Why Voting for Trump or Harris Is Voting to Destroy America
Eric Zuesse
| Resize text-+= |
Trump and Harris are the inevitable and logical "choices" that an utterly corrupt system presents to Americans every four years. Their pathetic qualities mirror the advanced decay of the US empire.
The problem with the U.S. Government is its corruptness. Both Trump and Harris represent that corruptness because they are beholden to it in order to fund their political campaigns. Politicians, in America and many other countries, don’t honor their public promises to their voters but they do honor their private promises to their megadonors, who, consequently, control America’s Government. It’s called the “Deep State,” the super-rich few who basically hire and fire America’s successful politicians. (For a megadonor to fire — cease donating to — an unsatisfactory owned Government official, is to close the revolving door when that person leaves Government, and thereby close off the otherwise tens of millions of dollars per year in income that the person would otherwise be receiving each year as a board member of their corporations, or etc., because the big payoff to a political career comes in the person’s ‘retirement’.)
wouldn’t allow him to report honestly about U.S. invasions and military occupations. Whereas the billionaires will allow entirely truthful reporting about finance, they entirely prohibit completely truthful reporting about the American empire (which topic Hedges specialized in). So, this is two great reporters discussing finance, which is something that America’s billionaires do allow to be honestly reported, and the topic here is specifically Morgenson’s (co-authored with Joshua Rosner) 2023 book, These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs ― and Wrecks ― America:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shv9g-4xXww&t=34s
“How private equity conquered America | The Chris Hedges Report”
Voting for Trump or Harris is voting for what Morgenson described there. It is to ignore America’s deep-seated problem, the problem that is destroying this country: institutionalized corruption. It is for a voter to be distracted away from the actual reason why things are getting worse in America — runaway corruptness.
America’s version of capitalism is this, corrupt capitalism; and another name for it is fascism. But America’s version of it is the worst type of that: it is imperialistic fascism. And this is the reason why honest political discussion of America’s imperialism, and even merely referring to “the U.S. empire,” is prohibited throughout all of the billionaires’ ‘news’-media. So, here, from a news-medium that is not controlled by any billionaire, is a knowledgeable expert discussion of that:
https://theduran.com/point-of-no-return-in-middle-east-ukraine-john-mearsheimer-alexander-mercouris-glenn-diesen/
“Point of No Return in Middle East & Ukraine – John Mearsheimer, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen”
The three discussants there are reporting on the counterproductiveness of these two U.S. wars, but hide the blame for it, which is the corruptness of the leaders of the U.S. Government and of its colonies (‘allies’), and the U.S. Government coup against Ukraine that grabbed control over Ukraine in 2014, and turned it against its neighbor Russia, and to which coup Russia finally responded — entirely as a defensive necessity — on 24 February 2022. The reason that none of this is mentioned by the discussants might be their desires to not be entirely blackballed by the institutions that the billionaires control and upon which each of these discussants might some day need to rely, in order to have a satisfactory financial future.
To close here, I shall present the only evidences that I see which contradict the title of this article. These evidences are two videos, which will be linked-to here. There is no realistic possibility for Kamala Harris to be anything other than a disastrously neoliberal neoconservative (pro-MIC, Military-Industrial-Complex) President, but there might be a possibility that Trump has been deeply affected in a positive way by the assassination-attempt against him and by the soon-after abandonment of Trump for Harris on the part of many billionaires after Biden became replaced on July 21st by Harris as the Democratic Party’s appointed nominee. I had initially thought that RFK Jr.’s endorsement of Trump on August 23rd was just a ploy by him to get a Cabinet position, and thought that it didn’t really indicate anything about Trump; but, when I saw the 48-minute speech by Kennedy explaining there in depth the reasons why he had come to this decision, it changed my mind.
