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Category: China

  • Anyone Who’d Support Going To War Over Taiwan Is A Crazy Idiot

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    Taiwan has been in the news a lot lately, and it’s really bringing out the crazy in people.

    The mass media have been falsely reporting that China has been encroaching on Taiwan’s “air defense zone”, which gets stretched into the even more ludicrous claim that China “sent warplanes flying over Taiwan”. In reality Chinese planes simply entered an arbitrarily designated area hundreds of miles from Taiwan’s coast it calls its “Air Defence Identification Zone”, which has no legally recognized existence and contains a significant portion of China’s mainland. This is likely a response to the way the US and its allies have been constantly sailing war ships into disputed waters to threaten Beijing.

    As Moon of Alabama reports, US warmongers inflamed this non-controversy even further by feeding a story to the press about the already public information that there are American troops in Taiwan training the military there, citing “concern” about the danger posed by China.

    Now headlines are blaring about President Tsai Ing-wen responding to this non-event with the announcement that Taiwan will “do whatever it takes to defend its freedom and democratic way of life.” Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott just visited Taipei to advocate that “democracies stand shoulder to shoulder” with Taiwan against China. The CIA has announced the creation of a new spy center that will focus solely on China, which CIA Director William Burns says will “further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century: an increasingly adversarial Chinese government”.

    A recent poll says that now more than half of Americans would support sending US troops to defend Taiwan from an invasion by the mainland, plainly the result of the aggressive propaganda campaign that has greatly escalated public hysteria about China. In Australia the mass media are cranking out unbelievably insane 60 Minutes episodes ridiculously pushing the idea that China may attack Australia and that Australians should be willing to go to war to protect Taiwan. I’ve been having many disturbing interactions with people online who emphatically support the idea of the US and its allies going to war with China over Taiwanese independence.

    This is clearly nuts, and anyone who buys into this line of thinking is a brainwashed fool.

    This isn’t some kind of complicated anti-imperialist issue, and it has nothing to do with which side you take in the debate over what government Taiwan belongs under. The US and its allies engaging in a full-scale war with nuclear-armed China over Taiwan is a prospect that should be vehemently opposed out of simple, garden variety self-preservation.

    Obviously if Beijing decides to launch a military assault on Taiwan in its bid to reunify China that would be a terrible thing which would cause a lot of suffering. I don’t think that will happen unless western powers push Taipei into declaring independence or otherwise upset the delicate diplomacy dance in some major way, but if it does happen under any circumstances that would be awful.

    But Taiwanese independence is not worth fighting a world war that could kill millions, and potentially billions if things go nuclear. This should be extremely obvious to everyone.

    War proponents will reference Hitler, as they literally always do whenever there’s talk of war against someone the United States doesn’t like, arguing that China taking Taiwan would be like the Nazis invading Poland after which they’ll just keep invading and conquering until they are stopped. But there’s no evidence that China has any interest in invading Japan, much less Australia, still less everyone else, or that it has any ambitions on the world stage beyond reunification and securing its own economic and security interests.

    The idea that China wants to take over a bunch of foreign lands, make you live under communism and give you a social credit score is the same kind of foam-brained bigoted othering which told previous generations that Black men want to take over your neighborhood so they can have sex with your wives. It’s the sort of belief that can only find purchase in an emotionally primitive mind that lacks the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand that not everyone wants what you have.

    The jarring amount of pushback I’ve been getting for my very sane and moderate position that we should not be willing to start World War Three between nuclear powers over Taiwanese independence makes it abundantly clear that many people don’t truly understand that starting a war means you have to actually send actual human beings to go fight that war. All the big brave warrior men bloviating about the need to stand up to China know they’ll never find themselves on the front line of that conflict because they’re too old, but they’ll happily send my kids and the kids of countless of other mothers to go and fight in it. It’s like a video game or a movie to them.

    Propaganda has made us so compartmentalized and detached from the realities of the horrors of war. If people could really see what war is and what it does, truly grok deep down in their guts how their own governments are inflicting those horrors on people right now, they’d fall to their knees in anguish and never again advocate for such things. No sane person would support a war of this scale if they truly understood what it would mean.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Chomsky: It’s Life and Death — Intellectuals Can’t Keep Serving the Status Quo

    Noam Chomsky lectures during the ceremony for the Conferment of the Honorary Doctorate at Peking University on August 13, 2010, in Beijing, China.

    The overwhelming majority of intellectuals have historically been servants of the status quo.

    That was the case more than half a century ago, when Noam Chomsky pointed out as much in his classic essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” and it continues to be the case today, when oppositional public intellectuals continue to be a small minority.

    Indeed, if anything, the number of critical/oppositional public intellectuals — in other words, thinkers who are versed to speak on a wide range of issues from an anti-establishment standpoint — has been in decline in recent decades, even as the public sphere has grown bigger and louder due to the dramatic expansion of the internet and social media. One factor in this trend may be universities’ overwhelming emphasis on narrow, specialized and even arcane knowledge, and a resistance within academic culture to prioritizing making an impact on the public arena by addressing issues that affect directly people’s lives and challenge the status quo. Another factor may be the rising tide of anti-intellectualism in the U.S. and beyond.

    Yet, in a highly fragile world facing existential threats, we need the voice of critical intellectuals more than any other time in history. In the interview that follows, Noam Chomsky — the scholar, public thinker and activist who has been described as a “world treasure’” and “arguably the most important intellectual alive” — discusses the urgent need for more intellectuals not to “speak truth to power” but to speak with the powerless.

    C.J. Polychroniou: Long ago, in your celebrated essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” you argued that intellectuals must insist on truth and expose lies, but must also analyze events in their historical perspective. Now, while you never implied that this is the only responsibility that intellectuals have, don’t you think that the role of intellectuals has changed dramatically over the course of the last half century or so? I mean, true, critical/oppositional intellectuals were always few and far between in the modern Western era, but there were always giants in our midst whose voice and status were not only revered by a fair chunk of the citizenry, but, in some cases, produced fear and even awe among the members of the ruling class. Today, we have mainly functional/conformist “intellectuals” who focus on narrow, highly specialized and technical areas, and do not dare to challenge the status quo or speak out against social evils out of fear of losing their job, being denied tenure and promotion, or not having access to grants. Indeed, whatever happened to public intellectuals like Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, and to iconic artists like Picasso with his fight against fascism?

    Noam Chomsky: Well, what did happen to Bertrand Russell?

    Russell was jailed during World War I along with the handful of others who dared to oppose that glorious enterprise: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Eugene Debs — who was even excluded from postwar amnesty by the vengeful Woodrow Wilson — to mention only the most famous. Some were treated more kindly, like Randolph Bourne, merely ostracized and barred from liberal intellectual circles and journals. Russell’s later career had many ugly episodes, including his being declared by the courts to be too free-thinking to be allowed to teach at City College, a flood of vilification from high places because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, scurrilous treatment even after his death.

    Not all that unusual for those who break ranks, no matter how distinguished their contributions, as Russell’s surely were.

    The term “intellectual” itself is a strange one. It is not applied to a Nobel laureate who devotes his life to physics, or to the janitor in his building who may have little formal education but deep insight and perceptive understanding of human affairs, history, culture. The term is used, usually, to refer to a category of people with a degree of privilege who are somehow regarded to be the guardians of society’s intellectual and moral values. They are supposed to uphold and articulate those values and call upon others to adhere to them.

    Within this category there is a small minority who challenge power, authority and received doctrine. It is sometimes held that their responsibility is “to speak truth to power.” I’ve always found that troubling. The powerful typically know the truth quite well. They generally know what they are doing, and don’t need our instructions. They also will not benefit from moral lessons, not because they are necessarily bad people, but because they play a certain institutional role, and if they abandon that role, somebody else will fill it as long as the institutions persist. There is no point instructing CEOs of the fossil fuel industry that their activities are damaging communities and destroying the environment and our climate. They’ve known that for a long time. They also know that if they depart from dedication to profit and concern themselves with the human impact of what they are doing, they’ll be out on the streets and someone will replace them to carry out the institutionally required tasks.

    There remains a range of options, but it is narrow.

    It would make a lot more sense to speak truth not to power, but to its victims. If you speak truth to the powerless, it’s possible that it could benefit somebody. It might help people confront the problems in their lives more realistically. It might even help them to act and organize in such ways as to compel the powerful to modify institutions and practices; and, even more significantly, to challenge illegitimate structures of authority and the institutions on which they are realized and thereby expand the scope of freedom and justice. It won’t happen in any other way, and it’s often happened in that way in the past.

    But I don’t think that’s right either. The task of a responsible person — anyone who wants to uphold intellectual and moral values — is not to speak what they regard as truth to anybody — the powerful or the powerless — but rather to speak with the powerless and to try to learn the truth. That’s always a collective endeavor and wisdom and understanding need not come from any particular turf.

    But that’s quite rare in the history of intellectuals.

    Let’s recall that the term “intellectual” came into use in its modern sense with the Dreyfus trial in France in the late 19th century. Today we admire and respect those who stood up for justice in their defense of Dreyfus, but if you look back at that time, they were a persecuted minority. The “immortals” of the French Academy bitterly condemned these preposterous writers and artists for daring to challenge the august leaders and institutions of the French State. The prominent figure of the Dreyfusards, Emile Zola, had to flee from France.

    That’s pretty typical. Take almost any society you like and you will find that there is a fringe of critical dissidents and that they are usually subjected to one or another form of punishment. Those I mentioned are no exception. In recent history, in Russian-run Eastern Europe, they could be jailed; if it was in our own domains, in Central or South America, they could be tortured and murdered. In both cases, there was harsh repression of people who are critical of established power.

    That goes back as far as you like, all the way back to classical Greece. Who was the person who drank the hemlock? It was the person who was “corrupting” the youth of Athens by asking searching questions that are better hidden away. Take a look at the Biblical record, roughly about the same period. It’s kind of oral history, but in what’s reconstructed from it, there were people who by our standards might be called intellectuals — people who condemned the king and his crimes, called for mercy for widows and orphans, other subversive acts. How were they treated? They were imprisoned, driven into the desert, reviled. There were intellectuals who were respected, flatterers at the Court. Centuries later, they were called False Prophets, but not at the time. And if you think through history, that pattern is replicated quite consistently.

    The basic operative principle was captured incisively by McGeorge Bundy, a leading liberal intellectual, noted scholar, former Harvard dean, national security adviser under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, then director of the Ford Foundation. In 1968, when protest against the Vietnam War was peaking, Bundy published an article in the main establishment journal Foreign Affairs in which he discussed protest against the war. Much of the protest was legitimate, he conceded: there had in retrospect been some mistakes in managing such a complex effort. But then there was a fringe of “wild men in the wings” who merit only contempt. The wild men actually descended so far as to look into motives. That is, they treated the U.S. political leadership by the standards applied to others, and hence must be excluded from polite company.

    Bundy’s analysis was in fact the norm among liberal intellectuals. Their publications soberly distinguished the “technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals” from the “value-oriented intellectuals.” The former are the good guys, who orchestrate and inform policy, and are duly honored for their constructive work — the Henry Kissingers, the kind who loyally transmit orders from their half-drunk boss for a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia, “anything that flies against anything that moves.” A call for genocide that’s not easy to duplicate in the archival record. The latter are the wild men in the wings who prate about moral value, justice, international law and other sentimentalities.

    The U.S. isn’t El Salvador. The wild men don’t have their brains blown out by elite battalions armed and trained in Washington, like the six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, who suffered this fate along with their housekeeper and her daughter on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Who even knows their names? Properly, one might argue, since there were many other religious martyrs among the hundreds of thousands slaughtered in Washington’s crusade in Central America in the 1980s, managed with the assistance of technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals.

    It is, regrettably, all too easy to continue.

    I believe it would be of great interest if you talked about the historical context of “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” but also if you elaborate on what you mean when you say intellectuals must see events from their historical perspective.

    The essay was based on a talk given in1966 to a student group at Harvard. It was published in the group’s journal. They’ve probably expunged it since. It was the Harvard Hillel Society. The journal is Mosaic. This was a year before Israel’s military victory in 1967, a great gift to the U.S., which led to a sharp re-orientation in U.S.-Israeli policies and major shifts in popular culture and attitudes in the U.S. — an interesting and important story, but not for here.

    The New York Review of Books published an edited version.

    Since the talk was at Harvard, it was particularly important to focus on intellectual elites and their special links to government. The Harvard faculty was quite prominent in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Camelot mythology is in considerable part their creation. But as we’ve been discussing, it’s just one phase in a long history of intellectual service to power. It’s still unfolding without fundamental change, though the activism of the ‘60s and its aftermath has substantially changed much of the country, widening the wings in which “wild men” can pursue their value-oriented subversion.

    This impact has also greatly broadened the historical perspective from which events of the world are perceived. No one today would write a major diplomatic history of the U.S. recounting how after the British yoke was overthrown, the former colonists, in the words of Thomas Bailey, “concentrated on the task of felling trees and Indians and of rounding out their natural boundaries” — in “self-defense,” of course. Few in the ‘60s fully grasped the fact that our “forever wars” began in 1783. The horrendous 400-year record of torture of African Americans was also scarcely acknowledged by mainstream academics; more, and worse, is constantly being unearthed. The same is true in other areas. Dedicated and conscientious activism can open many windows for valuable historical perspective to be gained.

    The world has changed a great deal since the era of the Vietnam War, and I think you would agree with me that we are facing greater challenges today than ever before. Moreover, we live in a much smaller world, and some of the challenges facing us are truly global in nature and scope. In that context, what should be the role of intellectuals and of social movements in a globalized world and with a shared future for humanity?

    You’re quite right that we face far greater challenges today than during the Vietnam era. In 1968, when liberal intellectuals were excoriating the value-oriented “wild men,” the leading issue was that “Viet-Nam as a cultural and historic entity [was] threatened with extinction [as] the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size,” the judgment of the most respected Vietnam specialist, military historian Bernard Fall.

    It is now organized human society worldwide that is “threatened with extinction” under the blows of environmental destruction, overwhelmingly by the rich, concentrated in the rich countries. That’s apart from the no less ominous and growing threat of nuclear holocaust, being stoked as we speak.

    We are living in an era of confluence of crises that has no counterpart in human history. For each of these, feasible solutions are known, though time is short. There is no need to waste words on responsibility.

    Who is undertaking the historic task of addressing these crises? Who carried out the Global Climate Strike on September 24, a desperate attempt to wake up the dithering leaders of global society, and citizens who have been lulled into passivity by elite treachery? We know the answer: the young, the inheritors of our folly. It should be deeply painful to witness the scene at Davos, the annual gathering where the rich and powerful posture in their self-righteousness, and applaud politely when Greta Thunberg instructs them quietly and expertly on the catastrophe they have been blithely creating.

    It’s clear the rich are thinking: Nice little girl. Now go back to school where you belong and leave the serious problems to us, the enlightened political leaders, the soulful corporations working day and night for the common good, the responsible intellectuals. We’ll take care of it, ensuring that the betrayal will be apocalyptic — as it will be, if we grant them the power to run the world in accord with the principles they have established and implemented.

    The principles are not obscure. Right now, governments of the world, the U.S. foremost among them, are pressuring oil producers to increase production — having just been advised in the August IPCC report, by far the direst yet, that catastrophe is looming unless we begin right now to reduce fossil fuel use year by year, effectively phasing them out by mid-century. Petroleum industry journals are euphoric about the discovery of new fields to exploit as demand for oil increases. The business press debates whether the U.S. fracking industry or OPEC is best placed to increase production.

    Congress is debating a bill that might have slightly slowed the race to destruction. The denialist party is 100 percent opposed, so the fate of legislation is in the hands of the “moderate” Democrats, particularly Joe Manchin. He has made his position on climate explicit: “Spending on innovation, not elimination.” Straight out of the playbook of PR departments of the fossil fuel companies, no surprise from Congress’s leading recipient of fossil fuel compensation. Fossil fuel use must continue unimpeded, driving us to catastrophe in the interests of short-term profit for the very rich. Period.

    On the rest of the Biden package, Manchin — the swing vote — has made it clear that he will accept only a trickle, also insisting on cumbersome and degrading means testing for what is standard practice in the civilized world. The posture is certainly not for the benefit of his constituents. As for other “moderates,” it is much the same. Without far more intense public pressure, there was never much hope that this Congress would allow the country to begin to beat back the cruel assault of overwhelming business power.

    There is no need to tarry on what this entails about responsibility.

    And again, we dare not neglect the cloud that was cast over the world by human intelligence 75 years ago and has been darkening in recent years. The arms control regime that had been laboriously constructed over many decades has been systematically dismantled by the last two Republican administrations, first Bush II and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, then Trump wielding his wrecking ball with abandon. He left office barely in time for Biden to salvage the New START Treaty, accepting Russia’s pleas to extend it. Biden continues, however, to support the bloated military budget, to pursue the race to develop more dangerous weapons, and to carry out highly provocative acts where diplomacy and negotiations are surely possible.

    A major point of contention right now is “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea. More accurately, as Australian strategic analyst Clinton Fernandes points out, the conflict concerns military/intelligence operations in China’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) extending 200 miles offshore. The U.S. holds that such operations are permissible in all EEZs. China holds that they are not. India agrees with China’s interpretation, and vigorously protested recent U.S. military operations in its EEZ.

