CALEB MAUPIN—Peter Navarro, the crackpot anti-China hack who worked in the Trump administration after a career making sponsored documentaries, used his platform on FOX Business to make similar statements on November 15th writing: “The Beijing Winter Olympics offer a golden opportunity for Biden to exert pressure on Communist China on all of these issues.” (https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/biden-meeting-china-xi-trade-climate-human-rights) Prior to working with Trump, Navarro was considered fringe by most academic economists, and since 2020 he has been a promoter of the “Stop the Steal” claims that China somehow teamed up with Venezuela to rig the US elections and remove Trump. And while heated words against the Beijing Olympic Games from the usual suspects shouldn’t be surprising, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has jumped in with a very out of character criticism specifically directed at sponsors.
CHINA
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GODFREE ROBERTS—Amidst global gloom, 2021 was the best year in modern Chinese history. Here’s what they accomplished:
Eliminated extreme poverty.
Reached 98% home ownership.
Kept Covid death rate at 0.6% of America’s. -
Why India will likely ally with China, not with U.S.
22 minutes readERIC ZUESSE—Given this reality, India has recently been tending to get off the ideological fence that it has been sitting on ever since 1947, to side increasingly with its fellow-anti-imperialist nations. If it finally (decisively) does so, then that would become the most momentous blow yet against the Rhodesist UK-U.S.-Zionist joint global empire ever since the UK itself lost India on 15 August 1947. India would then no longer be “neutralist.” It would instead become an additional enemy of the imperialist powers. It would become allied with China, Russia, and Iran, against the imperialist powers — including, finally, at long last, against the UK, which was India’s former master.
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PEPE ESCOBAR—Vladimir Putin got straight to the point. At the opening of his one-hour and fourteen-minute video conversation with Xi Jinping on 15 December, he described Russia-China relations as “an example of genuine inter-state cooperation in the 21st century.” Their myriad levels of cooperation have been known for years now – from trade, oil and gas, finance, aerospace and the fight against Covid-19, to the progressive interconnection of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). But now the stage was set for the announcement of a serious counter-move in their carefully coordinated ballet opposing the relentless Hybrid War/Cold War 2.0 combo deployed by Empire.
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Putin, Xi running circles around Biden’s hybrid war
16 minutes readPEPE ESCOBAR—Beijing has not fallen into the trap but has asserted at different levels that Taiwan will eventually be integrated into the mainland motherland, without any ludicrous “invasion.” And the wishful thinking that massive American pressure will lead to cracks inside the Chinese Communist Party is also likely generating zero traction.
Ukraine is a much more volatile proposition: a dysfunctional nightmare of systemic instability, widespread corruption, shady oligarchic entanglements, and poverty.
Washington still follows the Zbigniew Brzezinski-concocted Maidan plan laid out for cookie distributor Nuland in 2014. Yet seven years later, no American “strategist” managed to understand why Russia would fail to invade Ukraine, which has been part of Russia for centuries.