Illustration above; 2022 is the year of the "Wet Tiger".

America is not a happy country.

If the current power grid can't handle a night of 20 degree temperature without rolling blackouts, how will we plug 100 million electric cars into the grid? 

Is there any country that tax their citizens and sends some of it to America?

Imagine, if you will, a world where every tweet and meme must be fact checked but not a ballot. 

How to stop drunk drivers from killing sober drivers? Ban sober drivers from driving. That's exactly how gun control works. 

Can we still order black coffee? Are brownies being taken off the shelf? Is White Castle changing its name? I'm sure Cracker Barrel is screwed. Can we still play Chinese checkers? Is that season still called Indian summer? No more Italian sausages? 

How far do you want to go with this foolishness? 

The 'Payday' candy bar is changing its name since it's offensive to those who don't work. 

Hell of a job, Democrats! You've managed to bring back the 1918 pandemic, the 1929 depression, the 1968 race riots and the 1973 gas prices - all at the same time. 

In this article, we will provide a global Sitrep concerning the state of the world at the conclusion of the Beijing Winter Olympics in February 2022. During this period, both Russia and China signed a very comprehensive agreement that defined a very detailed plan for global coorination and cooperation. And as I write this article, it is being implemented with great speed and gusto.

Here we will collect some articles, and misc brick-a-brack that will accumulatively (in total) provide a fine understanding of the global changes that are now occurring all over the planet. (Which, by the way, are NOT being reported on in the Western Media.)

Instead the Western media are reporting other things. Like this screen shot from the American “news” aggregator “DrudgeReport” 8FEB22.

This article consists of related articles concerning various geographic regions thoughout the world. If you, the reader, think only in terms of your nation and may either Russia or China, you might this article collection to be a tad boring.

However, it covers a wade swatch of signifigant nation states. When you read the articles you will have a far better picture about what is going on in the world as the power-base shifts from a uni-polar world led by the United States to one that is multi-polar and not ruled at all.

We kick off this discussion with the United Nations.

[0] United Nations

"...demonizing china and russia at every turn and at such a scale, i was thinking the third war is imminent. now i know better, the entire world is against the empire. they abused propaganda and brainwashing tactics so much that only thing their adversaries need to do is just tell the truth."

-demonize | Feb 8 2022 22:17 utc

Rules for the World

4915 Views February 07, 2022 From HERE

by Observer R for the Saker Blog

BACKGROUND

On February 4, 2022, on the occasion of the opening of the XXIV Olympic Winter Games in Beijing, the presidents of China and Russia issued a document entitled:

Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development

This document sets a new level in the cooperation between the two countries in foreign policy and is their exposition of a common viewpoint for setting out the rules that the world should follow in politics among nations.

A key section up front contains the following:

“The sides call on all States…

...to protect the United Nations-driven international architecture and the international law-based world order, 

...seek genuine multipolarity with the United Nations and its Security Council playing a central and coordinating role….”

The reliance on the United Nations (UN) as the major guiding rulemaker is an important point.

A major question concerning this reliance is the extent to which the design of the UN matches the current reality of the world distribution of wealth and power.

The UN was set up in 1945 according to a design that reflected the post-WWII distribution of economic output and advanced weapon systems.

Overall, it was based on the outcome of that war, with the winners getting the spoils and the losers getting the left-overs.

After some seventy-seven years, the situation has radically changed.

According to the CIA Fact Book,

China now has a larger economy than the US,

India is independent and has the third largest economy,

and India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea have become nuclear powers.

Japan and Germany each have larger populations and economies than either Britain or France.

And yet, the permanent members of the UN Security Council with veto rights are the same nations that were made members in 1945.

This is not a recipe for sustainable development of UN-based rules for a peaceable world.

Of course, there have been many calls for reform of the UN ever since it was founded.

A quick search for “reform of the united nations” turns up a cornucopia of websites dealing with the topic.

Everything from Wikipedia, various think-tanks, to the United Nations University has articles on the subject.

They point out in great detail the many reforms proposed and the far fewer reforms completed over the seventy-seven years.

All of them, however, tend to point out the immense difficulty in getting any agreement on any changes to the Security Council.

UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL ACTIONS

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) regularly concerns itself with various controversies around the world and adopts measures intended to ameliorate difficult situations.

However, there appears to be a lack of foresight in considering how the measures might be lifted when no longer needed or appropriate.

For example, the UNSC placed sanctions on North Korea over the nuclear proliferation issue, but now Russia and China would like to have the sanctions lifted, but this is blocked by the United States (US).

The UNSC also placed sanctions on Iran, some of which have now expired, but which seemed mostly to support the US interests.

With the benefit of hindsight, it would appear that Russia and China may have done better simply to have informal agreements with the other permanent members of the UNSC to institute sanctions and other measures when useful, thus leaving the two countries free to change tactics when the measures were no longer useful from their viewpoint.

This is especially true since both Russia and China are claiming to uphold the UN as the proper international body for making rules and would suffer great loss of face if they broke one of the UN rules.

The same is not true for the US since it is quite adept at following the “international rules-based order” that it conveniently makes up as it goes along.

The US claims to follow a higher order that is based on democracy and humanitarian issues.

Perhaps Russia and China knew what they were doing at the time, but it would be helpful to have an expert analysis of how they plan to avoid being trapped like this in the future.

UNITED NATIONS ORGANIZATION

Permanent membership in the Security Council is a bone of contention that will likely get worse as the years go by since some major countries are excluded, while some less prominent countries are included.

If China can be a member, then it will be more and more difficult to explain why India is not a member.

If Russia is a member, it still will be a question as to why Japan is not.

Having permanent members confined to the countries on the winning side in WWII will not be an adequate answer three-quarters of a century later and in light of all the changes that have transpired since the war.

If Britain and France are members, why not Germany and Brazil?

Is the criteria the possession of nuclear weapons, or the size of the economy, or the land area, or the population?

Now that India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea have nuclear weapons, should they become permanent members?

Russia and China are again in an awkward position claiming the UN as the organizing force in the world, when the UN is obviously not structured to match the actual makeup of the world.

In addition, the UN headquarters was located in the US, reportedly because that was an inducement for the US to join the organization.

The fact that New York was undamaged by WWII and transportation was by steamship made it a logical choice at the time.

Now, however, travel is by air and there are many locations with good facilities and transport options.

In addition, the US places travel restrictions on diplomats trying to attend UN meetings in New York, and the UN employees also are subject to US rules.

Consequently, it would appear that a proper world management organization should be located in a small neutral country that possesses modern facilities and means of communication, and excellent air travel options to all other countries.

Another example of stress is the continuing issue of the Palestinians and the votes in the UN General Assembly on this topic.

The votes overwhelmingly go against the US position and yet next to nothing seems to ever be done.

There is no doubt that “safety in numbers” is a factor here—the US cannot sanction nearly 200 countries because they vote the “wrong way” at the same time.

In any event, the current UN setup is likely to experience continuing severe stress and instability in the coming years, unless these issues and likely others are addressed.

Some solutions could be helpful here also, since it bears directly on the Russian and Chinese positions concerning who makes the rules for the world.

INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

Another factor that China and Russia need to address is the question of independence, neutrality, and impartiality of the various international organizations that promote and enforce international rules.

Several news reports and allegations have arisen concerning the activities of three such organizations: Interpol, OPCW, and IAEA.

Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization) is the subject of controversy because a general from the UAE was just selected as President despite vigorous opposition due to his qualifications and background.

The OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) is in the news with complaints over its investigations of chemical weapons in Syria. Whistleblowers have come forth with damaging accusations about the organization’s activities and its alleged bias.

The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) is in a difficult position in checking up on Iran’s nuclear activities while not being able to check up on other West Asian countries’ nuclear activities. The Director just called for a change in the rules so that the IAEA could check up on Israel’s nuclear activities.

Many analysts suggest that there exists an undue influence on these organizations by the US, which prevents them from impartial operation.

Consequently, if the world is to move forward in a rules-based order using rules made by the UN and the affiliated international organizations, then China and Russia will need to exert more effort to ensure impartiality and more universal coverage of said rules.

This issue also applies to “international law” as it appears in court cases such as at the International Criminal Court (ICC), and in the various treaties such as the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

This is especially pertinent now that the US has announced that it will move from containment of China to competition with China.

The competition appears to be focused on the US and its allies in the West attempting to have more influence over the system of international rules than China.

The European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy essentially admitted that basis for competition when he stated in essence: He who sets the standards, rules the world.

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

The Joint Statement places a lot of emphasis on the various regional organizations that China and/or Russia belong to.

There is a favorable reference to the grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, & South Africa (BRICS), although political changes in the constituent countries have made it less coherent.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is Asian-based, as are several others, including the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The document contains many proposals for widening the involvement of these organizations in the many pressing issues confronting Asia.

A reading between the lines suggests that China and Russia plan to go ahead with getting a more robust set of rules for Asia, even if there is less prospect currently for agreements on world-wide rules.

CONCLUSION

China and Russia have issued a very long and very detailed statement of their goals for the future.

They specifically mention many international organizations and agreements, and provide concrete details about what they support and what they would like changed.

It is much more than a listing of political pious platitudes.

Nevertheless, it reads in large part like a political campaign statement for their domestic audiences and marching orders for their officials and bureaucrats.

It is, therefore, likely to be disappointing to those analysts who had perhaps expected something more concerning rules for the world.

The statements about relying on the UN and international law are fine as aspirations, but lack any specific proposals as to how to turn sentiment into reality.

For the past seventy-seven years, the UN has been under the major influence of the US and international law has been under the influence of the rules-based order designed by the US.

The Joint Statement does not directly provide clues about how China and Russia propose to deal with this situation during the next seventy-seven years.

…

Let’s look at the various geographical regions. We start with Europe.

It’s a destination / origination point for the BRI, and runs through the Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the Xinjiang region (Uighur) of China.

[1] Europe

The US is losing its shit now. Putin should head to Berlin now and set out the alternatives in that flawless deutsche Sprache of his. The arrogance and hubris of a dying empire.

-Patroklos | Feb 8 2022 21:53 utc

China rail transports to Europe jumped

Did you know that the total number of China-Europe freight trains has risen to 50,000?

As of February this year (2022), more than 50,000 freight train trips between Europe and China have been made since the first Europe-bound train left the city of Chongqing in 2011.

▪️The China-Europe railway via about 70 routes connects 89 cities in China with 180 cities in 23 European countries with an average travel time of less than 20 days, which is significantly faster than shipping (about 70 days)

▪️The total cargo volume has exceeded 4.55 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) with IT products, automobiles and parts, chemicals, mechanical and electronic products among others with a total value of EUR 211 billion (the value of goods transported by China-Europe freight trains rose from EUR 7 billion in 2016 to EUR 65.8 billion in 2021)

▪️In 2021, the number of China-Europe freight trains amounted to 15,000 (1.46 million TEU, in comparison: capacity Ever Given 20,124 TEU), a Y-o-Y increase of 22%

▪️The share of China-Europe freight trains in total trade between China and Europe has increased from 1.5% in 2016 to 8% in 2021

▪️In 2021, the border point of Khorgos became the main port of entry or exit for China (previously, this was Alashankou; in 2021, 5,848 China-Europe trains were operated via Alashankou, while 6,362 China-Europe trains were handled at Khorgos)

▪️As of January 6, the average cost of transporting a standard 40-foot sea container by sea between China and Europe on 8 major routes was EUR 8,300, 5 times more than before the COVID-19 pandemic – by comparison, transporting a similar container from China to Paris by rail, costs was about EUR 7,000 (Drewry Shipping, SNCF) with subsidized transportation on the return route being cheap as EUR 1,800

▪️Rail accounts for only 5% of the total transport market between Europe and China but that number could double by 2030 (Drewry Shipping)

Side facts:

• Containers moving between Europe and China must be switched to new rail cars twice, once at the China-Kazakhstan border and again at the Poland-Belarus border, since former Soviet countries use a different rail gauge than China and Europe
• The total imports and exports between China and the European Union reached a total of EUR 728 billion (a Y-o-Y increase of 27.5%) with China remaining the EU’s largest trading partner, while the EU was China’s second-largest trading partner

…

I commented that 3rd graders could understand the concepts. 

Last week, I linked to this paper, "Indivisible Security and Collective Security Concepts: Implications for Russia’s Relations with the West". 

Indeed, the entire scenario we are currently within is all about Law, specifically the UN Charter and the basis it sets for International Law that's violated daily by the Outlaw US Empire. 

Monarchies make Unilateral decisions, while democracies supposedly do so only after having an informed public debate prior to the decision being taken, thus rendering it something other than unilateral. 

Thus, we have "fixing facts around the policy" by two clandestine Monarchies.

- karlof1 | Feb 8 2022 19:49 utc

Now, this is unacceptable to the United States. The BRI is a direct threat to the ability of the United States to control naval shipping, and isolate China, Russia and Europe.

Here is an article that discusses this matter…

America’s real adversaries are its European and other allies: The U.S. aim is to keep them from trading with China and Russia

8564 Views February 07, 2022 From HERE

By Michael Hudson

The Iron Curtain of the 1940s and ‘50s was ostensibly designed to isolate Russia from Western Europe – to keep out Communist ideology and military penetration.

Today’s sanctions regime is aimed inward, to prevent America’s NATO and other Western allies from opening up more trade and investment with Russia and China.

The aim is not so much to isolate Russia and China as to hold these allies firmly within America’s own economic orbit.

Allies are to forego the benefits of importing Russian gas and Chinese products, buying much higher-priced U.S. LNG and other exports, capped by more U.S. arms.

The sanctions that U.S. diplomats are insisting that their allies impose against trade with Russia and China are aimed ostensibly at deterring a military buildup.

But such a buildup cannot possibly really be the main Russian and Chinese concern.

They have much more to gain by offering mutual economic benefits to the West. So the underlying question is whether Europe will find its advantage in replacing U.S. exports with Russian and Chinese supplies and the associated mutual economic linkages.

What worries American diplomats is that Germany, other NATO nations and countries along the Belt and Road route understand the gains that can be made by opening up peaceful trade and investment.

If there is no Russian or Chinese plan to invade or bomb them, what is the need for NATO?

What is the need for such heavy purchases of U.S. military hardware by America’s affluent allies?

And if there is no inherently adversarial relationship, why do foreign countries need to sacrifice their own trade and financial interests by relying exclusively on U.S. exporters and investors?

These are the concerns that have prompted French Prime Minister Macron to call forth the ghost of Charles de Gaulle and urge Europe to turn away from what he calls NATO’s “brain-dead” Cold War and beak with the pro-U.S. trade arrangements that are imposing rising costs on Europe while denying it potential gains from trade with Eurasia.

Even Germany is balking at demands that it freeze by this coming March by going without Russian gas.

Instead of a real military threat from Russia and China, the problem for American strategists is the absence of such a threat.

All countries have come to realize that the world has reached a point at which no industrial economy has the manpower and political ability to mobilize a standing army of the size that would be needed to invade or even wage a major battle with a significant adversary.

That political cost makes it uneconomic for Russia to retaliate against NATO adventurism prodding at its western border trying to incite a military response. It’s just not worth taking over Ukraine.

America’s rising pressure on its allies threatens to drive them out of the U.S. orbit.

For over 75 years they had little practical alternative to U.S. hegemony.

But that is now changing.

America no longer has the monetary power and seemingly chronic trade and balance-of-payments surplus that enabled it to draw up the world’s trade and investment rules in 1944-45.

The threat to U.S. dominance is that China, Russia and Mackinder’s Eurasian World Island heartland are offering better trade and investment opportunities than are available from the United States with its increasingly desperate demand for sacrifices from its NATO and other allies.

The most glaring example is the U.S. drive to block Germany from authorizing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to obtain Russian gas for the coming cold weather.

Angela Merkel agreed with Donald Trump to spend $1 billion building a new LNG port to become more dependent on highly priced U.S. LNG. (The plan was cancelled after the U.S. and German elections changed both leaders.)

But Germany has no other way of heating many of its houses and office buildings (or supplying its fertilizer companies) than with Russian gas.

The only way left for U.S. diplomats to block European purchases is to goad Russia into a military response and then claim that avenging this response outweighs any purely national economic interest.

As hawkish Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, explained in a State Department press briefing on January 27:

“If Russia invades Ukraine one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”[1]

The problem is to create a suitably offensive incident and depict Russia as the aggressor.

Nuland expressed who was dictating the policies of NATO members succinctly in 2014: “Fuck the EU.”

That was said as she told the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine that the State Department was backing the puppet Arseniy Yatsenyuk as Ukrainian prime minister (removed after two years in a corruption scandal), and U.S. political agencies backed the bloody Maidan massacre that ushered in what are now eight years of civil war.

The result devastated Ukraine much as U.S. violence had done in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is not a policy of world peace or democracy that European voters endorse.

U.S. trade sanctions imposed on its NATO allies extend across the trade spectrum.

Austerity-ridden Lithuania gave up its cheese and agricultural market in Russia, and is blocking its state-owned railroad from carrying Belarus potash to the Baltic port of Klaipeda.

The port’s majority owner complained that “Lithuania will lose hundreds of millions of dollars from halting Belarus exports through Klaipeda,” and “could face legal claims of $15 billion over broken contracts.”^[2]

Lithuania has even agreed to U.S. prompting to recognize Taiwan, resulting in China refusing to import German or other products that include Lithuanian-made components.

Europe is to impose sanctions at the cost of rising energy and agricultural prices by giving priority to imports from the United States and foregoing Russian, Belarusian and other linkages outside of the Dollar Area.

As Sergey Lavrov put matters:

“When the United States thinks that something suits its interests, it can betray those with whom it was friendly, with whom it cooperated and who catered to its positions around the world.”[3]

America’s sanctions on its allies hurt their economies, not those of Russia and China

What seems ironic is that such sanctions against Russia and China have ended up helping rather than hurting them.

But the primary aim was not to hurt nor to help the Russian and Chinese economies.

After all, it is axiomatic that sanctions force the targeted countries to become more self-reliant.

Deprived of Lithuanian cheese, Russian producers have produced their own, and no longer need to import it from the Baltic states.

America’s underlying economic rivalry is aimed at keeping European and its allied Asian countries in its own increasingly protected economic orbit.

Germany, Lithuania and other allies are told to impose sanctions directed against their own economic welfare by not trading with countries outside the U.S. dollar-area orbit.

Quite apart from the threat of actual war resulting from U.S. bellicosity, the cost to America’s allies of surrendering to U.S. trade and investment demands is becoming so high as to be politically unaffordable.

For nearly a century there has been little alternative but to agree to trade and investment rules favoring the U.S. economy as the price of receiving U.S. financial and trade support and even military security. But an alternative is now threatening to emerge – one offering benefits from China’s Belt and Road initiative, and from Russia’s desire for foreign investment to help modernize its industrial organization, as seemed to be promised thirty years ago in 1991.

Ever since the closing years of World War II, U.S. diplomacy has aimed at locking Britain, France, and especially defeated Germany and Japan, into becoming U.S. economic and military dependencies.

As I documented in Super Imperialism, American diplomats broke up the British Empire and absorbed its Sterling Area by the onerous terms imposed first by Lend-Lease and then the Anglo-American Loan Agreement of 1946.

The latter’s terms obliged Britain to give up its Imperial Preference policy and unblock the sterling balances that India and other colonies had accumulated for their raw-materials exports during the war, thus opening the British Commonwealth to U.S. exports.

Britain committed itself not to recover its prewar markets by devaluing sterling.

U.S. diplomats then created the IMF and World Bank on terms that promoted U.S. export markets and deterred competition from Britain and other former rivals.

Debates in the House of Lords and the House of Commons showed that British politicians recognized that they were being consigned to a subservient economic position, but felt that they had no alternative.

And once they gave up, U.S. diplomats had a free hand in confronting the rest of Europe.

Financial power has enabled America to continue dominating Western diplomacy despite being forced off gold in 1971 as a result of the balance-of-payments costs of its overseas military spending.

For the past half-century, foreign countries have kept their international monetary reserves in U.S. dollars – mainly in U.S. Treasury securities, U.S. bank accounts and other financial investments in the U.S. economy.

The Treasury-bill standard obliges foreign central banks to finance America’s military-based balance-of-payments deficit – and in the process, the domestic government budget deficit.

The United States does not need this recycling to create money.

The government can simply print money, as MMT has demonstrated. But the United States does need this foreign central bank dollar recycling to balance its international payments and support the dollar’s exchange rate.

If the dollar were to decline, foreign countries would find it much easier to pay international dollar-debts in their own currencies.

U.S. import prices would rise, and it would be more costly for U.S. investors to buy foreign assets.

And foreigners would lose money on U.S. stocks and bonds as denominated in their own currencies, and would drop them.

Central banks in particular would take a loss on the Treasury’s dollar bonds that they hold in their monetary reserves – and would find their interest to lie in moving out of the dollar.

So the U.S. balance of payments and exchange rate are both threatened by U.S. belligerency and military spending throughout the world – yet its diplomats are trying to stabilize matters by ramping up the military threat to crisis levels.

U.S. drives to keep its European and East Asian protectorates locked into its own sphere of influence is threatened by the emergence of China and Russia independently of the United States while the U.S. economy is de-industrializing as a result of its own deliberate policy choices.

The industrial dynamic that made the United States so dominant from the late 19^th century up to the 1970s has given way to an evangelistic neoliberal financialization.

That is why U.S. diplomats need to arm-twist their allies to block their economic relations with post-Soviet Russia and socialist China, whose growth is outstripping that of the United States and whose trade arrangements offer more opportunities for mutual gain.

At issue is how long the United States can block its allies from taking advantage of China’s economic growth.

Will Germany, France and other NATO countries seek prosperity for themselves instead of letting the U.S. dollar standard and trade preferences siphon off their economic surplus?