    EEZs were established by the 1982 Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The U.S. is the only maritime power not to have ratified the Law, but asserts that it will not violate it. The relevant wording about military operations in the Law is not entirely precise. Surely this is a clear case where diplomacy is in order, not highly provocative actions in a region of considerable tension, with the threat of escalation, possibly without bounds.

    All of this is part of the U.S. effort to “contain China.” Or, to put it differently, to establish “The fact that somehow, the rise of 20 per cent of humanity from abject poverty into something approaching a modern state, is illegitimate — but more than that, by its mere presence, an affront to the United States. It is not that China presents a threat to the United States — something China has never articulated nor delivered — rather, its mere presence represents a challenge to United States pre-eminence.”

    This is the quite realistic assessment of former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, reacting to the recent AUKUS (Australia-U.K.-U.S.) agreement to sell eight advanced nuclear submarines to Australia, to be incorporated in the U.S. naval command in order to respond to the “threat of China.”

    The agreement abrogates a France-Australia agreement for sale of conventional subs. With typical imperial arrogance, Washington did not even notify France, instructing the European Union on its place in the U.S.-run global order. In reaction, France recalled its ambassadors to the U.S. and Australia, ignoring the U.K., a mere vassal state.

    Australian military correspondent Brian Toohey observes that Australia’s submission to the U.S. does not enhance its security — quite the contrary — and that AUKUS has no discernable strategic purpose. The subs will not be operational for over a decade, by which time China will surely have expanded its military forces to deal with this new military threat, just as it has done to deal with the fact that it is ringed by nuclear-armed missiles in some of the 800 military bases that the U.S. has around the world (China has one, Djibouti).

    Toohey outlines the naval military balance that is disrupted further by AUKUS. It’s worth quoting directly to help understand how China threatens the U.S. — not in the Caribbean or the California coast, but on China’s borders:

    China’s nuclear weapons are so inferior that it couldn’t be confident of deterring a retaliatory strike from the US. Take the example of nuclear-powered, ballistic missile-armed submarines (SSBNs). China has four Jin-class SSBNs. Each can carry 12 missiles, each with a single warhead. The subs are easy to detect because they’re noisy. According to the US Office of Naval Intelligence, each is noisier than a Soviet submarine first launched in 1976. Russian and US subs are now much quieter. China is expected to acquire another four SSBNs that are a little quieter by 2030. However, the missiles on the subs won’t have the range to reach the continental US from near their base on Hainan island in the South China Sea. To target the continental US, they would have to reach suitable locations in the Pacific Ocean. However, they are effectively bottled up inside the South China Sea. To escape, they have to pass through a series of chokepoints where they would be easily sunk by US hunter killer nuclear submarines of the type the [Australian] Morrison government wants to buy. In contrast, the US has 14 Ohio-class SSBNs. Each can launch 24 Trident missiles, each containing eight independently targetable warheads able to reach anywhere on the globe. This means a single US submarine can destroy 192 cities, or other targets, compared to 12 for the Chinese submarine. The Ohio class is now being replaced by the bigger Columbia class. These [are being] constructed at the same time as new US hunter killer submarines.

    That’s before eight new advanced nuclear subs are built for Australia. In nuclear forces generally and other relevant military capacity, China is of course far behind the U.S., as are all potential U.S. adversaries combined.

    AUKUS does serve a purpose, however: to establish more firmly that the U.S. intends to rule the world, even if that requires escalating the threat of war, possibly terminal nuclear war, in a highly volatile region. And eschewing such “sissified” measures as diplomacy.

    It is not the only example. One of these should have been on the front pages in the past few weeks as the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, executing Trump’s cynical sell-out of Afghans in his February 2020 deal with the Taliban.

    The obvious question is: Why did the Bush administration invade 20 years ago? The U.S. had no interest in Afghanistan, as Bush’s pronouncements at the time made explicit; the real prize was Iraq, then beyond. Bush also made it clear that the administration also had little interest in Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda. That lack of concern was made fully explicit by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when the Taliban offered surrender. “We do not negotiate surrenders,” Rumsfeld stormed.

    The only plausible explanation for the invasion was given by the most highly respected leader of the anti-Taliban resistance, Abdul Haq. He was interviewed shortly after the invasion by Asia scholar Anatol Lieven.

    Haq said that the invasion will kill many Afghans and undermine promising Afghan efforts to undermine the Taliban regime from within, but that’s not Washington’s concern: “the US is trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don’t care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose.”

    That also seems a fair description of current U.S. strategy in “containing the China threat” by provocative escalation in place of diplomacy. It’s no innovation in imperial history.

    Returning to the responsibility of intellectuals and how it is being fulfilled, no elaboration should be necessary.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Chinese ‘Disinformation’ And US Propaganda

    In Western media’s latest anti-China crusade, unsubstantiated allegations of a Chinese disinformation campaign—which the reports themselves admit have had little engagement on social media, and nonexistent impact offline—supposedly represent a very serious threat to the US. FAIR has repeatedly pointed out how governments like to decry “fake news” or “disinformation” to discredit sources of unfavorable information, or to use those nebulous accusations as a cynical pretext to outright censor perspectives they dislike. Corporate media reports of “bots” or fake social media accounts alleged to be from foreign governments (like Russia) that Washington dislikes are oftentimes themselves fake news.

    The post Chinese ‘Disinformation’ And US Propaganda appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Joe Biden and Xi Jinping to hold virtual meeting this year – White House

    Biden administration announces plan after meeting between US national security adviser and China’s top diplomat

    The US president, Joe Biden, and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, are planning to meet by video link before the end of the year, a senior US official said on Wednesday.

    There is an “agreement in principle” for the “virtual bilateral”, the official told reporters on condition of anonymity.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Chinese ‘Disinformation’ and US Propaganda

     

    In Western media’s latest anti-China crusade, unsubstantiated allegations of a Chinese disinformation campaign—which the reports themselves admit have had little engagement on social media, and nonexistent impact offline—supposedly represent a very serious threat to the US.

    FAIR (3/9/17, 11/29/17, 4/9/20) has repeatedly pointed out how governments like to decry “fake news” or “disinformation” to discredit sources of unfavorable information, or to use those nebulous accusations as a cynical pretext to outright censor perspectives they dislike. Corporate media reports of “bots” or fake social media accounts alleged to be from foreign governments (like Russia) that Washington dislikes are oftentimes themselves fake news (FAIR.org, 4/5/18).

    ‘Explosion of activity’

    Here are a few of the latest reports:

    • “Pro-China Social Media Campaign Hits New Countries, Blames US for Covid” (Reuters, 9/8/21)
    • “Experts See ‘Explosion of Activity’ by Pro-China Group to Mobilise Protests and Exploit Divisions in US” (Independent, 9/9/21)
    • “Pro-China Online Network Used Fake Accounts to Urge Asian Americans to Attend Protests, Researchers Say” (Wall Street Journal, 9/8/21)
    • “Pro-China Misinformation Operation Attempting to Exploit US Covid Divisions, Report Says” (CNN, 9/8/21)

    The CNN story (9/8/21) described a “new report” from cybersecurity firm Mandiant and “experts at Google,” claiming that a

    pro-Chinese government online influence operation is targeting Americans in an effort to exploit divisions over the Covid-19 pandemic and “physically mobilize protestors in the US in response.”

    CNN made it sound as if this supposed operation has a truly impressive scope and outreach:

    The operation, which initially attempted to discredit pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019, has expanded into a “global campaign that’s operating in seven languages, on at least 30 social media platforms and across 40+ website & forums,” experts at Mandiant and Google say, noting parallels to the Russian disinformation campaign around the 2016 presidential election.

    Reuters (9/8/21) likewise reported:

    A misinformation campaign on social media in support of Chinese government interests has expanded to new languages and platforms, and it even tried to get people to show up to protests in the United States…. This expansion suggests Chinese interests have made a deeper commitment to the sort of international propaganda techniques Russia has used for several years, experts said.

    The Independent (9/9/21) depicted a sinister internet army of Chinese propagandists trying to deceive Americans and impact US politics:

    Experts are seeing an “explosion of activity” by a pro-China group to mobilize physical protests in the US and spread disinformation, according to a report…. The campaign has now reportedly expanded its mission and spread from Twitter, Facebook and Google to “thousands of handles on dozens of sites around the world.”

    The Wall Street Journal (9/8/21) propagated perhaps the most sensationalist innuendo:

    A network of fake social-media accounts linked to the Chinese government has attempted to draw Americans out to real-world protests against anti-Asian-American racism and popular but unsubstantiated allegations that China engineered the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic, according to US security firms.

    Assuming Beijing’s role

    Independent: Experts see ‘explosion of activity’ by pro-China group to mobilise protests and exploit divisions in US

    The Independent (9/9/21) used a photo of people carrying Chinese flags in China to illustrate a story about Twitter accounts that “did not appear to achieve any success” in encouraging people to attend a protest in the US.

    Some questions should spring to mind when reading these innuendo-filled reports of a supposed Chinese disinformation campaign. Perhaps the most important one: Is there evidence the Chinese government is behind this? As one reads further into these reports, one quickly discovers there is no such evidence. The source of the report, Mandiant, doesn’t even attribute responsibility for this supposed Chinese disinformation to the Chinese government.

    Reuters ironically implied that this supposed disinformation campaign, because it echoed claims made by Chinese state media, might be evidence the Chinese government is behind this. It cited evidence-free claims from Chinese media, such as the charge that the Covid-19 pandemic might have originated from the US’s Fort Detrick:

    Many of the posts echo claims in state-controlled Chinese media, and they are consistent with other government propaganda efforts. The researchers do not have proof of involvement by a specific arm or ally of Beijing. The Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

    This argument is especially funny coming from Reuters, as the Grayzone (2/20/21) exposed them and the BBC as participants in a covert information warfare campaign aimed at “countering Russia” by effecting “attitudinal change,” in an effort to “weaken the Russian state’s influence.”

    There is no evidence the pandemic originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, either, so by Reuters’s own logic, Americans spouting baseless speculations on social media that the pandemic originated from the Wuhan lab would count as a US disinformation campaign, since it’s being promoted by the US government and media (FAIR.org, 6/28/21; MintPress News, 9/15/21; 9/29/21).

    Speculation as evidence

    Reuters: Pro-China social media campaign hits new countries, blames U.S. for COVID

    Reuters (9/8/21) used a blurry photo of Chinese President Xi Jinping, although the report its story is based on does not claim to have evidence that the Chinese government is behind the social media campaign.

    The Journal reported speculation from the vice president of analysis at Mandiant, John Hultquist—”In addition to aligning with China’s strategic interests, the campaign appears to involve ‘significant resources, based on the growing scale of this operation,’ Mr. Hultquist said”—even as it noted that the report itself doesn’t offer proof the Chinese government is behind it, when Beijing denied responsibility. Such reports are tantamount to accusing the Chinese government of lying without any proof.

    CNN implied that anonymous US officials believing something constitutes evidence:

    US officials believe the operation is linked to the Chinese government and have been monitoring its evolution, according to one source familiar with the situation.

    The cable channel even cited previous evidence-free allegations from US officials, laundered by Western media outlets like the New York Times (7/24/20), BBC (8/8/20), Reuters (8/9/20) and Fox (10/13/20), that China was trying to meddle in the 2020 election. The fact that, according to US intelligence agencies (Business Insider, 3/16/21), China did not in fact intervene in the election seemed to be offered by CNN as evidence that it could have if it wanted to:

    During the 2020 election, US officials were watching to see if the operation might be used to spread disinformation, but ultimately assessed that the Chinese government avoided doing so because it did not want to provoke a response, the source added.

    FAIR (7/3/20) has repeatedly pointed out that anonymous officials are notoriously unreliable sources who often lie or make unproven claims, with the most recent example making headlines being the evidence-free “Havana Syndrome” (FAIR.org, 12/16/20). Ironically, one could argue that the CNN report provided more evidence that CNN was operating as a US government propaganda agent—because it plainly gives credence to evidence-free statements from anonymous US officials—than it offered for the supposed disinformation campaign being linked to the Chinese government.

    Little impact online or IRL

    CNN: Pro-China misinformation operation attempting to exploit US Covid divisions, report says

    Though equally evidence-free, the accusation that Covid escaped from a Chinese lab will not receive the “baseless…conspiracy theory” label from CNN (9/8/21).

    Yet another question one could ask is whether this alleged disinformation campaign had any significant impact on US politics offline. But when one reads these reports, one quickly discovers that not only did it have little effect on real life, it had almost no online engagement. Why are Western media spreading sensationalist innuendo when their own source, Mandiant, admits the program it claims to have uncovered had virtually no effect online or offline? CNN noted that the Mandiant report acknowledged

    while this attempt did not appear to achieve any success, we believe it is critical that observers continue to monitor for such attempts in case greater degrees of organic engagement are later realized by the network.

    Reuters acknowledged comical statements from Mandiant and Google staff:

    So far, the accounts on the main US platforms and major networks elsewhere, such as Russia-based VKontakte, have gained little interaction with authentic users, the researchers said.

    “A lot of it is tweeting into the void,” said John Hultquist, vice president of intelligence analysis at FireEye… “It’s almost like they are being paid by volume,” instead of engagement, said Shane Huntley, director of the threat analysis group at Google.

    Discrediting anti-racist protests

    WSJ: Pro-China Online Network Used Fake Accounts to Urge Asian-Americans to Attend Protests, Researchers Say

    The Wall Street Journal (9/8/21) accompanied a story about protests that “appear not to have taken place” with a photo of actual anti-racism protests.

    Reports and headlines imply that Asian-Americans have been attending multiple anti-racism protests because of this disinformation campaign. Reuters claimed that this “misinformation campaign on social media in support of the Chinese government” tried to “get people to show up to protests in the United States.”

    However, when one reads the actual Mandiant report, it cites only one instance of this supposed incitement to attend a protest on April 24 this year in New York City, and it wasn’t even successful at that. Yet reports managed to turn the only example in the Mandiant report into several in their audience’s imagination by implying there were others cited, as they reported: “In one example, the network encouraged Asian Americans to show up to a protest on April 24 in New York City,” the Journal reported, while CNN had:

    In April, for example, experts saw thousands of fake accounts calling on Asian-Americans to protest racial injustice in the US, and “disinformation about the virus’ origins.”

    Reports like these can potentially serve to discredit all anti-racist protests by Asian Americans as merely being duped by “Chinese propaganda.”

    FAIR (4/5/18) has previously reported how corporate media have been spreading evidence-free claims of “Russian bots” on social media like Twitter trying to “sow discord” or “exploit tensions,” even as their own primary source for those claims acknowledged they were “overdone.” A lot of these stories were described as “total bullshit” in a report interviewing the primary source for those claims, Hamilton 68, because not all bots are in Russia (many are based in the US), and journalists might just be confusing people genuinely passionate about promoting Russia with fake accounts. Twitter is already clogged with bots, which makes it extremely difficult to tell which accounts are inauthentic, let alone whether they’re under the command of the Russian government.

    The eerily familiar evidence-free narrative about this supposed Chinese disinformation campaign might lead the most cynical people to conclude these almost formulaic reports will be used as a pretext for American social media companies like Twitter to ban accounts on behalf of the US government that echo claims made by the Chinese government and media, regardless of whether they’re fake or not. Journalists and FAIR contributors like Alan MacLeod and Ben Norton have reported how giant American social media companies like Twitter and Reddit already have executives from Western governments, and how these companies have already acted to censor foreign perspectives that challenge narratives and disinformation from the US government under the pretext of combating foreign disinformation.

    The post Chinese ‘Disinformation’ and US Propaganda appeared first on FAIR.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Joshua Cho.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Biden Seems To Invent ‘Taiwan Agreement’ With China In Comments

    “China has…I’ve spoken with Xi about Taiwan. We agree, we will abide by the Taiwan agreement,” Biden said outside the White House on Tuesday evening, when asked about the recent flight of several dozen Chinese aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone. “That’s where we are and I made it clear that I don’t think he should be doing anything other than abiding by the agreement,” he added. It’s unclear to which agreement Biden is referring, as there is no such pact called the “Taiwan Agreement.” There are a few possibilities, however, although none of them make Biden’s statement make any more sense.

    During a phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping on September 10, Biden said he had no intention of changing the US’ “One-China Policy.” That policy, a foundation for every nation’s bilateral relationship with Beijing, holds to the principle that the PRC is the legitimate representative of the Chinese people and not the Republic of China (ROC), the formal name of the government in Taipei.

