onslaughts of imperialism.
Haiti made poor by imperialism
Compared to Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, Haiti is suffering even more. It is the poorest country in the hemisphere, made so by imperialism. Few countries in the hemisphere have had as intimate a relationship with the hegemon to the north as Haiti…unfortunately. Presently civil society has risen up in revolt and for good reason.
Haiti achieved independence in 1804 in the world’s first successful slave revolt and the first successful anti-colonial revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean. For those Afro-descendants, the price of freedom has been stiff. The former colonial power, France, along with the US have been bleeding Haiti dry ever since. Over $20 billion has been extracted for “reparations” under the force of arms for the cost of the slaves and repayment of the consequent “debt.”
Under US President Bill Clinton – he has since apologized after the damage was done – peasant agriculture was destroyed with an IMF deal. Since then, Haiti has gone from being a net exporter of rice to an importer from the US. The consequent population shift from the land to the cities conforms to the designs for Haiti to be a low-wage manufacturing center for foreign capital.
The treatment of Haitian immigrants and would-be immigrants on the US southern border by the overtly racist and anti-immigrant Donald Trump has been even worse by his supposedly “woke” Democratic successor. Tellingly, Biden’s special envoy quit in protest because he found the administration’s policy, in his words, “inhumane.”
Haiti has been without an elected president. Ariel Henry, the current officeholder, was simply installed by the Core Group of the US, Canada, and other outside powers after his also unelected predecessor, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in July 2021. The Haitian parliament doesn’t meet, most government services are non-functional, rival armed groups control major swarths of the national territory, and cholera has again broken out.
The US has proposed a return of a multi-national military force like the previous disastrous MINUSTAH effort by the UN, which left the country in the state it is now. Little wonder that the peoples of the hemisphere aspire to alternatives to the US aiding their development.
Chinese tsunami and the Russian rip tide
China has emerged as an alternative and challenger to US dollar dominance of the hemisphere. China has provided vital life support for the socialist states targeted by US for regime change. During the Covid pandemic, China supplied the region with medical equipment and vaccines, literally saving lives.
The Chinese economic presence has been like a tsunami wave from the east building up as it approached the American landmass. In 2000, China accounted for a mere 2% of the region’s trade. Economic exchanges began to swell when China joined the World Trade Association in December 2001. Today, China is the number one trading partner with South America and second only to the US for the region as a whole.
China has expanded its political, cultural, and even military ties with the region, while Taiwan’s fortunes have receded. Over twenty Latin American and Caribbean countries have joined the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), offering more diverse commercial and financial options.
Russia, too, has been a salvation as when Cuba was caught in the pandemic peak with the Delta strain and their oxygen plant broke down. Russia airlifted life-saving oxygen and later brought vital fuel after the fires at Matanzas crippled the Cuban energy grid.
To be continued…
• The inflationary blowback from western sanctions on some one third of humanity present an increasingly volatile global context.
• Part III concludes with the challenges ahead for countries striving for independence from US dominance.