Oil diplomacy and America’s dream for post-Soviet Russia

The expectation of Gorbachev and other Russian officials in 1991 was that their economy would turn to the West for reorganization along the lines that had made the U.S., German and other economies so prosperous.

The mutual expectation in Russia and Western Europe was for German, French and other investors to restructure the post-Soviet economy along more efficient lines.

That was not the U.S. plan.

When Senator John McCain called Russia “a gas station with atom bombs,” that was America’s dream for what they wanted Russia to be – with Russia’s gas companies passing into control by U.S. stockholders, starting with the planned buyout of Yukos as arranged with Mikhail Khordokovsky.

The last thing that U.S. strategists wanted to see was a thriving revived Russia.

U.S. advisors sought to privatize Russia’s natural resources and other non-industrial assets, by turning them over to kleptocrats who could “cash out” on the value of what they had privatized only by selling to U.S. and other foreign investors for hard currency.

The result was a neoliberal economic and demographic collapse throughout the post-Soviet states.

In some ways, America has been turning itself into its own version of a gas station with atom bombs (and arms exports).

U.S. oil diplomacy aims to control the world’s oil trade so that its enormous profits will accrue to the major U.S. oil companies.

It was to keep Iranian oil in the hands of British Petroleum that the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt worked with British Petroleum’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company to overthrow Iran’s elected leader Mohammed Mossadegh in 1954 when he sought to nationalize the company after it refused decade after decade to perform its promised contributions to the economy.

After installing the Shah whose democracy was based on a vicious police state, Iran threatened once again to act as the master of its own oil resources.

So it was once again confronted with U.S.-sponsored sanctions, which remain in effect today.

The aim of such sanctions is to keep the world oil trade firmly under U.S. control, because oil is energy and energy is the key to productivity and real GDP.

In cases where foreign governments such as Saudi Arabia and neighboring Arab petrostates have taken control, the export earnings of their oil are to be deposited in U.S. financial markets to support the dollar’s exchange rate and U.S. financial domination.

When they quadrupled their oil prices in 1973-74 (in response to the U.S. quadrupling of its grain-export prices), the U.S. State Department laid down the law and told Saudi Arabia that it could charge as much as it wanted for its oil (thereby raising the price umbrella for U.S. oil producers), but it had to recycle its oil-export earnings to the United States in dollar-denominated securities – mainly in U.S. Treasury securities and U.S. bank accounts, along with some minority holdings of U.S. stocks and bonds (but only as passive investors, not using this financial power to control corporate policy).

The second mode of recycling oil-export earnings was to buy U.S. arms exports, with Saudi Arabia becoming one of the military-industrial complex’s largest customers. U.S. arms production actually is not primarily military in character.

As the world is now seeing in the kerfuffle over Ukraine, America does not have a fighting army.

What it has is what used to be called an “eating army.”

U.S. arms production employs labor and produces weaponry as a kind of prestige good for governments to show off, not for actual fighting.

Like most luxury goods, the markup is very high.

That is the essence of high fashion and style, after all. The MIC uses its profits to subsidize U.S. civilian production in a way that does not violate the letter of international trade laws against government subsidy.

Sometimes, of course, military force is indeed used.

In Iraq, first George W. Bush and then Barack Obama used the military to seize the country’ oil reserves, along with those of Syria and Libya.

Control of world oil has been the buttress of America’s balance of payments.

Despite the global drive to slow the planet’s warming, U.S. officials continue to view oil as the key to America’s economic supremacy.

That is why the U.S. military is still refusing to obey Iraq’s orders to leave their country, keeping its troops in control of Iraqi oil, and why it agreed with the French to destroy Libya and still has troops in the oilfields of Syria.

Closer to home, President Biden has approved offshore drilling and supports Canada’s expansion of its Athabasca tar sands, environmentally the dirtiest oil in the world.

Along with oil and food exports, arms exports support the Treasury-bill standard’s financing of America’s overseas military spending on its 750 bases abroad.

But without a standing enemy constantly threatening at the gates, NATO’s existence falls apart.

What would be the need for countries to buy submarines, aircraft carriers, airplanes, tanks, missiles and other arms?

As the United States has de-industrialized, its trade and balance-of-payments deficit is becoming more problematic.

It needs arms export sales to help reduce its widening trade deficit and also to subsidize its commercial aircraft and related civilian sectors.

The challenge is how to maintain its prosperity and world dominance as it de-industrializes while economic growth is surging ahead in China and now even Russia.

America has lost its industrial cost advantage by the sharp rise in its cost of living and doing business in its financialized post-industrial rentier economy.

Additionally, as Seymour Melman explained in the 1970s, Pentagon capitalism is based on cost-plus contracts: The higher military hardware costs, the more profit its manufacturers receive.

So U.S. arms are over-engineered – hence, the $5000 toilet seats instead of a $50 model.

The main attractiveness of luxury goods after all, including military hardware, is their high price.

This is the background for U.S. fury at its failure to seize Russia’s oil resources – and at seeing Russia also break free militarily to create its own arms exports, which now are typically better and much less costly than those of the U.S.

Today Russia is in the position of Iran in 1954 and again in 1979.

Not only do its oil sales rival those of U.S. LNG, but Russia keeps its oil-export earnings at home to finance its re-industrialization, so as to rebuild the economy that was destroyed by the U.S.-sponsored shock “therapy” of the 1990s.

The line of least resistance for U.S. strategy seeking to maintain control of the world’s oil supply while maintaining its luxury-arms export market via NATO is to Cry Wolf and insist that Russia is on the verge of invading Ukraine – as if Russia had anything to gain by quagmire warfare over Europe’s poorest and least productive economy.

The winter of 2021-22 has seen a long attempt at U.S. prodding of NATO and Russia to fight – without success.

U.S. dreams of a neoliberalized China as a U.S. corporate affiliate

America has de-industrialized as a deliberate policy of slashing production costs as its manufacturing companies have sought low-wage labor abroad, most notably in China.

This shift was not a rivalry with China, but was viewed as mutual gain.

American banks and investors were expected to secure control and the profits of Chinese industry as it was marketized.

The rivalry was between U.S. employers and U.S. labor, and the class-war weapon was offshoring and, in the process, cutting back government social spending.

Similar to the Russian pursuit of oil, arms and agricultural trade independent of U.S. control, China’s offense is keeping the profits of its industrialization at home, retaining state ownership of significant corporations and, most of all, keeping money creation and the Bank of China as a public utility to fund its own capital formation instead of letting U.S. banks and brokerage houses provide its financing and siphon off its surplus in the form of interest, dividends and management fees.

The one saving grace to U.S. corporate planners has been China’s role in deterring U.S. wages from rising by providing a source of low-priced labor to enable American manufacturers to offshore and outsource their production.

The Democratic Party’s class war against unionized labor started in the Carter Administration and greatly accelerated when Bill Clinton opened the southern border with NAFTA.

A string of maquiladoras were established along the border to supply low-priced handicraft labor.

This became so successful a corporate profit center that Clinton pressed to admit China into the World Trade Organization in December 2001, in the closing month of his administration.

The dream was for it to become a profit center for U.S. investors, producing for U.S. companies and financing its capital investment (and housing and government spending too, it was hoped) by borrowing U.S. dollars and organizing its industry in a stock market that, like that of Russia in 1994-96, would become a leading provider of finance-capital gains for U.S. and other foreign investors.

Walmart, Apple and many other U.S. companies organized production facilities in China, which necessarily involved technology transfers and creation of an efficient infrastructure for export trade.

Goldman Sachs led the financial incursion, and helped China’s stock market soar.

All this was what America had been urging.

Where did America’s neoliberal Cold War dream go wrong?

For starters, China did not follow the World Bank’s policy of steering governments to borrow in dollars to hire U.S. engineering firms to provide export infrastructure.

It industrialized in much the same way that the United States and Germany did in the late 19^th century: By heavy public investment in infrastructure to provide basic needs at subsidized prices or freely, from health care and education to transportation and communications, in order to minimize the cost of living that employers and exporters had to pay.

Most important, China avoided foreign debt service by creating its own money and keeping the most important production facilities in its own hands.

U.S. demands are driving its allies out of the dollar-NATO trade and monetary orbit

As in a classical Greek tragedy, U.S. foreign policy is bringing about precisely the outcome that it most fears.

Overplaying their hand with their own NATO allies, U.S. diplomats are bringing about Kissinger’s nightmare scenario, driving Russia and China together.

While America’s allies are told to bear the costs of U.S. sanctions, Russia and China are benefiting by being obliged to diversify and make their own economies independent of reliance on U.S. suppliers of food and other basic needs.

Above all, these two countries are creating their own de-dollarized credit and bank-clearing systems, and holding their international monetary reserves in the form of gold, euros and each other’s currencies to conduct their mutual trade and investment.

This de-dollarization provides an alternative to the unipolar U.S. ability to gain free foreign credit via the U.S. Treasury-bill standard for world monetary reserves.

As foreign countries and their central banks de-dollarize, what will support the dollar?

Without the free line of credit provided by central banks automatically recycling America’s foreign military and other overseas spending back to the U.S. economy (with only a minimal return), how can the United States balance its international payments in the face of its de-industrialization?

The United States cannot simply reverse its de-industrialization and dependence on Chinese and other Asian labor by bringing production back home.

It has built too high a rentier overhead into its economy for its labor to be able to compete internationally, given the U.S. wage-earner’s budgetary demands to pay high and rising housing and education costs, debt service and health insurance, and for privatized infrastructure services.

The only way for the United States to sustain its international financial balance is by monopoly pricing of its arms, patented pharmaceutical and information-technology exports, and by buying control of the most lucrative production and potentially rent-extracting sectors abroad – in other words, by spreading neoliberal economic policy throughout the world in a way that obliges other countries to depend on U.S. loans and investment.

That is not a way for national economies to grow.

The alternative to neoliberal doctrine is China’s growth policies that follow the same basic industrial logic by which Britain, the United States, Germany and France rose to industrial power during their own industrial takeoffs with strong government support and social spending programs.

The United States has abandoned this traditional industrial policy since the 1980s.

It is imposing on its own economy the neoliberal policies that de-industrialized Pinochetista Chile, Thatcherite Britain and the post-industrial former Soviet republics, the Baltics and Ukraine since 1991.

Its highly polarized and debt-leveraged prosperity is based on inflating real estate and securities prices and privatizing infrastructure.

This neoliberalism has been a path to becoming a failed economy and indeed, a failed state, obliged to suffer debt deflation, rising housing prices and rents as owner-occupancy rates decline, as well as exorbitant medical and other costs resulting from privatizing what other countries provide freely or at subsidized prices as human rights – health care, education, medical insurance and pensions.

The success of China’s industrial policy with a mixed economy and state control of the monetary and credit system has led U.S. strategists to fear that Western European and Asian economies may find their advantage to lie in integrating more closely with China and Russia.

The U.S. seems to have no response to such a global rapprochement with China and Russia except economic sanctions and military belligerence.

That New Cold War stance is expensive, and other countries are balking at bearing the cost of a conflict that has no benefit for themselves and indeed, threatens to destabilize their own economic growth and political independence.

Without subsidy from these countries, especially as China, Russia and their neighbors de-dollarize their economies, how can the United States maintain the balance-of-payments costs of its overseas military spending?

Cutting back that spending, and indeed recovering industrial self-reliance and competitive economic power, would require a transformation of American politics.

Such a change seems unlikely, but without it, how long can America’s post-industrial rentier economy manage to force other countries to provide it with the economic affluence (literally a flowing-in) that it is no longer producing at home?

 

[2] India

Can we consider India a Democracy or a DemoCrazy?

India is essentially a fragmented country starting from its government. Take your pick on the other factors:

• Corruption, cronyism, and abuse of government authority that have come to light in recent years
• Powers of the bureaucracy have to be substantially curbed … a country overburdened by a massive bureaucracy, India has one of the lowest rates of per capita public sector employment of any G20 country.
• The Indian state suffers from debilitating weaknesses that hinder its ability to raise revenue, adjudicate disputes, guarantee public order, and provide public goods.
• It has the lowest tax-to-GDP ratio of any #BRICS country (a grouping that also includes #Brazil, #Russia, and #China). Indeed, it has one of the smallest ratios of any country in the #G20.
• India’s security forces suffer from endemic personnel shortages. As of the end of 2011, only 77 percent of available posts in the civil police force were occupied according to the National Crime Records Bureau. (and yet it is part of #AUKUS).
• Finally, India also struggles in its ability to provide basic services such as healthcare and education.
• Caste hierarchies are alive and well.

For over sixty years, India, a low-income country occupying a sprawling geography and serving as a home to a dizzying diversity of ethnic and linguistic groups, has managed to survive—indeed, thrive—as a functioning democracy.

Its political system in particular has the capacity to confound even the most knowledgeable and insightful Indian, so it should come as no surprise that for outsiders, interpreting Indian politics can be downright daunting.

But trying to fit India into neat categories to get a handle on the South Asian behemoth misses much of the nuance at the heart of the Indian polity.

For instance, India’s politics have grown more regionalized, yet powerful forces of centralization remain intact.

Old caste divides have lost social relevance but often thrive in the domain of politics.

India’s party system is fragmented, but centralization has not disappeared

A dominant narrative about Indian politics over the last few decades has been the increasing regionalization of the political party system.

One way to measure this fragmentation is to compare political competition in India’s first general elections in 1952 to the most recent parliamentary elections of 2009. In 1952, 55 parties contested general elections, and in 2009, there were 370 competitors (see figure 1).

Of course, these numbers overstate the level of fragmentation because they do not account for the actual support political parties have among the electorate, but the changes remain large even when parties are weighted by the actual seats they win.

In 1952, this measure of effective number of parties in parliament stood at 1.7, and it has exhibited a more-than-fourfold increase over the past six decades, reaching 6.5.

Milan Vaishnav

Vaishnav’s primary research focus is the political economy of India, and he examines issues such as corruption and governance, state capacity, distributive politics, and electoral behavior.

The emerging federal nature of India’s electoral politics was given a shot in the arm in the early 1990s thanks to the rise of coalition governments in New Delhi, which provided a new set of incentives for aspiring regional politicians to abandon the dominant national parties and establish their own political outfits. 

While some of these new “regional parties” have strong links to subnational, separatist, or regional cultural markers, most simply draw support from a narrow (subnational) geographically defined territory. 

In this sense, several Indian parties formally classified as “national” by the Election Commission of India are actually regional in nature, such as the Nationalist Congress Party, whose success is largely confined to the state of Maharashtra.

As a result of these shifts, state-level politics are now the principal settings for political contestation, while national elections are increasingly “derivative.” 

While this does not mean that national elections are merely a sum of state-level contests, state-level politics is often the prism through which voters make decisions about national elections. 

For example, when state-level elections are held less than two years prior to national elections, voters are prone to reaffirm their state-level decisions when they vote in parliamentary elections.

 But when national elections take place midway through a state government’s tenure, more often than not voters punish the ruling state party or parties in national polls.

Indian National Congress

Moreover, fractures have developed within the two major national parties. Fragmentation within the ruling Indian National Congress (Congress, for short) is largely due to the leadership’s “dyarchic” nature.

Ever since the Congress Party’s current president, Sonia Gandhi, refused to assume the position of prime minister after the Congress came to power in 2004, handing over the reins to former finance minister Manmohan Singh, dual power centers revolving around these two figures have persisted. 

In reality, Singh occupies the throne, but Gandhi is perceived to wield the power. 

The wheels came off the arrangement during its second term. 

Now, the “divided leadership” within the Congress Party may be the most significant political hurdle to implementing badly needed political and economic reforms.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)

The problem for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is far more complicated.

The party boasts a surfeit of leaders clamoring for the post of prime minister. 

Many of the BJP’s most well-known personalities continue to jockey for greater visibility and stature within the party hierarchy—leading to frequent internal disputes. 

Complicating this picture even more is the fact that the BJP exhibits a significant amount of diversity at the state level. 

In the words of scholar Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the BJP “is, for all practical purposes, a collection of six or seven state parties.” 

Furthermore, the leaders of the BJP in the states pledge their political loyalties to different national-level BJP leaders.

Yet, it would be premature to sound the death knell for the two major national parties.

In the 2009 general elections, the Congress and BJP won a combined total of 322 seats—or 60 percent of the overall count (543). 

Indeed, Congress’s vote share in national elections has essentially remained constant since 1996—hovering around 28 percent. 

(Yet due to the peculiarities of India’s winner-take-all electoral system, the number of seats the Congress has won with a roughly similar vote share has fluctuated wildly from election to election—see figure 2.) 

Both parties also continue to have a considerable presence at the state level. 

Nearly two-thirds of states (19 of 30) are presently governed by either Congress or BJP chief ministers, though several are in a coalition with regional parties.

States are the solution to India’s policy dilemmas, but also the problem

When India’s central government is unwilling or unable to take action on policy reform, its states are often heralded as the solution to gridlock or “policy paralysis” because Indian federalism gives the states considerable space for policy innovation. When the center fails, the respective states can usher in and lead intra-Indian competition for resources, investment, and talent, which produces a dynamic process of policy diffusion.

What complicates the picture is that the degree to which “good policies” are adopted often varies considerably within states. For instance, Gujarat has enjoyed fantastic economic growth rates and enormous investment inflows under Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s tenure.

In this sense, it is one of India’s most highly developed states. Yet, while Gujarat’s economic “model” is heralded, it a lags on health and family welfare, scoring near the bottom of India’s states on basic indicators of malnutrition.

The coexistence in Modi’s Gujarat of economic vitality with endemic malnutrition illustrates, in a nutshell, the promise and the peril of state-level leadership. Indeed, while there is a generally positive correlation between the level of development and malnutrition across India’s states, the states that thrive economically often “underperform” on addressing malnutrition (see figure 3 with Gujarat highlighted in red).

And when it comes to natural resource management states have strongly opposed reforms that would minimize their discretion and, therefore, their rent extraction possibilities. Consider the recent corruption scandal known as “Coalgate.”

A blistering report from the comptroller and auditor general accused the central government of using an opaque, uncompetitive, and ad hoc discretionary process for allocating nearly 60 licenses for captive coal mines across India. The report estimates that the policy led to $33 billion in lost revenue.

The central government is surely to blame for dithering in establishing a new, competitive policy for allocating coal licenses. But the states themselves played a starring role in the scandal.

The chief ministers of several mining-intensive states strongly opposed a change of policy and lobbied the government to maintain the status quo.

And state governments played a prominent role in recommending which private sector firms should receive licenses.

The Indian state is often overbureaucratized yet undermanned

Given the corruption, cronyism, and abuse of government authority that have come to light in recent years—ranging from the discretionary allocation of licenses governing 2G telecommunication spectrum to the procurement scandals which plagued India’s hosting of the Commonwealth Games—there is a strong sentiment within India that the powers of the bureaucracy have to be substantially curbed.

There is certainly a considerable need to curtail the worst excesses of the state, especially where the state’s heavy-handed role distorts economic incentives. For instance, transactions involving land—construction, mining, and infrastructure—remain a hotbed of corruption and malfeasance.

The regulatory intensity of the state with respect to land is extremely high, allowing politicians and bureaucrats to trade regulatory forbearance for bribes and kickbacks.

Yet, while the Indian state needs to cede authority over certain realms, it simultaneously needs to expand its authority in others.

Notwithstanding the widely held image of India as a country overburdened by a massive bureaucracy, India has one of the lowest rates of per capita public sector employment of any G20 country.

Furthermore, government employment in India (across local, state, and federal levels) is in decline.

The Indian state suffers from debilitating weaknesses that hinder its ability to raise revenue, adjudicate disputes, guarantee public order, and provide public goods. It has the lowest tax-to-GDP ratio of any BRIC country (a grouping that also includes Brazil, Russia, and China). Indeed, it has one of the smallest ratios of any country in the G20.

Admittedly, it is difficult to disentangle issues of policy choice from capacity, but there are ample signs that India is failing to enforce the taxes that are on the books.

For instance, a new investigations unit of the income tax department dedicated to recovering lost tax revenue has barely gotten off the ground one year after setting up shop thanks to a personnel shortfall.

The relative incapacity of the judiciary has been well documented. The Supreme Court reported in late 2011 that the country’s courts are saddled under the weight of 32 million pending cases. C

ourts at all levels—the Supreme Court as well as various high courts and district and subordinate courts—see their dockets grow rather than shrink year after year.

Meanwhile, India’s security forces suffer from endemic personnel shortages. As of the end of 2011, only 77 percent of available posts in the civil police force were occupied according to the National Crime Records Bureau.

Even if the state governments were to boost their recruitment and close the vacancy gap, India would still have one of the smallest ratios of police per capita anywhere in the world.

The armed forces too struggle with manpower shortfalls: the Indian army faces a shortage of 12,000 officers, or roughly 20 percent of its overall sanctioned strength.

Finally, India also struggles in its ability to provide basic services such as healthcare and education.

On education, for instance, it is true that India is growing ever closer toward achieving universal primary enrollment.

Yet, the quality of those activities that regularly take place in schools is, on average, abysmal.

According to the last several rounds of the Annual Status of Education Report conducted by the nongovernmental organization Pratham, the proportion of children aged six to fourteen who can read a simple paragraph has stagnated around 40 percent—with only marginal improvement over the past several years.

India’s economic crisis is largely self-inflicted

After over a decade of booming growth, the Indian economy was recently brought down to earth. In the quarter ending in June 2012, the economy grew at a rate of 5.5 percent—down from 8 percent the same quarter one year ago. While the International Monetary Fund now projects that growth in 2012 will dip below 5 percent, most independent observers forecast a quick rebound in 2013. A sustained period of growth at 5 percent or below, if such a situation materialized, would constitute a serious social and economic crisis for India.

