While I am just “so-so” as a word smith, there are other that are more perceptive and better suited to document the decline and collapse of the American Global Empire. Here, we have a writer who editorialized how he believes America is starting to get involved in yet another “cold war” with China. I read his writing, found them brilliant, but feel that he is missing out on the big picture. America is collapsing all around us.
There won’t be any “cold war” where the world is on “America’s side”, and the “evil empire” is isolated.
Nope. Instead, China will continue to be aligned with Russia, and will continue to design, invent and manufacture high-end, high quality products. While the cheaper products and simpler constructions will be made in third-world nations for export to Americans at ridiculously high prices.
Americans in turn will continue to be manipulated, taxed, and generally forced into government-sponsored servitude of one form or the other. Social mobility will be non-existent. And American will live eating the cheapest foods, possessing the cheapest gear, and working the longest hours while praising their “inherent freedoms”…
The following is an article titled “The new Cold War with China has cost lives against coronavirus” written by Max Blumenthal@MaxBlumenthal for the Chicago Reader. It was edited to fit this venue, but aside from that, left intact. All credit to the author.
More than any event since the financial crash, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the rotten foundation of American empire.
By Max Blumenthal@MaxBlumenthal
Chinese president Xi Jinping has called his country’s fight against coronavirus “the People’s War,” while President Trump calls the disease "the China virus."
-Narendra Modi; SHEALAH craighead
March 19, 2020, was a milestone for the People’s Republic of China.
After enduring over two months of an epidemic of novel coronavirus,
China reported that it experienced its first day without a new case of
locally transmitted infection. After placing 46 million residents in
Wuhan and 15 other cities under quarantine, mobilizing thousands of
medical professionals to the front lines, building new hospitals
practically overnight, and implementing cautionary measures
such as forcing banks to disinfect cash, the country turned a corner in
what its president, Xi Jinping, called “the People’s War.”
Throughout the crisis, leaders of the World Health Organization
(WHO) heaped praise on the Chinese government. “Its actions actually
helped prevent the spread of coronavirus to other countries,” said WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Tedros, as he is known, added that he was “very impressed and
encouraged by the president [Xi’s] detailed knowledge of the outbreak.”
Tedros’s assistant, Dr. Bruce Aylward, who also visited China, was
astounded by what he observed: “What I saw was a tremendous sense of
responsibility, and of duty, to protect their families, their
communities, and even the world, from this disease,” Aylward marveled
in a televised interview. “I left with such a deep sense of admiration
for the people of Wuhan and for Chinese society in general.”
During the early days of the crisis around Wuhan, Chinese
authorities took some ham-fisted measures to suppress public discussion
of the outbreak. Perhaps Beijing was in denial about the gravity of the
epidemic, or terrified of its societal ramifications. It was not long,
however, before the Chinese government made the genome of the virus
public, shared detailed information
about the virus with the international community, and provided
intelligence to the WHO, which relayed it to the U.S. Center for Disease
Control (CDC). In fact, Health and Human Services Director Alex Azar recently revealed
that the CDC first learned about coronavirus from Chinese colleagues on
January 3. Tragically, while Beijing was buying valuable time for the
West to prepare for the lethal pandemic, and losing the lives of medical
personnel in the process, Washington chose conflict over cooperation.
Almost as soon as news of the viral outbreak reached the West,
mainstream pundits turned up their noses and sneered at China’s
aggressive response. A now-discredited January 24 op-ed
published in Slate and authored in conjunction with the Democratic
Party-affiliated New America Foundation proclaimed, “Many of China’s
actions to date are overly aggressive and ineffective in quelling the
outbreak.” The Los Angeles Times reinforced the condescending line, mocking President Xi’s efforts to rally Chinese citizens as “shoddy propaganda.” At around the same time, the cover of the neoliberal Economist magazine depicted China as a global disease infecting the planet—an authoritarian plague that threatened the free world more than any pandemic.