    The post Biden Seems To Invent ‘Taiwan Agreement’ With China In Comments appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • EDITOR’S BUNKER BRIEFING (6 October 2021, No.72)

    Dear Readers, Last week I attended a meeting that addressed how the conflict in Afghanistan was covered by the international media, as well as the restrictions that were placed on them. It was a long conflict, and as often happens in conflicts those who are trying to control its direction also try to ‘manage’ how […]

    The post EDITOR’S BUNKER BRIEFING (6 October 2021, No.72) appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • China’s Market Reformers

    While China is often seen as an outlier from neoliberal trends, its transformation in recent decades was not at odds with tectonic shifts in the global system of growth but an essential part of it.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Chadburns Ring Full Ahead for Modernisation

    The increasing pace of naval modernisation in the Indo-Pacific is fuelling regional industrial growth backed by the maturation of indigenous technology. The rise of China as a pre-eminent world power to challenge the superiority of the United States has led to the focus of military and geo-political concerns centring even more on the Indo-Pacific. Military […]

    The post Chadburns Ring Full Ahead for Modernisation appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Starbucks Chooses Shanghai For First Circular ‘Greener Store’ Outside North America

    4 Mins Read Starbucks has chosen Shanghai as the first destination for its Greener Store concept outside of North America. Opening this week, the new store is fitted with repurposed materials and zero-waste initiatives and marks the first in a series of circular store openings the coffee giant has planned for Japan, Chile and the UK.  Starbucks has […]

    The post Starbucks Chooses Shanghai For First Circular ‘Greener Store’ Outside North America appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • China Urges US To Join Talks On Preventing Arms Race In Outer Space

    “After the end of the Cold War, and especially in the past two decades, the US has tried its best to get rid of its international obligations, refused to be bound by new treaties and long resisted multilateral negotiations on PAROS [the 1967 UN resolution on the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space],” Li said.

    The post China Urges US To Join Talks On Preventing Arms Race In Outer Space appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • News on China | No. 70

    Meng Wanzhou is released and returns to China. Corporate corruption is punished. Power supply prioritized for the basic needs of people. A new hybrid species of giant rice is featured.

    The post News on China | No. 70 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Revenge Of White Colonialism Motivates The AUKUS Alliance

    The United States, United Kingdom, and Australia have formed an alliance called “AUKUS” to create, in the words of Australia PM Scott Morrison, “a partnership where our technology, our scientists, our industry, our defense forces are all working together to deliver a safer and more secure region that ultimately benefits all.” AUKUS is primarily a military relationship but is said to include broad economic measures that undoubtedly seek to counter China’s rise in all spheres of development. The deal has been met with some opposition in the West. New Zealand has rejected the legitimacy of the alliance  while the French ambassadors to the US and Australia were recalled  after AUKUS essentially tore up a submarine agreement between France and Australia.

    The post The Revenge Of White Colonialism Motivates The AUKUS Alliance appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Revenge of White Colonialism Motivates the AUKUS Alliance Against China

    Another point of controversy is whether AUKUS violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The first major initiative of AUKUS is to develop Australia’s first nuclear submarine fleet in the Pacific. Each party in the alliance has denied the intention of developing a “civil” (read military) nuclear weapons capacity in Australia. However, the fact remains that the United States and the UK are sharing nuclear-powered technology for military purposes.

    The post The Revenge of White Colonialism Motivates the AUKUS Alliance Against China appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • PLA Air Force highlights its J-16D electronic warfare aircraft at Airshow China

    The People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) is showcasing an electronic warfare (EW) variant of the Shenyang Aircraft Corporation (SAC) J-16 multirole fighter aircraft at the Airshow China 2021 defence exhibition being held from 28 September to 3 October in Zhuhai. The two-seat aircraft, officially designated the J-16D, is being highlighted at the outdoor static […]

    The post PLA Air Force highlights its J-16D electronic warfare aircraft at Airshow China appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • The Entire Korean Peninsula as an American Satrapy?

    Anti-imperilaism poster in Pyongyang shop

    Foreign Affairs (FA) magazine, published by the right-wing Council on Foreign Relations, has recently published some articles on taking advantage of economic challenges faced by North Korea. On 29 July, FA says, “Change is underway on the Korean Peninsula. FA posits that sanctions have worked for the US, as can be gleaned from the article’s title: “A Grand Bargain With North Korea: Pyongyang’s Economic Distress Offers a Chance for Peace.” The title is also disingenuous in the extreme since former US secretary-of-state Colin Powell made it clear: “We won’t do nonaggression pacts or treaties, things of that nature.”

    FA posits a re-prioritization in North Korean governance whereby the military will now play second fiddle to the economy. This, says FA, “sets the stage for efforts to resuscitate North Korea’s dying economy.”

    Why is North Korea’s economy in the predicament that it is? FA, presumably attributes the economic difficulties to military overspending. But FA’s analysis downplays the deleterious effects of sanctions spearheaded by the United States against North Korea. It does admit to this further down in the article, and it also points to the adversity imposed by “COVID-19 restrictions … and a relentless series of natural disasters.” However, why would anyone sanction a country beset by natural disasters and disease? And North Korea, despite whatever skepticism, does not list itself as having any COVID-19 cases.

    FA notes, “Kim’s criticisms of U.S.-South Korean joint military exercises and his country’s firing of cruise missiles and short-range ballistic missiles have also been more notable for their level of self-restraint than for escalating tensions on the peninsula.”

    However, North Korea has already demonstrated that it has a nuclear weapon and that it has long-range delivery capability. It is obvious that if any actor were to attack North Korea that the aggressor would be punished. Any reading of this exposes a hypocrisy, on the one hand North Korea is considered “notable for their level of self-restraint” and not “escalating tensions on the peninsula.” On the other hand, the US and South Korea conducted joint military exercises in late August. Is this self-restraint or is it provocation? Was not the seizure, announced by the US Justice Department in July, of a tanker that transports oil to North Korea a provocation?

    Cycling in a North Korean agricultural village

    FA points at food shortages in North Korea. However, it is important to remember that during US intrusion into the Korean civil war, the US wiped out the economic and agricultural basis of North Korea and killed millions of North Koreans. Following its aggression of North Korea, North Koreans have been forced to endure hardship to remain independent of their attacker. Absent this historical background, one might be fooled by FA’s attempt to create an image of American benevolence when it writes: “Kim [Jong-un] is treading carefully on the military front so as not to foreclose the opportunity for dialogue with the United States, which could serve as a guarantor of his country’s future economic security.”

    North Korea does not need an economic guarantor, it needs the US to stop sabotaging North Korea’s economic efforts.

    FA preposterously dreams:

    For U.S. President Joe Biden and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Pyongyang’s shift represents an opportunity. They should aim to resolve North Korea’s underlying security concerns—particularly its economic security—in return for progress on denuclearization, the reduction of Pyongyang’s dependence on China, and North Korea’s eventual integration into the U.S.-led liberal international order with the close support of South Korea.

    FA posits North Korea handing over its defense and integrating into the “U.S.-led liberal international order” with the close support of South Korea while at the same time poking a stick in the eye of China. North Koreans are extremely aware of their history and how the US separated the Korean people, conducted a scorched earth campaign in the northern part of the peninsula, and they are well aware that China came to fight alongside them to defeat the US. It is risible that anyone would posit that North Korea would relinquish its independence, its juche, and ally, to be led by its aggressor.

    FA argues, “Achieving superior joint military and diplomatic power is what will enable the allies to deter Kim’s threats, allowing for a new approach to North Korea that can pave the way to a lasting peace.”

    How will the US achieve this? To threaten North Korea with “superior joint military and diplomatic power”? Peace from the barrel of a gun and deadly sanctions? North Korea succeeded in achieving nuclear capability to punish any military attack against it. In the meantime, North Korean chairman Kim Jong-un can achieve economic development by joining the Chinese-initiated BRI and further opening up to Russia.

    FA pushes increased militarization of South Korea, by having South Korea ease access to US military forces in the country. FA complains that South Korean domestic political pressure is a barrier to freer military training in the country.

    FA portrays the US-South Korean summit in May where the US committed to providing South Korea with COVID-19 vaccines as sending “a powerful signal to South Koreans that the United States is placing a high priority on the relationship.”

    The Diplomat asked, “Why isn’t South Korea Buying Chinese Vaccines?” It noted, “Like many Asian countries, Seoul is having troubling sourcing vaccines. But unlike its neighbors, South Korea has so far refused to turn to a ready supplier: China.” The article states, “Part of the problem is that the South Korean government is still eagerly and persistently seeking vaccine supplies from the United States.” China’s Global Times reported, “After the World Health Organization (WHO) officially approved two Chinese-made COVID-19 vaccines, South Korea became the first country to fully exempt travelers vaccinated with shots of Sinopharm and Sinovac from its original mandatory two-week quarantine” on 1 July. It seems a prudent move to maintain good relations with South Korea’s largest trading partner, China.

    FA has further scorn for China. It accused China of “bullying” South Korea over its apoplexy regarding the deployment of the US Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system in 2016 — a system which can be used against China.

    The US places military armaments a continent away from US shores — a hop, skip, and jump from China — and FA accuses China of bullying? How would the US feel if such a missile-interceptor system were placed in Cuba by China?

    FA promoted an end-of-war declaration that “would not be linked in any way to a peace treaty.” Other steps are demanded before consideration of a peace treaty between the parties. One is a non-starter: the verified destruction of nuclear weapons by North Korea. Of course, only by North Korea, the US will keep its nuclear weapons. As a test of the US’s word, imagine the American reaction if North Korea agreed to denuclearize, as long as the US also destroys its nuclear weapons, as is required by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty’s article 6, which the US signed on to.

    *****

    In a September article, “The Last Chance to Stop North Korea?: U.S. Aid Could Help Revive Nuclear Diplomacy,” FA seems to have had its druthers about the late July article that envisioned coercing North Korea through “superior joint military and diplomatic power” and now supports humanitarian aid as the way to denuclearization.

    Kim Il Sung Square in the center of Pyongyang

    The subtitle should give pause to most informed readers. First, consider what is meant by “nuclear diplomacy” in this context. It means that a country (especially the northern half of a country) that was devastated by an American scorched earth campaign, one that used bioweapons and chemical weapons — and even threatened attack with nuclear weapons, should disarm itself of a deterrent while the aggressor maintains its nuclear arsenal. Furthermore, just what is US aid? The Democratic Republic of Korea does not need US aid; it needs an end to US-led international sanctions against the country.

    Despite noting US participation with South Korea for military exercises, FA writes that “the Biden administration should not take comfort in the relative lack of [North Korean] provocations” recently.

    This wording seems particularly one-sided. Are the South Korean and US military maneuvers (including training previously of a decapitation unit) not provocative? Is the stationing of US troops in South Korea not provocative? Consider what the reaction would be if North Korea held military exercises off the American coast?

    FA attempts to evoke fear of the North Korean menace:

    “… these [North Korean] tests aren’t the only troubling signs. … the reprocessing of plutonium and enriched uranium for an arsenal of bombs now estimated to number between 20 and 40. … The direction is clear: North Korea wants to have a modern force that can engage in nuclear warfighting, that can threaten the United States with missiles that can carry multiple warheads and are impervious to ballistic missile defenses, and that can survive and retaliate credibly against a U.S. preemptive attack.” [italics added]

    This appears to be just a risible posturing. How is it that North Korea would threaten the United States? Through the mere development of its military capability? Such logic would apply to every country that seeks to upgrade its military. Are all these countries then threatening the US? Moreover, would it be responsible for a government to allow its defensive capability to lag behind that of a belligerent parked next door? A belligerent that eschews a peace treaty. A belligerent that refuses to adhere to a no-first use of nuclear weapons as North Korea does?

    The FA article then complains that the improved military capability “would make it more difficult for the United States to preemptively strike a missile before its launch. These are all capabilities that make North Korea’s nuclear deterrent more survivable and impervious to a U.S. first strike.” A contradiction arises; now the writer has positioned the US as a preemptive threat. So, in essence, the writer defies all logic by preposterously postulating that a country enhancing its survivability and deterrence against a preemptive external attack makes it the threat.

    But FA has a solution on “how to stop North Korea before it crosses this threshold”: “getting diplomacy back on track through humanitarian assistance that includes American COVID-19 vaccines and food aid, both of which the country needs.”

    Providing US aid would serve American hegemonic aims in that it “would reduce Chinese influence in Pyongyang.” Seems to be rather self-serving aid. Sanction a nation, intercept North Korean shipping at sea, then take advantage of any economic deterioration to pose as a generous benefactor by proffering aid.

    To its credit, the September FA article does not suggest a militaristic or sanctions-based approach; instead it suggests a humanitarian approach, but a purportedly humanitarian approach that secures American geo-strategic aims.

    *****

    Does one dare trust the word of the United States? Look no further than what happened to Muammar Gaddafi and Libya when it abandoned its nuclear weapon program, what happened when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq allowed inspections for weapons or mass destruction, or when Syria’s Bashar al-Assad surrendered Syria’s chemical weapons.

    Pyongyang

    As A.B. Abrams expressed with crystal clarity in his excellent book, Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years at War with American Power, that North Koreans are well aware of how American imperialism works, of its military depravity, and its proclivity for disinformation. North Korans have demonstrated resistance, resilience, and self-reliance. It has served them well since the armistice was signed on 27 July 1953. North Korea is an economically sanctioned country, yes, but it is not an economically stunted country. North Korea has achieved so much. It provides tuition-free education right through university, universal health care, preschools, and housing and jobs for all its citizens. It is a country that despite the destruction it suffered from US-led UN warring has achieved military deterrence and social development that Americans can only dream of. It is an independent country neither rich, neither poor.

    All photos by Kim Petersen, copyleft.

    The post The Entire Korean Peninsula as an American Satrapy? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Voices From The African Left: China Vs The US & The New Cold War

    Western governments along with their loyal media and think tanks warn that China is colonizing, exploiting, and forcing Africa into a debt trap. Is this true? Or is it Cold War propaganda? What is China’s actual role in Africa and how does it compare with the West’s? To help us understand what’s really happening, Rania Khalek was joined by two leading African leftists: Mikaela Nhondo Erskog and Kambale Musavuli

    The post Voices From The African Left: China Vs The US & The New Cold War appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Chinese Armour on the Move

    While many countries have ceased the design, development and production of main battle tanks (MBT), China is reaching out to the export market. Today China North Industries Corporation (Norinco) is marketing a number of MBT designs with some of these already in service with the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) with others aimed at the potentially […]

    The post Chinese Armour on the Move appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • China’s ‘Hostage Diplomacy’ Wins

    Big crowds greeted Huawei senior executive Meng Wanzhou’s arrival back in China, which believes its show of strength against America forced Washington to back down in this three-year standoff. The biggest story of the weekend saw Meng released from house detention in Canada and returned to China, while Beijing subsequently released two Canadian prisoners it had accused of spying. The development brought an end to a horrific three-year saga for all involved.

    The post China’s ‘Hostage Diplomacy’ Wins appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Our Man in Washington: Morrison’s Tour of Deception

    It was startling and even shocking.  Away from the thrust and cut of domestic politics, not to mention noisy discord within his government’s ranks, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison could breathe a sign of relief.  Perhaps no one would notice in Washington that Australia remains prehistoric in approaching climate change relative to its counterparts.  Being known in his own country as “Scotty from Marketing”, he just might pull it off.

    Besides, a security compact with the United States and the United Kingdom had just been cemented, one promising Canberra eight submarines with nuclear propulsion.  That these promised to be eye-wateringly expensive and available sometime in the 2040s, were they to ever make it to water, was a point not even worth considering.

    In the US press, Morrison was careful to toe the line of the partner made supplicant.  On CBS’s Face the Nation, he was asked whether the US and its allies were moving towards conflict with Beijing.  “I don’t think it’s inevitable at all,” he chirped, claiming that it was “in everybody’s interest” that we all co-exist. But this “happy co-existence” was premised on keeping China in the box or, as he preferred to put it, a committed role of “free nations like Australia” and others in the Indo-Pacific region to stay vigilant.

    On climate change, he was also pressed on having not “given a timeline” on placing Australia on the path to net zero emissions. He admitted this to be the case and vacillated.  Slipping back into advertising mode, Morrison said that “performance matters” for Australia.  The net zero target was being pursued, and would be achieved “preferably by 2050.”  The usual half-baked assurances followed: Australia’s record was “strong”.  “We’ve already reduced emissions in Australia by over 20 percent since 2005.  We committed to Kyoto. We met that target and beat that target.”  As for the Paris target?  Not an issue: Australia would romp it.

    At that point, CBS’s Margaret Brennan could only observe that no country had actually delivered on such targets.  Hardly a problem, came Morrison’s reply to the bubble’s bursting.  “See, it’s one thing to have a commitment, but in Australia, you’re not taken seriously unless you’ve got a plan to achieve the commitment.”  This was delightful coming from a Prime Minister who has no plans to speak off when it comes to dealing with climate change.  In fact, Morrison’s tenure has been marked by an absence of plans on any major policy decision.  When any have been proposed – the vaccine rollout being the conspicuous example – they have been spectacular failures.

    In a press conference given on September 24, Morrison pursued his favourite theme in colouring Australia’s lamentable contribution to the global climate debate: technology.  Australia is never the laggard in Morrison’s environmental cosmos.  Developing countries, he insisted, should be the priority, which was another way of saying that they were the problem.  “If we want to address climate change, then we need to address the change that is necessary in developing economies, so they can grow their economies, build their industries, make the things the world needs.”  For any difference to be worthwhile, “we’ve got to make a difference everywhere”.

    Such a slanted view found its mark.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was taken by a flight of fancy in thinking that Morrison was doing something special. In welcoming the Australia prime minister to the Capitol, Pelosi considered the AUKUS security pact “pretty exciting” and thanked Morrison for showing “leadership” on the issue of climate change.