In many ways, the particular success of India’s economy may have planted the seeds of its future slowdown. Reforms of the early 1990s, which involved industrial delicensing, reducing tariffs, and removing barriers to foreign capital flows, created a powerful new class of entrepreneurs who leveraged their political connections to entrench their positions in a newly liberalized economy.

These private sector winners, and their political allies, believed it was in their self-interest to obstruct follow-on, second-generation reforms that would further increase international competition in the economy or introduce more transparent and competitive processes for natural resource contracts.

Crony capitalism may have helped fuel rapid economic growth, but the rot in the system now threatens to swallow the whole thing up as the economy struggles in the wake of revelations of gross misgovernance and corruption.

There is also a perception that the roots of the current economic malaise are deeply political, from two years of unrelenting corruption scandals to a divided ruling party.

The situation was further compounded by the government’s missteps on key policy issues at critical junctures.

For instance, the government announced aggressive new anti-tax-avoidance policies that would retroactively levy taxes on business deals it perceived were structured to circumvent tax compliance.

This move rattled investor confidence and contributed to an atmosphere of heightened private sector uncertainty.

In an encouraging move, in mid-September the government announced a slew of long-awaited reforms, notably raising the price of diesel (which is heavily subsidized) and increasing foreign investment caps in a range of sectors such as broadcasting, multibrand retail, and civil aviation.

The government referred to these reforms as a “big bang,” but the current changes can best be described as a collection of modest steps.

Most political parties acknowledge the need for more fundamental structural reform; India’s administrative, regulatory, and legal machinery is hopelessly out of date. Yet the implementation of such reforms carries with it great political risk, discouraging bolder action.

Caste in India is declining socially, but remains strong politically

Social relations in India have long been defined by the peculiar tenets of Hinduism’s hierarchical caste system. But according to a recent study, the social inequalities that have historically defined relations between Dalits (lower castes) and non-Dalits have declined precipitously in the market-reform era.

Indeed, India now boasts a talented crop of “Dalit millionaires” who have formed their own Dalit Chamber of Commerce. Moreover, several groups have benefitted from reservations (or ethnic quotas) in government jobs, higher education, and political representation.

Yet caste hierarchies are alive and well in other areas. In one study, economists sent fictitious online job applications to firms, randomly manipulating the caste-based surnames of the fake applicants.

Large and significant differences in the treatment of applicants was seen in competition over call-center jobs, where “soft” or intangible skills are difficult to effectively signal through resume credentials alone, suggesting the persistence of discrimination against disadvantaged groups in certain sectors.

And there can be no doubt that a significant amount of political mobilization still occurs along caste or communal lines.

This is most glaring in north Indian states such as Uttar Pradesh, where rival political parties vociferously court opposing “vote banks” and speak of “caste equations.”

Yet, political mobilization along identity lines is hardly confined to north India: politically motivated communal violence in Kerala and the persistence of political divisions between the Kamma, Reddy, and Kapu communities in Andhra Pradesh are evidence of this.

Moreover, caste seems to still influence voter behavior across India. Some observers have heralded the delinking of ethnicity and vote choice by examining national-level aggregates of voter behavior, finding little evidence to suggest that a majority of any given ethnic community favors one political party over another. But when one disaggregates the data at the state level—which is the prime venue for political contestation—a majority of a caste group in many states votes in favor of one political party.

A closer look at state-level realities also suggests that some prominent leaders who have been celebrated for their perceived willingness to transcend caste divides in fact embrace caste—albeit in less overt, divisive ways. One prominent leader who is said to have risen above caste politics is Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in the state of Bihar.

In reality, Kumar has not ignored caste; he has simply played the caste card shrewdly. In his first term, Kumar instituted a “Mahadalit” scheme—earmarking government transfers for certain Dalit segments, namely those that fell outside of the traditional vote banks of his opposition—and established quotas in government jobs for lower caste Muslims.

Looking Ahead

Over the past two decades, India’s politics have grown far more complex. Economic liberalization, growing political competition, and increasing decentralization have fundamentally remade India’s political economy. Yet these new shifts have not completely displaced prevailing ideologies and proclivities.

In today’s India, liberalization coexists with the remnants of state-driven planning. Regionalization has expanded but has not completely taken over. And the bureaucracy’s authority has receded in many domains while becoming more entrenched in others.

Those looking to make sense of where India’s political project is headed in the years to come would be well-served to heed the words of Cambridge economist Joan Robinson: “Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.”

 The author thanks Reedy Swanson for excellent research assistance, Ashley Tellis and Frederic Grare for comments, and Devesh Kapur for useful conversations.

[3] Argentina

Here’s a pretty good summary…

Sitrep Argentina: Odious debt and Belt and Road

February 07, 2022 From HERE

.

The president of Argentina as a matter of urgency approached President Putin in the day before President Putin left for Beijing.  They needed help with odious debt that the country entered into with the IMF.  This is the sequence of events in the last few days:

Argentina is trapped in $44 billion of odious debt from the US-controlled IMF.

Seeking alternatives to US hegemony, Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández traveled to Russia and China, forming an alliance with the Eurasian powers, joining the Belt & Roadhttps://t.co/rTbO1ZGsPE
— Multipolarista (@Multipolarista) February 6, 2022

And…

Additional details from the Argentine presidency on the deal made in Beijing: https://t.co/bXEWO2UuUB

— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) February 6, 2022

And then, one of the most interesting points in the second tweet: China reaffirmed its support for Argentina’s demand to fully exercise sovereignty over the Malvinas.

Argentina reaffirmed its commitment to the One China principle and China reaffirmed its support for Argentina’s demand to fully exercise sovereignty over the Malvinas. More: https://t.co/kSCICjsyFOpic.twitter.com/iMhhV63Uzz
— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) February 6, 2022

This is then how Zone B grows, with countries saying they have had enough of hegemony and taking clear steps to help themselves.

Trapped in IMF debt, Argentina turns to Russia and joins China’s Belt & Road

Argentina is trapped in $44 billion of IMF odious debt taken on by corrupt right-wing regimes.

Seeking alternatives to US hegemony, President Alberto Fernández traveled to Russia and China, forming an alliance with the Eurasian powers, joining the Belt and Road Initiative.

The United States constantly intervenes in the internal affairs of Latin America,

• • • organizing coups d’etat,
    • destabilizing independent governments,
    • trapping nations in debt,
    • and imposing sanctions.

Washington sees the region as its own property, with President Joe Biden referring to it this January as “America’s front yard.”

Seeking alternatives to US hegemony, progressive governments in Latin America have increasingly looked across the ocean to form alliances with China and Russia.

Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández did exactly that this February, taking historic trips to Beijing and Moscow to meet with his counterparts Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

Fernández signed a series of strategic agreements…

• • • officially incorporating Argentina into Beijing’s international Belt and Road Initiative,
    • while expanding economic partnerships with the Eurasian powers and
    • telling Moscow that Argentina “should be the door to enter” Latin America.

China offered $23.7 billion in funding for infrastructure projects and investments in Argentina’s economy.

In the meetings, Fernández also asked for Argentina to join the BRICS framework, alongside Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Xi and Putin reportedly both agreed.

“I am consistently working to rid Argentina of this dependence on the IMF and the US,”

Fernández explained.

“I want Argentina to open up new opportunities.”

The Argentine president’s comments and meetings with Putin and Xi reportedly angered the US government.

Argentina is trapped in odious debt with the US-controlled IMF

Argentina is a Latin American powerhouse, with significant natural resources and the third-largest economy in the region (after Brazil and Mexico, both of which have significantly larger populations).

But Argentina’s development has often been weighed down by…

• • • debt traps imposed from abroad,
    • resulting in frequent economic crises,
    • cycles of high inflation,
    • and currency devaluations.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) – a de facto economic arm of the United States, over which Washington alone has veto power – has significant control over Argentina, having trapped the nation in huge sums of odious debt.

In 2018, Argentina’s right-wing President Mauricio Macri requested the largest loan in the history of the IMF: a staggering $57.1 billion bailout.

Macri was notorious for his corruption, and this was no secret at the time.

By agreeing to give such an enormous sum of money to Macri’s scandal-plagued government, the IMF knew it was ensnaring Argentina in debt it would not be able to pay off.

But this was far from the first time the US-dominated financial instrument had trapped Argentina in odious debt.

In December 2021, the IMF published an internal report admitting that the 2018 bailout completely failed to stabilize Argentina’s economy.

But when Argentina’s center-left President Alberto Fernández entered office in December 2019, his country was ensnared in $44.5 billion in debt from this bailout that the IMF itself admitted was a total failure. ($44.5 billion of the $57.1 billion loan had already been disbursed, and Fernández cancelled the rest.)

The Argentine government has tried to renegotiate the debt, but in order to do so the IMF has imposed conditions that severely restrict the nation’s sovereignty – such as appointing a British economist who “will virtually be the new economic minister,” acting as a kind of “co-government,” warned prominent diplomat Alicia Castro.

Seeking ways around these US debt traps, Fernández decided this February to turn to the two rising Eurasian superpowers.

Argentine President Fernández travels to Russia to meet with Putin

On February 3, Argentine President Alberto Fernández travelled to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin.

“I’m certain Argentina has to stop being so dependent on the [International Monetary] Fund and the United States, and has to open up to other places, and that is where it seems to me that Russia has a very important place,”

Fernández said, explaining his motivation for the trip.

Fernández added that, for Russia, Argentina “should be the door to enter” the region, telling Putin, 

“We could be a venue for the development of your cooperation with Latin American nations.”

The two leaders discussed Russian investment in the Argentine economy, trade, railroad construction, and energy technology.

Fernández also thanked Moscow for collaborating with his country in the production of its Sputnik V covid-19 vaccine.

Argentina was the first country in the western hemisphere to do so.

The Argentine president even pointed out in their meeting that he has received three doses of the Sputnik V vaccine. Putin added, “Me too.”

Putin said the two countries agree on many issues, calling Argentina “one of Russia’s key partners in Latin America.”

Argentine President Fernández travels to China to meet with Xi Peng

Just three days after meeting with Putin, President Alberto Fernández travelled to China on February 6 to meet with President Xi Jinping.

In this historic trip, Argentina officially joined Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, a massive global infrastructure program.

Fernández and other top Argentine officials signed agreements for $23.7 billion in Chinese financing, including investments and infrastructure projects.

The funding will be disbursed in two parts: one, which is already approved, will provide Argentina with $14 billion for 10 infrastructure projects; the second, for $9.7 billion, will finance the South American nation’s integration into the Belt and Road.

There are three joint Chinese-Argentine projects that were reportedly at the top of Fernández’s list:

• • • creating 5G networks,
    • developing Argentina’s lithium industry,
    • and building the Atucha III nuclear power plant.

Fernández also discussed plans for Argentina to produce China’s Sinopharm covid-19 vaccine, in addition to Russia’s Sputnik V.

Argentina and China signed a comprehensive memorandum of understanding, including 13 documents for cooperation in areas such as green energy, technology, education, agriculture, communication, and nuclear energy.

Fernández and Xi discussed ways to…

“strengthen relations of political, commercial, economic, scientific, and cultural cooperation between both countries,”

…according to an Argentine government readout of the meeting.

The two leaders apparently hit it off very well, with Fernández telling Xi,

“If you were Argentine, you would be a Peronist.”

Argentina’s incorporation into the Belt and Road comes mere weeks after Nicaragua joined the initiative in January, and Cuba in December.

Latin America’s growing links with China and Russia show how the increasingly multipolar international system offers countries in the Global South new potential allies who can serve as bulwarks against and alternatives to Washington’s hegemony.

While right-wing leaders in Latin America keep looking north to the United States as their political compass, progressive governments are reaching across the ocean to the Eurasian powers of China, Russia, and Iran, building new international alliances that weaken Washington’s geopolitical grip over a region that the US president still insists is its “front yard.”

[4] Africa

Thanks for the repost of the Russia/China manifesto joint statement. The SAD truth is, that NOWHERE, in the U$ MSM, can it be seen, or even read, to the U$ public...

THAT FACT, should speak volumes about managed perception..

-vetinLA | Feb 8 2022 21:44 utc

What is FOCAC? Three historic stages in the China-Africa relationship

The FOCAC partnership platform between China and Africa has produced increasingly deep and complex relations between regions. Africa has benefited from significant investments and China has developed extensive soft power. In its 22nd year, Shirley Ze Yu looks at four stages in FOCAC’s evolution and how they shaped the China-Africa relationship today.

This is the first of two parts exploring the history and purpose of the FOCAC partnership between China and Africa, and part of the China-Africa Initiative series with the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa.

The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) was established in 2000 as a uni-multilateral partnership platform between China and 53 African states (all African states except Eswatini, which maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan).

Of the many partnership platforms Africa has today with a single external actor, FOCAC remains the most strategically intertwined and far-reaching in its depth, scope and level of cooperation.

In theory, the Forum creates a form of multilateralism in which all countries are equal partners, but the comparative weight of China’s state capacity effectively dictates 53 pairs of bilateral relationships under a single architecture.

So why was FOCAC created and what was it meant to stand for?

Contrary to the conventional belief that FOCAC was initiated by China, the Forum was created in response to a proposal by the then-African leader Madagascan Foreign Minister Lila Ratsifandrihamanana.

The new organisation would see China emulate other Western nations who were steps ahead in partnering with Africa, most notably the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, the Africa-France Summit, the US-Africa Business Forum, the EU-Africa Summit, the Tokyo International Conference on Africa Development (TICAD) and others.

Contrary to the ad hoc nature of the EU-Africa Summit or Japan’s TICAD, FOCAC has been institutionalised with a clear operating architecture since inception, following two years of initial incubation.

FOCAC has evolved from a forum of diplomatic exchange and development-centric body to a comprehensive economic-political-security-soft power nexus, which advances China’s long-term vision in Africa.

It features triannual ministerial-level meetings with core secretarial responsibilities housed in the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Commerce and Finance.

FOCAC’s evolution

The inaugural FOCAC meeting was convened in 2000 during Chinese leader Jiang Zemin’s era.

In 2006, FOCAC gathered over 40 heads of states or governments from Africa for the first time, overseen by then Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Its elevation during the Xi Jinping era from 2013 to an all-encompassing strategic uni-multilateral framework spanned issues on health, the environment, trade, finance, security, politics, ideology and human development.

Among the eight FOCAC Forums held during this period, three were elevated to a China-Africa Leaders’ Summit, attended by heads of state and government: the 3rd FOCAC in 2006 in Beijing, the 6th FOCAC in 2015 in Johannesburg and the 7th FOCAC in 2018 – again in Beijing.

Not coincidentally, each summit redefined the form and scope of the uni-multilateral relationship.

Today, FOCAC has grown far beyond a single development parameter.

It has become the quintessential component of China’s grand strategy for the global South.

In Africa, in contrast to the continent’s old colonial powers, China’s soft power has deepened alongside its hard power.

Up until 2021, the Forum’s 21st year, FOCAC’s history can be divided into three historic, incremental phases. A distinct fourth phase has just begun.

The first phase of FOCAC: 2000-2006

Until 1996, four years prior to FOCAC’s creation, China’s level of wealth as measured by per capita GDP trailed that of sub-Saharan Africa.

China was a marginal player on the world stage, with scant economic presence on the continent.

FOCAC’s priority in 2000 was therefore deeper trade engagement.

A grander relationship was inconceivable given China’s capacity.

At the time of FOCAC’s first ministerial meeting in late 2000, China was on the cusp of accession to the World Trade Organisation, which subsequently enabled it to become the world’s largest exporter within the next decade and assume the title of the ‘World’s Factory’.

In contrast to Beijing’s global trade strategy at the time, which was overwhelmingly aimed at driving Chinese exports and a current account surplus, FOCAC’s trade agenda was always to attract more imports from Africa.

At the second FOCAC meeting in 2003, China offered tariff-free imports from Africa’s least developed countries (LDCs).

By the 2006 FOCAC Summit in Beijing, over 440 items from the LDCs could be exported tariff-free to China.

Two-way trade with Africa expanded 5.2 times during this period.

The second phase of FOCAC: 2006-2015

During this second phase, China advanced the partnership’s economic cooperation from trade-only to encompass foreign aid, direct investment, development finance and, since 2013, continental-scale infrastructure building under its Belt and Road Initiative.

At the 2006 FOCAC Summit, then-Chinese President Hu Jintao pledged to double China’s financial aid and offered $5 billion of preferential loans and credit to Africa over the next three years.

This debuted China’s ballooning presence as Africa’s creditor.

In 2007, the China-Africa Development Fund was established, boosting China’s foreign direct investment (FDI) across Africa.

Chinese companies were led to develop special economic zones, free trade zones and industrial parks on the continent; the next wave of trade growth needed an efficient supply chain and upgrades in production capacity.

China’s FDI in Africa grew 3.5 times between 2006-9 and by this point China became Africa’s largest trade partner.

Upon the initiation of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, China furthered its role as a direct contributor to Africa’s infrastructure building, prioritising power grids, special trade zones, ports, transportation routes and other prestigious projects, in which China provided a full range of capabilities including finance, construction, management and, often, equity partnerships.

The infrastructure programme fundamentally remained physical over this phase of FOCAC, only to pivot towards digital from 2015 onwards.

The third phase of FOCAC: 2015-2021

Over the period from 2015-21, China asserted security and political partnerships with Africa as core pillars of FOCAC and envisioned a ‘China-Africa Common Destiny’ – a China-posited ideational framework of an alternative global destiny. Africa was the first global region that China conceives as a quintessential sphere of its ‘China Vision’.

The uni-multilateral partnership was raised to a new, comprehensive level at the 2015 Summit, where Chinese President Xi Jinping strengthened the commitment to mutual political trust and ‘mutual security assistance’.

Over this period, China established multiple sub-categories of the China-Africa cooperation mechanisms.

These include the

• China-Africa People-to-People Forum,
• China-Africa Youth Leaders Forum,
• China-Africa Health Ministers Forum,
• China-Africa Media Cooperation Forum,
• China-Africa Poverty Alleviation and Development Forum,
• China-Africa Legal Forum,
• China-Africa Local Government Cooperation Forum and
• China-Africa Think Tank Forum.

These civic engagements naturally score Chinese soft power in Africa, in sectors ranging from education, media, law and political mentoring to rural development.

At the 2018 Summit, where 50 African heads of state and government were present in Beijing to accelerate the FOCAC agenda, Xi Jinping further named political cooperation an essential task for the partnership platform. Xi asserted China’s support for African countries to explore alternative development paths that suit their national characteristics, implying that China does not promote democracy as the only form of government leading to economic development.

China’s political engagement with Africa instead strives to enlighten a Chinese philosophical path to development: the ‘development-for-peace’ narrative, contrasted with the West’s long-held ‘democracy-for-development’ consensus.

By empowering the Communist Party in FOCAC political dialogues with African counterparts, an ideological front has been added to what had previously been predominantly government-bureaucracy exchanges.

China offered to train African political leaders in its country on elite university programmes, modelled on the leagues of the Harvard Kennedy School.

Beyond politics, China’s infrastructure development in Africa during this period evolved from the physical to include digital and technology spheres, intended to support Africa’s pursuit of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’.

Over this phase, China laid down submarine cable networks along the coast of Africa, providing large parts of the continent with high-speed and low-cost broadband access.

China has since developed Africa’s first public cloud, built data storage centres and provided software systems for national governments.

China’s technology infrastructure incorporates both hard and soft elements.

China has further ventured in joint space development, and promoted Beidou – a global satellite positioning system comparable to the Google GPS – to support satellite-based services on the continent.

Data collected from space has the potential to produce $2 billion a year in benefits for Africa, according to the World Economic Forum.

Since China helped Ethiopia launch its first satellite in 2019, China has partnered resolutely with more African countries in space exploration.

Unlike Russia, which considers African countries only space launch customers, China has provided space launch services and financing for countries to acquire satellites; $6 of the $8 billion cost of Ethiopia’s satellite was financed by China.

As outer space projects have increasingly become the ambition and pride of rising nations, China’s commitment to Africa’s space missions supports the African dream for this sector.

FOCAC has manifested the ‘China Vision’

From Beijing’s humble defining of FOCAC as a new form of partnership in 2000, to the Forum’s strategic expansion beyond trade engagement in 2006 and its all-encompassing relationship in 2015, China’s enormous growth on the continent has not been coincidental. The China-Africa Common Destiny defined at FOCAC in 2018 was China’s foreign policy holy grail.

As China’s global economic and military prowess further grows, with the country aiming to gradually step into the centre of the world stage by 2049, China has elevated the African partnership to a height none can rival.

But what does this mean for Africa?

The continent could become a formidable exogenous force that prototypes Xi Jinping’s China Wisdom (中国智慧) with an alternative path to national prosperity, peace and security – a force without democracy or western political values.

Read the second part in the series on the future of FOCAC.

---

Some trailing thoughts

A ‘Multi-Polar World’ order is emerging. I would like to suggest that the outlines of this emerging order are as follows:

1. The dominant pole of this Multi-polar World is that led by the alliance of Russia and China. Spanning Eurasia from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, this pole includes the countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Eurasian Economic Union, and includes Iran, Iraq, Syria, and possibly, in the future, Turkey.

2. The second pole will be the remnants of the ‘Globalist’ empire, stripped, however, of Europe (ex. U.K.) and any Asian representation, i.e. the U.S., U.K., Israel and likely Canada.

3. A third group consists of countries that are currently either occupied militarily by the U.S. or are part of NATO, but are either economically dependent on China or are in economic competition with the U.S. This includes most of Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and the GCC countries (KSA, UAE, etc.). These countries cannot be considered as poles by themselves, for while some of them may have the economic weight to be considered a pole, such as Germany and Japan, they lack the geo-political weight. These countries are likely to try to escape from their status as American (‘Globalist’) vassals and become independent nations dealing equitably with all the poles of the new Multi-Polar World. In my view, it is unlikely that the EU will survive the birth of this new-world order in its current form. At best it is likely to revert back to a European free trade area, in which each country will recapture its sovereignty and its own currency.