For his part, Trump has referred to the sickness as the “China virus,” deploying xenophobic bile to deflect blame for weeks of inaction. (“We have it totally under control,” the president insisted on January 22,
trying in vain to calm markets. A month later, Trump claimed without
evidence, “The people that have [coronavirus] are getting better.”) By
March 14, as coronavirus exploded throughout New York City and Seattle,
Joseph Biden took to the stage of a Democratic presidential debate and
painted the sickness as a foreign weapon of mass destruction. “This is
like we are being attacked from abroad!” he bellowed. CNN debate moderator Dana Bash proceeded to push
the candidates to propose “consequences” China should face for the
coronavirus–not lessons the U.S. could learn from China’s successful
fight against it.
In reflexive and mostly bipartisan fashion, the U.S. political
class has exploited a pandemic to ratchet up hostility against China.
While the rising power is a necessary partner against a gathering storm
of disease and societal unraveling, too many in Washington are unable to
see Beijing as anything other than the greatest single threat to
American global hegemony.
Over the past seven decades, the U.S. has encircled China with hundreds of military bases,threading
bombers, naval warships, and nuclear-tipped missiles into a
geopolitical noose. President Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” designated a
full two-thirds of U.S. naval forces to contain China, setting the
stage for a new Cold War. Trump’s national defense doctrine formally
enshrined the strategy by declaring “great power competition” with Beijing and Moscow as the Pentagon’s top priority. A trade war followed, with the U.S. jailing a CEO of the Chinese telecom company Huawei, banning its 5G technology, and slapping hefty tariffs on $112 billion on Chinese imports. Dubiously sourced stories
of Holocaust-level human rights violations by China supplied the new
Cold War with heartstring-tugging background music, drawing suggestible
Western liberals into the hostile narrative.
The same U.S. leadership class that launched the first Cold War and
reignited it during the Obama and Trump eras has also presided over a
systematic degradation of America’s public health system. While the task
of providing health care was handed over to corporations, the number of
beds per 1,000 Americans declined steadily from 4.5 in 1975 to 2.5 in
2014, according to the CDC.
Having left its citizens on the verge of mass suffocation by a ghastly
respiratory infection, the U.S. government has little to offer them
today beyond Cold War bluster and corporate bailouts.
More than any event since the 2008-09 financial crash, the
coronavirus pandemic has exposed the rotten foundation of American
empire—and it has only begun to exact its toll. By March 19, the day
that China declared victory over coronavirus, the U.S. achieved a
milestone of its own: it boasted the sharpest increase
in deaths and new infections per day of any country in the world. New
York City had become ground zero for the sickness, with 10,000 new
cases. At one Brooklyn emergency hospital, a doctor melted down over the
lack of resources. “It’s a disaster,” he fretted.
“We just had a half dozen staff test positive. We have 17 ventilators
left in the institution. Some staff can’t come because they’re getting
wiped out.”
In hospitals across the country, emergency room doctors have been
forced to fashion their own masks, or to simply wear a bandana over
their faces. Doctors badly needed N95 air-filtering respirator masks to
protect themselves from infection while they treated patients hacking up
toxic sputum. The Trump administration has invoked the Defense
Production Act, a Korean War-era provision that would enable him to
compel American businesses to produce urgently needed products.
Revealingly, Trump has refused to implement the act on the grounds that doing so would mimic Venezuelan-style socialism.
While doctors wait in vain for N95 masks, a bipartisan group of 130
lawmakers made their real priorities clear when they issued a call for a
massive buildup of F-35 jets. “Full funding is needed for the delivery
of new weapons and critical capabilities necessary to keep the F-35
ahead of our adversaries,” the lawmakers wrote in a March 19 letter to the Pentagon, demanding 98 new stealth fighters at a cost of $94 million each.
If anything has been more elusive than protective masks—and less
functional than the accident-prone F-35—it is America’s coronavirus
testing system. Testing kits were magically provided to entire NBA teams
and A-list celebrities with symptoms, but ask any average American in
need where they plan to get screened, and you’re almost certain to draw a
blank. As Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, confessed
in testimony to Congress,“The idea of anybody getting [tested] easily
the way people in other countries are doing it, we are not set up for
that. Do I think we should be? Yes. But we are not.”