    The next day, Pelosi latched on to Morrison’s remarks about the Paris targets in her weekly press conference with candy-grabbing enthusiasm.  Both the UK’s Boris Johnson and Morrison were “so exuberant about the urgency of addressing the climate issues.”  But it was the Australian who impressed with his slogan “We Meet It and We Beat It.”  That was enough for the Speaker: “they’re leading the way, and that’s what we all have to do” namely “meet our emissions responsibility and our financial responsibility to other countries so that when we leave COP26, having fulfilled our obligations to the Paris Accords, and then go further.”

    Such glaringly superficial assessments can be put down to the fanfare that accompanies visiting dignitaries from freedom land’s outposts.  Morrison was particularly fortunate on that score, winning over his hosts with a shameless slogan that sounded hopelessly electoral and starkly mendacious.

    Which takes us to the next point: Pelosi and company have proved to be something of a sounding board for the next Australian federal election.  Morrison’s action on climate change will be minimal, but that will be irrelevant in a number of electoral battlegrounds.  Having a slogan, writes Sean Kelly, a former advisor to two previous Australian Labor Prime Ministers, will be acceptable to “a remarkable number of people, as an acceptable substitute for reality – just as it was in America last week.”  The Australian Labor Party, still languishing in hopeless opposition, have every reason to be worried.

    The post Our Man in Washington: Morrison’s Tour of Deception first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • China’s Emissions Are Made in America

    An aerial photo taken on September 11, 2021, shows large container ships loading and unloading cargo at Yangshan Deep-water Port in Shanghai, China.

    The debate over the reality of climate change is over. After years of oil-fueled denialism, the inescapable fact of the human-altered climate has finally hit home for many once-skeptical Americans. In some cases, it has literally hit home. In various parts of the country, homes are being threatened, torched and inundated by a barrage of climate-stoked catastrophes. Real-world experience has replaced easy-to-dismiss graphs and scientific models with failing crops, drowning livestock, escalating insurance costs, collapsing infrastructure, rising seas and waning biodiversity. The doomsday scenarios scientists have predicted for five decades are now all too real for 1 in 3 Americans.

    An Ipsos poll in June of this year found that, “Seven out of 10 Americans are aware of the scientific consensus that climate change is largely caused by people,” and a Morning Consult poll in April found that only 19 percent of voters said climate change is “not an important threat at all.” Additionally, a fulsome 60 percent of the voters surveyed by Morning Consult wanted the U.S. in the Paris climate accord, while just 22 percent wanted to keep the U.S. out. For all but a shrinking minority, fanciful claims that climate change is a hoax or a “globalist” plot have been largely foreclosed by realities on the ground. Even notable naysayer and snowball artist Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) now claims he never called climate change a “hoax,” despite authoring a book titled, “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.”

    Sadly, it took successive years of deadly floods, grinding droughts and apocalyptic wildfires to convince so many people, but here we are. The popular question has moved on from “Is it settled science?” to “What can and should be done about it?” And while some might take solace in knowing that many of the oil industry’s congressional stalwarts have finally acquiesced, it is cold comfort to others who see valuable time ticking away while leaders who’ve long accepted the reality of climate change haggle with recent converts over the appropriate steps to avoid catastrophe.

    For members of the recently created Conservative Climate Caucus in the House of Representatives, it’s an existential struggle between elements of socialism and status-quo capitalism, between the Green New Deal and market-based strategies, between regulations and unchecked economic growth, between immediate reductions in hydrocarbon use and long-term hopes for scientific breakthroughs, and between government intervention and the laissez-faire logic of adaptation.

    It’s a debate echoed in the Senate by “former” climate skeptic Sen. John Barrasso, a Republican from the uranium-rich petrostate of Wyoming. He’s switched from outright denial to tactical retreat and obfuscation. While now admitting the climate crisis is a thing, he’s also said “reducing the use of fossil fuels will not solve climate change,” an idea that common sense and expert opinion resoundingly rejects. In a USA Today op-ed, Barrasso touted his role in a “historic, bipartisan environmental innovation law,” referring to an agreement tucked into an energy bill that reduced hydrofluorocarbons emissions. But he also claimed President Biden’s executive orders to rejoin the Paris accord, nix the Keystone XL pipeline and freeze new oil, gas and coal leases on federal lands took “a sledgehammer to the economies of Western states without putting a dent in climate change.”

    Then he revealed the core of the emerging “debate and delay” strategy with this key juxtaposition:

    Damaging America’s economy won’t stop climate change. Between 2015 and 2019, carbon dioxide emissions jumped in Russia, China and India.

    At the same time, U.S. emissions continued to drop, as they have since 2007.

    And there it is. For Republicans ranging from supposed converts like Barrasso to meme-wielding conspiracy peddlers like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), China is the excuse to do little or nothing.

    To wit, the mission statement for the aforementioned Conservative Climate Caucus bluntly asserts that “China is the greatest immediate obstacle to reducing world emissions.” And when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) dire “Sixth Assessment” hit the news cycle in August, Conservative Climate Caucus ranking member Garret Graves (R-Louisiana) admitted it “highlights the urgency of climate change,” but said, “we must ensure we approach this issue the right way.” The “right way” for Graves means “avoid[ing] policies that rely on higher taxes, increased regulations, and ensure us being under the thumb of China.”

    More specifically, conservatives often emphasize, the U.S. must avoid being “under the thumb” of “Communist” China. They stress the “Communist” part (a label still ironically pasted on the face of a country so steeped in neoliberal capitalism), perhaps because it’s only a short rhetorical leap from Beijing’s “Reds” to the “socialist” Green New Deal here at home? More directly, they deem it “unfair” to demand unilateral action by freedom-loving Americans while Communist China gets away with runaway carbon emissions.

    Of course, it’s true that China accounts for more than half the world’s coal power — and is the world’s largest carbon-dioxide emitter. It’s also true that U.S. CO2 emissions have declined over the years, while China’s are now nearly twice the U.S.’s. And it’s also true that, as David Holt, president of the fossil-fueled Consumer Energy Alliance recently wrote, China is home to 23 of the “top 25” cities “responsible for 52 percent of the planet’s urban greenhouse gas emissions.” But that fact doesn’t magically vacate the U.S.’s responsibility for its own emissions.

    Nor does it obviate the fact that, as Mongabay pointed out, “historically, the U.S. is responsible for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas output.” That’s despite being home to less than 5 percent of the world’s population. In fact, the study Holt cited on emissions in China also noted that China’s per capita output is still below “wealthier countries” like the U.S. and those in Europe. But for conservative climate converts looking for a way to block real regulatory efforts, the question of “Why should we ‘pay the price’ economically while China gets away scot-free?” is the ultimate Trump card (pun intended).

    The “Unfairness Doctrine”

    When former President Donald J. Trump announced his withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, he claimed it was “simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries.” He complained that it “punishes the United States” while “China will be able to increase these emissions by a staggering number of years — 13. They can do whatever they want for 13 years. Not us.”

    For Trump, who often wove a narrative of betrayal rooted in the relocation of the U.S.’s consumer-driven industrial base to China, the Paris accord was “less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States.” He bemoaned that “the Paris Accord is very unfair, at the highest level, to the United States.”

    In post-denialism U.S., this is the main political argument against unilateral climate action. It’s the “Unfairness Doctrine.” It’s the idea that it is patently “unfair” for the U.S. to absorb the economic harms that will come from unilateral disarmament on climate while environmentally lax “Communist China” hums along in a profitable, carbon-spewing victory. But this is based on a fundamental fallacy: that the U.S. bears no responsibility for the millions of tons of landfill fodder produced in Chinese factories and shipped to its seemingly insatiable consumer market.

    The stark truth is that China’s pollution is largely made in America.

    Simply put, corporate America has fueled much of China’s carbon-belching industrial behemoth. U.S. corporations and investors exploited China’s relatively few environmental regulations, along with its vast supply of cheap labor, in an effort to minimize the cost of doing their business. U.S. corporations were able to relocate their manufacturing to China thanks in no small part to All-American economic policies emphasizing maximum profit and avoidance of regulations. Those policies, in turn, globalized the supply chains that made those profitable regulatory dodges possible.

    A Decades-Long Process of “Offshoring”

    Six million dollars.

    According to U.S. Census data, that was the trade deficit with China in 1985. It’s also the launching pad for a meteoric rise. It started during the yearly renewals of its “Most Favored Nation” (MFN) trade status during the Clinton years. But it skyrocketed after President George W. Bush granted China “Permanent Normal Trading Relations” (PNTR) — meaning a “free-trade” designation that drops trade barriers and lowers tariffs to “most favored nation” status — in 2001. That, along with President Clinton ushering China into the World Trade Organization during the previous year, accelerated the now-infamous process of “outsourcing” or “offshoring” as U.S. businesses rode the wave of globalization in search of cheap labor in poorly regulated countries with lax or nonexistent environmental standards.

    Another term for this process is “externalization.” That’s when a business removes, or “externalizes,” a negative cost of doing business, taking it off the balance sheet and, therefore, increasing profitability. When it comes to externalizing the environmental costs of pumping out billions of dollars of consumer goods, it can also be thought of as “exporting” the ecological overhead to another market or country (in this case, China) where the price of polluting is pennies on the dollar. And that’s exactly what the U.S. business sector has done since that paltry $6 million deficit was logged in 1985.

    By the time Clinton was elected in 1992, the trade deficit with China was $18.3 billion. It hit $83 billion when he left office in 2001. It basically doubled during George W. Bush’s first term, reaching $162 billion in 2004. It nearly doubled again by 2013, hitting $318.8 billion, before hitting a high $419 billion in 2018. But those dollar amounts only tell half the story. To visualize the way the trade deficit has “externalized” billions of tons of carbon production over the years, compare the following two charts:

    A Long-Term View on U.S. Trade With China
    Credit: Statista
    Fossil CO2 Emissions of the Major Emitting Economies
    Credit: © European Union, 1995-2021

    As these charts illustrate, there’s a direct correlation between the rise of China as Corporate America’s offshore factory and China’s rise as the world’s leading fossil fuel-burning, carbon-emitting nation. You can see the “lift-off” point after it was granted PNTR in 2001.

    Currently, U.S. corporations and consumers directly drive at least one-fifth of China’s industrial carbon output. But that doesn’t fully account for the indirect, carbon-polluting oil-driven supply chain that takes oil and gas out of the ground in the Middle East and ships it to China, where it is burned for fuel and manufactured into hydrocarbon-based plastic products. Those products get shipped overseas to ports on the West and East Coasts of the United States before being trucked to retail outlets and home shoppers around the country, with CO2 produced every step of the way. Even worse, China’s mass production of hydrocarbon-based plastic for the U.S. market helps sustain the global oil industry’s heavily subsidized business model.

    China’s carbon production is also indirectly subsidized by the U.S. military, which is the de facto guarantor of the international oil economy and, specifically, of oil and gas shipments from U.S. partners in the Persian Gulf to China. The U.S. Navy’s Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet, among other military assets, ensures the free flow of hydrocarbons into China’s fossil-fueled factories. In 2020, according to World’s Top Exports, nearly “half (47.1 percent) of Chinese imported crude oil originated from nine Middle Eastern nations,” with U.S.-protected Saudi Arabia atop the list of China’s main oil providers. The U.S. is ninth on the list. In 2020, the U.S. and its staunch allies in the United Arab Emirates and oil-rich Norway were the only countries increasing oil exports to China’s carbon-generating industrial sector, while the rest saw declines.

    At $6.3 billion, the amount of oil the U.S. provides is overshadowed by the amount of hydrocarbon-fueled goods that flow back across the Pacific and into the U.S. economy. But that huge deficit is priceless when it comes to creating plausible deniability for U.S. politicians who can crow about the “unfairness” of regulating U.S. carbon emissions while China’s emissions grow unchecked. Frankly, it’s implausible to deny the role played by the U.S. economy’s appetite for a vast array of cheap products, plastic widgets, electronic components, tools, chemicals and other goods that externalize the production of carbon emissions and, in the process, give politicians and the oil companies they represent a bogus argument for doing little or nothing to address the climate crisis.

    They even want to have it both ways.

    So, conservatives say it’s unfair to expect the U.S. to reduce its carbon output without an enforcement mechanism punishing China for its pollution, and it’s unfair for the EU to use an enforcement mechanism to punish nations like the U.S. that refuse to meet its higher standards.

    What’s truly unfair is the cost being paid by low-emitting climate causalities like Madagascar and the Maldives and Honduras. Meanwhile, fairness-obsessed, but heavily oil-funded politicians of both parties haggle over incremental efforts versus market-based solutions while the manufacturing monster U.S. policy helped build takes steps aimed, as OilPrice.com reported, at “maintaining its domination” of the renewable sector “into the near future.”

    But China’s epic lead in manufacturing renewables is fraught for the same reason it was problematic to externalize manufacturing of consumer goods and industrial components. Solar panels are being built with forced labor and battery production tainted by child labor.

    That China’s model is imprinting the future with exploitatively produced solar panels and batteries is, in part, a function of the United States’s abdication of its outsized responsibility for the climate crisis. Ironically, the political debate about “fairness” mimics the process of externalization that offshored megatons of carbon pollution to China. In essence, U.S. political leaders and the corporate interests they serve seek to externalize their responsibility for creating China’s carbon-belching behemoth. As they do, they are merely replacing climate denial with costly climate delay by making China the boogeyman, which justifies doing nothing at all.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • News on China | No. 69

    China deals with housing crisis caused by the real-estate developers, particularly, Evergrande. China punishes mining companies for criminal practices in the Democratic Republic of Congo and orders them back home. China also remembers the Mukden Incident, a Japanese pretext to invade and occupy Chinese territory.

    The post News on China | No. 69 first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • As Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou Enters Chinese Airspace, Foreign Ministry Slams ‘Arbitrary Detention’

    Huawei Technologies executive Meng Wanzhou is flying back to China, after reaching a deal on Friday with prosecutors in New York that effectively resolves a US fraud case that had kept her in legal limbo in Vancouver for nearly three years. Shortly after Meng’s flight entered Chinese airspace, state broadcaster CCTV quoted foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying as saying that China’s position on the Meng Wanzhou incident has been “consistent and clear”.

    The post As Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou Enters Chinese Airspace, Foreign Ministry Slams ‘Arbitrary Detention’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • China in Action: Carbon Neutral by 2050

    Transcript of a presentation at a Webinar sponsored by the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing, 23 September 2021.

    *****

    An early priority for China – at least two to three decades back – was to reduce Carbon Dioxide (CO2) output, as well as that of other greenhouse gases, such as methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and some artificial chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), to eventually reach carbon neutrality, meaning, eliminating as much CO2 as is produced, by 2050.

    With industrialization and excessive consumption, the output of CO2 and other greenhouse gases has increased rapidly and especially in later years. And this despite repeated pledges during numerous UN-sponsored Environmental Conferences, to reduce the world’s carbon footprint.

    Global Carbon dioxide levels reached 419 parts per million (ppm) in May 2021, the highest since CO2 output has been measured 63 years ago. Compare this to China’s CO2 output of 409 ppm by 2018.

    China is often blamed as being the world’s largest polluter which may be the case in absolute terms, as China also has the world’s largest population. However, putting China’s CO2 output in perspective, on a per capita basis, China ranks only 5th, after Australia, the US, Russia and Germany:
    – Australia: 17.27 tons per capita
    – USA:  15.52 tons p/c
    – Russia: 11.33 tons p/c
    – Germany: 8.52 tons p/c
    – China: 7.38 tons p/c (less than half the US level)
    – India:  1.91 tons p/c
    These are 2019 figures.

    China’s 14th Five Year Plan (14th FYP), published in March 2021, included 2025 energy and carbon intensity reduction targets, as well as a mid-point non-fossil share target to achieve her nationally determined contributions, or NDC.

    At China’s Leaders Climate Summit in April 2021, President Xi Jinping announced that China will strictly control coal generation until 2025 when she will start to gradually phase out of coal.

    President Xi just announced at the UN General Assembly in NYC of 2021, that China ceases using coal powered plants as of now.
    To understand the concept and the lingo of the different terms and terminologies, let’s back-track a bit.

    It all began decades ago with the First United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the ‘Earth Summit’, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 3-14 June 1992. It set the stage for the reduction of greenhouse gases, the most important of which is Carbon Dioxide.

    CO2 emissions are toxic and harmful for the environment and life, when produced in excess.

    However, let’s also keep in mind CO2 is one of the most important gases on earth, because the plants use it to produce carbohydrates in a process called photosynthesis. Since humans and animals depend on plants for food, thus, CO2 is necessary for the survival of life on earth.

    In the meantime, there have been numerous climate change conferences around the world, most of them UN-sponsored, the latest one – if I’m not wrong, was the Santiago Climate Change Conference, the 25th so-called Conference of the Parties (COP25) of December 2019, meaning the 25th conference to the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC).

    The names of these conferences and their results are often confusing, at times also controversial, especially between the industrialized countries and the so-called developing countries, or the Global South.

    A chief reason for potential conflicts is rapid industrialization – excessive consumption, particularly in the West, or the Global North. The output of CO2 and other greenhouse gases has increased rapidly and unequally between the Global North and the Global South. Yet, developing countries are often asked to take similar measures to reduce greenhouse gases, in particular, CO2.