4. A fourth group consists of countries that, while not being a part of the Russia/China pole will be under its wing, with Russia providing military, political and geo-political support, and China providing economic support. This group includes countries which are currently either under threat from the ‘Globalists’ (ie. Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, etc.), are in turmoil due to exploitation by the ‘Globalists’ (ie. Chile, Argentina, Brazil, etc.) or are outright failed states (most of Africa). Under the protection of Russia and China, they will once again have a chance to overcome the anarchy of the past 20 or so years and to return to peaceful development.

5. A fifth group consists of what will likely end up as secondary poles of the Multi-Polar World. These are countries that today are both independent and have the geo-political and economic weight to continue to function independently. This group includes the likes of India and the ASEAN countries.’

The new order appears to be progressing apace. The commotion of the last year about Russia and Ukraine appears to be about trying to prevent Europe from ‘escaping from their status as American (‘Globalist’) vassals’.

Conclusion

The “rules based order”, where America makes the rules as it pleases is OVER. There is now a multi-polar global society, and the membership is being sorted out as you read this.

Preliminairly, it appears that only an handful of nations are sticking with the old-world American-led order.

• • • The United States
    • The UK
    • Australia

Some are trying to “straddle the fence”…

• • • Japan
    • South Korea
    • Canada
    • Poland

However, let it be well understood that most nations are embracing the Asian model.

The Asian model is one of society, of tradition, of help and of being a Rufus.

A Rufus makes the sidewalk on the street a little bit safer. His own time. His own costs. His own initative. Combined we all make the place a better place to live. Video 20MB

The change in the global economic situation will have catastrophic repurcussions economically upon the United States, but (the good news is) that it can be mitigated and leveraged. This would be conducted by adept handling of the entire global situation, and taking it’s domestic demons at home. Of course, those tasks cannot be outsourced and must be handled inside of the Washington DC “beltway”.

How capable the United States is with this effort has yet to be seen.

Never the less I, for one, look forward to a bright and sustainable future for the entire world.

The world is turning Rufus.

It’s a glorious thing.

Be the Rufus.

Guy finds a girl in distress in her car. She honks the horn at him, and they open the door to investigate. And there they find her in a dangerous state. They take action immediately. Be that Rufus.

Video 5MB

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

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Articles & Links

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It’s the middle of the Chinese New Year 2022. There’s a Winter Olympics in Beijing, and both Putin and Xi Peng have presented to the world a blueprint for a massive and comprehensive new world order. It is based upon the UN,  and is designed to punish malcontent nations (without specifically naming the United States and it’s allies.).

And how are these major events being reported in the Western “news”?

Look…

All bullshit. All lies.

“Quarantine Hell”?

Nothing at all about the earth-shattering Xi Peng and Putin announcement. Everyone in the West must be kept dumb, stupid and ignorant. They must be taught to hate, and live in fear, and get ready for the next “freedom war”.

Here we are going to grab some various snapshots of what is going outside the American gulag and see what’s really going on.

Japanese companies refuse to decouple from China

“But while Tokyo has tried to wean its companies off China, even offering subsidies to Japanese groups to exit the Chinese market, it is clear that leaving China is easier said than done.

Japanese companies operating in China remain bullish: just 7.2 per cent of them said they were moving or considering moving production out of China in a September survey by JETRO, down from 9.2 per cent in 2019.

Naoto Saito, chief researcher at the Daiwa Institute of Research, said: “Japan Inc is actually increasing its investment in China, while also seeking to set reasonable limits due to geopolitical risks, and remaining aware of avoiding overdependence.” He added: “It’s unthinkable for companies not to consider the Chinese market at all.”

The Chinese market is “too large for us to ignore”, he added. “Given its size and the pace of growth, there would be no choice but to develop products for that market, in addition to ones for the western and Japanese market.”

Facing a rapid decoupling world, Murata and most of Japan Inc is sticking with the Chinese market, an outcome that runs counter to the advice from the Japanese government, which has been urging Japanese companies to diversify away from China.”

In Q1 2020, when the pandemic in China was at its peak, the Japanese government offered subsidies for Japanese companies to move their operations out of China. At that time, many people were asserting that Japanese companies and indeed foreign companies in general would leave China in droves. Fast-forward to two years later, has that happened?

• https://amp-ft-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.ft.com/content/d1e2f806-1958-4cd6-8047-e27901786f26

Bloomberg makes a BIG mistake

Bloomberg LP published a headline that read, ‘Live: Russia invades Ukraine’. It went up on its homepage around midnight Moscow time and stayed there for nearly half an hour before it was removed and an apology for the mistake (https://lnkd.in/eg5WCMh3) issued.

Everyone should be cancelling their Bloomberg subscription … “real” misinformation that could have started World War III … or was that just the propaganda narrative some corners of our elitist are pushing ?

As I mentioned before, an entire package of videos, reports, interviews, and all the rest were all prepared to take advantage of a war in the Ukraine.

The West is unraveling fast, and everything is in free fall right now. The “man behind the curtain” is being exposed, and the threadbare curtain is rotten and falling off its pole

A war with Russia would be unlike anything the US and NATO have ever experienced

From HERE, with all credit.

“Their [NATO’s] main task is to contain the development of Russia,”

“Ukraine is simply a tool to achieve this goal. They could draw us into some kind of armed conflict and force their allies in Europe to impose the very tough sanctions that are being talked about in the United States today,”

“Or they could draw Ukraine into NATO, set up strike weapons systems there and encourage some people to resolve the issue of Donbass or Crimea by force, and still draw us into an armed conflict.”

“Let us imagine that Ukraine is a NATO member and is stuffed with weapons and there are state-of-the-art missile systems just like in Poland and Romania. Who will stop it from unleashing operations in Crimea, let alone Donbass? Let us imagine that Ukraine is a NATO member and ventures such a combat operation. Do we have to fight with the NATO bloc? Has anyone thought anything about it? It seems not.”

“screaming from the top of the hen house that he's scared of the chickens,”

 “should not be reported as a statement of fact.”

“[t]he synergy of our efforts must force Russia to negotiate the return of our peninsula,”

“As long as he’s [Putin] acting aggressively, we are going to make sure we reassure our NATO allies in Eastern Europe that we’re there and Article 5 is a sacred obligation.”

“Article 5 we take as a sacred obligation,”

“I want NATO to know America is there.”

“As President Obama has said, Ukraine should … be able to choose its own future. And we reject any talk of a sphere of influence. 

And speaking in Estonia this past September, the president made it clear that our commitment to our NATO allies in the face of Russian aggression is unwavering. 

As he said it, in this alliance there are no old members and there are no new members. 

There are no junior partners and there are no senior partners. 

There are just allies, pure and simple. And we will defend the territorial integrity of every single ally.”

“Should US forces find themselves in a land war with Russia,”

“they would be in for a rude, cold awakening.”

The anti-China speal is fully funded

Paid for by the United States government, and directed at the citizens of America, Australia, Japan and NATO. $7 billion dollars.

China warned you all…

China says US plans to pay athletes to ‘sabotage’ Winter Olympics

From HERE.

BEIJING—China’s foreign ministry and an official newspaper have accused the United States of planning to interfere with and “sabotage” the Beijing Winter Olympics by paying athletes from some countries to make half-hearted efforts in competition and to criticize China.

The allegations were made a week before the Games start amid tensions between the two superpowers that has included a diplomatic boycott of the event by the United States, which has been joined by several other countries.

Asked about the Chinese allegations, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing on Saturday reiterated a previous position that Washington was not coordinating a global campaign regarding participation at the Olympics.

Here’s how the Associated Press uses that money…

BEIJING (AP) — Not enough food. Inedible meals. No training equipment. Some Olympic athletes unlucky enough to test positive for the coronavirus at the Beijing Olympics feel their quarantine conditions are making a bad situation much worse.

“My stomach hurts, I’m very pale and I have huge black circles around my eyes. I want all this to end. I cry every day. I’m very tired,” Russian biathlon competitor Valeria Vasnetsova posted on Instagram from one of Beijing’s so-called quarantine hotels.

Her problem wasn’t with any symptoms of the virus. 

It was the food.

Vasnetsova posted a picture Thursday of what she said was “breakfast, lunch and dinner for five days already” — a tray with food including plain pasta, an orange sauce, charred meat on a bone, a few potatoes and no greens.

She said she mostly survived on a few pieces of pasta because it was “impossible” to eat the rest, “but today I ate all the fat they serve instead of meat because I was very hungry.” She added she lost a lot of weight and “my bones are already sticking out.”

Well…

Maybe you should judge for yourself. Because the American “news” is just a fucking steaming pile of bullshit. You make the judgement. You watch, and stop reading a purposely funded effort…

Video and narrative by a few American athletes at the Olympics

Video 33MB

Wow!

So what is going on here? How can this “news report” be so differnt from the videos?

It’s easy. It’s called money and power.

Here’s another article. This one is from HERE.

CHINA has been accused of using the Winter Olympics to try to "whitewash" the regime's disturbing record of torture and executions.

The world's eyes have descended on Beijing as the glitzy opening ceremony kicked off the 2022 games.

But hidden from view are the hideous human rights abuses allegedly carried out like clockwork by the regime.

Gory executions, brutal torture and "concentration camps" are just some the of vile measures the Communist regime has allegedly inflicted on its own people for decades.

Human rights organisations have insisted Chinese authorities should not be allowed to use the Winter Olympics as a "sportswashing" opportunity to improve its tarnished reputation.

As with the 2008 Summer Olympics, it's feared China will put on a glossy and carefully stage-managed image to the rest of the world as the Communists attempt to airbrush their horrendous history of show trials, executions, and some of the worst torture imaginable - let alone alleged genocide.

Ahead of the games, China has been determined to crush any sign of dissent, and officials have warned that even foreign athletes who make political statements would be subject to "certain punishment".

But leading human rights organisation Amnesty International has blasted China for "sportswashing" in an attempt to "deflect attention" from its "abysmal human rights situation".

Wait! Can that be right?

Let’s have another look at the Olympics, and talk to some of the participants…

Video and Narrative 2

video 15MB

Let’s try again…

Video and Narrative 3

Video 38MB

Well…

Let’s talk about some of the under-reported aspects of this Beijing Winter Olympics. Heck, did I say “under-reported”? Nope, I meant Never-until-Hell-freezes-over will it ever be reported…

Russian entry into the Ice Hockey Arena

Amazing what can be done! Just amazing!

Video 3MB

Oh, and the kick off performance…

It is tied together with the Putin, Xi Peng plan for a new world order; a multi-polarity world. Watch it from that point of view.

Video 2MB

And the reactions to this performance is sometimes too emotional. Most Westerneer’s won’t understand why it is so meaningful to Asians.

It’s about inclusiveness, belonging and welcoming the little guys, the mistreated and the downtrodden into your fold as equals.

Video 4MB

One last video narrative…

Video 4MB

None of the Western “news” is reporting on the new Xi Peng and Putin agreement. But that is a key aspect of this Olympics at this time.

Just pretend that nothing is going on and act like nothing happened. It reminds me of a child trying to hide behind a curtain by hiding it’s eyes, while the entire body is fully exposed.

When I say that no one is reporting on it, I literally mean no one. What’s more they are not doing ANY REPORTING on the Winter Olympics at all.

Yahoo had one singular article on the Olympics. This is a screen shot of it…

Wow! Those cute girls with the lighted balloons were a “middle finger” to the world? Really?

Let’s look at the “article”…

A day after the International Olympic Committee tried to claim these Games should be free of politics, the Chinese Communist Party staged an Opening Ceremony draped in dual-track political messaging for audiences both inside China and out that was as loud and clear as the fireworks that lit up the Beijing sky.

It was a sign of both Chinese strength in its ability to use the Olympics to spread its narrative and its hidden terror at the truth actually seeping out.

It ended with an affront to the sensibilities and a middle finger to much of the world, whose prominent governments — including the United States, India, Great Britain, Australia and Canada — refused to send diplomats to grant this absurdity any measure of legitimacy.

Then it gets bad…

People are getting upset with this onslaught of focused hate…

Such as this gal.

Video 48MB

Now, let’s bounce to asking the question that many of us has pondered. Exactly WHY is Britian, Australia and Japan allowing themselves to pick a fight with China? What’s in it for them. Because as I see it, it’s a lose-lose senario.

There are no upsides.

Opinion | Who are the world’s good leaders?

It’s a topsy-turvy world out there. The world cries out for leaders who can steady the ship of state. Instead, we have a parade of fools like Boris Johnson, Scott Morrison and Justin Trudeau.

Boris is, undoubtedly, a gift to the entertainment world, but he doesn’t belong in government. Previously, he has parlayed his non-seriousness into his personal brand, from which he can wriggle out of any scandal. But this time, with “partygate”, the party is over. Like a kite dancing in the hurricane, he is crashing to earth. No one can trust a single word coming out of his mouth. With zero interest in the mundane business of government, he only comes to life at parties or in front of the camera.

Every time, when he opens his mouth, only hot air comes out. This time, not even his unruly, carefully curated, tousled hair can save him. Clueless about how to govern, and callous to the sufferings of others, he ordered the evacuation of pets over endangered people in the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul. Who knows what lurks in his dark heart? To him, life is just a game, to be played by his rules. He is the living embodiment of Etonian entitlement.

In foreign affairs, he is a one-trick pony, his sole role being a docile US stooge. He follows at his master’s heels into potential armed conflict where Britain has no business to be. He has forgotten the shame that has been visited upon Tony Blair in Iraq and looks likely to repeat that folly. Having decoupled from the EU, Britain’s most important partner, unfriended China, the world’s major rising power, and betrayed France, he now faces a country that demands its pound of flesh. What kind of drug-addled leader would send his country’s newest aircraft carrier out to the South China Sea, looking for trouble, in a region that has long ceased to be Britain’s sphere of influence, endlessly burning precious dollars his country can’t afford—all for the sake of reliving Britain’s imperial past?

Boris, you were born two centuries too late!

Without an ounce of common sense, or an iota of strategic sense, the best that can be said about Boris is that he is never dull. He is unprepared to govern, and unfit to lead. Woe betide any nation that picks Boris as helmsman. He has no clue where Britain is heading, only that he wants to go back to the past. But Winston Churchill he is not, with no idea about the future, no heart for the present and only an obsession with the past. I nominate Boris the geopolitical clown of the world, an expensive joke that Britain can ill-afford, good for boozy parties, but not for party politics.

Sitting one notch below Boris in the totem pole of fools is Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Despite his lineage, his CV is alarmingly thin. Trading on his name, this former bar-room bouncer has become top leader. For once Trump was right, calling the Canadian prime minister “weak and stupid”, allowing his country to be played like a pawn and dragged into a prolonged tug-of-war with China over Huawei’s CFO, whereas his father had studiously cultivated China as an ally. Under Justin, Canada has become the 51st state of the US, with none of the rights, and all of the complications of union. Under his father, neutral Canada refused to live in the pocket of the US, and had a moderating influence on its neighbor’s China policies. With his son’s total tilt towards the US, not a scintilla of that influence remains. It’s gone with the Trumpian hurricane. Foolishly, Trudeau signed up for 5-Eyes to contain China, sending Canadian naval vessels to the most combustible region in the world, the South China Sea. The US has an agenda on containing China which Canada ostensibly doesn’t share. No good can come out of this. If you go looking for trouble, you will find it, sooner or later. All it takes is an accidental cannon and you will find Canadian ships at the bottom of the ocean. And for what?

Trudeau’s one weapon is his good looks. But looks don’t amount to a hill of beans in building relationships. Yes, his looks can charm the pants off the wives of foreign leaders, cuckolding buffoons like Trump. Maybe that’s why Trump has a visceral dislike of Trudeau. But the world needs global leaders with brains, not political ‘gigolos’ with brawn.

Where Boris is funny, Trudeau is weak. Despite being a former bouncer, Justin is seen by Trump as a soft bullying target. Both Boris and Justin share a disinterest in the future, devoid of vision, of strategic awareness, of long-term planning. Both gravitate to photo ops. For this duo, style trumps substance. They are exemplary shallow leaders.

What about the leader Down Under? Oh well, this one takes the cake for suicidal stupidity. One word sums up Scott Morrison: pig-headedness. Previously, Australia enjoyed a comfortable relationship with China, its largest trading partner, a relationship that had been enormously beneficial to both. But, without provocation, Morrison decides to buy into US accusations of China’s abuse of human rights in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. As a Hong Konger, I can tell him he is dead wrong about my city. Hong Kong is a misgoverned place, yes. But that is because Beijing has given local leaders too long a leash for 23 years, letting US-funded activists run amok: It was a total abuse of freedom, not lack of freedom. For nine months, chaos and violence raged. They are Hong Kong’s Trump-like rioters.

As for Xinjiang, it is imported terror. The US response to 911 attacks was to invade Iraq on false pretenses, killing over a million innocent civilians. Where was Australia’s moral outrage then? China did not invade any country, only rounded up perpetrators for reeducation and job-training, then released them back into the community.

Morrison swallowed CIA propaganda whole.

Then he doubled down and demanded a US-inspired push to investigate China as the source of the coronavirus. By upping the ante, Morrison has derailed Sino-Australian relations, to the detriment of both.

Worse, he is committing billions to building nuclear submarines to counter China’s military rise. Didn’t he know that China must arm itself to fend off aggressive US containment?

What has China done to earn Australian enmity?

The militarization of the South China Sea islands is a matter of life-and-death struggle against US encirclement.

In the history of the world, have you ever heard of one country, trying non-stop for 70 years to encircle another country?

Should China fold its arms and wait for strangulation?

What would Morrison do if Australia were in China’s shoes? Australia would be entitled to the right of self-defense. With trade dollars dwindling, with billions siphoned off into building unneeded nuclear submarines for a non-existent conflict, where is mad Morrison taking Australia?

China and Australia have never been at war. If war breaks out between them, Morrison can take full radioactive credit.

The Taiwan affair had long been a sleepy affair, until America nudges Taiwan separatists into poking the dragon’s eye. As a Pacific country, Australia should do its part to cool the tempers, not fan the flames. So far, what has Australia gained from being a US pawn? Increasingly, Morrison looks like Australia’s Iraq-tainted Tony Blair. Instead of reaping the benefits of the Pacific Century, Australia is swaggering its way into a major needless conflict. I cannot think of an act of geopolitical stupidity more stupendous and suicidal than this.

Western reporters have baselessly and reflexively called President Xi of China “authoritarian”, misjudging him on how he handled the Hong Kong and Xinjiang unrest. They are too blind and biased to see that US judgments are nothing more than anti-China propaganda. Do you deny a sovereign nation’s right to quell imported riots?

Bye-bye Boris, so long Morrison, au revoir Trudeau. You have been proven unfit for office. As for Trump, this serial liar has been caught spouting over twenty thousand falsehoods during his four years in office, with over a thousand lawsuits under his belt. He may be out of office, but not out of the picture. With over 70 million Americans voting for a narcissistic madman, why are Australia, Britain and Canada still licking America’s boots?

By his competence in coping with Covid-19 alone, China’s leader, hands down, deserves an avalanche of accolades. No other leader has acted so decisively in “leveling up”, which Boris boasted but never delivered, smashing up monopolies and ending oppressive profit-making after-school tutoring, promoting “housing for living, not for speculating”, while lifting 800 million out of poverty and building the world’s biggest network of high-speed trains. If you go by achievements, there is only one clear winner in good government. If you call massive and unceremonious sacking of corrupt officials and keeping streets midnight-safe “authoritarian”, then give me “authoritarian” any day. With so many failed states littering the globe, only one leader thinks long-term and promotes “common prosperity”—and he lives and leads in China.

What it means to be British

Funny. Video 3MB

to be a brit-2022-02-06_15.41.40

Opinion | The world owes China an apology

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The West has wronged China, grievously. I say this more in sorrow than in anger. The gulf of misunderstanding between the two seems unbridgeable.

The US and the UK are joined by Australia in an ostentatious diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic games, citing its human rights abuses in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

To me, as someone who has lived on the mainland, this accusation is the height of irony.

Today’s China is a morally-driven society, full of energy and yearning for economic equality. If you listen to a mainland official and a Hong Kong official speak, the contrast in style and substance is stark.

• The former speaks of being at one with the people, of national reconstruction, of technological leaps, of selfless service to the people.
• The latter is adrift in petty talk and lethargically unmotivated. They yak instead of act. If they underperform, their six-figure monthly salary is punctually paid into their bank account. A princely pension awaits.

On the mainland, they would have been turfed out.

The number of mainland officials who have been unceremoniously removed for misdeeds or failures is staggeringly comforting. The Hong Kong “accountability” system is a joke.

In mainland official circles, it is a do-or-die matter.

Chinese officials are paternalists, in that they see themselves as father figures who are entrusted with the welfare of the people.

Hong Kong officials are risk-averse, notorious for inaction, as action carries its own risk. Their first instinct is self-preservation. On the mainland a powerful risk-and-reward system kicks in, and that has made all the difference.

There is something else. Mainland leaders think long-term. They hatch plans that cover five, ten or even a span of a hundred years. Hong Kong officials, and for that matter, leaders in the West, think in terms of ad hoc programs or election cycles. That is why China, without debilitating foreign wars, has leapfrogged other nations.

The term “China speed” says it all.

Go to the mainland, and experience the world’s first truly cashless society. Even beggars have their own QR codes. With no one carrying cash, the streets are free of thieves and robbers.

It is 100% safe to go strolling in the park at midnight.

This is unthinkable in Detroit or LA.

It’s your funeral if you do.

There are no racist insults or attacks either. People’s obsession is their children’s education, not hating those who look different from them.