Inside China, an already effective coronavirus screening regimen is
likely to improve thanks to an innovative test that can be administered
in airports, and that produces results in just 40 minutes. The creator
of the groundbreaking test, Weihong Tan, was a professor at the
University of Florida’s cancer research lab until last year, when the
Department of Justice targeted him
with a McCarthy-style investigation. Accused by a Cold War-crazed U.S.
government of failing to disclose Chinese funding for his department, he
returned to Hunan University, where he found ample government support
for his lifesaving research.
With its hollowed out public health-care system overwhelmed by a
pandemic in just its early phase, the U.S. has sat and watched as China
embarks on the largest international humanitarian mission in modern
times. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has effusively thanked China
for donating two million surgical masks, 200,000 N95 masks, and 50,000
testing kits to hard-hit areas of Europe. After welcoming a massive
delivery of Chinese aid to his country, Serbian President Aleksandar
Vucic angrily accused the EU of abandonment:
“European solidarity does not exist. That was a fairytale. The only
country that can help us in this hard situation is the People’s Republic
of China. For the rest of them, thanks for nothing.”
In response to China’s humanitarian crusade, the Trump administration’s National Security Council has rolled out
a coordinated propaganda offensive blaming China for “covering up”
coronavirus. Ironically, the same corporate networks that have spent the
past year clamoring for Trump’s impeachment have provided the White
House with an eager megaphone for its anti-China crusade. A report by
CNN, for instance, suggested dark motives behind China’s delivery of
ventilators and masks to Europe, claiming Beijing was “possibly trying
to curry favor.” On Twitter, trending hashtags like #ChinaLiedAndPeopleDied have suddenly materialized, amplifying the Trump administration’s influence operation.
While China and the tiny, U.S.-embargoed nation of Cuba send medical brigades to hard-hit regions of Europe, Washington is sending the world sanctions and shows of military force.
The Trump administration has zealously weaponized coronavirus to drive
its “maximum pressure” policy of regime change against Iran, where the
death toll is approaching 2,000. During a March 18 press conference,
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vowed to ramp up crushing sanctions on Iran, even though (or perhaps because) the economic blockade was preventing the country from purchasing vital medicine and ventilators. In Venezuela, meanwhile, U.S. sanctions have increased the cost of a coronavirus test to three times more than in non-sanctioned countries.
Those who find Trump’s actions at home and abroad deadly and
dangerous must take heart that his opponents in the Democratic Party
have united behind Biden, who seems to forget where he is at times. One of the 76-year-old former vice president’s most recent public appearances
saw him in a makeshift studio in his Delaware home, staring off into
the distance in a stupor, seemingly frozen in confusion, until his wife
shuffled him off camera. Dogged by rumors of dementia following a
comically stumbling performance on the presidential trail, where his shell of a campaign has been sustained by some 60 faceless billionaires,
Biden disappeared for an entire week in mid-March, as the crisis
reached its apex in the U.S. He finally resurfaced on March 23 for a
deeply uninspiring online livestream that pitted the stammering
candidate against a barely functional teleprompter.
As the pandemic spreads across the country, college students have
descended on the beaches of South Florida for the spring break beer bash
that has become a rite of passage for the young and mindless. The
state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a Harvard graduate who was
narrowly elected after warning his African American opponent would “monkey this up,”
defended his decision to keep beaches open for the annual bacchanal.
“If you have a Floridian that goes and walks their dog, like a married
couple on the beach,” De Santis eloquently explained, “as long as you’re not within six feet of each other, they view that as a healthy thing.”
With the shores wide open for randy fun, a widely-watched video circulated on Twitter showing a sun-burned bro gawking
at a bikini-clad woman slurping a Bud Light through the rear end of a
bent-over co-ed and exclaiming, “Nobody gives a fuck about coronavirus
here!”
Shelter in place and grab a protective mask if you can find one. The deluge has just begun. v
Correction: An earlier version of this piece misidentified Xi Jinping as the premier of China; he is the president.
Conclusion
It will not be long now. Four years tops. Maybe as early as one year. Figure all Hell to unravel around 2023 or so.
This is part one.
You can read part two HERE.
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