    A safe level of CO2 in the air, according to one of the first 21st Century UN Conferences – it may have been the 2009 Copenhagen Conference — was suggested to be 350 ppm. This figure was already exceeded in 1987, reaching, as mentioned before, 419 ppm in May 2021.

    Despite Covid, the concentration has not been significantly changed for the better, in some cases, to the contrary.

    Despite pledges to the contrary, the main source of energy has changed little in the last 20 years. Hydrocarbons are still king. Today’s world economy still depends on some 84% of hydrocarbons (petrol, gas, coal) of all energy used, as compared to 86% at the turn of the century.

    What does Carbon Neutral mean?

    Carbon neutral – the amount of CO₂ emissions put into the atmosphere is the same as the amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere. The impact is neutral. This is not making it actively worse, but it doesn’t make it better either, especially when the average output is above 400 ppm, meaning above the considered “safe” target of 350 ppm.

    Carbon negative, or carbon net zero might be a step in the right direction. It means the amount of CO₂ removed from the atmosphere is bigger than the CO₂ output. The impact is positive; something is actively done to reduce the harm to the atmosphere – and to improve the air for every breathing life.

    We have the historical responsibility to urgently clean up the atmosphere to eventually get back to the civilized level of 275 ppm.

    Since the beginning of human civilization, our atmosphere contained about 275 ppm of carbon dioxide. According to renowned climatologist Dr. James Hansen, these are the conditions under which civilization developed and to which life on earth adapted.  Going beyond this indicator risks disrupting our global climate system’s 1,000,000+ years of relative stability. Beginning in the 18th century, with the age of industrialization, humans began to burn coal, gas, and oil to produce energy and goods. The carbon in the atmosphere began to rise, at first slowly and, then ever more rapidly.

    Many of the activities we do every day rely on energy sources that emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. We’re redistributing millions and millions of years’ worth of carbon, once stored beneath the earth as fossil fuels, and releasing it into the atmosphere.

    Just a thought.

    Apologies for this long background. The environmental agenda is very complex.

    As to China,  China’s Ministry of Environment and Ecology publishes regularly CO2 concentration levels. China’s greenhouse gas emission in 2018 reached 409.4 ppm with an estimated annual growth of 1.3%.

    While in full action towards carbon neutrality, China was hosting the 5th Ministerial meeting on Climate Action in April 2021. A virtual event attended by the European Union and Canada, plus ministers and representatives from 35 governments and international organizations from all the world’s regions.

    The meeting aimed at drastically reducing the carbon level in the air through significant shifts from fossil fuel energy to alternative sources for the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), hosted by the UK, from 31 October to 12 November 2021 in Glasgow.

    The Glasgow Conference will focus at implementation of the Paris Agreement in a comprehensive, balanced and effective manner, building a fair global climate governance system, equitable and centered on win-win cooperation with focus on renewable energy, the phase-out of fossil fuels, zero-emissions vehicles, resilience-building, carbon-pricing, green finance, nature-based climate solutions such as afforestation and reforestation, biodiversity conservation, and waste management.

    China is already pushing ahead with this agenda.

    The Ministers asked for an equitable transition throughout the implementation process. This may include financial, technological and capacity building support to developing countries, especially the poorest and most vulnerable ones. Implementation of the Paris Agreement should also reflect the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities in light of different national circumstances.

    China’s ambitious agenda to reach carbon neutrality, or better, by 2050, includes …

    • Investing in projects of liquid hydrogen which can be used, for instance, in hydrogen fuel cell automobiles, and hydrogen metallurgy, a technology that applies hydrogen instead of carbon.
    • Third generation photovoltaic energy with efficiency above 40%, is another sector where China’s world-class development and vast demands may attract global investors.
    • In addition, China has ambitious research projects into generating energy from photosynthesis, the process plants use to transform carbon dioxide and sunlight into energy. It’s an ecosystem’s way of producing fuel at a high level of efficiency (>90%) without polluting residues.
    • Green parks in urban areas and reforestation as well as improved water management, so as to reduce areas of frequent droughts and convert them into green agricultural crop lands.
    • At the same time, China is seeking new alternative energy investments abroad, such as an automotive lithium-ion battery production in Germany – a planned investment of 1.8 billion euros.

    And much more….

    China is not only on the right track to seek environment-friendly renewable sources of energy, thus, reducing her carbon footprint, but to exceed the 2050 net zero emissions target into a carbon negative project.

    China, as in other matters of importance to the world’s societies, just to mention one – poverty alleviation – may be again an example on environmental progress towards a human society with shared benefits for all.

    The post China in Action: Carbon Neutral by 2050 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Gaslighting The Public: Serial Deceptions By The State-Corporate Media

    During last week’s Tory Cabinet reshuffle, ITV political editor Robert Peston inadvertently summed up the primary function of political journalists:

    ‘I simply pass on’

    His tweet was in reference to a ministerial source saying that Priti Patel was ‘not looking happy’. She remained in her job as Home Secretary.

    Peston’s phrase was a tragicomic echo of a remark by Nick Robinson, ITV political editor during the Iraq war, who infamously declared that:

    ‘It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking… That is all someone in my sort of job can do.’

    (‘“Remember the last time you shouted like that?” I asked the spin doctor’, The Times, 16 July, 2004)

    In 2012, Robinson, by now the BBC’s political editor, mourned:

    ‘The build-up to the invasion of Iraq is the point in my career when I have most regretted not pushing harder and not asking more questions’.1

    However, Robinson’s career certainly did not appear to have been harmed having abdicated this basic responsibility of journalism; namely, holding those in power to account. After a ten-year stint as the BBC political editor, he became a presenter on the high-profile BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

    Peston’s counterpart at the BBC, political editor Laura Kuenssberg, also performs the required function of ‘I simply pass on’, broadcasting and amplifying the words of those in power with minimal ‘analysis’, far less critical appraisal. Relaying Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s words on the current crisis in gas supply in the UK, as he flew to New York to attend climate talks, she tweeted:

    ‘Speaking on the plane Johnson said..

    1. gas supply probs shd be “temporary”, the squeeze is a result of world waking up from pandemic shutdowns like everyone “going to put the kettle on at the end of the TV programme” and he said he was confident in UK supply chains’

    Gary Neville, the football pundit and former Manchester United defender, replied to Kuenssberg’s tweet:

    ‘Hi Laura do you believe this guys crap ?’

    A tad blunt perhaps. But, judging by the number of ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’, it was a welcome challenge from someone with a public profile to the endless channelling by highly-paid political journalists of Johnson’s twaddle – and worse (as we will see below).

    Daniel Finkelstein, the Tory peer and Times columnist, defended Kuenssberg and responded that reporting the Prime Minister’s words ‘is a part of her job’ so that the public can judge them for themselves. Three obvious glaring holes in his argument are that the BBC political editor:

    (a) rarely challenges Johnson (or other government ministers) to any significant extent;

    (b) provides very few perspectives or opinions from outside the narrow range of ‘mainstream’ Parliamentary debate (Labour hardly counts as an effective ‘Opposition’ under the Blair-lite Sir Keir Starmer;

    (c) ignores Johnson’s many lies, falsehoods and misrepresentations which have been well-documented by several independent political observers, including Peter Oborne and Peter Stefanovic. Kuenssberg and her corporate media peers have given the Prime Minister a free pass on his serial deceptions.

    There are countless examples of establishment bias by Kuenssberg (and her predecessors as BBC political editor). Recall, for example, that for years she channelled a one-sided account of Labour’s supposed antisemitism crisis, including an infamous BBC Panorama programme that was demolished as a ‘catalogue of reporting failures’ by the Media Reform Coalition. Recall, too, her evident disapproval when Jeremy Corbyn, then leader of the Labour Party, refused to give her a commitment in a BBC News television interview that he was willing to press the nuclear button to launch weapons that would cause untold death and suffering.

    On 20 September, 2021, The National newspaper in Scotland reported that the flagship BBC News at Six ‘did not run a single negative news story about the UK Government’ during the previous week, 13-17 September. This was probably not an unusual week in that regard. Genuinely hard-hitting critical reporting of the Tory government is notable by its absence on BBC News and other establishment news media.

    The truth is, that on one issue after another, leading journalists like Kuenssberg, Peston, and all the high-profile correspondents ‘reporting’ on politicians, the military and intelligence services spend too much time performing as mere stenographers to power. Rational and critical opposing voices are routinely ignored, marginalised or ridiculed.

    Media Lens has documented and explained over the past two decades how ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ are alien concepts to state-corporate journalism. As the US commentator Michael Parenti once noted:

    ‘Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for “objectivity”. Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological.’

    Similarly, Matt Kennard, head of investigations at Declassified UK, a vital resource for independent journalism, put it well:

    ‘If you’re sympathetic to the weak, it’s activist journalism. If you’re sympathetic to the powerful, it’s objective journalism.’

    The public are, in effect, constantly being subjected to gaslighting by corporate journalists purporting to inform the public what is happening around us. We are being told, explicitly and implicitly, that nothing is fundamentally wrong with the system of economics and power politics that prevail in the world. We are being misled that any serious problems that arise – even climate instability – can be ‘fixed’ by ‘incentivising’ changes to consumer behaviour, rejigging the economy by redirecting public subsidies from fossil fuels to renewables, but all still within a corporate-driven ‘market’ framework to maximise private profit, and by implementing technical ‘solutions’, such as capturing and storing carbon emissions (which have failed to live up to the grandiose PR promises made, while fossil fuel companies have received large injections of public cash from governments).

    In fact, ‘mainstream’ news is characterised by serial deceptions and omissions that hide essential truths about the world. We are being drip-fed propaganda that preserves the current inequitable system of power, privilege and class – even as we hurtle towards the abyss of climate chaos.

    Any one of the topics addressed here could merit a media alert in its own right. Indeed, in each case, we have done so several times before. The objective here is to provide something of an overview of the propaganda system that is leading us towards ever greater levels of inequality and misery, even human extinction; a timely reminder of what is at stake.

    Endless War

    Consider the recent pull-out of US troops from Afghanistan after twenty years of occupation. In an excellent article for the Morning Star, Ian Sinclair observed that BBC News and other outlets continued to promote ‘misleading narratives about the Afghan invasion and its motives’. As just one example, Sinclair highlighted Johnson’s ‘astonishingly deceitful claim’ that:

    ‘It was no accident that there has been no terrorist attack launched against Britain or any other Western country from Afghanistan in the last 20 years.’

    Sinclair countered:

    ‘First, terrorist attacks have taken place in Britain and the US that have been inspired by the US-British invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.’

    He continued:

    ‘Second, it is widely understood by intelligence agencies and experts that the West’s military intervention in Afghanistan led to a heightened terrorist threat to the West.’

    Sinclair added:

    ‘The final problem with the government’s claim that the war stopped terrorism on the West from Afghanistan is that it’s based on a simplistic understanding of the September 11 2001 terror attacks — that it was necessary for terrorists to “have a safe haven to plan and launch attacks on America and other civilised nations,” as president George W Bush explained in 2006.’

    However, the 9-11 attacks were planned initially in Germany, training was implemented in the US and most of the hijackers were Saudi. A recent article in CovertAction Magazine noted that:

    ‘The invasion of Afghanistan was launched following the NATO invocation of Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, but eventually it emerged that the report presented to NATO by U.S. Ambassador Frank Taylor contained no actual forensic evidence to support the assertion that the terror attacks had been orchestrated in Afghanistan.’

    The 7 July 2005 bomb attacks in London, and the Manchester Arena bombing and London Bridge attacks in 2017, required no ‘safe haven’ for terrorists to commit atrocities in Britain.

    Sinclair summed up:

    ‘The omissions and distortions that have been made by politicians about Afghanistan over the last few weeks, echoed by much of the media, have been so big and unremitting it’s easy to start questioning one’s own grip on reality.’

    But following corporate news media daily can have precisely that effect. In gaslighting media audiences, ‘mainstream’ news routinely skews the agenda in favour of what Washington and its allies wish to project. Thus, as Julie Hollar noted in a piece for US-based media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), the corporate media only rediscovered Afghan women and their human rights when US troops left:

    ‘[corporate media] coverage gives the impression that Afghan women desperately want the US occupation to continue, and that military occupation has always been the only way for the US to help them. But for two decades, women’s rights groups have been arguing that the US needed to support local women’s efforts and a local peace process. Instead, both Democrat and Republican administrations continued to funnel trillions of dollars into the war effort, propping up misogynist warlords and fueling violence and corruption.’

    Hollar continued:

    ‘The US did not “rescue” Afghan women with its military invasion in 2001, or its subsequent 20-year occupation. Afghan women need international help, but facile and opportunistic US media coverage pushes toward the same wrong kind of help that it’s been pushing for the last two decades: military “assistance,” rather than diplomacy and aid.’

    She concluded:

    ‘For more than 20 years, US corporate media could have listened seriously to Afghan women and their concerns, bringing attention to their own efforts to improve their situation. Instead, those media outlets are proving once again that Afghan women’s rights are only of interest to them when they can be used to prop up imperialism and the military industrial complex.’

    FAIR has summarised a 20-year-long pattern of corporate media self-censorship, scapegoating and stenography since 9-11. The US ‘war on terror’ has likely killed more than one million people at a cost of $8 trillion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. The report states:

    ‘Several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars – because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and water-related disease.’

    Cost of War co-director Stephanie Savell said:

    ‘Twenty years from now, we’ll still be reckoning with the high societal costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars – long after US forces are gone.’

    The corporate media played a major role in bringing about this catastrophe, then covering it up afterwards.

    Meanwhile, the Biden administration is continuing its immoral mission to prosecute Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks co-founder and publisher, for telling the truth about US crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Assange rightly said in 2011 that the US goal was ‘an endless war, not a successful war’. The aim is to line the pockets of the narrow sector of society that profits from the military-industrial complex, at the expense of the general population.

    In a piece for Newsweek, Daniel Ellsberg, Alice Walker and Noam Chomsky wrote that:

    ‘When Assange published hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents in 2010, the public was given an unprecedented window into the lack of justification and the futility of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The truth was hidden by a generation of governmental lies. Assange’s efforts helped show the American public what their government was doing in their name.’

    As we have noted in previous media alerts, Assange’s continued incarceration and long-term confinement, described as torture by Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, is a damning indictment of Western ‘democracy’.

    Political commentator Philip Roddis observes astutely that ‘Western democracy is ninety-five percent bogus’ because:

    ‘(a) democracy implies consent, (b) consent is meaningless if not informed, and (c) informed consent implies truly independent media. That last we do not have when they are “large corporations selling privileged audiences to other large corporations” [quoting Noam Chomsky].’

    A recurring feature of ‘democracy’ and its ‘free press’ is judicious silence or quiet mumbling when a ‘mistake’ is made. Consider the BBC’s limited apology, and dearth of follow-up by almost all media, when the BBC conceded its coverage of an alleged chemical weapons attack in the Syrian city of Douma on 7 April, 2018 was ‘seriously flawed’.

    As we have described in numerous media alerts, the corporate media declared with instant unanimity and certainty that Syria’s President Bashar Assad was responsible for the attack. One week later, the US, UK and France launched missiles on Syria in response to the unproven allegations. Since then, there has been a mounting deluge of evidence, in particular from whistleblowers, that the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the UN poison gas watchdog, has perpetrated a cover-up to preserve the Western narrative that Assad gassed civilians in Douma.

    Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens had complained to the BBC following last November’s Radio 4 broadcast of ‘Mayday: The Canister On The Bed’, which propagated the official Western narrative of the attack. In particular, Hitchens had objected to the slurs against an anonymous OPCW whistleblower named ‘Alex’. The BBC had claimed that ‘Alex’ only cast doubt on the official narrative because he had been promised $100,000 by WikiLeaks. The claim was false, as the BBC later admitted. There was no evidence to suggest that ‘Alex’, described as ‘a highly qualified and apolitical scientist’, was motivated by anything other than a desire for truth in sharing his doubts about the attack.

    Aaron Maté, an independent journalist with The Grayzone, has vigorously and repeatedly pursued the story, shaming both ‘mainstream’ media and most progressive media outlets who, like the corporate media, have blanked the scandal. He recently wrote a devastating account of the deceptions and evasions by OPCW Director-General Fernando Arias when appearing before the UN. Now, in a must-watch interview with Jimmy Dore about the BBC’s apology, Maté said that the BBC only retracted part of its attack on the OPCW whistleblowers and that ‘the retraction only scratches the surface of its deceit.’

    Steve Sweeney, international editor of the Morning Star, noted in response to the BBC’s apology on its Douma coverage that:

    ‘None of the major British newspapers such as The Times, The Telegraph, or the liberal mouthpiece for war with a human face, The Guardian, gave it column space despite the serious nature of the matter.’

    The Stark Reality Of Newspeak

    But, of course, ‘we’ are the ‘good guys’. And when evidence emerges to the contrary, it is shunted to the margins or buried. Other countries might be ‘belligerent’, but not us. Hence the deeply skewed reporting of the recent ‘Aukus pact’ between the US, UK and Australia which will provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines. This was largely presented by state-corporate news, including the BBC and the Guardian, as a ‘defence’ deal to ‘counter’ China in its ‘belligerent behaviour’ in the Indo-Pacific.