For a chronically poor country, this is about as close as the Chinese would get to living in an idyllic world. If you talk to Chinese citizens, they will tell you that they trust their government to do what is best.

How can they not?

Their government has wiped out poverty in nearly 130, 000 villages or for over 800 million people. If this sounds too good to be true, it is because this scale of poverty eradication has never been done in human history.

The Chinese don’t just talk the talk, but walk the talk.

And yet, there is not a ripple of approval in the West.

Super-success has made China ultra-rational and far less ideological. Ideology is only a veneer. China is governed like a corporation, sending goods to Africa, not troops. It builds its Belt and Road infrastructure for trade and to circumvent US encirclement.

If Confucius were alive today, he would be amazed to find his ideal realized after two and a half thousand years: The first nation that advocates universal prosperity and a common human destiny.

America’s fear of China is not ideological.

It demonizes China as a communist country to frighten its allies into an anti-China coalition, knowing that it is the only country capable of challenging American unilateralism.

Even if China were to officially rename itself a Confucian country, American paranoia will persist. Vietnam is communist, but posing no threat to American global domination, is welcome into a marriage of convenience.

The world must now decide which system is better for the global order.

China today is what America was during the Second World War—a do-good nation. Post-war,

America has abused its superpower status to start wars and topple regimes it doesn’t like. The adage that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” applies equally to nations as to individuals.

America’s relentless encirclement of China has only produced one result: unite the Chinese people against a hostile West.

The greater the hostility, the greater its internal unity.

China doesn’t seek world domination, knowing it spells nothing but trouble. If there was a Nobel Prize for good government, China would win it hands down.

The world is littered with failed states.

Mexico, to name just one, lives in fear of its drug gangs, with the beautiful beaches of Acapulco patrolled by gun-toting soldiers. No wonder, two-thirds of British polled prefer socialism as a fairer system.

This doesn’t mean that the Chinese system is without weakness. China’s biggest strategic failure is its lack of soft power. It may wield enormous economic muscle, but it has a clunky and crude image. When it reacts angrily to American provocations, Westerners treat that anger as signs of aggression. China is losing the PR war big time.

Style is substance.

In overwhelming numbers, Chinese students flock overseas to study science and technology. Few opt for the arts and humanities. China may boast an army of well-trained interpreters. In a nation with tens of thousands of engineers and scientists, there is not a single eloquent cross-cultural interpreter on the world stage.

The world is facing a choice between tribalist unilateralism or humane universalism, between rationality or extremism, between might and morality.

Cultural insight into what China is all about.

Curious. interesting. Stunning, really stunning.

Video 60MB

Why is America the greatest nation in the world?

This is a great scene from an interview with Jeff Bridges, and I have to tell you that it is very spot-on. This is the full scene.

video 30MB

Listen to what he said.

America used to be great becuase we were brave and fearless. We were informed.

Today, most American live in fear with whatever the latest evil threat is.

And Americans are NOT informed.

Not in the least.

So stay informed. Do not live in fear, and shut that god-damn Western “news media” off. It controls your mind and sucks the precious life blood out of you.

Let’s be real about what nation we are talking about here…

America the land of Billionaires and a permanent underclass of serf-slaves. It’s a horrible mess, and it’s a full idiocracty with nuclear weapons. It is a very dangerous combination.

Video. 42MB

OK, enough of that.

Now for some pretty Chinese girls. Video 1

Tall thin, leggy with a big chest. Video 1 4MB

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 3 FEBRUARY 2022

China Elementary school

Celebrated for his ability to connect with the people through language -- Xi's often quoted maxims such as "do concrete work and take the lead," "a state thrives on practical work but wanes on empty talk" and "grab the iron bar hard enough to leave a mark" shed some light on how China can achieve so much in such a short period.

-China Today

All Chinese children have mandatory military training throughout their school years. It starts in Kindergarden, and continues weekly. Each grade they learn more skills, and are rated in their classes.

• First grade. Marching, basic disipline, making beds, saluting, roll call.
• Second Grade. Formations. Gun disassembly. Patrols. Self defense.
• Third Grade. hand to hand combit. Target practice…
• etc…

The following is either a Kindergarden or a first grade. You will note that they concentrate on basic military disipline and training.

Video 12MB

Another video. It’s a first-grade obsticle course. Video 9MB

More training.

Here the first grade students are taught how to rescue a teacher who is captured. Of course they are very young, and they are going though the basic skills but each year this training is built upon. By the time they are in middle school and go into the basic training they will be able to do all of this automatically without a second thought.

Video 14MB

Finally here’s a first grade roll call. Video 5MB

When did you learn disipline, respect and pushing yourself under obsticle courses? How do you think the West (led by the United States) can handle a one-on-one confrontation with talented, industrious, and lethal nation of 1.4 billion soldiers?

Maybe the United States should realize that teaching it’s citizenry to be afriad, fearful and to cower and hide is not the best policy.

Keep in mind

The American govenrment is constantly drumming up hatred against Chinese and Asians, and many of the (emotional and downtrodden) urban black populations are really getting riled up and really attacking the Chinese. Such as this video of a black woman hassling a Chinese-American woman waiting in a medical clinic.

It’s a good thing that the security guard is there and puts an end to the harassment.

Video 5.7MB

All this negative energy is going to boomerang back on the American people. Mark. My. Words.

Unpacking the Russian-Chinese joint statement

From HERE.

Introduction:

First things first, this is a very long statement (5300 words).  It is also an extremely important one since it deals primarily with grand strategy issues (it discusses the “whats” not the “hows”).  To put it succinctly, this is a common vision of the future shared between Russia and China.  It is therefore also a common goal setting document.  Considering its scope and objective, this is most definitely a crucial historical document.

Next, it is really important to understand who the target audience of this statement is.  By definition, the target audience of such a document is the entire planet, but by its language I would argue that it is pretty clear that this is not a document addressed to anybody in the West (for one thing, it is too long for the average western reader and it is too long to be reprinted or read in full in the general press).  There is a saying which all Russians know: “the East is a delicate/refined matter” (it comes from a famous Soviet movie).  The style and contents of this joint statement shows that it is primarily aimed at the Russian and Chinese public, especially those in position of power: to a typical western reader the text itself looks long-winded and full of well-meaning platitudes.  The Russians and the Chinese understand each other much better, and not only can they read between the lines and they can evaluate what is said and what is only suggested.  The fact that some things are only alluded to does in no way make them less crucial.  Again, the audience here is most definitely not a western one.

Having said all that, I want to pick, roughly in order, some key parts of that speech and try to unpack what this joint statement really says.  This is a somewhat arbitrary selection, in reality, word letter and comma matter here, but for the sake of brevity, I won’t comment on the full text.  I do, however, recommend that you take the time and read it here: http://thesaker.is/joint-statement-of-the-russian-federation-and-the-peoples-republic-of-china-on-the-international-relations-entering-a-new-era-and-the-global-sustainable-development/

***

Key excerpts from the RU-CH Joint Statement: (emphasis added)

Some actors representing but the minority on the international scale continue to advocate unilateral approaches to addressing international issues and resort to force; they interfere in the internal affairs of other states, infringing their legitimate rights and interests, and incite contradictions, differences, and confrontation, thus hampering the development and progress of mankind, against the opposition from the international community.

Translation into plain English: the USA and a few of its vassal states want to maintain a world hegemony and ignore international law.  This is a threat to the peace and security of our entire planet.  We oppose this.

There is no one-size-fits-all template to guide countries in establishing democracy. A nation can choose such forms and methods of implementing democracy that would best suit its particular state, based on its social and political system, its historical background, traditions, and unique cultural characteristics. It is only up to the people of the country to decide whether their State is a democratic one.

Translation into plain English: there is no one way to establish real people power, and outsiders are, by definition, disqualified from judging the degree of “democracy” of any nation.  Each nation has the right to decide how it wants to live, how it wants to formally structure its people power and only the people of that nation can decide whether their country’s organization faithfully expresses and upholds their national values.  Outsiders cannot think of themselves as “teachers of democracy”.

The sides reaffirm their focus on building the Greater Eurasian Partnership in parallel and in coordination with the Belt and Road construction to foster the development of regional associations as well as bilateral and multilateral integration processes for the benefit of the peoples on the Eurasian continent. The sides agreed to continue consistently intensifying practical cooperation for the sustainable development of the Arctic.

Translation into plain English: we, the locals, are (and have been) building a Eurasian community which will encompass the entire Eurasian landmass and its adjacent Arctic waters.  This Eurasian landmass will be sovereignly ruled by those nations who compose it.

The sides are gravely concerned about serious international security challenges and believe that the fates of all nations are interconnected. No State can or should ensure its own security separately from the security of the rest of the world and at the expense of the security of other States.

Translation into plain English: security is always and by definition collective.  There cannot be security for some at the expense of the security of others.  The AngloZionist Empire’s notion of unilateral security is basically putting a gun to the head of each nation on the planet with the very explicit threat to pull the trigger if that nation dares to resist this typical act of imperialist aggression.

The sides reaffirm their strong mutual support for the protection of their core interests, state sovereignty and territorial integrity, and oppose interference by external forces in their internal affairs.

Translation into plain English: we are, and will, be standing side by side and we will jointly defeat those forces who are trying to prevent us from achieving and maintaining true, full, sovereignty.

The Russian side reaffirms its support for the One-China principle, confirms that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, and opposes any forms of independence of Taiwan.

Translation into plain English:Russia will support the Chinese efforts to reintegrate Taiwan.  Russia has got China’s back.

Russia and China stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions, intend to counter interference by outside forces in the internal affairs of sovereign countries under any pretext, oppose color revolutions, and will increase cooperation in the aforementioned areas.

Translation into plain English: China will support Russia in her efforts to prevent the USA/NATO/EU to turn the Ukraine into an anti-Russia or to overthrow governments friendly to Russia.  China has got Russia’s back.

The sides believe that certain States, military and political alliances, and coalitions seek to obtain, directly or indirectly, unilateral military advantages to the detriment of the security of others, including by employing unfair competition practices, intensify geopolitical rivalry, fuel antagonism and confrontation, and seriously undermine the international security order and global strategic stability. The sides oppose further enlargement of NATO and call on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologized cold war approaches, to respect the sovereignty, security and interests of other countries, the diversity of their civilizational, cultural and historical backgrounds, and to exercise a fair and objective attitude towards the peaceful development of other States.

Translation into plain English: the West is trying to destabilize, subvert, control and destroy any country which is not willing to become a US vassal state.  NATO is an aggressive, violent and totalitarian superstructure whose aim is to prevent any country from achieving sovereignty.  It is just the latest iteration of Anglo imperialism.  It’s ideology is based on hate and projection of its own hateful worldview and ethos unto others.  It’s nature is imperialist and its motto divide et impera.  We will oppose that geostrategic malignant tumor together.

The sides are seriously concerned about the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom (AUKUS), which provides for deeper cooperation between its members in areas involving strategic stability, in particular their decision to initiate cooperation in the field of nuclear-powered submarines. Russia and China believe that such actions are contrary to the objectives of security and sustainable development of the Asia-Pacific region, increase the danger of an arms race in the region, and pose serious risks of nuclear proliferation.

Translation into plain English: AUKUS is yet a further iteration of Anglo imperialism.  It is dangerous and we will oppose it together.

The sides call on the United States to respond positively to the Russian initiative and abandon its plans to deploy intermediate-range and shorter-range ground-based missiles in the Asia-Pacific region and Europe. The Chinese side is sympathetic to and supports the proposals put forward by the Russian Federation to create long-term legally binding security guarantees in Europe.

Translation into plain English: China fully backs the Russian ultimatum to the West.  The West’s rejection of the Russian demands also affects to Asia-Pacific region and, therefore, it affects and even threatens China’s national interests.  Russia and China have a common goal to resist the West’s imperialistic policies.

The sides note that the denunciation by the United States of a number of important international arms control agreements has an extremely negative impact on international and regional security and stability. The sides express concern over the advancement of U.S. plans to develop global missile defense and deploy its elements in various regions of the world, combined with capacity building of high-precision non-nuclear weapons for disarming strikes and other strategic objectives.

Translation into plain English: Russia will not allow the US to militarily encircle China and China will not allow the US to militarily encircle Russia.  Russia and China stand back to back and will protect each other, thereby foiling any Anglo plans to encircle either one, or both, of these nations.

The sides oppose attempts by some States to turn outer space into an arena of armed confrontation and reiterate their intention to make all necessary efforts to prevent the weaponization of space and an arms race in outer space. They will counteract activities aimed at achieving military superiority in space and using it for combat operations.

Translation into plain English: Russian and Chinese space programs will make a joint effort to defeat the Anglo attempts at militarizing space, both countries will help each other to develop future space capabilities and to create and deploy the means to prevent the US from threatening them from space.

The sides emphasize that domestic and foreign bioweapons activities by the United States and its allies raise serious concerns and questions for the international community regarding their compliance with the BWC. The sides share the view that such activities pose a serious threat to the national security of the Russian Federation and China and are detrimental to the security of the respective regions.

Translation into plain English:the USA clearly has an active biowarfare program.  Russia and China feel threatened by this and they will act together to stop the USA from developing illegal and dangerous bioweapons.

The Russian side notes the significance of the concept of constructing a ”community of common destiny for mankind“ proposed by the Chinese side to ensure greater solidarity of the international community and consolidation of efforts in responding to common challenges. The Chinese side notes the significance of the efforts taken by the Russian side to establish a just multipolar system of international relations.

Translation into plain English: Russia and China agree that the new, post Western, world order they want to achieve will be based on the brotherhood and solidarity of all those countries who, rather than exploiting the entire planet for the benefit of a few, want to see an international systems based on shared values rather than on greed and the oppression of the weak by the strong.  In that system, relations between countries will be based on international law and the United Nations as its cornerstone and not by some ad hoc “alliances of the willing” or any other such illegal nonsense.

They reaffirm that the new inter-State relations between Russia and China are superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ”forbidden“ areas of cooperation, strengthening of bilateral strategic cooperation is neither aimed against third countries nor affected by the changing international environment and circumstantial changes in third countries.

Translation into plain English: “relations between Russia and China are superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era” is pretty darn clear:  Russia and China are more than allies or “just” symbionts, the alliance they have formed is not a western-style peace of paper which can be revoked or ignored.  

Russia and China have decided to establish a true “friendship which knows no limits“, that is a brotherhood that is much bigger in scope and much deeper in nature than any formal alliance.  

The two countries see a common future and will stand by each other as two loving brothers.  

Note: the choice of words “friendship with no limits” has been carefully crafted to not make sense to a western audience which will see it only as “pious and vague platitudes with no binding obligations” but which will be very clear to those who come from the Russian and Chinese civilizational realms.  

Simply put: nobody in the West truly believes in “friendship” between states, only situational allies and personal interests.  

The concept of friendship has a very different meaning in China and Russia.  Furthermore, “no limits” is also nonsensical in western geopolitics.  

Again, to a Russian or Chinese audience the paragraph above means and expresses much MORE than any “alliance”, “treaty” or “agreement”.  Western political leaders simply cannot fathom or imagine what Russia and China are saying here – their minds simply cannot comprehend what is being said here.

Russia and China aim to comprehensively strengthen the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and further enhance its role in shaping a polycentric world order based on the universally recognized principles of international law, multilateralism, equal, joint, indivisible, comprehensive and sustainable security. They consider it important to consistently implement the agreements on improved mechanisms to counter challenges and threats to the security of SCO member states and, in the context of addressing this task, advocate expanded functionality of the SCO Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure.

Translation into plain English: China and Russia will develop their full-spectrum security cooperation.  Just as the CSTO recently, the SCO will soon grow more powerful “teeth” and bare them if/when needed.  And don’t be fooled by the reference to “anti-terrorism” choice of worlds.  The recent CSTO operation in Kazakhstan was also an “anti-terrorist” one :-)

Conclusion:

The release of this joint statement is the geostrategic equivalent of Putin’s famous speech in which he described the new Russian weapons systems: it will initially be dismissed by western politicians who will then slowly undergo the five Kübler-Ross stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance).  This “limitless friendship” working towards a “community of common destiny for mankind” is the absolute worst nightmare of western imperialism and it is only made worse by the fact that there is absolutely nothing which the West can do to foil, oppose or even slow the progress of Russia and China towards their common goal and future.

Far from “attacking” the West or from invading anybody,  Russia and China have been doing something for years already and now what that “something” is is quite clear (at least to those with the sobriety and intelligence to see it):  Russia and China are simply leaving the united West behind, letting it do its own thing (political, cultural, economic, military and even spiritual suicide) while they built an alternative.

You could say that Zone B does not want to destroy or bring down Zone A.  Zone B want to offer an alternative to Zone A and then let each nation decide for itself what zone it wants to live in.

There is one word which is missing from this statement.  That word is “Iran“.

It is not missing because China or Russia don’t care about Iran or don’t realize how important Iran will be for the future of the Middle-East and even our entire planet.  They know that very, very well.  The reason the word “Iran” is missing is simple: while Iran is most definitely a friend and ally of both Russia and China, Iran does not share a “limitless friendship” or brotherly symbiotic relationship with either country.  Neither is Iran a full member of the SCO, yet (but will be soon). Talk about true diversity!  These countries have completely different cultures, histories and political systems, yet they fully support each other.  That is the “there is no one-size-fits-all template” model already being built before our eyes!  I also believe that Iran’s bid to become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation was approved but in needs to be formalized (may be mistaken here)..  Yet both China and Russia understand that Iran is crucial, not only as a gateway for Russia and China into the Middle-East, but also as a crucial member of the supra-ideological system of alliances Russia and China want to create.  In fact, these countries have been helping each other for years already.  But there is more, look at this:

• Russia is a democratic and “social” state, with a weird, and changing, mix of capitalism and traditional Russian collectivism.
• China is a unique mix of capitalism and Communist state control
• Iran is an Islamic Republic.

Talk about true diversity!  These countries have completely different cultures, histories and political systems, yet they fully support each other.  That is the “there is no one-size-fits-all template” model already being built before our eyes!  I also believe that Iran’s bid to become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was approved but in needs to be formalized and fully implemented.

This model will attract and easily include those Latin American countries which will chose “21 century socialism” (primarily developed by Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia) ideology.  It will also be far more attractive to many African countries than the “western imperialist boot” (examples include Mali, Burkina Faso, Congo and, potentially many others).

The map below shows the current situation.

The Russian-Chinese joint statement tells us all we need to know about how this map will change in the near future.

Andrei

Underwhelming?

For all of you who think that the events and 6000 word statement is “underwhelming” take a note that…

Kremlin reveals number of approved agreements during Putin’s visit to China
There are 16 intergovernmental, interdepartmental and commercial documents

MOSCOW, February 4. /TASS/. A package of 16 intergovernmental, interdepartmental and commercial documents was approved as part of the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to China. The list of documents was posted on the Kremlin’s website on Friday.

The Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development was adopted during the Sino-Russian summit talks.

In particular, the Russian state corporation Roscosmos and the Chinese Satellite Navigation System Commission signed a cooperation deal in the sphere of mutual complementarity of the GLONASS and Beidou global satellite navigation systems.

The Russian Ministry of Economic Development and China's Ministry of Commerce made a joint statement on the completion of developing a roadmap for mutual trade in goods and services and signed a memorandum of understanding for deepening investment cooperation in sustainable (green) development areas.

The customs authorities of Russia and China signed a protocol on mutual recognition of the status of an authorized economic operator. The parties approved 11 intergovernmental and interdepartmental documents in total.

Four commercial contracts were signed during the visit. Gazprom and CNPC inked a long-term contract for the delivery of 10 bln cubic meters of natural gas over the Far Eastern route. Rosneft and Huawei sealed a deal on cooperation. Rosneft and CNPC signed an agreement on the deliveries of 100 mln tonnes of oil via Kazakhstan over a decade and approved a memorandum of understanding to cooperate in the low-carbon development sphere.

Video 2

Girl in a nice bouncy sweater. Video 2 4MB

What about India?

Ah. The “QUAD” to contain China, and now Russia. How does India fit in? Here’s an editorial from HERE.

US plays QUAD card during Beijing Olympics

The appalling decision by the External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar to huddle together with his QUAD colleagues bang in the middle of the Beijing Winter Olympics may have unpleasant consequences. 

China sees QUAD as a US-led clique working to “contain” it. 

An action-reaction syndrome has once again developed. Beijing’s apparent retaliation by picking the Galwan hero as the Olympic torchbearer was not the end of the story.

Delhi swiftly crossed over to the US-led group to boycott the Beijing Olympics. Some protestors in Delhi also set the Chinese national flag on fire.

Even a moron would know China regards the staging of the Winter Olympics as a cherished moment.

President Xi Jinping’s toast at the Welcoming Banquet of The Olympic Winter Games on Friday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing exuded immense national pride when he said,

“China has just entered the Year of the Tiger according to the lunar calendar. Tiger is a symbol of strength, courage and fearlessness.”

That is precisely why the US, including President Biden himself, smear Beijing Olympics. Americans are bad losers. They feel impotent as China marches ahead inexorably while the US is declining irreversibly. Panic and hatred is setting in mixed with intense envy and helplessness. 

But what has India got to do with it? 

India did well not to join the US-led boycott of the Games initially. But it has since “tweaked” its principled stance when Washington mooted the idea to schedule a QUAD ministerial in Asia-Pacific on February 9.

Apparently, it occurred to no one in Delhi to ask Washington: “Why February 9? Why not after February 20?”

Plainly put, the upcoming QUAD ministerial on Wednesday is a contrived American sideshow to thumb the nose at Beijing bang in the middle of the Olympics.

This cheeky move by Washington is linked to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s regional tour to Australia, Fiji, and Hawaii “for a series of bilateral, trilateral, and multilateral engagements to advance our priorities in the Indo-Pacific.”