His speech, which was delivered flawlessly without notes, and with no teleprompter, and no prepared text, was, nonetheless, in my opinion, perhaps the greatest political speech in recent decades, and it stated that Kennedy had achieved from Trump and that Trump would as President adopt, Kennedy’s international-policy positions and would fervently condemn imperialism and end the choke-hold that the billionaires have till now had over American foreign policies — the U.S. Government’s neoconservatism. (If you are more concerned about domestic policies, then just consider that the $1.5 trillion the U.S. Government spends in total each year on its military is half of the entire planet’s total on that, and that over a trillion of it is waste that could instead be spent productively to improve this country.)
Print this article
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
China has achieved escape velocity: it is now unstoppable
Pepe Escobar
scf
| Resize text-+= |
The four-day, twice-a-decade plenum of the Communist Party of China that took place last week in Beijing, designing an economic road map all the way to 2029, was a stunning affair in more ways than one.
Let’s start with continuity – and stability. There’s no question after the plenum that Xi Dada, or The Big Panda, will stay on the helm until 2029 – the end of the current five-year economic drive.
And if Xi is healthy enough, he stays up to 2035: the fateful and uber game-changing target year for China to exhibit a GDP per capita of $30,000, with massive around-the-world reverberations.
Here we see the confluence between the progression of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and the defining contours if not of a Pax Sinica, at least of the non-Hegemon-centric, multi-nodal world (italics mine).
The proverbial U.S. Think Tankland/Sinophobia axis has been hysterical on China not being able to sustain a 5% a year growth rate for the next few years – the target once again stressed at the plenum.
A Russian analysis by the Center for Geopolitical Forecasts makes a crucial point: “The Chinese themselves have not bothered about the growth rate for a long time, since in 2018 they switched to a strategy of so-called qualitative development, that is, not at the expense of traditional industries, but on the basis of high technologies and the creation of new areas, such as the production of new energy sources and artificial intelligence.”
Pres. Xi
Made in China 2025 – which is being implemented at breakneck speed: high-tech development leading the way towards a “high-level socialist market economy”, to be consolidated by 2025 and fully constructed by 2035.
The next step will be to attain the status of “modernized socialist power” by 2049, at the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The plenum proved once more that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – or, for the recalcitrant, Chinese-modified capitalism – is “people-centric”. The supreme values are national interest and the people’s interests – attested by the fact that large private corporations remain under the strategic control of the CPC.
It’s idle to try to find in the final communique at the end of the plenum any restrictions on private capital on the path to “universal prosperity”. The key point is that the role of capital should always be subordinated to the concept of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.
Watch the reform ship steadily sailing
Everything is explained here in nearly didactic terms, chronicling the birth of the “Decision of the CPC Central Committee on further comprehensive deepening of reforms to promote Chinese modernization”.
What is now already referred to colloquially all across China as “The Decision” spreads across 15 parts and 60 articles, divided into three main sections, proposing more than 300 important reforms.
Take a look, for instance, at this passage:
“To ensure that the reform ship sails forward steadily, the ‘Decision’ proposes that further comprehensive deepening of reform must implement the “six principles”: adhere to the party’s overall leadership, adhere to the people-centered approach, adhere to the principle of maintaining the integrity and promoting innovation, adhere to system building as the main line, adhere to the comprehensive rule of law, and adhere to a systematic approach.”
Most of the “Decision” – 6 parts in a total of 13 – is about economic reform. Will China pull it off? Of course it will.
Just look at the precedents. In 1979 the Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping started to transform a nation of farmers and peasants into a well-oiled machine of efficient industrial workers. Along the way, GDP per capita was multiplied by no less than 30 times.
Now the ramifications of Made in China 2025 are turning a nation of factory workers into a nation of engineers. Of 10,5 million university graduates a year, a third are engineers.
The emphasis on AI has led, among other examples, to the automobile industry being able to produce a $9,000 EV in complete automation and make a profit. China is already a global leader in EVs (BYD building plants in Brazil, Thailand, Turkey, Hungary), solar power, drones, telecom infrastructure (Huawei, ZTE), steel, shipbuilding – and soon, also semiconductors (thank you, Trump sanctions).