    BBC News at Ten declared on 16 September:

    ‘The deal will deliver nuclear-powered submarines to the Australian navy to promote stability in the Indo-Pacific region which has come under increasing pressure from China.’

    The BBC might as well admit that they are reading out press releases on behalf of Western power.

    An online BBC News article included the deceptive wording:

    ‘Aukus is being widely viewed as an effort to counter Beijing’s influence in the contested South China Sea.’

    The weasel phrase ‘widely viewed’ is newspeak for ‘the view from Washington and London’.

    Likewise, the Guardian dutifully carried the official US-UK view and framed its reporting accordingly:

    ‘In Washington, the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, made clear that the administration had chosen to close ranks with Australia in the face of belligerent Chinese behaviour.

    ‘Austin said he had discussed with Australian ministers “China’s destabilising activities and Beijing’s efforts to coerce and intimidate other countries, contrary to established rules and norms”, adding: “While we seek a constructive results-oriented relationship with [China], we will remain clear-eyed in our view of Beijing’s efforts to undermine the established international order.”’

    Imagine if western journalists regularly wrote news reports about the plentiful examples of belligerent US behaviour. And about America’s destabilising activities and efforts to coerce and intimidate other countries, contrary to established rules and norms. But that would be real journalism. Instead, a Guardian editorial oozed its approval:

    ‘A firm and unified response to China’s actions by democratic nations is both sensible and desirable.’

    There was no mention in any of the current reporting, as far as we could see, that the UK is set to increase its number of nuclear warheads by over 40 per cent, breaking international law. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is encouraging the public to report the UK government to the UN.

    This behaviour by the UK is no exception. ‘We’ routinely flout the law on arms, nuclear or conventional. Andrew Feinstein and Alexandra Smidman recently reported for Declassified UK, that Britain’s ‘robust’ arms export controls are a fiction:

    ‘In practice, UK controls on arms exports are all but voluntary, and Britain routinely arms states abusing human rights and those at war.

    ‘Britain exported more than £11-billion worth of arms around the world in 2019 but UK ministers claim this trade is properly administered in a mantra that goes like this:

    ‘“HM Government takes its export control responsibilities very seriously and operates one of the most robust arms export control regimes in the world. We consider all export applications thoroughly against a strict risk assessment framework and keep all licences under careful and continual review as standard.”’

    However, Feinstein and Smidman pointed out that:

    ‘These contentions are not true and the stark, unavoidable reality is that the British government and its weapons manufacturers, between whom there is a symbiotic relationship, repeatedly violate domestic law and international agreements on arms controls with no repercussions.’

    In short:

    ‘The British arms industry, politicians, the military and intelligence services can all essentially do what they want, with limited scrutiny and virtually no accountability.’

    As just one damning example: in supplying arms and other support, including military training and maintenance services to Saudi Arabia, Britain is an active contributor to the brutal Saudi subjugation of the Yemeni people.

    The UK also defies its own arms exports criteria in relation to Israel, to whom the UK has sold military equipment worth more than £400 million since 2015. Even this year’s deadly Israeli attacks in Gaza caused no let-up in UK sales to Israel.

    These are all yet more examples of the gaslighting that state-corporate news media are guilty of: the constant framing of the UK as a ‘defender’ and ‘promoter’ of ‘security’ and ‘stability’, while the state and military companies pursue arms sales and a wider foreign policy that kills and endangers people abroad and at home.

    ‘Nothing Is Moving’ On Climate

    Almost inevitably, BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg makes a return in this alert for another dishonourable mention. ‘Boris Johnson aims to push for more climate action during trip’, she gushed after travelling as part of a press pack with him and his entourage on a plane headed to New York for climate talks. She wrote that Johnson was ‘delighted’ to be:

    ‘acting as the host of the government plane he has had repainted with the Union Jack on the tail, urging journalists to approve of the new paint job.’

    But the most significant ‘paint job’ here was the BBC’s depiction of Johnson as some kind of climate hero. ‘Brokering climate deals a political priority’, was one headline in Kuenssberg’s report. She added:

    ‘the prime minister’s main task on this trip to New York is to push other countries to make more meaningful promises on cash and climate.’

    The notion that Johnson, who has frequently cast doubt on global warming and made derogatory remarks about ‘bunny-hugging’, is a true champion of climate and environmental protection is bogus and dangerous. As recently as December 2015, when it was unseasonably warm, he published a Telegraph piece titled, ‘I can’t stand this December heat, but it has nothing to do with global warming’.

    He wrote:

    ‘We may all be sweating in the winter air, but remember, we humans have always put ourselves at the centre of cosmic events.’

    Referring to the leaders of state who had been at the 2015 Paris climate talks, Johnson added:

    ‘I am sure that those global leaders were driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity; and that fear – as far as I understand the science – is equally without foundation.

    ‘There may be all kinds of reasons why I was sweating at ping-pong [in December] – but they don’t include global warming.’

    The reference to ‘ping-pong’, and his flippant remarks on the climate talks, suggest the whole thing was all just a game to Johnson; a ‘jolly wheeze’ to provide ammo to churn out another newspaper column.

    In this month’s Cabinet reshuffle, Johnson appointed Anne-Marie Trevelyan as his new International Trade Secretary. She had previously rejected climate science in a series of tweets between 2010 and 2012, stating in one:

    ‘Clear evidence that the ice caps aren’t melting after all, to counter those doom-mongers and global warming fanatics.’

    People can, of course, change their minds when confronted by cast-iron evidence and solid arguments. Johnson himself said this month that ‘the facts change and people change their minds’. But the facts had not changed. Certainly not since 1988 when the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up and renowned climate scientist James Hansen testified to the US Congress about the already-known dangers of climate instability.

    Moreover, how sincere can someone like Johnson be with his appalling track record? Has his understanding around the serious reality and implications of catastrophic climate change really changed? Or does he just say whatever he believes is politically expedient to retain his grip on power?

    In April 2021, Johnson waffled about ‘building back greener’ after the pandemic.

    ‘It’s vital for all of us to show that this is not all about some expensive, politically correct, green act of bunny hugging.

    ‘What I’m driving at is this is about growth and jobs.’

    Experienced observers of political rhetoric will recognise that ‘jobs’ is often newspeak for ‘corporate profits’.

    Johnson’s insincerity and disregard for those he considers beneath him surfaced once more in the grossly insensitive remarks he made in ‘joking’ about Margaret Thatcher’s ‘green legacy’. During a visit to a windfarm off the Aberdeenshire coast in July, he was asked if he would set a deadline for ending fossil fuel extraction. He replied with what he clearly thought was a witty remark:

    ‘Look at what we’ve done already. We’ve transitioned away from coal in my lifetime.

    ‘Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, who closed so many coal mines across the country, we had a big early start and we’re now moving rapidly away from coal altogether.’

    Continuing his track record of serial deceptions, Johnson boasted this month that:

    ‘The fact is the UK is leading the world [in tackling the climate crisis] and you should be proud of it.’

    The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was scathing of this ‘lie’ that has been channelled repeatedly by Johnson and other cabinet ministers ahead of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow this November:

    ‘There’s a lie that the UK is a climate leader and that they have reduced their emissions by 45 per cent since 1990.’

    She pointed out that the statistics do not include the UK’s share of emissions from international aviation, shipping and imported goods:

    ‘Of course, if you don’t include all emissions of course the statistics are going to look much nicer. I’m really hoping that we stop referring to the UK as a climate leader, because if you look at the reality that is simply not true. They are very good at creative carbon accounting, I must give them that, but it doesn’t mean much in practice.’

    Rational analysis also shows that none of the world’s major economies – in particular, the entire G20 (which includes the UK) – is in line with the Paris Agreement on climate.

    The watchdog Climate Action Tracker (CAT) analysed the policies of 36 countries, as well as the 27-nation European Union, and found that all major economies were off track to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The countries together make up 80 per cent of the world’s emissions.

    Niklas Höhne, a founding partner of the NewClimate Institute, a CAT partner, warned that:

    ‘there has been little to no improvement: nothing is moving. Anyone would think they have all the time in the world, when in fact the opposite is the case.’

    The lack of seriousness given by UK broadcasters to the crisis is evident in the results of a recent study that showed that the word ‘cake’ appeared 10 times more on British television than ‘climate change’ in 2020 while ‘dog’ was mentioned 22 times more. Mentions of climate change and global warming fell by 10 per cent and 19 per cent respectively compared with 2019, the report from BAFTA-backed sustainability initiative Albert found.

    Joanna Donnelly of Met Éireann, the Irish Meteorological Service, told viewers of the ‘Claire Byrne Live’ programme on Irish television that:

    ‘when it comes to climate change, we are in an emergency situation’

    Irish journalist John Gibbons highlighted the TV clip on Twitter, praising Donnelly’s forthright words, adding:

    ‘We’re in a Code Red national/global emergency, might be a good time to start acting like it (yes, media friends, that means YOU)’

    A soberly-worded, but terrifying, assessment of climate change risk published last week by Chatham House warned that, unless countries dramatically increase their commitments in carbon cuts:

    ‘many of the climate change impacts described in this research paper are likely to be locked in by 2040, and become so severe they go beyond the limits of what nations can adapt to.’

    The report added that:

    ‘Any relapse or stasis in emissions reduction policies could lead to a plausible worst case of 7°C of warming by the end of the century’

    That prospect is terrifying. John Schellnhuber, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, warned a decade ago that:

    ‘the difference between two degrees and four degrees [of global warming] is human civilisation.’

    In other words, we are potentially talking about the end of human life as we know it; perhaps even human extinction.

    James Hansen, the previously mentioned climate expert, remains sceptical about a truly successful outcome of COP26 in Glasgow. He wrote earlier this month:

    ‘The bad news: we approach the gas bag season – the next Conference of the Parties (COP26) is scheduled for November 1-12.  Gas bag politicians won’t show you the data that matter because that would reveal their miserable performances.  Instead, they set climate goals for their children while adopting no polices that would give such goals a chance.  Some of them may have been honestly duped about the science and engineering, but many must be blatant hypocrites.’ 2

    Other than the ever-present risk of nuclear war, there is no greater threat to humanity than the climate crisis. And there is no more damning example of gaslighting by state-corporate media when they tell us we can trust governments and corporations to do what is required to avert catastrophe.

    1. Nick Robinson, ‘Live From Downing Street’, Bantam Books, London, 2012, p. 332
    2. James Hansen, ‘August Temperature Update & Gas Bag Season Approaches’, email, 14 September 2021.
    The post Gaslighting The Public: Serial Deceptions By The State-Corporate Media first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • China readies to flex latest indigenous defence technologies in Zhuhai

    State-owned and private Chinese defence and aerospace companies are set to showcase their latest platforms and technologies at the biennial China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition, also known as Airshow China, that will be held from 28 September to 3 October. The exhibition, which will take place in the southern city of Zhuhai, was postponed […]

    The post China readies to flex latest indigenous defence technologies in Zhuhai appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Is the US Global Empire Actually in Decline?

    It is almost taken for granted, if not an article of faith, in the progressive milieu (e.g., here) that the US empire is declining. Does this hold up, or is it comfort food for the frustrated hoping for the revolution?

    First, it is essential not to confuse the ongoing decline of the living conditions of US working people with a decline in the power of the US corporate empire. The decline of one often means the strengthening of the other.

    In the aftermath of World War II, the US was the world manufacturing center, with the middle class rapidly expanding, and this era did end in the 1970s. It is also true the heyday of uncontested US world and corporate neoliberal supremacy is over, its zenith being the decade of the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allies. Now, looming on the horizon is China, with the US empire and its subordinate imperial allies (Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Belgium, Canada, Australia, Italy) unable to thwart its rise this century, even more than when China stood up in 1949.

    Yet the US imperial system still maintains decisive economic and political dominance, cultural and ideological hegemony, backed by tremendous military muscle. If US ruling class power were in decline, why have there been no socialist revolutions ­­­− the overturning of capitalist rule ­­­− in almost half a century? What would the world look like if the US lacked the muscle to be world cop?

    Imperialism continually faces crises; this is inherent to their system. The question is: which class takes advantage of these crises to advance their interests, the corporate capitalist class or the working class and its allies at home and abroad. In the recent decades, capitalist crises have resulted in setbacks for our class, and a steady worsening of our conditions of life.

    Previous proponents of US empire decline have predicted its demise with an expanding Communist bloc, then Germany and Japan with their supposedly more efficient capitalist production methods, then the European Union encompassing most of Western Europe into a supra-national entity, then the Asian Tigers, and then BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). All challenges turned out to be wishful thinking. Now the proponents of decline expect China itself will soon supplant US dominion.  We explore a number of the economic, political, and military difficulties the US empire confronts in its role as world cop.

    Imperial Decline or Adjustments in Methods of Rule?

    A common misconception among believers of US ruling class demise holds that imperial failure to succeed in some particular aim signifies imperial weakening. Examples of setbacks include Afghanistan, the failure to block North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, catastrophic mishandling of the COVID pandemic, and seeming inability to reign in the mammoth US national debt. However, throughout history, successful maintenance of imperial hegemony has never precluded absence of terrible setbacks and defeats. Most importantly, the fundamental question arising from a setback is which class learns to advance its interests more effectively, the imperial overlords or the oppressed.

    The US rulers, as with other imperial nations, have proven adept at engineering more effective methods of control from crises, as Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine illustrates. For instance, in the mid-20th century the imperial powers were forced to relinquish direct political governance of their colonial empires, often due to costly wars. Until after World War II, the Western nations owned outright most of Africa and much of Asia. Yet this new Third World political independence did not herald the end of imperial rule over their former colonies. The imperialists simply readjusted their domination through a neocolonial setup and continued to loot these countries, such as siphoning off over $1 trillion  every year since 2005 just through tax havens.

    Likewise, for seven decades the imperial ruling classes endured repeated defeats attempting to overturn the seemingly invincible Russian revolution. But they only needed to succeed one time, using a new strategy, to emerge victorious.

    A third example, the growing US national deficit due to the cost of the war on Vietnam forced Nixon to no longer peg the value of the dollar to gold at $35 an ounce. After World War II, the US had imposed the dollar as the international reserve currency, fixed at this exchange rate.  Today gold is $1806 an ounce, yet the dollar continues as the world reserve currency. The US rulers resolved their crisis by readjusting the manner their dollar reigned in international markets.

    A fourth example is the world historic defeat dealt the empire at the hands of the Vietnamese. Yet Vietnam today poses no challenge to US supremacy, in sharp contrast to 50 years ago.

    The US ruling class is well versed in the lessons gained from centuries of Western imperial supremacy. They have repeatedly demonstrated that the no longer effective methods of world control can be updated.  Bankruptcy in methods of rule may not signify a decline, but only the need for a reset, allowing the domination to continue.

    Part 1:  US Economic and Financial Strength

    Decline in US Share of World Production

    A central element of the waning US empire argument comes from the unparalleled economic rise of China. As a productive powerhouse, the US has been losing ground. As of 2019, before the COVID year reduced it further, the US share of world manufacturing amounted to 16.8%, while China was number one, at 28.7%.

    Similarly, the US Gross Domestic Product itself (GDP) slipped from 40% of the world economy in 1960 to 24% in 2019. GDP is the total market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country.

    When GDP is measured by the world reserve currency, the dollar, the US ranks first, at $21 trillion, with China number two at $14.7 trillion. Using the Purchasing Power Parity measure of GDP,  which measures economic output in terms of a nation’s own prices, China’s GDP surpasses the US at $24.16 trillion. By either measure, a steady US erosion over time is evident, particularly in relation to China, and a major concern for the US bosses.

    Worsening US balance of trade reflects this decline. In 1971 the US had a negative balance of trade (the value of imports greater than the value of exports) for the first time in 78 years. Since then, the value of exports has exceeded that of imports only two times, in 1973 and 1975. From 2003 on, the US has been running an annual trade deficit of $500 billion or more. To date the US rulers “pay” for this by creating dollars out of thin air.

    Ballooning US National Debt

    The ballooning US national debt is considered another indicator of US imperial demise. The US debt clock puts the national debt at $28.5 trillion, up from $5.7 trillion in 2000. According to International Monetary Fund (IMF) numbers, the US debt is 118% of the GDP, near a historic high point, up from 79.2% at the end of 2019.

    The international reserves of the imperialist nations do not even cover 2% of their foreign debt. In contrast, China tops the list with the largest international reserves, which covers 153% of its foreign debt.

    However, today US debt as a percent of GDP is lower than in World War II, at the height of US economic supremacy. Germany’s debt to GDP ratio is 72%. Japan’s is 264%, making its debt over two and a half times the size of the country’s GDP. China’s is 66%.

    Yet a key concern with the ballooning national debt − inflation caused by creating money backed with no corresponding increase in production − hasn’t been a problem in any of these countries, not even Japan. The immediate issue with debt is not its size in trillions of dollars, but the degree annual economic growth exceeds the annual interest payment on the debt.