Obviously, it was hatched much before the Galwan hero appeared in the news cycle.

The US state department gave the customary briefing in Washington on the QUAD ministerial venture on coming Wednesday

“in this era of intense competition, changing strategic landscapes… (for) strengthening the security environment in the region to push back against aggression and coercion… “

(By the way, the briefing was timed exactly for February 4, the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing.)

Interestingly, Assistant Secretary Daniel Kritenbrink who gave the briefing took umbrage at the China-Russia joint statement issued at Beijing earlier in the day following President Vladimir Putin’s visit.

Kritenbrink who is in charge of the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, in fact, came armed with a tirade against both China and Russia.

He said: 

“The (Xi-Putin) meeting should have provided China the opportunity to encourage Russia to pursue diplomacy and de-escalation in Ukraine.  

That is what the world expects from responsible powers.  

If Russia further invades Ukraine and China looks the other way, it suggests that China is willing to tolerate or tacitly support Russia’s efforts to coerce Ukraine even when they embarrass Beijing, harm European security, and risk global peace and economic stability.  

We have, unfortunately, seen this before.  

This marks the second time that Russia has escalated aggression towards a sovereign country during a Beijing Olympics.  

The last time was Russia’s invasion of Georgia during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.  

The United States has had almost 200 diplomatic engagements with allies and partners since Russia created this crisis.  

We are focused on working with allies and partners, including in the Indo-Pacific, to respond decisively if Russia further invades Ukraine.”

Now, this is the other thing about QUAD.

It is no longer about containing China alone; Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy is poised to advance its ‘dual containment’ of China and Russia.

The Indian leaders travelling in the QUAD bandwagon ought to know that they are also being drawn unwittingly into the US’ dual containment of China and Russia.

Russia has been explicit in its criticism of the QUAD as a factor of instability and regional discord in the Asia-Pacific. The EAM cannot close his eyes and pretend he’s cherrypicking. The big-power rivalries are getting very serious, as anyone who reads newspapers can tell.

At any rate, the appalling thing is that India has now got into the US bandwagon, armed with a Galwan-hero alibi. And this is coming at a time when the tensions on the border have shown signs of easing and there’s hope of a better climate becoming available for further talks between India and China.

Isn’t this history repeating — US butting into India-China discourses in self-interest and India refusing to reject such attempts, which in turn triggering negative vibes that of course become grist to the mill of the clutch of operatives who all along wanted to fasten India in the American stable?

In these troubled times, how rationally and with maturity Germany is handling its difficult relationship with Russia offers some fresh ideas. Indeed, Germany has a far more painful and complex relationship with Russia than India can ever imagine with any of its neighbours. Yet, German Minister of Defense Christine Lambrecht has opposed any attempt to draw a link between between Nord Stream 2 and Germany’s differences with Moscow over Ukraine.

Equally, Berlin rejects calls for German arms deliveries to Ukraine and reportedly also blocked the export of German weapons by third countries like Estonia. As Marcel Dirsus, a German think tanker at the Institute for Security Policy at the University of Kiel, wrote this week, Germany has “moved beyond power politics, the national interest and militarism.”

It is borne out of a “historically-informed sense of security.” Dirsus writes:

“Whether true or false, the idea that dialogue is more effective than deterrence is deeply embedded in German political culture… Since the end of the Cold War, Germany has largely found itself in a position to trade freely with anyone and everyone without being constrained by rigorous considerations of politics or security.”

Indeed, what really brought down the Berlin Wall wasn’t missiles or tanks, but engagement — the strategy known as Ostpolitik. But then, German foreign policy is the way it is because that is the way Germans want it.

That is the cardinal difference between Germans and Indians. In our country, the public opinion roots for militarism with active encouragement from the establishment. Curiously, the Indian opposition too constantly taunts the government for not being aggressive enough toward China, a superpower manifold stronger than India.

It is not that the opposition politicians are illiterate, but they parrot what their constituents think — even if they themselves understand what’s at stake. To be sure, the EAM’s a priori assumption too is well-founded — that his decision to attend the QUAD ministerial is bound to go down well in the Indian bazaar, although he must be intelligent enough to know that it may weaken the nascent process at the border talks. Sadly, India comes out a loser in all this.

Movie “The Battle at Lake Changjin”

If anyone wants more fireworks, the Chinese-made Korean war epic “The Battle at Lake Changjin” is now up on Youtube. It’s got English subtitles and it’s free.

It’s very good, for a war movie, and it was pleasing to see the American army soundly defeated for a change.

Also it’s a good look at the Peoples’ Volunteer Army in comparison to the American Marines.

In one scene, the Americans are feasting on turkey dinners in tents while the volunteers are sharing cold potatoes in the snow. One take-away I had from the movie is that it’s a sign the empire is in decline.

https://youtu.be/j7AXdh3OpZA

Here’s a short scene (historically accurate) depicting how the Chinese fight. With overwhelming manpower and an intense devotion to sacrifice.

Video 90MB

abreviet-attack-scene-2022-02-07_11.20.32

Here’s a short scene (historically accurate) from the movie. It depicts the moment when the Chinese took over the American HQ…

video 54MB

abreviet-capture-scene-2022-02-07_11.04.40

Article by Vladimir Putin ”Russia and China: A Future-Oriented Strategic Partnership“ for the Chinese News Agency Xinhua

On the eve of my upcoming visit to China, I am pleased to address directly the large Chinese and foreign audience of Xinhua, the world’s largest news agency.

Our countries are close neighbours bound by centuries-old traditions of friendship and trust. We highly appreciate that Russian-Chinese relations of comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation, entering a new era, have reached an unprecedented level and have become a model of efficiency, responsibility, and aspiration for the future. The basic principles and guidelines for joint work were defined by our countries in the Treaty of Good Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation, the twentieth anniversary of which we celebrated last year. These are, first and foremost, equality, consideration of one another’s interests, freedom from political and ideological circumstances, as well as from the vestiges of the past. These are the principles we are consistently building on year after year in the spirit of continuity to deepen our political dialogue. Despite the difficulties caused by the coronavirus pandemic, we are striving to dynamically build the capacity of economic partnerships and expand humanitarian exchanges.

During the upcoming visit, the President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping and I will thoroughly discuss key issues on the bilateral, regional, and global agendas. It is symbolic that our meeting will take place during the Spring Festival – the Chinese Lunar New Year. After all, as the Chinese saying goes, ”make your whole year’s plan in the spring“.

The development of business ties will certainly be given special attention. There is every opportunity for this as our countries have substantial financial, industrial, technological and human resources allowing us to successfully resolve long-term development issues. By working together, we can achieve stable economic growth and improve the well-being of our citizens, strengthen our competitiveness, and stand together against today’s risks and challenges.

At the end of 2021, the volume of mutual trade increased by more than a third, exceeding the record level of 140 billion U.S. dollars. We are well on the way towards our goal of increasing the volume of trade to 200 billion U.S. dollars a year. A number of important initiatives are being implemented in the investment, manufacturing, and agro-industrial sectors. In particular, the portfolio of the Intergovernmental Commission on Investment Cooperation includes 65 projects worth over 120 billion U.S. dollars. This is about collaboration in such industries as mining and mineral processing, infrastructure construction, and agriculture.

We are consistently expanding the practice of settlements in national currencies and creating mechanisms to offset the negative impact of unilateral sanctions. A major milestone in this work was the signing of the Agreement between the Government of Russia and the Government of the PRC on payments and settlements in 2019.

A mutually beneficial energy alliance is being formed between our countries. Along with long-term supplies of Russian hydrocarbons to China, we have plans to implement a number of large-scale joint projects. The construction of four new power units at Chinese nuclear power plants with the participation of Rosatom State Corporation launched last year is one of them. All this significantly strengthens the energy security of China and the Asia region as a whole.

We see an array of opportunities in the development of partnerships in information and communication technologies, medicine, space exploration, including the use of national navigation systems and the International Lunar Research Station project. A serious impetus to strengthening bilateral ties was given by the cross Years of Russian-Chinese Scientific, Technical and Innovative Cooperation in 2020–2021.

We are grateful to our Chinese colleagues for their assistance in launching the production of Russian Sputnik V and Sputnik Light vaccines in China and for the timely supply of necessary protective equipment to our country. We hope that this cooperation will develop and strengthen.

One of Russia’s strategic objectives is to accelerate the social and economic upliftment of Siberia and the Russian Far East. These territories are immediate neighbors of the PRC. We also intend to actively develop interregional ties. Thus, the modernization of the Baikal-Amur Mainline and the Trans-Siberian Railway has been started. By 2024, their capacity must increase one and a half times through higher volumes of transit cargo and reduced transport time. The port infrastructure in the Russian Far East is also growing. All this should further enhance the complementarity of the Russian and Chinese economies.

And, of course, the conservation of nature and shared ecosystems remains an important area of bilateral cross-border and interregional cooperation. These issues have always been the focus of our countries’ public attention, and we will certainly discuss them in detail during the negotiations, as well as a wide range of humanitarian topics.

Russia and China are countries with thousands of years of unique traditions and tremendous cultural heritage, the interest in which is persistently high both in our countries and abroad. It is true that in the last two years the number of tourists, joint mass events, and direct contacts between our citizens has reduced due to the pandemic. However, I have no doubt that we will catch up and, as soon as the situation allows, will launch new outreach and educational programs to introduce our citizens to the history and present-day life of the two countries. Thus, President Xi Jinping and I have agreed to hold the Years of Russian-Chinese cooperation in physical fitness and sports in 2022 and 2023.

Certainly, an important part of the visit will be a discussion of relevant international topics. The coordination of the foreign policy of Russia and China is based on close and coinciding approaches to solving global and regional issues. Our countries play an important stabilizing role in today’s challenging international environment, promoting the democratization of the system of interstate relations to make it more equitable and inclusive. We are working together to strengthen the central coordinating role of the United Nations in global affairs and to prevent the international legal system, with the UN Charter at its centre, from being eroded.

Russia and China are actively cooperating on the broadest agenda within BRICS, RIC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as well as other associations. Within the G20, we are committed to taking national specifics into account when formulating our recommendations, be it the fight against pandemics or the implementation of the climate agenda. Thanks to a large extent to our countries’ shared solidarity, following the 2021 G20 Summit in Rome informed decisions were made on international cooperation to restore economic growth, recognize vaccines and vaccine certificates, optimize energy transitions, and reduce digitalization risks.

We also have convergent positions on international trade issues. We advocate maintaining an open, transparent and non-discriminatory multilateral trading system based on the rules of the World Trade Organization. We support relaunching of global supply chains. Back in March 2020, Russia proposed an initiative on ”green trade corridors“ that excludes any sanctions, political and administrative barriers. Its implementation is a useful aid to overcoming the economic consequences of the pandemic.

The XXIV Olympic Winter Games starting in Beijing are a major event of global significance. Russia and China are leading sporting nations renowned for their sporting traditions and not once have hosted the largest international competitions with dignity. I fondly remember my visit to Beijing in August 2008 to attend the 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremony. Guests and athletes from Russia will remember the vivid performance for a long time, and the Games themselves were organized with the scale and exceptional hospitality inherent to our Chinese friends. For our part, we were delighted to host President Xi Jinping at the opening of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Sadly, attempts by a number of countries to politicize sports to the benefit of their ambitions have recently intensified. This is fundamentally wrong and contrary to the very spirit and principles of the Olympic Charter. The power and greatness of sports are that it brings people together, gives moments of triumph and pride for the country and delights with fair, just and uncompromising competition. And these approaches are shared by most of the states participating in the international Olympic Movement.

Our Chinese friends have done tremendous work to prepare well for the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. I am convinced that China’s extensive experience in the excellent organization of representative international competitions will make it possible to hold this festival of world sports at the highest level. I would like to wish the Russian and Chinese teams impressive results and new records!

I send my warmest congratulations to the friendly people of China on the occasion of the Spring Festival, which marks the beginning of the Year of the Tiger. I wish you good health, prosperity, and success.

Video 3

She’s one of my favorites. Short, cute, big happy smile. She makes me feel good about life. video 9MB

Here’s another of her…

I’ve got to tell you, I really do like her presentation, and this is what China is like. It’s really nice, peopled with very nice people.

video 7MB

Unprecedented China-Russia ties to start a new era of intl relations not defined by US

Joint statement highlights close coordination, rejects US hegemony

Following the highly anticipated meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, China and Russia issued a lengthy joint statement that elaborated on shared views and consensuses on major global and regional issues and delivered a scathing rejection of the US-led West’s hegemony that increasingly threatens global security and stability, a move that experts say ushers in a new era of international relations.

During the meeting ahead of the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games, Xi stressed the further deepening of “back-to-back” strategic coordination between the two countries in upholding international fairness and justice and adhering to the four consensuses in supporting each other’s sovereignty, security and development interests to better tackle external interference and regional threats.

The two countries’ broad consensuses on almost all core issues related to global strategic stability, expressed during the meeting of the two leaders and stated in the nearly 6,000-word joint statement, are extremely rare and will further boost close strategic coordination that helps ensure global stability and peace, Chinese experts said.

The joint statement, which focuses on international relations in a new era and global sustainable development, extensively expounded on common positions on democracy, development, security and order.

The joint statement mentioned US at least five times and contained the two countries’ common stance on a number of key regional and global issues, including…

• firm oppositions or serious concerns over the expansion of NATO eastward,
• the West-led ideological clique in the name of democracy,
• the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy that threatens regional stability,
• the trilateral security partnership among Australia,
• the US, and the UK (AUKUS),
• and US domestic and overseas bioweapons activities.In a clear rejection of the US-led West’s hegemony in international relations, the joint statement said that a small number of forces continue stubbornly to promote unilateralism, adopt power politics and interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, stressing that such acts will not be accepted by the international community.

  "It's the first time that China and Russia released such a long statement after the meeting between the two heads of state, which includes all the major issues and strategic questions and shows that China-Russia ties have reached an unprecedented level,"  
  
  -Lü Xiang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Friday.

  The world order has entered a new era, the Chinese expert said, noting that in the face of US hegemony – a product left behind by the Cold War mentality – China and Russia are the only two countries that have the capability to safeguard their core interests and sovereignty.

  "The solidarity between China and Russia gives a new definition to the world order, as they share the common knowledge about where the major threats to the global stability come from,"

He said.

In the joint statement,

• China and Russia oppose the further expansion of NATO and called on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologized Cold War approaches,
• to respect the sovereignty, security and interests of other countries, the diversity of their civilizational, cultural and historical backgrounds,
• and to exercise a fair and objective attitude towards the peaceful development of other states.They also stand against the formation of closed bloc structures and opposing camps in the Asia-Pacific region and remain highly vigilant about the negative impact of the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy on peace and stability in the region.

China and Russia are also seriously concerned about AUKUS, which allows cooperation on nuclear-powered submarines.

"The US is now touting its Cold War mentality and so-called China threat theory in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as the so-called Russia threat theory in Europe, which prompted China and Russia to stand up against such zero-sum mentality," 

-Zhang Hong, an Eastern European studies expert from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Friday.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, unrest across Western countries such as the US Capitol protest last year shows how the illusion that “Western democracy is the destination of human beings” has collapsed, Zhang noted, adding that emerging countries are showing great vitality and increasingly contributing in international trade and economy, which have also been underscored in the shared views between China and Russia.

The two countries share an understanding that democracy is a universal human value, rather than the privilege of a limited number of countries, the joint statement said. And it is up to the people of a country to decide whether their country is democratic.

Developing countries such as China and Russia gradually found a development model suitable to their own national conditions after the Cold War, while abandoning the West-led Washington Consensus because they saw its inherent defects, which prompted China and Russia to be more vocal on a pluralistic global order, Zhang said.

China and Russia have been reiterating that there is no limit to bilateral strategic cooperation, a new form of partnership between major powers that has clearly made the US anxious. And a crucial factor behind such a limitless development in bilateral ties is the high degree of mutual understanding between the two powerful leaders on global governance.

Putin is the first foreign head of state to confirm his attendance at the 2022 Games last year, and the trip to Beijing was also his first overseas trip in 2022.

Putin said during the meeting on Friday that official visits during the opening of the Olympics have become a tradition, mentioning his visit to Beijing in the summer of 2008 for the Summer Olympics, Xi’s visit to Russia in 2014 for the Sochi Winter Olympics and the meeting in Beijing before the Winter Olympics.

Xi said that this rendezvous at the Winter Olympics, which also coincides with spring, will inject much momentum to China-Russia relations, saying that he is willing to work with President Putin to plan a blueprint for and guide the direction of China-Russia ties under new historical conditions.

How NATO visualizes war

It’s funny and pathetic and a comedy, but no. Real war is a terrible, terrible thing. It’s NOTHING to laugh about.

Never the less, this clip is actually funny.

video 13MB

A Chinese girl on the street

This gal has nice bouncing boobies. I like them, though I personally believe that she has seventh-generation “ergomax” breast implants to make those boobs jiggle like they do. It’s a nice effect, though terribly distracting.

video 2MB

The Year of the Tiger Starts With a Sino-Russian Bang

From HERE.

Video 4

She is another one of my favorites. She is relaxing like a fine spring day.

Video 4MB

And another of this fine Chinese woman

I really like her.

Video 2MB

What a Chinese home is like…

And, here’s a girl dancing in her house. You will notice the white stone floor and the walls and everythign else, including the cats in their cage (typical but not common). Enjoy the video.

video 4MB

Now, Let’s chat about ourselves…

When you get older, you start to look back at the moments where an opportunity presented itself to you and you didn’t take it. You were too afraid, or too fearful. You didn’t want to hear rejection. You were too fragile.

Nonsense!

You get older and you realize that the time is now. And you start making your life and defining your life on your terms, and if others don’t like it, well that is too bad. You just smile and move forward. Just keep on, keeping on.

Like in this video…

Video 100MB

Everything is forcing us to conform.

They use fear, lust, greed, and envy to move us, manipulate us and force us to either hide, or do things that are contrary to our best interests.

Not allow them to do that to you.

It’s a new world, and the rest of the world are embracing the idea that they can be themselves, and not be forced to conform to the American ideal. And they are relishing in it.

They can live their lifes without fear that one day the United States government will blow up their homes, strafe their children, ruin their economies, and enslave them; forcing them to eat McDonald’s hamburgers, drink Starbucks coffee, and become alternative sexual orientation friendly.

Video 5.2MB

Or, maybe not so traditional, perhaps more commercial, or merchantary. Such as this video. Enjoy it. Uh oh.

Video 9MB

The world is NOT bad, ugly and full of danger

Actually, the reast of the world is really rather nice.

Remember, the world is under YOUR control. Not the rich, the powerful or the rulers. It’s you.

Do not allow them to box you into some kind of fake reality.

Here’s where MM lives. This was what it was like today. This is the small park outside my complex front port. video 81MB

It’s a new world order and the future now is owned by Asia. It’s just that this fact is not being reported in the West. But whether it is reported or not, makes no difference.

The future has moved on.

So enjoy life and savor it. There’s a lot of good things all around you. The adults are now in charge of the world, and the spoiled brats that inhereted the reins of power in the United States are trying to pretend that it is not the case.

Savor life. Appreciate it, and stop living a life in fear.  Nothing bad is going to happen to you. Just control your reality. It’s nto that hard to do.

video 13MB

And remember that it’s a new world.

It’s a new world order, and MoA said it best…

The U.S. will say that the above is just some grand declaration with no meaning. But it is much more. It is a political program that China and Russia as well as their allies will be working on for the next decades.

Asian as well as European countries should consider if they want to support or oppose it. 

They should recognize that siding with the U.S. against China and Russia guarantees that they will find themselves on the losing side.

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

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Articles & Links

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• You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
• You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
• You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
• You can find out more about the author HERE.
• If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
• If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

“It’s no longer in Poland’s interests to continue criticizing China simply to please the Americans.”

-Polish President Andrzej Duda announced

The Illegal Four Billion Dollar Disinformation War Against China

USA Strategic Competition Act of 2021 – Part 2

All of the political and media mechanisms that led to the Iraq War are still in place and have been turned on China. The Strategic Competition Act of 2021 is simply a very well financed new weapon designed to suppress any and all alternative views in the media, and disinform and bribe other nations and even the United Nations to participate in this rapidly escalating series of crimes.

By Greg Brundage
https://lnkd.in/eyu5dmXW

Home invasion in London

The entire Western Bloc is in tatters. It’s crumbling, on fire and just dying left and right. here’s a home invasion in London. Check it out.

Video 12MB

China says U.S. plans to pay athletes to ‘sabotage’ Beijing Games | Reuters

Who is surprised? It’s the standard operating procedure.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-media-says-us-pays-athletes-disrupt-beijing-games-2022-01-29/

Chang calls American TSMC chip manufacture to be unfeasible, with $52bn in subsidies far too little

The Sacrifice

This is a scene from history. The Chinese people work together as one. The American planes would bomb Chiense bridges and then 20 minute slater the bridges would be repaired and up and working again. How?

Sounds like science fiction, but it’s true. Check out this amazing video. 17MB

Americans making a difference in the world…

Where does bullying come from?

"The Punishers" are a group of bikers who respond to bullied children's requests for help. After a year their intervention, no one has more bullized this child.

What are the origins of bullying?

The causes at the origin of bullying are plurime and attributable to individual or group dynamic factors: the child temperament, family models, stereotypes imposed by the media, education imparted by parents or school institutions and other variables connected to 'social environment.

The Swedish psychologist Dan Olweus was the first to use, in the 1970s, the term "bullying", to indicate the preputances of peer in his pioneering research on the school violence that led to the formulation of an antibullying program widely adopted in schools of Nordic countries.

According to the relationship an Everyday Lesson: #endViolence in schools half of the students between 13 and 15 years in the world – about 150 million – reported to have suffered violence from their peers at school and outside.

I think we want a collective effort to prevent these numbers worsening in the future.

Video

China discovers 100-million-tonne oil, gas reserves in Tarim Basin

Uh oh! No wonder the USA wants a war over the Uighurs!

None Dare Call It “Encirclement”…

Numerous reports in the West about China threats or influence towards the West are being published by the day but nothing is mentioned in these reports or media about the huge military encirclement of China by Western nations, lead by the USA.

… while Western media and politics on the other hand were in a great uproar and confirming the ‘China threat’ when Chinese President Xi Jinping mentioned “We will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us, anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

The 2022 US National Defense Authorization Act passed with no significant opposition in the House or Senate from both parties.

Despite little opposition, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees instead voted to increase this year’s already staggering allotment for the Pentagon by another $24 billion — specifically to better contain (or fight) China. For the majority, going toward the creation of hypersonic missiles and other advanced weaponry aimed at China (not defensive, offensive).

But no one or no bill calls it what it actually is…

…encirclement and containment.

Guangzhou

A nice video of Guangzhou. Here. 4MB

It’s all about money and power

How about if just a small part of this China research and reporting diverts inward towards the global humanitarian threats of the current warmongering or even war inciting policies.

It might be revealing and maybe we would come to more human perspectives and policies for a better world.

A part of today’s China perspective originates from about 120 years ago when Western nations discussed how to divide a then also encircled China among themselves. Mostly forgotten in the West but not in China, certainly not with respect to today’s developments.

People and institutes can dive “deep and smart” in reporting and media but encirclement, containment and war inciting policies are all but that…

Let’s start with the basal facts before creating threats and perspectives (often with lies and manipulation)

By the way, this also applies for today’s Ukraine conflict and the ‘Russia threat’.

China’s missiles.

A great little video.

China is ready. Video 2MB

China where everything vanishes.

From MoA

Editors and headline writers in the ‘western’ press seem to have certain cliches about certain countries.

It is why one can make lists with 111 headlines which say that Russia is weaponizing this or that.

Another one is that whatever happens in China must have come at a cost.

China is also the place where everything vanishes.

Note that the vanishing of long slow train journeys are under ‘threat’. That of course means that modern fast train rides come at a cost. This is like China curing cancer faster and cheaper than anywhere else but is going too fast with that. Pure nonsense.

So for the heck of it here is a list of all the stuff that is vanishing in China, mostly because it develops ‘but is going too fast with that’.

• The vanishing slow trains of China
  – Financial Times, Jan 29 2022
• Paywall free copy of the above:
  The vanishing slow trains of China
  – The NY Ledger, Jan 29 2022

• Vanishing Culture: The death of China’s villages
  – China Institute, Dec 8, 2021
• China’s disappearing ships: The latest headache for the global supply chain
  – CNN, Dec 3 2021
• Mysterious Vanishing of Advanced Chinese Civilization 4,000 Years Ago Finally Solved
  – Science Alert, Nov 29, 2021
• After Vanishing For Weeks Chinese Tennis Player Peng Shuai Appears In Several Odd Videos Over The Weekend Which Have Done Little To Confirm Her Safety
  – Barstool Sports, Nov 22 2021
• The Vanishing of Peng Shuai
  – Quillette, Nov 20 2021
• Vanishing Freedom in China and Beyond at the Hands of Technology
  – Columbia University, Oct 19 2021
• The vanishing allure of doing business in China
  – Economist, Sep 18 2021
• Memories of a Vanishing China
  – New Yorker, Aug 13 2021
• There’s No Vanishing Act for China’s Hidden Debt
  – Bloomberg, May 19 2021
• China’s Vanishing Trade Imbalance
  – New York Times, May 1 2021
• An American-Egyptian Architect’s Photographs of China’s Vanishing Trades
  – Caixin, Apr 27 2021
• The vanishing billionaire: how Jack Ma fell foul of Xi Jinping
  – Financial Times, Apr 15 2021
• Hong Kong’s vanishing freedom on the agenda as China’s annual congress begins
  – NBC News, Mar 5 2021
• The strange case of Alibaba’s Jack Ma and his three-month vanishing act
  – Guardian, Jan 23 2021
• San Francisco’s historic Chinatown is at risk of vanishing
  – SF Gate, Jan 14 2021
• ‘HONEY TRAPPER’ China ‘spy’ Fang Fang ‘targeted Eric Swalwell and presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard’ before mysteriously vanishing
  – The Sun Dec 8 2020
• Life on the Slow Train: Views of a Vanishing China
  – Sixth Tone, Aug 21 2020
• China Developer Joint Ventures: The Case Of The Vanishing Revenue
  – S&P Global, Jun 10 2020
• Apple in China: Vanishing iPads
  – The Street, Jun 2 2020
• The vanishing interest income of Chinese banks as an indicator of loan quality problems
  – VOXeu, May 22 2020
• China’s vanishing trade surplus Now you see it, now you don’t.
  – Milkenreview, May 4 2020
• Fact Check: Did 21 Million Cell Phones Really Disappear In China?
  – Republic World, Mar 30 2020
• New Satellite Video Shows China Pollution Vanishing During COVID-19 Lockdown—Then Coming Back
  – Forbes, Mar 22 2020
• A Mysterious Vanishing Village in China
  – Mysterious Universe, Jun 26 2019
• Faith in ruins: China’s vanishing beards and mosques
  – BBC, Jun 20 2019
• Solving the mystery of vanishing rivers in China
  – National Science Review, Feb 11 2019
• A lady vanishes: In China, a movie star disappears amid culture crackdown
  – Reuters, Sep 14 2018
• In Search Of A Vanishing Civilization – Rock Art In China …
  – Bradshaw Foundation, ?
• Consecrated virgins in China: A vanishing life of service
  – UCA News, Jul 26 2017
• Vanishing Point of Jurisprudence : South China Sea Arbitration Case
  – Legal India, Aug 12 2016
• AT THE TAIL OF THE DRAGON: VANISHING TATTOOS OF CHINA’S LI PEOPLE
  – Lars Krutak, 2016
• Chinese executives keep going missing
  – CNN, Nov 27 2015
• China’s vanishing coastal wetlands are nearing critical red line
  – Science, Oct 23 2015
• In China, Civic Groups’ Freedom, and Followers, Are Vanishing
  – New York Times, Feb 26 2015
• The Vanishing Hong Kong: China’s Latest Casualty
  – American Consequences, ?
• Ethiopia Vies for China’s Vanishing Factory Jobs
  – Bloomberg, Jul 24 2014
• China’s Vanishing Worlds: Countryside, Traditions, and Cultural Spaces ´
  – MIT Press, Oct 25, 2013
• The Curious Case Of The Vanishing Chinese City
  – NPR, Sep 21 2011
• Vanishing Point: How to disappear in China without a trace
  – Asia Art Archive, 2011
• China’s Vanishing Fiscal Stimulus
  – Wall Street Journal, Feb 8 2010

China J-20 Aircraft

Nice, tight little video. HERE 10MB

Washington Tightens the Noose around China

Michael Klare

January 17, 2022

Since he published “War Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams” in 1972, Michael Klare has established himself as one of the world’s leading experts on US military foreign policy, warfare, weapons, military intervention, energy policies and the nexus between militarism and climate change.

I’ve known and followed him during all these years. Within the last few weeks, Michael has written two analyses pertain to the one-sided US Cold War on China that are frightening.

They provide you with cool documentation of the systematic planning and the impossible-to-understand sums the US has now allocated to this destructive – also self-destructive – project for the years ahead.

Western mainstream media will keep you in the dark about this perversely world-endangering policy. I call it that for the simple reason that the problems humanity faces which must be solved very rapidly through cooperation cannot be solved with the two largest economic and political powers in deadly conflict. This is the most significant diversion of attention and political energies – and financial resources – on earth at the moment.

Michael tells what you must know to take action – big or small – to stop this reckless US/NATO policy.

Here are the two articles:

Oh great. After absolutely pulverizing and destroying the middle East into rubble, the attention will now focus on destroying China and the South Pacific as well. Lovely. -MM

Chiense girl

Bouncing outside. video 3MB

Sitrep China: As the competitors start entering the newly constructed Olympics villages the war beat goes on

4332 Views January 26, 2022

Reproduced from HERE.

By Amarynth and the Here Comes China Newsletter by Godfree Roberts

What were we talking about just three or four months ago? Remember? China was going to imminently attack Taiwan. There was wall-to-wall coverage.

The jingoism did not work. Nobody attacked Taiwan.

China stated that Taiwan will be integrated with the mainland at the right time, and follow the correct procedure. China is dealing with a recalcitrant province that historically is as a result of war.

Now, there is even a bigger outcry. Russia is going to imminently invade the Ukraine. So we see an exchange in the western rhetoric from territorial flashpoint Taiwan, to territorial flashpoint the Ukraine in an attempt to contain something, anything that could create the space for the US/NATO and western puppets to maintain power and hegemony.

Will it work this time? The jury is out.

This is on the eve of the Winter Olympics that has already started with qualifying competitions and competitors entering the Olympic villages. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202201/1246696.shtml

A month or two ago, China gave what one could see as a request, but it can also be interpreted as stronger than that.

World expects ‘truce’ during Winter Games

A UNGA resolution, co-sponsored by 173 countries and adopted on Dec 2, asks all countries to observe the Olympic truce and stop hostile activities seven days before the Winter Olympic Games through to seven days after the end of the Winter Paralympic Games.

http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/0115/c90000-9945122.html

This is consistent with the historical values of these games all the way back to Ancient Greece in the ninth century.

Even so, the provocation beat, and false information continues on.

Russia does not rule out military provocations from US, Kiev regime – diplomat

A Bloomberg publication that Chinese President Xi Jinping allegedly asked Russian President Vladimir Putin not to invade Ukraine during the Olympic Games is an operation of US intelligence agencies, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

China called this a despicable trick. “The report was purely made out of thin air. It seeks not only to smear and drive a wedge in China-Russia relations, but also to deliberately disrupt and undermine the Beijing Winter Olympics. Such a despicable trick cannot fool the international community,” Zhao Lijian, spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a routine press conference.”

https://tass.com/politics/1391903

The cowardly attacks on China itself also have not really reduced. We are just not seeing those as all eyes are on Russia

Chinese military calls U.S. warship’s trespassing a “serious provocation”

http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/0121/c90000-9947625.html

Before this, we had the endless media announcements of who is going to boycott the Olympics (whether invited or not but they never said they were not invited, they just made it up), and then quietly, they asked for visas to attend anyway. It is all a show.  The Anglosphere has lost military supremacy as well as economic supremacy, and they are not elegant losers. In fact, they will continue to attempt to overturn any security balance anywhere in the world to appease their own hubris for total spectrum dominance or at least the appearance of that.

India for once spoke out and said they will not boycott the Olympic Games, as in these circumstances they will follow their policy of ‘neighbors first’. Uhm, who knew they had such a policy?

Out of 206 nations eligible to participate in the Olympics, only 14 have decided not to send their diplomats.  Of the 14, five quoted Covid as the reason, others do not have a winter olympics team.  Not because of some US led diplomatic boycott.

The backdrop to the Anglosphere being butthurt and trying to change the Russian ‘request’ for security guarantees into sole focus on Ukraine is not stopping the march towards a world order based on Law and not Rule by some flunky. China is not falling for it in their press, or in their spoken word.  This trend is inexorable and the Anglosphere has but limited time to change or to be run over.  The old games of money and guns, the warfare model based on coercion, are coming to an end.

Here are three examples of the world changing.

• China launches Global South economic alliance to challenge US ‘unilateralism’ and ‘cold-war mentality’

China just launched a new economic alliance of Global South nations called the “Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative”.  Beijing said it seeks to challenge (US) “unilateralism” and the “Cold-War mentality,” and promotes “win-win cooperation”.

• The Stans are now being ‘multi polarized’ and while Russia gathered them together with the recent military adventure in Kazakhstan, China is following and cementing the trend.

Xi to chair virtual summit commemorating 30th anniversary of China-Central Asia ties  http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/20220124/cdb72b8e378647a192152361a299c216/c.html

So, this meeting happened yesterday and the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, will be attending the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing.

• Pakistan is sailing Chinese Frigates and contracted the construction of eight Hangor-class submarines, four Type 054A/P ships and medium-altitude long-endurance unmanned combat aerial vehicles from China.  https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202201/1246789.shtml

On the big picture, Chas Freeman has this to say…

The question is whether China will choose to accept an active role in stabilizing the region.  “Great power rivalry” or a putative Manichean struggle between China and democracy will not drive this decision.  

On the evidence to date, it will instead reflect the broadly overlapping national interests of China, Europe, India, Japan, and Korea, the fractious states of West Asia and North Africa, and the United States.  

All share a compelling interest in a stable Middle East whose quarrels do not export radicalism or endanger access to crucial energy supplies.

It would be in America’s interest for China and other countries that rely on Middle Eastern energy exports to share the burden of preserving global prosperity by coming together to safeguard the world’s energy trade.  

If China faces a choice in this regard, so does America.  

The United States can cooperate to mutual advantage with China, other rising powers, and the oil producing countries of the region, or it can overwrite obvious interests it shares with China and others with irrational antagonism and pursue a pointless game that no one can hope to win. 

Chas W. Freeman

A New Economic System

In terms of economics and trade, what I personally expect to see as a result of Putin and Xi’s talks while Putin attends the Olympic games, is a much revealed new economic system, which, on a transaction level, will start to be closely integrated across the non-Anglo world. The level of the reveal may be muted, and we may have to read the tea leaves to understand the size and scope of this change.

The driver of that will be the E-CNY, China’s digital currency, which will be massively rolled out for use at the Winter Olympics.  https://govt.chinadaily.com.cn/s/202101/27/WS601137c9498eaba5051c195e/e-cny-chinas-digital-currency.html

We also note financial integration in other spheres as the Russian Standard Bank clients are now able to transfer money to the cards of the Chinese UnionPay payment system. This is not a SWIFT transaction.

Overall, the anti-China rhetoric remains at top decibels. As you will see from the extra reading below, while we were watching Russia, the war propaganda against China did not reduce one bit…

The Great Western Wall vs Snow Niggers

From HERE.

You know about the Great Wall of China, right?  But have you ever heard of the Great Western Wall?

That is the immense wall which was built around the minds of the people of the West for the past 1000 or so years.  I will try to describe it using a few salient examples, but what I want to clearly state here is that these examples are only some I chose, but in reality, there are millions of them and they constitute a kind of “mental force field” which has (almost) no holes in it.  Until now.  But let’s first start with a few examples of what that wall looks like and how those enclosed by it think:

• Say what you wish, or don’t say it, but everybody knows and understands that the so-called Western civilization (which in this narrative was not born from the Middle-Ages, but from Antiquity) is superior to all others.  Oh sure, we will pay lip service to the liberal ideas of Rousseau or the Woke insanity, but deep inside, we are the best, we will eventually prevail, and nobody can match, nevermind, beat us.
• Russians are racially and culturally inferior.  Oh sure, they are mostly white, but they act like Mongols (something quite terrible in the average western mind which knows *nothing* about the Mongol Empire, this is even true on the UK Ministerial level!!!).  They are either soaking their brains with vodka, or they are planning devious and bloody attacks on the irenic and noble people of the West.  The term I suggest for them would be Russians are “Snow Niggers“.
• The Snow Niggers control way too much land and resources.  We need to bring them true democracy.
• Russians have never known democracy, so they don’t even have the concept of “freedom”: true, we don’t really understand the distinction they make between “svoboda” and “volia” anymore than we understand the distinction between “pravda” and “istina” – but who cares, they don’t think like we do, therefore their concepts are irrelevant.
• Russians cannot be trusted.  Ever.  Ask any of the people who neighbor Russia and they will tell you how horrible it was to live under Russian rule.  The fact that Russians (unlike the West) never committed genocide and that there are still 193 ethnic groups and over 100 languages in Russia herself is irrelevant.  The fact that not a single successor republic to the USSR became stable and viable – except Russia, that is – is also irrelevant.  All that Russian do is murder, rape, pillage and persecute everybody else, especially “gays”!
• Russians have always used stupid tactics, they always throw a huge amount of poorly trained soldiers but animalistically stubborn/courageous at any enemy.  During WWII, the German military was vastly superior to the Soviet one and the German generals eons ahead of the rather dull Soviet ones, especially in tactics and operational warfare.  Germany only lost WWII thanks to the US and UK and their superb military academies.  Any Soviet victory is explained by “Stalin’s terror”, of course.  Then these brutes went on a raping spree and created a giant Gulag while US forces only delivered chocolate and cool music to the poor Europeans, including the Germans.  Then the US generously rebuilt western Europe.  End of story.
• We have the best military in the world, with the best equipment and training.  The fact that we spend more on defense than the entire planet is the proof of that.  We also have the best intelligence community in the world, the fact that we have 17 “intelligence” agencies while others typically do with just a few (2-4 is typical) just further proves our infinite superiority (by some estimates, the total “peace budget” of the USA, combining military, intelligence and contractors is over a TRILLION per year!).
• The entire world envies us – that is why we are the #1 destination for immigrants from all over the world.  Even the fact that we have by far the biggest penitentiary network on the planet, and one of the most barbarically brutal ones at that, does not deter these immigrants.  Clearly, the world loves us!

Trust me, I could go on for pages and pages.  I lived my entire life in the West, I was born in the middle of Europe (in Switzerland) and I lived about half of my life in Europe and half in the USA.  I am fluent in 5 western languages and understand quite a few more others (related ones, of course).  I have two US graduate degrees.  I know the West.  Most westerners who met me initially did not know of my origins, so they treated me like “one of them” until I mentioned my Russian roots, at which point their attitude immediately changed: “careful, he is one of them” was written all over their faces.

And, OF COURSE, there were (plenty) of exceptions to what I describe above.  But these exceptions were never numerous or influential enough to make a difference: Western countries always elect rabid russophobes: they all equally hate and fear Russia, they just express it in different manners.  So those westerners who do not live behind the Great Western Wall have made no difference, especially no difference to us, the Asiatic Snow Niggers.

Again, all this has been going on for close to a thousand years, but something has changed recently and stuff like this began to happen:

And by “this” I don’t mean an F-35 missing its landing on a carrier and splashing into the water.  No, that F-35 is a perfect metaphor for the entire western civilization.

• Official version: the F-35 is the most amazing military aircraft ever designed
• True version: the F-35 is the most overpriced piece of semi-airborne shit in world history

Notice, corruption plays THE key role here.

Say what you want, but a country which designed and produced the F-16, the F-5, the A-10 or the breathtakingly beautiful Boeing 747 can produce superb aircraft.  And while all the US ‘stealth’ aircraft are overpriced and over-hyped, the F-35 is truly a masterpiece of corruption.  There is nothing the many extremely talented US scientists and engineers could do to beat the most corrupt people on the planet: the US ruling elites.  And, for the latter, the F-35 is a total, absolute, success.  I would even call it a triumph.

A personal recollection now: while a student in the USA, I had military force planning classes, taught by a VERY sharp USAF Colonel (who also worked for the Northrop YF-23 program).  His classes were a masterpiece each time.  One day, we did something funny.  We made a graph with, on one hand, the average cost of each new US fighter aircraft and, on the other, the money allocated for their acquisition.  Then we projected both curves and the result was quite hilarious, but also unforgettable: we saw that there would come a time when the entire US military budget would be just enough to produce only ONE, but very super dooper bestest of the bestest in the history of the galaxy fighter!  One!  Sadly, I do not remember what date we came up with, but I would argue that the F-35 is the real-world illustration of what our (tongue in cheek) graphic showed (BTW – the Lockheed YF-22 was inferior in design to the Northrop YF-23, the choice for the Lockheed candidate was made solely on political grounds: not to give it all the kickbacks to Northrop basically).

The year 1990 was the year when the YF-22/YF-23 made their first flight.  That same year, the Snow Niggers flew a modified version of the Soviet Su-27, called the SU-34, for the first time.  In my strictly personal opinion, the Su-34 is the single most formidable all-weather supersonic medium-range fighter-bomber/strike aircraft ever produced in Russia or elsewhere.  The fact that this design (originally based on a Soviet-era Su-27 interceptor) not only survived the horrific 90s when Russia was “democratic”, but has now fully matured to the absolutely amazing Su-34M version, shows how truly superb Soviet designers and engineers were even in the years of “Commie stagnation” under Brezhnev & Co.  This is what this true masterpiece looks like:

You can read about its capabilities here or, better, watch this video.  Check out its actual characteristics, and it will blow your mind!

No, it ain’t “stealth”, but its formidable EW, avionics, missiles and radar negate the need for any F-22 like RCS.  And it sure is a big aircraft (think range and payload here).  But its capabilities are absolutely formidable, no other aircraft comes even close, not even current 5th generation ones, especially to the (much improved) current Su-34M version (which is still very much a 4th generation aircraft, but which does not need the full 5th generation capabilities to execute its missions, that is where the 4++ generation Su-30M2 and Su-35S would be used, or, if needed, the 5th generation Su-57.

I do not intend this post to be a comparison of the YF-22/YF-23/F-35 with the Su-34 or any other aircraft.

But I will ask a rhetorical question: why is it that the USA, the sole world superpower (especially after 1991 and the fall of the USSR) and world leader in everything produced such a piece of shit (aka “flying brick”) as the F-35, while the vodka soaked Asiatic Snow Niggers, while undergoing a truly apocalyptic phase like the 90s (TWO civil wars in Chechnia, one in Moscow in 93) produced a masterpiece like the Su-34?