    In the US, this payout costs almost $400 billion a year, 1.9% of GDP. Federal Reserve Board president Powell stated: “Given the low level of interest rates, there’s no issue about the United States being able to service its debt at this time or in the foreseeable future.” Former IMF chief economist and president of the American Economic Association, Olivier Blanchard likewise declared: “Put bluntly, public debt may have no fiscal cost” given that “the current US situation in which safe interest rates are expected to remain below growth rates for a long time, is more the historical norm than the exception.” According to these ruling class economists, the huge size of the US national debt presents no economic difficulty for their bosses.

    Technological Patents

    Patents are an indicator of a country’s technological progress because they reflect the creation and dissemination of knowledge in productive activities. Today China is on the technological cutting edge in wind power, solar power, online payments, digital currencies, artificial intelligence (such as facial recognition), quantum computing, satellites and space exploration, 5G and 6G, drones, and ultra-high voltage power transmission. In 2019, China ended the US reign as the leading filer of international patents, a position previously held by the US every year since the UN World Intellectual Property Organization’s Patent Cooperation Treaty System began in 1978.

    The failure of the US rulers to thwart China’s scientific and technological advances threatens the preeminence the US holds on technological innovation. Rents from the US corner on intellectual property is a major contributor to the US economy. The drastic measures the US has taken against Huawei exemplify the anxiety of the empire’s rulers.

    US technological superiority is now being challenged. Yet, as John Ross points out, “Even using PPP measures, the US possesses overall technological superiority compared to China…. the level of productivity of the US economy is more than three times that of China.”1

    The US Still Controls the Global Financial Network

    While the world share of US manufacturing and exports has shrunk, the US overlords still reign over the world financial order. A pillar of their world primacy lies in the dollar as the world’s “reserve currency,” an innocuous term referring to US sway over the global financial and trade structure, including international banking networks, such as the World Bank and the IMF.

    Following the 1971 end of the dollar’s $35 an ounce peg to gold, Nixon engineered deals with the Middle East oil exporting regimes, guaranteeing them military support on condition they sell their oil exclusively in dollars. This gave a compelling new reason for foreign governments and banks to hold dollars. The US could now flood international markets with dollars regardless of the amount of gold it held. Today, most of the world’s currencies remain pegged directly or indirectly to the dollar.

    To facilitate growing international trade, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) was created in 1973. SWIFT is a payment and transaction network used by international banks to monitor and process purchases and payments by individuals, companies, banks, and governments. Dominated by the US, it grants the country even greater mastery over world trade and financial markets. Here, China poses no challenge to US supremacy.

    After the euro became established, the percent of world reserves held in US dollars diminished from the 71% share it held in 2001. Since 2003, the dollar has kept the principal share, fluctuating in the 60-65% range. Today, the percent of world nations’ currency reserves held in US dollars amounts to $7 trillion, 59.5% of international currency reserves.

    In 2021 the dollar’s share of total foreign currency reserves is actually greater than in the 1980s and 1990s.

    Because only a few reserve currencies are accepted in international trade, countries are not free to trade their goods in their own money. Rather, over 90% of nations’ imports and exports requires use of the dollar, the euro, or the currencies of other imperial states. The Chinese RMB, in contrast, constitutes merely 2.4% of international reserves, ranking China on the level of Canada. The US continues as the superpower in world currency reserves, while China is a marginal player.

    The US Dollar as the World Reserve Currency

    The US maintains preeminence because banks, governments and working peoples around the world regards US dollar as the safest, most reliable, and accepted currency to hold their savings.

    A capitalist economic crisis, even when caused by the US itself, as in 2008, actually increases demand for the dollar, since the dollar is still viewed as the safe haven. People expect the dollar to be the currency most likely to retain its value in periods of uncertainty. Ironically, an economic crisis precipitated by the US results in money flooding into dollar assets, keeping world demand for dollars high. The 2008-09 crisis enabled the ruling class to advance their domination over working people, fleecing us of hundreds of billions of dollars.

    SWIFT data show that China’s RMB plays a minor role in world trade transactions.  While China has become the world exporter, its currency was used in merely 1.9% of  international payments, versus 38% for the US dollar, with 77% of transactions in the dollar or euro. This means almost all China’s own imports and exports are not traded in Chinese currency, but in that of the US and its subordinates.

    Being the leading force in SWIFT gives the US a powerful weapon. The US rulers can target countries it seeks to overthrow (such as Venezuela, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and Iran) with sanctions declared illegal by the United Nations. SWIFT enables the US rulers to prevent those countries’ access to their overseas bank accounts, blocks their access to international trade as well as loans from the World Bank, the IMF and most international banks. The US uses its authority in the World Trade Organization to prevent countries like Venezuela from demanding the WTO punish the US for disrupting Venezuela’s legitimate trade by means of these sanctions.

    Arguments that China and Russia are abandoning the dollar point out that, while in 2015 approximately 90% of trade between the two countries was conducted in dollars, by spring 2020 the figure had dropped to 46%, with 24% of the trade in their own currencies. This shows some increasing independence, yet almost twice as much China-Russia trade still takes place in the dollar rather than in their own money. Further, their moves from the dollar have been in reaction to US imposed sanctions and tariffs, forcing them off the dollar, not from their own choice to cast aside the dollar as the international currency.

    If China and Russia had the means to create a new world economic order they could withdraw their over $1.1 trillion and $123 billion invested in US Treasury bonds and use the funds to start their own international financial structure.

    That China pegs the RMB to the dollar, rather than the dollar pegged to the RMB, also indicates the economic power relations between China and the US. China has expressed unease about the US potential to cut China off from the SWIFT network. Zhou Li, a spokesperson for China’s Communist Party, urged his party’s leaders to prepare for decoupling from the dollar, because the US dollar “has us by the throat… By taking advantage of the dollar’s global monopoly position in the financial sector, the US will pose an increasingly severe threat to China’s further development.”

    While China has displaced the US as the primary productive workhouse of the world, it remains far from displacing the US as the world financial center. The size of China’s economy has not translated into a matching economic power.

    Part 2: Military and Ideological Forms of Domination

    The US regards as its Manifest Destiny to rule the world. The US bosses equate their national security interests with global security interests; no place or issue is insignificant. The US sees its role as defending the world capitalist order even if narrow US interests are not immediately and practically involved.

    The Question of a US Military Decline

    The second central element of the waning US empire argument is based on the US armed forces failures in the Middle East wars. However, they overlook that the US rulers suffered more stinging defeats in Korea 70 years ago and Vietnam 50 years ago, when the US was considered at the height of its supremacy. While over 7000 US soldiers and 8000 “contractors,” a code word for mercenaries, have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, this is much smaller than the 41,300 troops killed in Korea, or the 58,000 in Vietnam. Although in wars against Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan, the US ruling class could not achieve its aims, these peoples’ anti-imperial struggles were derailed, a US key objective. To the extent the peoples of these countries “won,” they inherited a country in ruins.

    Likewise, the rising British empire suffered defeats at the hands of the US in 1783 and 1814, but this had little impact on 19th century British global ascendancy.

    Save Iraq in 1991, the US has not won a war since World War II. Yet even in its heyday, the US military did not take on and defeat another major power without considerable outside aid. Spain was mostly defeated in Cuba and the Philippines before the US attacked. The US entered World War I after the other fighting forces were reaching exhaustion. In World War II, the Soviet Red Army broke the back of the German Wehrmacht, not the US. Only against Japan did the US military play a key role in crushing an imperial rival, though even here, the bulk of Japanese troops were tied down fighting the Chinese.

    While today, the US military is reluctant about engaging in a full-scale land war, this has been mostly the case for the whole 20th century before any alleged imperial deterioration. Previously, the US rulers proved adept at not entering a war until it could emerge on top once the wars ended.

    The “Vietnam syndrome,” code word for the US people’s opposition to fighting wars to defend the corporate world order, continues to haunt and impede the US rulers when they consider new military aggressions. This “syndrome,” which Bush Sr boasted had been overcome, has only deepened as result of the Afghanistan and Iraq debacles. Yet the corporate class took advantage of these wars to loot trillions from public funds, with working people to pay the bill.

    The US is spending over a trillion dollars to “upgrade” a nuclear capacity which could wipe out life on the planet.  Even if US military capacity were diminishing in some areas, this is immaterial so long as the US still can, with a push of the button, annihilate all it considers opponents, even if this means a likely mutually assured destruction. The US also possesses similarly dangerous arsenals of biological and chemical weapons. It is not rational to think the US rulers spend mind-boggling sums of money on this weaponry but will not use them again when considered necessary to preserve their supremacy.

    The US empire’s military dominion remains firmly in place around the world. Peoples’ struggles to close US military bases have met with little success. US ruling class de facto military occupations overseas continue through its over 800 bases in over 160 countries. These constitute 95% of the world’s total foreign military bases.

    To date, if there has been any lessening of US military destructive capacity, no new armed forces or uprisings have dared to take advantage of this. If some national force considered it possible to break out of the US world jailhouse, we would be seeing that.

    Hybrid Warfare: US Regime-Change Tools Besides Military Intervention

    Military victory is not necessary for the US rulers to keep “insubordinate” countries in line. It suffices for the US to leave in ruins their attempts to build political and economic systems that prioritize national sovereignty over US dictates.

    When incapable of overturning a potential “threat of a good example” through military invasion, the US may engineer palace coups. Since 2000, it has succeeded in engineering coups in Honduras, Bolivia, Georgia, and Haiti, to name a few.

    Alternatives to fomenting a military coup include the US conducting lawfare to overturn governments, as seen in Paraguay and Brazil. The US ruling class also skillfully co-opts “color revolutions,” as seen in the Arab Spring and in the implosion of the Soviet bloc. Worldwide, the US regularly violates the sovereignty of nations through its regime-change agencies such as the CIA, USAID, and NED.

    Besides invasions, coups, lawfare, election interference, and color revolutions, the US relies on its command over the global financial system and the subservience of other imperialist nations. This enables the US overlords to impose crippling sanctions and blockades on countries that assert their national sovereignty. The blockades on Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, and Syria constitute a boot on their neck, which have only become more severe the more these peoples valiantly defend their independence.

    Condemnation of these blockades by working people and nations worldwide has yet to have material effect in constraining this imperial cruelty against whole peoples. Rather than a decline of the US empire’s ability to thwart another country’s right to determine their own future, there have been changes in method, from overtly militaristic to more covert hybrid warfare. Both are brutal and effective means of regime change.

    US-First World Ideological Hegemony

    The corporate leaders of the West wield world dominion over the international media, including news services, social media, and advertising. Their Coke and Disney characters, for instance, have penetrated even the remotest corners of the world. Today most of the world’s viewers of the news are fed a version of the news through media stage-managed by the US and its subordinate allies. In addition, there are almost 4 billion social media users in the world, with six social media companies having more than one billion users. China owns just one of these. Only the US and its subordinates have world reach in their control of news and social media, while China does not.

    Ramon Labanino, one of the Cuban 5, illustrated how the US rulers use their media to foment the July 12 regime change operation in Cuba:

    We are in the presence of an international media dictatorship, the big media are in the hands of imperialism and now the social networks and the alternative media also use them in a masterful way. They have the capacity, through data engineering, bots, to replicate a tweet millions of times, which is what they have done against Cuba. A ruthless attack on social networks and in the media to show a Cuba that is not real. On the other hand, we have an invasion in our networks to disarticulate our computer systems so that even we cannot respond to the lies. The interesting thing is the double purpose, not only that they attack us, but then we cannot defend ourselves because the media belong to them… Within the CIA, for example, they have a special operations group that is in charge of cyber attacks of this type and there is a group called the Political Action Group that organizes, structures and directs this type of attack.

    Worldwide use of media disinformation and news spin plays a central role in preserving US primacy and acceptance of its propaganda. As Covert Action Magazine reported:

    United States warmakers have become so skilled at propaganda that not only can they wage a war of aggression without arousing protest; they can also compel liberals to denounce peace activists using language reminiscent of the McCarthy era. Take the case of Syria. The people and groups one would normally count on to oppose wars have been the ones largely defending it. They have also often been the ones to label war opponents as “Assad apologists” or “genocide deniers”—causing them to be blacklisted.

    The ruling class media’s effective massaging of what is called “news” has penetrated and disoriented many anti-war forces. This illustrates the appalling collapse of a world anti-war opposition that almost 20 years ago had been called “the new superpower,” not some decline of the US as world cop. Corporate media operations play a role comparable to military might in perpetuating US global control.

    Part 3: The Threat US Rulers Perceive in China

    Secretary of State Blinken spelled it out:

    China is the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system, all the rules, values and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to, because it ultimately serves the interests and reflects the values of the American people.

    China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin responded to Washington’s view that the international system operates primarily to advance US corporate interests:

    The ‘rules-based order’ claimed by the US…refers to rules set by the US alone, then it cannot be called international rules, but rather ‘hegemonic rules,’ which will only be rejected by the whole world.

    Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov recently said:

    The United States has declared limiting the advance of technology in Russia and China as its goal…They are promoting their ideology-driven agenda aimed at preserving their dominance by holding back progress in other countries.

    The Challenge China Presents to US Rulers Differs from that of the Soviet Union

    China’s development poses a threat to imperialist hegemony different from the former Soviet bloc. China competes in the world markets run by the Western nations, slowly supplanting their control. China’s economic performance, 70 years after its revolution, has been unprecedented in world history, even compared to the First World countries. In contrast, the Soviet economy after 70 years was faltering.

    China does not provide the economic and military protection for nations striving to build a new society the way the Soviet Union had. The importance of the Communist bloc as a force constraining the US was immense and is underappreciated. The Communist bloc generally allied itself with anti-imperialist forces, encouraging Third World national liberation struggles as well as the Non-Aligned Movement. The Communist bloc’s exemplary social programs also prompted the rise of social-democratic welfare state regimes (e.g., Sweden) in the capitalist West to circumvent possible socialist revolution.

    Now, with no Soviet Union and its allies to extend international solidarity assistance to oppressed peoples and nations, countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea are much more on their own to defend themselves against US military maneuvers and blockades.

    As John Ross points out, China is capable of slowly supplanting US-First World power over a long period of time, but in no position to replace these imperial states as world hegemon, nor does it desire to do so. US products are being driven out by China’s cheaper high-quality products and China’s more equitable “win-win” business arrangements with other countries, offering the opportunity for Third World countries to develop. However, China cannot displace the US in the world financial system, where the US and its allies retain overwhelming control.

    The US has proven incapable of impeding China from becoming an independent world force. No matter the tariffs and sanctions placed on China, they have had little impact. Yet, the US has caused China to digress from its socialist planned economy, through US corporations and consumerist values penetrating the Chinese system.

    Part 4:  The World if the US were in Decline

    Revolutions on the International Stage

    A weakened US imperialism would encourage peoples and nations to “seize the time” and score significant gains against this overlord’s hold on their countries. Yet since shortly after 1975, with the victories in Vietnam and Laos, a drought in socialist revolutions has persisted for almost half a century. If the US empire were in decline, we would find it handicapped in countering victorious socialist revolutions. However, the opposite has been the case, with the US rulers consolidating their hegemony over the world.

    This contrasts with the 40-year period between 1917 and 1959, when socialist revolutions occurred in Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, eleven countries across eastern Europe, and Cuba. These took place in the era of US rise, not decline. During this period, the US empire had to confront even greater challenges to its dictates than presented by today’s China and Russia in the form of the world Communist bloc, associated parties in capitalist countries, and the national liberation movements.

    During the period of alleged US imperial demise, it has been socialist revolution that experienced catastrophic defeats. In the last 30 years, the struggle for socialist revolution has gone sharply in reverse, with the US and its subordinates not only blocking successful revolutions but overturning socialism in most of the former Communist sphere. The last three decades has witnessed greater consolidation of imperial supremacy over the world, not a deterioration.

    The socialist revolutions that continue − North Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba − have all had to backtrack and reintroduce private enterprise and capitalist relations of production.  North Korea has allowed the growth of private markets; Cuba relies heavily on the Western tourist market. They have this forced upon them to survive more effectively in the present world neoliberal climate.

    A victorious socialist revolution, even a much more limited anti-neoliberal revolution2 , requires a nation to stand up to the imperial vengeance that enforces neo-colonial subjugation. Small countries, such as Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela, have established political and some economic independence, but they have been unable to significantly advance against crushing blockades and US-backed coups in order to create developed economies. Historically, the only countries that have effectively broken with dependency and developed independently based on their own resources have been the Soviet Union and China.

    Raul Castro made clear this world primacy of the US neoliberal empire:

    In many cases, governments [including the subsidiary imperial ones] do not even have the capacity to enforce their sovereign prerogatives over the actions of national entities based in their own territories, as these are often docilely subordinated to Washington, as if we were living in a world subjugated by the unipolar power of the United States. This is a phenomenon that is expressed with particular impact in the financial sector, with national banks of several countries giving a US administration’s stipulations priority over the political decisions of their own governments.

    A test of the US overlords’ decline can be measured in the struggle against US economic warfare in the form of sanctions. To date, the US can arm twist most countries besides China and Russia into abiding by its unilateral sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, and Iran. The US rulers still possess the power and self-assurance to ignore United Nations resolutions against economic warfare, including the UN General Assembly’s annual condemnation of the US blockade on Cuba. The peoples and nations of the world cannot make the US rulers pay a price for this warfare.