And here we see the formidable power of The Great Western Wall!  That rhetorical question will be treated in any combination of the following ways:

• Dismissed as “Putin propaganda”
• Dismissed as factually incorrect (the correct version being: ours is SO MUCH better)
• Simply ignored, blocked from anybody’s awareness
• Explained by “the Russians steal all our secrets” whereas we invent real things (since the F-35 is actually largely based on the (much better!) Russian Yak-141, this is an especially funny argument to make).
• “Specialists” will declare that the Su-34 is based on primitive and old technologies while the F-35 is the bleeding edge of aeronautics (which is false, but if it was true, these idiots are too stupid to realize what this statement implies about the intelligence and experience of actual warfare of each party!)
• The same pseudo-experts will also fail to realize (or, at least, admit) that while the US MIC produced that abomination which the F-35 is, the Russians have just produced a similar aircraft, the Su-75, which has none of the flaws of the F-35, has broadly similar capabilities and for a small fraction of the F-35 criminally obscene price tag.

Western kids can peacefully sleep at night knowing that they are still part of the Master Race and that they are defended by Captain Murica style hyper-warriors with hyper-gadgets who can, and will, kick any Snow Niggers’ ass if needed!  Yeah!

Sweet dreams 🙂

***

But, seriously, why did I post all this stuff about US vs Soviet/Russian aircraft?

Just to illustrate the huge, immense, breathtaking difference between what I call Zone A and Zone B, the Great Western Wall being the monumental propagandist masterpiece which, at least so far, has kept the two Zones apart (the Zones themselves were originally a geographical category, but this is now changing, so let’s think of them as also a mental category).

(Truism alert!!)  We live in the age of the Internet, the ubiquitous smartphones (with excellent cameras!), the social media and too many ways to connect for any wall to stand, including the Great Western Wall!  Reality is now slowly seeping under, over, and even through this mental Great Wall and that has two main effects:

1. It puts the western ruling classes into a total, abject, panic mode
2. It stirs up doubts about the veracity of the Western propaganda machine in the heads of the western people (which only doubles the panic felt by the western ruling classes).

What recently happened in Kabul is just about the perfect illustration of how the Western Great Wall is collapsing before our eyes.

***

What about Putin and his ultimatum in all this?

In truth, the Russian ultimatum’s main goal was never to get the western Master Race to agree to negotiate with the drunken Snow Niggers, it was to bring down a major segment of the Western Great Wall: the West’s arrogant sense of axiomatic military superiority and narcissistic sense of impunity.  For decades we were fed a diet about how totally incredible the US and even NATO militaries were (forget about Iraq or Afghanistan!) and how the Russian bear was really only a paper tiger.  Just like the F-35 is the “bestest of the bestest” and the Su-34 “primitive” (we could also build it, we just don’t wanna).

Then why are the Snow Niggers not terrified of our “sanctions from hell” or “bestest militaries in the world”??

Why are our beloved (or maybe not so beloved) leaders so freaked out and clueless about what to do?

Could it be that reality is gradually achieving what scientists call “first contact” with the Western rulers and the serfs they rule over?

I will conclude with a question: what will it take to totally bring down that Western Great Wall?

The Su-34 sure did not do it.

How about the Su-34 as just one example, a tip of a huge iceberg if you wish, of what has happened in the entire Russian armed forces?

Nope.  99% of folks in the West still have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER that Russia can defeat both the US and NATO, even together, and that China is catching up at a phenomenal rate.

How about the total collapse of the western economies which have nowhere to “grow into” (by that they mean: “occupy a defenseless country and enslave them by trading valuable resources for worthless plastic beads”)?

Nope, not yet.  Not while much of the world still purchase dollars.

Now about the total collapse of the EU’s energy hallucinations (aka Greta Tunberg)?

Nope!  EU officials want to, I kid you not, sanction *Russia* by committing energetic and, therefore, economic suicide.  In Russia, we call that “scaring a hedgehog with a naked butt“.

So what about this Russian saying “those who refuse to talk to Lavrov will have to talk to Shoigu“.

Will anybody pay attention and realize what is going on?

Maybe.

But I am afraid that the drunken Snow Niggers will have to bring down that damned Western Great Wall, brick by brick, dollar by dollar, and even bullet by bullet (missile by missile would be more accurate).

But, don’t worry.  The drunken Snow Niggers won’t genocide you.  They are too “primitive” and “Asiatic” for that.

But neither will they pay much attention to you or take you seriously until you finally wake up from your 1000 years of self-delusion based on murderous ideologies and violence.

Russia’s future is on her south (Caucasus, Central Asia, Middle-East, Indian Sub.) east (Far East Asia) and north (Arctic).

I have no idea where the future of the West is.

Do you?

Andrei

.

How does one raid airspace?

China Launches Biggest Raid On Taiwanese Airspace Since October As CCP’s Pacific Perimeter Expands

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-launches-biggest-raid-taiwanese-airspace-october-ccps-pacific-perimeter-expands

Moon of Alabama did an exposé on how the ‘China Threat’ media cycle works: https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/10/how-the-china-is-a-threat-fake-news-cycle-works.html#more

And before that, he teased apart the Taiwan Airspace or Air Defense Zone:  https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/10/how-ap-reuters-and-scmp-propagandize-their-readers-against-china.html#more

Godfree Roberts created a comprehensive list of current propaganda at the end.

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China data points:  What are they up to?

Space

 

Common prosperity is the main driver of China’s values today.

“Common prosperity is not egalitarianism. To use an analogy, we will first make the pie bigger and then divide it properly through reasonable institutional arrangements. As a rising tide lifts all boats everyone will get a fair share from development and development gains will benefit all our people in a more substantial and equitable way”. Xi Jinping.

As part of the Common Prosperity drive, 6.5 million low-cost homes for leasing will be built across 40 major cities in the five years through 2025, Pan Wei, an official with the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, told reporters at a press conference.

No Corruption

On Tuesday, Xi told the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) to maintain “zero tolerance” for corruption (SCMP):

• “There is still a long way to go to effectively tackle the more invisible, deep-rooted corruption and we still have a long way to go to eradicate it completely.”

China is the manufacturer of the world

Imports and Exports Hit $6 trillion for the first time in 2021. The total import and export volume of China’s merchandise trade was 39.1 trillion yuan ($6.15 trillion), a year-on-year increase of 21.4%. Compared with 2019, China’s 2020 foreign trade volume, exports and imports had increased by 23.9%, 26.1% and 21.2%, respectively.

China-Africa trade rose 32%, or $67 billion, to $254 billion in 2020, according to China Customs.

19 out of 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean had signed up for the Belt and Road, but some of China’s biggest Latin American investment partners – Brazil, Argentina and Mexico – have not formally signed up to the Belt and Road. Nevertheless, China is now the largest trading partner of Brazil, Argentina and most of the rest of South America.

Healthy Planet

Renewables will meet over 70% of China’s additional electricity demand in the next three years as coal’s role in powering the world’s second-largest economy continues to decline. Wind and solar farm installations will lift their combined generating capacity 75% to 930 Gw by 2024 from 600GW now.

Happiness and Trust

At the January 20th Foreign Ministry Press Conference, a reporter from MASTV asked: “The 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer [above], from the top global public relations firm, Edelman, finds trust among Chinese citizens in their Government in 2021 hit a record 91%, up 9% from last year, and the top globally. Overall, China’s Trust Index is 83%, up 11%, the highest in the survey. Do you have any comment?”

FM Spokesperson Zhao Lijian: “I noted relevant reports. The 2017 and 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer reports, as I recall, showed that the trust among Chinese citizens in their government was the highest in all the countries surveyed.

The figure in this year’s report hits a record high in a decade.

We have shared with you a 10-year survey by the Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government on China. It finds out that the Chinese people’s satisfaction with their government’s performance has been over 90 percent for years in a row, which is consistent with the findings of the Edelman Trust Barometer.  As a Chinese citizen and civil servant, I’m not surprised at all. “

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Background on the USA backed HK “color revolution”

Background on the Hong Kong color revolution: https://www.fridayeveryday.com/under-the-surface-a-very-different-hong-kong-story/

A Forensic on the XinJiang / Uighur “genocide” nonsense…

A legal forensic take-down of the Xinjiang accusation of genocide and forced labor:  the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) substantially misrepresented and exaggerated allegations of forced labor in Xinjiang, having insufficient evidence to prove their claims.

http://www.cowestpro.co/uploads/1/9/9/7/19974045/cowestpro_working_paper_jan_2022_v2.pdf

Oil all over China!

Sinopec discovered yet more new oil and gas reservoirs in Xinjiang totaling 88m tons of condensate oil and 290bn cubic meters of natural gas.  So, do you get why the US wanted to destabilize Xinjiang via terrorist attacks in this region?

How a simple blogger exposed the supposed China experts in the West:  https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202201/1246795.shtml

Weaponized “Freedom of navigation” is ongoing

Two U.S. carriers enter S.China Sea, to ‘counter malign influence’ https://t.co/REorwjYKOOpic.twitter.com/O9J26y74Je

— Reuters (@Reuters) January 24, 2022

And…

 

The US Congress passed a $7 billion anti-China propaganda bill to villainize China and to exclude Chinese news from America. To put this in perspective, the 2020 budget of NASA is $20 billion dollars.

Ideological attacks…

• Bloomberg’s Stephen Engle interviews Oscar Kwok
• How BBC journalist John Sudworth reports on Xinjiang.
• Abdul Tursuntohti – a radicalized extremist in Xinjiang
• How are jailed extremists treated in Xinjiang?
• Jeffrey D. Sachs on BBC Newsnight.
• The big business of Uyghur genocide denial.

Economic attacks…

• China’s trade surplus hits annual record as exports soar 30% / FT (paywall)
• China’s economy is slowing, a worrying sign for the world / NYT (paywall)
• China sounds alarm on slowing economy as key political risk / Bloomberg (paywall)
• Xi warns of threats to global recovery / FT (paywall)
• China’s slowing growth will have a global impact / FT (paywall)

Health attacks…

• Top 10 Global Risks of 2022: From China’s COVID-19 policy to Trump’s fight for the midterms.
• Xi’an lockdown brings heartbreak as pressure to contain outbreak grows
• Beijing Is Intentionally Underreporting China’s Covid Death Rate.

A Chinese “Spy” arrested…

This is one more example. We see big news headlines that a ‘China Spy’ was arrested. But when the man is quietly let go because of no evidence, they don’t bother to report that.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202201/1246590.shtml

 

Tom Fowdy at RT reports as follows:

The Pre-War preparations are ongoing…

The US is now doing to China what it’s done in the build-up to every war

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/547290-chinas-global-image-worse/

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Big thanks to Godfree Roberts

Thank you to Godfree Roberts who does a yeoman’s job to pull together the 50 most important data points emerging from China in one newsletter week after week.

It is getting very difficult to remain a generalist China watcher as the place is just so big and the pace of development is astounding.

I use but a fraction of the newsletter information.  This week’s long reads contain work by: Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr., Ning Nanshan, Helen De Cruz & Pauline Lee,  and Wang Wenbin.

If you have an interest in China, go get the Here Comes China newsletter here: https://www.herecomeschina.com/#subscribe

There are a lot of behaviors being exhibited by those in positions of power in the US that seem disparate and odd. We watch Trump who is imposing sanctions on country after country, dreaming of eradicating his country’s structural trade deficit with the rest of the world. We watch pretty much all of US Congress falling over each other in their attempt to impose the harshest possible sanctions on Russia.

People in Turkey, a key NATO country, are literally burning US dollars and smashing iPhones in a fit of pique.

Confronted with a new suite of Russian and Chinese weapons systems that largely neutralize the ability of the US to dominate the world militarily, the US is setting new records in the size of its already outrageously bloated yet manifestly ineffectual defense spending.

As a backdrop to this military contractor feeding frenzy, the Taliban are making steady gains in Afghanistan, now control over half the territory, and are getting ready to stamp “null and void,” in a repeat of Vietnam, on America’s longest war.

A lengthening list of countries are set to ignore or compensate for US sanctions, especially sanctions against Iranian oil exports. In a signal moment, Russia’s finance minister has recently pronounced the US dollar “unreliable.” Meanwhile, US debt keeps galloping upwards, with its largest buyer being reported as a mysterious, possibly entirely nonexistent “Other.”

Although these may seem like manifestations of many different trends in the world, I believe that a case can be made that these are all one thing: the US—the world’s imperial overlord—standing on a ledge and threatening to jump, while its imperial vassals—too many to mention—are standing down below and shouting “Please, don’t jump!”

To be sure, most of them would be perfectly happy to watch the overlord plummet and jelly up the sidewalk.

But here is the key point: if this were to happen today, it would cause unacceptable levels of political and economic collateral damage around the world.

Does this mean that the US is indispensable? No, of course not, nobody is. But dispensing with it will take time and energy, and while that process runs its course the rest of the world is forced to keep it on life support no matter how counterproductive, stupid and demeaning that feels.

What the world needs to do, as quickly as possible, is to dismantle the imperial center, which is in Washington politically and militarily and in New York and London financially, while somehow salvaging the principle of empire.

“What?!” you might exclaim, “Isn’t imperialism evil.”

Well, sure it is, whatever, but empires make possible efficient, specialized production and efficient, unhindered trade over large distances.

Empires do all sorts of evil things—up to and including genocide—but they also provide a level playing field and a method for preventing petty grievances from escalating into tribal conflicts.

The Roman Empire, then Byzantium, then the Tatar/Mongol Golden Horde, then the Ottoman Sublime Porte all provided these two essential services—unhindered trade and security—in exchange for some amount of constant rapine and plunder and a few memorable incidents of genocide.

The Tatar/Mongol Empire was by far the most streamlined: it simply demanded “yarlyk”—tribute—and smashed anyone who attempted to rise above a level at which they were easy to smash.

The American empire is a bit more nuanced: it uses the US dollar as a weapon for periodically expropriating savings from around the world by exporting inflation while annihilating anyone who tries to wiggle out from under the US dollar system.

All empires follow a certain trajectory. Over time they become corrupt, decadent and enfeebled, and then they collapse.

When they collapse, there are two ways to go. One is to slog through a millennium-long dark age—as Western Europe did after the Western Roman Empire collapsed. Another is for a different empire, or a cooperating set of empires, to take over, as happened after the Ottoman Empire collapsed. You may think that a third way exists: of small nations cooperating sweetly and collaborating successfully on international infrastructure projects that serve the common good.

Such a scheme may be possible, but I tend to take a jaundiced view of our simian natures.

We come equipped with MonkeyBrain 2.0, which has some very useful built-in functions for imperialism, along with some ancillary support for nationalism and organized religion.

These we can rely on; everything else would be either a repeat of a failed experiment or an untested innovation.

Sure, let’s innovate, but innovation takes time and resources, and those are the exact two things that are currently lacking.

What we have in permanent surplus is revolutionaries: if they have their way, look out for a Reign of Terror, followed by the rise of a Bonaparte.

That’s what happens every time.

Lest you think that the US isn’t an empire—a collapsing one—consider the following.

The US defense budget is larger than that of the next ten countries combined, yet the US can’t prevail even in militarily puny Afghanistan. (That’s because much of its defense budget is trivially stolen.)

The US has something like a thousand military bases, essentially garrisoning the entire planet, but to unknown effect. It claims the entire planet as its dominion: no matter where you go, you still have to pay US income taxes and are still subject to US laws.

It controls and manipulates governments in numerous countries around the world, always aiming to turn them into satrapies governed from the US embassy compound, but with results that range from unprofitable to embarrassing to lethal.

It is now failing at virtually all of these things, threatening the entire planet with its untimely demise.

What we are observing, at every level, is a sort of blackmail: “Do as we say, or no more empire for you!”

The US dollar will vanish, international trade will stop and a dark age will descend, forcing everyone to toil in the dirt for a millennium while mired in futile, interminable conflicts with neighboring tribes.

None of the old methods of maintaining imperial dominance are working; all that remains is the threat of falling down and leaving a huge mess for the rest of the world to deal with.

The rest of the world is now tasked with rapidly creating a situation where the US empire can be dealt a coup de grâce safely, without causing any collateral damage—and that’s a huge task, so everyone is forced to play for time.

There is a lot of military posturing and there are political provocations happening all the time, but these are sideshows that are becoming an unaffordable luxury: there is nothing to be won through these methods and plenty to be lost.

Essentially, all the arguments are over money. There is a lot of money to be lost. The total trade surplus of the BRICS countries with the West (US+EU, essentially) is over a trillion dollars a year. SCO—another grouping of non-Western countries—comes up with almost the same numbers. That’s the amount of products these countries produce for which they currently have no internal market.

Should the West evaporate overnight, nobody will buy these products. Russia alone had a 2017 trade surplus of $116 billion, and in 2018 so far it grew by 28.5%. China alone, in its trade just with the US, generated $275 billion in surplus. Throw in another $16 billion for its trade with the EU.

Those are big numbers, but they are nowhere near enough if the project is to build a turnkey global empire to replace US+EU in a timely manner. Also, there are no takers.

Russia is rather happy to have shed its former Soviet dependents and is currently invested in building a multilateral, international system of governance based on international institutions such as SCO, BRICS and EAEU.

Numerous other countries are very interested in joining together in such organizations: most recently,

Turkey has expressed interest in turning BRICS into BRICTS. Essentially, all of the post-colonial nations around the world are now forced to trade away some measure of their recently won independence, essentially snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The job vacancy of Supreme Global Overlord is unlikely to attract any qualified candidates.

What everyone seems to want is a humble, low-budget, cooperative global empire, without all of the corruption and with a lot less life-threatening militarism. It will take time to build, and the resources to build it can only come from one place: from gradually bleeding US+EU dry.

In order to do this, the wheels of international commerce must continue to spin. But this is exactly what all of the new tariffs and sanctions, the saber-rattling and the political provocations, are attempting to prevent: a ship laden with soya is now doing circles in the Pacific off the coast of China; steel I-beams are rusting at the dock in Turkey…

But it is doubtful that these attempts will work. The EU has been too slow in recognizing just how pernicious its dependence on Washington has become, and will take even more time to find ways to free itself, but the process has clearly started.

For its part, Washington runs on money, and since its current antics will tend to make money grow scarce even faster than it otherwise would, those who stand to lose the most will make the Washingtonians feel their pain and will force a change of course.

As a result, everyone will be pushing in the same direction: toward a slow, steady, controllable imperial collapse.

All we can hope for is that the rest of the world manages to come together and build at least the scaffolding of a functional imperial replacement in time to avoid collapsing into a new post-imperial dark age.

After years of behaving like a teenager shadow boxing in the basement of his mother’s house, playing out the fantasy of knocking out Ivan Drago in the 1985 movie Rocky IV, the US and NATO find themselves confronting the reality.

– SCOTT RITTER 

“The main issue is our clear position on the unacceptability of further NATO expansion to the East and the deployment of highly-destructive weapons that could threaten the territory of the Russian Federation.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov 

 “The United States and NATO don’t seem to have taken Russia’s concerns on security guarantees into account when drawing up responses to Moscow’s proposals, nor did they demonstrate any willingness to do so, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday.

“The numerous statements that our colleagues made yesterday make it clear that as for the major aspects of the draft agreements that we earlier presented to other parties, we can’t say that they took our concerns into account or showed any readiness to take our concerns into consideration.” (Tass News Agency) 

 “There is no positive reaction on the main issue in this document. The main issue is our clear position that further NATO expansion to the east and the deployment of strike weapons that could threaten the territory of the Russian Federation are unacceptable.” 

 “They promised not to expand NATO, but didn’t keep their promise,” Medvedev said speaking with the Russian media. “They say that ‘we did not sign anything.’ But we all know well who and when granted to whom such promises, such assurances….. They failed to keep their promises. They are now encroaching on our state borders.” 

 “There’s no doubt in my mind that if Russia were to approach this seriously, and in a spirit of reciprocity, with the determination to enhance collective security for all of us, there are very positive things in this document that should be pursued,” he said. 

 The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them……

The Parties shall undertake not to deploy ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles outside their national territories, as well as in the areas of their national territories, from which such weapons can attack targets in the national territory of the other Party.

Article 7

The Parties shall refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories and return such weapons already deployed outside their national territories at the time of the entry into force of the Treaty to their national territories.” (“Treaty between the United States and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees,” Official Russian State Document, December 17, 2021) 

…

A Quote…

“If a fight becomes inevitable, you must be sure to be the first to strike”.

MM Gut Feeling…

My gut feeling is that the USA is (as crazy and insane as it seems) planning a first-strike nuclear action against either Russia or China, or even both. My gut feeling is that they are seriously discussing it right now, and that are are some seriously insane people demanding that it take place. They are seriously discussing it. As in… WHEN.

Not…IF.

Jesus.

I sincerely hope that I am wrong.

But…

What I can positively tell you all is that EVEN if the United States tries to make a massive preemptive nuclear catastrophic strike against Asia, it will be too late.

…

…

It will be too late.

…

With both Russia and China, they are staffed with real talent; real experts, who are really serious about their roles and are there through merit and ability.

…

Not though blowjobs, polictical donations, graft, or inheritance.

Like America.

The truth is that both Russia and China has a gun pointed at the head of the United States. Both of them do. Right now. This is on all levels, nuclear, black ops, economic, financial, social, societal, and political.

The United States is still playing around with media to “control the narrative” while the world has moved well, well further than that.  The future is now firmly in the hands of Asia.

The Commander says that the Russians and Chinese are uniformly at

96% readiness.

That’s about the best you can get.

Seriously.

That’s substantially better than what was the case 8 months ago. It is no wonder that Russia and China placed their clear demands; set up their defined “white tents”.

They have a gun to the head of the USA.

When the USA reaches for it’s gun, it will be too late.

And they know exactly what is going on, how and why, where, and when, and everything else in between. They know. They know.

They KNOW.

And thus, it will be scene right out of the Sopranos. Like this…

Video

wack-1-2022-01-30_16.02.42

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

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