    Domestic Struggles by the Working Class and its Allies that Shake the System

    If the US empire were weakened, our working class could be winning strikes and union organizing drives against a capitalist class on the defensive. But the working class remains either quiescent, its struggles derailed, or most strikes settled by limiting the degree of boss takebacks. The 1997 UPS and 2016 Verizon strike were two that heralded important gains for workers. So far, however, the weakening class at home is not the corporate bosses, but the working class and its allies.

    The workers movement has not even succeeded in gaining a national $15 minimum wage. The US rulers can spend over $900 billion a year on its war machine even during a pandemic that has killed almost 700,000, amid deteriorating standard of living  − no national health care, no quality free education, no raising of the minimum wage − without angry mass protests. This money could be spent on actual national security at home: housing for the homeless, eliminating poverty, countering global warming, jobs programs, and effectively handling the pandemic as China has (with only two deaths since May 2020). Instead, just in the Pentagon budget, nearly a trillion dollars a year of our money is a welfare handout to corporations to maintain their rule over the world. This overwhelming imperial reign over our workers’ movement signifies a degeneration in our working class organizations, not in the corporate overlords.

    A weakened empire would provide opportunities for working class victories, re-allocating national wealth in their favor. Instead, we live in a new Gilded Age, with growing impoverishment of our class as the corporate heads keep grabbing greater shares of our national wealth. Americans for Tax Fairness points out:

    America’s 719 billionaires held over four times more wealth ($4.56 trillion) than all the roughly 165 million Americans in society’s bottom half ($1.01 trillion), according to Federal Reserve Board data. In 1990, the situation was reversed — billionaires were worth $240 billion and the bottom 50% had $380 billion in collective wealth.

    US billionaire wealth increased 19-fold over the last 31 years, with the combined wealth of 713 billionaires surging by $1.8 trillion during the pandemic, one-third of their wealth gains since 1990.

    This scandalous appropriation of working people’s wealth by less than one thousand bosses at the top without causing mass indignation and working class fightback, encapsules the present power relations between the two contending classes.

    With a weakened empire, we would expect a rise of a militant mass current in the trade unions and the working class committed to the struggle to reverse this trend. Instead, trade unions support corporate governance and their political candidates for office, not even making noise about a labor party.

    With a weakened empire, we would expect the US working people to be turning away from the two corporate parties and building our own labor party as an alternative. In 2016 the US electorate backed two “outsiders,” Bernie Sanders and Trump, in the primaries against the traditional Democratic and Republican candidates, but this movement was co-opted with little difficulty. That the two corporate-owned parties still wield the power to co-opt, if not extinguish, our working class movements, as with the mass anti-Iraq war movement, the Occupy movement, the Madison trade union protests, the pro-Bernie groundswells in 2016 and 2020, shows the empire’s continued vitality, not deterioration.

    In 2020 most all liberals and lefts capitulated to the Democrats’ anti-Trumpism, under the guise of “fighting fascism.” The “resistance” became the “assistance.” The promising Black Lives Matter movement of summer 2020 became largely absorbed into the Biden campaign a few months later. If the corporate empire were declining, progressive forces and leftist groups would not have bowed to neoliberal politicians and the national security state by climbing on the elect-Biden bandwagon. The 2020 election brought out the highest percent of voters in over a century to vote for one or the other of two neoliberal politicians. This stunning victory for the US ruling class resulted from a stunning surrender by progressive forces. To speak of declining corporate US supremacy in this context is nonsense.

    Likely Indicators of a Demise of US Supremacy

    For all our political lives we have been reading reports of the impending decline of US global supremacy. If just a fraction of these reports were accurate, then surely the presidential executive orders that Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, and Cuba are “unusual and extraordinary threats to the national security of the United States” would have some basis in reality.

    If US corporate dominion were declining, we might see:

    • The long called for democratization of the United Nations and other international bodies with one nation, one vote
    • Social democratic welfare governments would again be supplanting neoliberal regimes
    • Replacement of World Bank, WTO, and IMF with international financial institutions independent of US control
    • Curtailing NATO and other imperialist military alliances
    • End of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency
    • Dismantling of US overseas military bases
    • Emergence of regional blocs independent of the US, replacing the current vassal organizations (e.g., European Union, OAS, Arab League, Organization of African Unity)
    • Nuclear disarmament rather than nuclear escalation
    • Working peoples of the world enforcing reductions in greenhouse gas emissions
    • A decline of the allure of US controlled world media culture (e.g., Disney, Hollywood)

    Part 5: Conclusion:  US Decline looks like a Mirage

    Proponents of US decline point to two key indicators: its diminished role in global production and ineffectiveness of the US ruler’s military as world cop. Yet, the US rulers, with the aid of those in the European Union and Japan, maintain world financial control and continue to keep both our country and the world under lock and key.

    The US overlords represent the spokesperson and enforcer of the First World imperial system of looting, while compelling subservience from the other imperial nations. None dare pose as potential imperial rivals to the US, nor challenge it in any substantial manner.

    It is misleading to compare China’s rise to the US alone, since the US represents a bloc of imperial states. To supplant US economic preeminence, China would have to supplant the economic power of this entire bloc. These countries still generate most world production with little prospect this will change. A China-Russia alliance scarcely equals this US controlled First World club.

    To date, each capitalist crisis has only reinforced the US rulers’ dominion as the world financial hub. Just the first half of this year, world investors have poured $900 billion into the safe haven US assets, more than they put into funds in the rest of the world combined. So long as the US capitalists can export their economic downturns to other countries and onto the backs of its own working people, so long as the world turns to the US dollar as the safe haven, decline of US ruling class preeminence is not on the table.

    The last period of imperial weakening occurred from the time of US defeat in Vietnam up to the reimposition of imperial diktat under Reagan and his sidekick, Margaret Thatcher. During this time, working peoples’ victories were achieved across the international stage: Afghanistan, Iran, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and Grenada; Cuban military solidarity in Angola, Vietnam’s equivalent in Cambodia; revolution in Portugal and in its African colonies, in Zimbabwe, and seeming imminent victories in El Salvador and Guatemala. At home, a rising class struggle current arose in the working class, as in the Sadlowski Steelworkers Fight Back movement and the militant 110-day coal miners strike, which forced President Carter to back down. This worldwide upsurge against corporate rule ended about 40 years ago, as yet unmatched by new ones.

    Proclamations of a waning US empire portray a wishful thinking bordering on empty bravado. Moreover, a crumbling empire will not lead to its final exit without a massive working peoples’ movement at home to overthrow it. Glen Ford observed that capitalism has lost its legitimacy, especially among the young: “But that doesn’t by itself bring down a system. It is simply a sign that people are not happy. Mass unhappiness may bring down an administration. But it doesn’t necessarily change a system one bit.”

    Capitalism is wracked by crisis – inherent to the system, Marx explained. Yet, as the catastrophe of World War I and its aftermath showed, as the Great Depression showed, as Europe in chaos after World War II showed, capitalist crises are no harbinger of its collapse. The question is not how severe the crisis, but which class, capitalist or working class, takes advantage of it to advance their own interests.

    A ruling class crisis allows us to seize the opportunity if our forces are willing to fight, are organized, and are well-led. As Lenin emphasized, “The proletariat has no other weapon in the fight for power except organization.” In regards to organization, we are unprepared. Contributing to our lack of effective anti-imperialist organization is our profound disbelief that a serious challenge at home to US ruling class control is even possible.

    Whatever the indications of US deterioration as world superpower, recall that the Roman empire’s decay began around 177 AD. But it did not collapse in the West until 300 years later, in 476, and the eastern half did not collapse for 1000 years after that. Informing a Roman slave or plebe in 200 AD that the boot on their necks was faltering would fall on deaf ears. We are now in a similar situation. The empire will never collapse by itself, even with the engulfing climate catastrophe. Wishful thinking presents a dysfunctional substitute for actual organizing, for preparing people to seize the time when the opening arises.

    1. John Ross, “China and South-South Cooperation in the present global situation,” in China’s Great Road, p. 203.
    2. There is a continuous class struggle between popular forces demanding increased government resources and programs to serve their needs, against corporate power seeking to privatize in corporate hands all such government spending and authority. This unchecked corporate centralization of wealth and power is euphemistically called “neoliberalism.”  An anti-neoliberal revolution places popular forces in political control while economic power remains in the hands of the capitalist class.
    The post Is the US Global Empire Actually in Decline? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Are the Motives of War Profiteers Driving Us to the Brink of a New Cold War?

    Royal Australian Navy submarine HMAS Rankin is seen during a biennial maritime exercise between the Royal Australian Navy and the Indian Navy on September 5, 2021, in Darwin, Australia.

    “The United States will compete, and will compete vigorously, and lead with our values and our strength,” President Biden told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. “We’ll stand up for our allies and our friends and oppose attempts by stronger countries to dominate weaker ones, whether through changes to territory by force, economic coercion, technological exploitation or disinformation. But we’re not seeking — I’ll say it again — we are not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs.”

    This was the only part of Biden’s speech where he said the words “Cold War.” They stood out; last everyone had heard, the U.S. was engaged in a “war on terror” that, thanks to the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), could conceivably run on until the stars burn out. The Cold War is black-and-white television, Ike, Nixon, Kennedy, the Cuban Missile Crisis, duck-and-cover drills, Ronald Reagan scaring the hell out of everyone, and finally a wall falling on my 18th birthday, seemingly a thousand years ago.

    Biden did not say “China” in that particular passage either — though China was mentioned several times elsewhere in his remarks — but that country was most certainly the intended recipient of that specific message. Biden was speaking amid a diplomatic meltdown between the U.S. and long-time ally France over a new Australia/United Kingdom/United States (AUKUS) strategic alliance, and specifically over the sale of at least eight nuclear submarines to Australia by the U.S.

    France was perturbed because it only learned of the new AUKUS alliance after Australia publicly announced it. This was an open-handed slap from Australia’s conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a man any modern U.S. Republican would embrace on sight, to the more left-leaning French prime minister, Emmanuel Macron. France was legitimately outraged over having been excluded from such important, high-level discussions and the French ambassador to the U.S. was immediately called home.

    Why the sudden reversal? Nuclear subs are more expensive to maintain and operate, and New Zealand does not allow anything nuclear within its territorial waters, which from a strategic standpoint leaves a huge swath of Australia’s west coast exposed. The Pacific is a massive ocean, to be sure, but what set of circumstances exist that would lead Australia — and the U.S. — to believe that nation needs at least eight of the most fearsome weapons platforms ever devised?

    Answer: The “pivot to Asia,” an Obama-era recasting of global strategic imperatives which was exacerbated by Donald Trump’s blizzard of nonsense tariffs against China. “Until this week, the so-called ‘pivot to Asia’ by the United States had been more of a threat than a reality for Europe,” reports The New York Times. “But that changed when the Biden administration announced a new defense alliance against China that has left Europe facing an implicit question: Which side are you on?”

    “We are not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs,” Biden said at the UN.

    But the sudden new AUKUS alliance (a rigid bloc?), and the placement of U.S.-made nuclear submarines into that portion of the Pacific, seems vividly at odds with the president’s placating words. Indeed, it is beginning to feel as if a new Cold War is off and running.

    Deploying U.S.-made subs in that part of the Pacific Ocean is a big, deliberate thumb in China’s eye, an act provocative enough to motivate UN Secretary-General António Guterres to speak words of warning a day before Biden’s speech. “We need to re-establish a functional relationship between the two powers,” Guterres told the Associated Press. “We need to avoid at all cost a Cold War that would be different from the past one, and probably more dangerous and more difficult to manage.”

    At bottom, however, the argument between France and the U.S. was as much over money as it was national pride. France had already inked a deal with Australia to sell a dozen diesel-powered submarines, and the AUKUS nuclear sub deal blew all that up. The collapse of the deal cost France tens of billions of euros — France is the United States of Europe when it comes to global arms sales, and France’s leaders take the arms trade as seriously as U.S. leaders do — which could translate into a whole slew of lost jobs if that money is not recouped. (French defense contractor Naval Group, which is partially owned by France and was already building the diesel subs, intends to bill Australia for the lost revenue.)

    It would surprise me not one single bit if the AUKUS agreement, and specifically the sub sale pivot from France to the U.S., first came into being after a few phone calls to some officers in “defense” procurement from lobbyists for General Dynamics and/or Huntington Ingalls, the only two shipbuilders in the U.S. with shipyards capable of building nuclear submarines. The cost to build one of these monstrously deadly machines runs, on average, around $3 billion per unit.

    “Why are you letting France get that money?” would have almost certainly been the crux of such a call. “Don’t you love America?” And away we go.

    Money. Cold Wars, you see, are notoriously expensive (read: wildly lucrative for the various war profiteers that circle the Pentagon like so many carrion birds).

    The average military spending during “peacetime” in the Cold War ran about $285.4 billion per year. The first hot Cold War conflict in Korea, according to Richard M. Miller Jr. of Praeger Security International, cost $678 billion. The cost of the Korean Conflict spanning from 1951 to 2000 is over $1 trillion. The Vietnam War cost another $1 trillion. Benefits to the veterans and veteran families of those wars runs into the tens of billions of dollars per year. The total cost of the Cold War from 1948 to 1991 is estimated to be $13.1 trillion, including $5.8 trillion for the development and maintenance of a vast nuclear arsenal.

    These eye-popping numbers, all pegged as closely as possible to current dollar values, scarcely tell the tale of the present moment. The “Black Budget” cost of the national security state, born during World War II and massively expanded during the Cold War, is unknown… well, someone knows, but they ain’t telling. The Pentagon, for its part, currently has a $35 trillion hole in its accounting. Nobody seems to know just where that money went… but somebody knows, and again, they ain’t telling. Meanwhile, despite our “withdrawal” from Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terror grinds on relentlessly, and expensively.

    U.S. politicians and the corporate “news” media have a casually self-destructive way of discussing military spending: They don’t. If someone goes on TV and says we have to feed the poor, ten voices will be raised howling “How much will that cost?” and “We can’t afford it!” A president flips 20 missiles into a foreign country, at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars from construction to deployment to launch, and “How much did that cost?” never seems to come up.

    It comes down to this: Every bullet, every bomb, every attack helicopter, every destroyer, every fighter jet, every field meal, every tent, every rifle, every pistol, every grenade, every land mine, every missile, every submarine (!), every uniform, every pair of boots, every body bag, every coffin, every everything that goes into the U.S. war-making machine is money flooding into some “defense” contractor’s bank account and stock portfolio.

    It has been 73 years since the onset of the first Cold War, and the “terror” war is not quite the money spigot it was for the last two decades. Still, 53 cents of every tax dollar goes to the fighting of and preparation for war already, and a new Cold War with China would dramatically increase that.

    It goes entirely without saying that a new Cold War with China is an astonishingly terrible idea, an undermining of nuclear nonproliferation efforts and a good reason for China to harm the U.S. by way of the massive share of our economy they already own and control. The potential cost in human life is nigh incalculable… but ask yourself this: When was the last time you can remember the warmakers actually thinking things through when massive profits were in play? I’m stumped.

    There is also this: Among the many things the Cold War is remembered for, inflicted popular fear and mass control stand out. Here in the “free” U.S., the groupthink inspired by enmity toward the Soviet Union destroyed lives and constrained liberty for decades. It inspired two lucrative shooting wars, one of which technically never ended and another that lasted 20 years, along with a dozen proxy skirmishes around the world. All of this invigorated the fury and paranoia of enforced patriotism, and did great and lasting damage to those who did not take up the standard of war.

    As we enter an era of unrest, amid racist police violence and state efforts to repress the popular uprising against it, a fascist authoritarian surge in the halls of government everywhere, and a climate preparing to show us all who is really in charge around here, a new Cold War with all attendant mechanisms of enforced control would be just the ticket for those looking to make a buck while avoiding actual solutions to these concerns.

    “If you want a picture of the future,” wrote George Orwell, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” I am forced to wonder if future years will have us looking back on this seemingly insignificant submarine deal between the U.S. and Australia the way historians today regard George Kennan’s “Long Telegram”: One diplomat’s long transatlantic missive that is now widely regarded as the seedcorn for U.S. Cold War policy toward the U.S.S.R. — along with all its consequences — for the next five decades. It had to start somewhere. It always does.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Regional countries react to AUKUS and Australia’s nuclear-powered submarine ambition

    Southeast Asian countries have raised concerns that Canberra’s decision to develop and procure eight nuclear-powered submarines under a trilateral security partnership with the United Kingdom and United States, announced on 15 September and collectively known as AUKUS, will spark a regional arms race. The nuclear submarine initiative signals an end to Australia’s contract with French […]

    The post Regional countries react to AUKUS and Australia’s nuclear-powered submarine ambition appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Impossible Pork is Here: Global Launch for Vegan Meat Giant

    4 Mins Read Impossible Foods has announced that it is launching its plant-based Impossible Pork product globally. After its initial debut in New York at famed Chef David Chang’s Momofuku bar in New York, Impossible Pork is set to roll out across restaurants in Hong Kong in October, before landing in Singapore in the coming weeks.  Impossible Foods […]

    The post Impossible Pork is Here: Global Launch for Vegan Meat Giant appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.