While the Hegemon spent at least $7 trillion – and counting – on unwinnable Forever Wars, China is spending $1 trillion in an array of Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects across the Global South: the emphasis is digital/transportation connectivity corridors. Geoeconomic imperatives intertwined with rising geopolitical influence.
Hegemon hysteria aside, the fact is the Chinese economy will grow by a whopping $1.7 trillion only in 2024. That is more than in all but the last three years – because of the Covid effect.
Researcher Geoff Roberts has compiled a very useful list of what China is doing right.
And when it comes to the nitty-gritty, the numbers are staggering. Here are just a few, apart from GDP growth:
- Foreign goods trade is up 6.1% to $2.9 trillion year-on-year.
- The trade surplus is at $85 billion, up 12% compared to 2023.
- China had a record crop, 150 million tons, of cereal grains.
- The courier sector handled 80 billion parcels, up 23% year-on-year.
- SMIC is the world’s number two pure-play foundry, after Taiwan’s TSMC.
- China Telecom paid $265 million for 23% of QuantumCTek, patenter of Micius, the world’s first quantum communications satellite.
- Commercial aerospace launched 39% of China’s 26 rockets.
- Invention patents rose 43% to 524,000. China is the first country with 4 million domestic invention patents in force.
- Baidu’s 1,000 robotaxis in Wuhan will break even in Q4, and will be profitable next year.
- China has 47% of the world’s top AI talent. It added no less than 2000 AI courses to school and college curricula since 2019.
- On world-class institutions doubling as research leaders, 7 out of 10 are Chinese, including the top one: the Chinese Academy of Sciences, ahead of Harvard.
Exceptionalist China “experts” believe their own fantasy that the U.S. allied with occupied Japan, Germany and South Korea would be able to match and surpass China’s pull with the Global Majority, because they have more resources and more capital.
Nonsense. Even more nonsense is to believe that the Hegemon’s NATO “partners” – as in vassals – will follow the leader in creating cutting edge technology.
The high-speed train that matters has already left the station. The 21st century is shaping up to be the Asian, Eurasian, Chinese century.
- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
Print this article
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
China is installing the wind and solar equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week
By technology reporter James Purtill
| Resize text-+= |
The need for space has led China to experiment with floating solar farms, like this one in Huainan, Anhui province.(Getty: Kevin Frayer)
In short:
China is installing record amounts of solar and wind, while scaling back once-ambitious plans for nuclear.
While Australia is falling behind its renewables installation targets, China may meet its end-of-2030 target by the end of this month, according to a report.
What's next?
Energy experts are looking to China, the world's largest emitter and once a climate villain, for lessons on how to rapidly decarbonise.
While Australia debates the merits of going nuclear and frustration grows over the slower-than-needed rollout of solar and wind power, China is going all in on renewables.
New figures show the pace of its clean energy transition is roughly the equivalent of installing five large-scale nuclear power plants worth of renewables every week.
A report by Sydney-based think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF) said China was installing renewables so rapidly it would meet its end-of-2030 target by the end of this month — or 6.5 years early.
It's installing at least 10 gigawatts of wind and solar generation capacity every fortnight.
By comparison, experts have said the Coalition's plan to build seven nuclear power plants would add fewer than 10GW of generation capacity to the grid sometime after 2035.
Energy experts are looking to China, the world's largest emitter, once seen as a climate villain, for lessons on how to go green, fast.
"We've seen America under President Biden throw a trillion dollars on the table [for clean energy]," CEF director Tim Buckley said.
"China's response to that has been to double down and go twice as fast."
Smart Energy Council CEO John Grimes, who recently returned from a Shanghai energy conference, said China has decarbonised its grid almost as quickly as Australia, despite having a much harder task due to the scale of its energy demand.
"They have clear targets and every part of their government is harnessed to deliver the plan," he said.
China accounts for about a third of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. A recent drop in emissions (the first since relaxing COVID-19 restrictions), combined with the decarbonisation of the power grid, may mean the country's emissions have peaked.
"With the power sector going green, emissions are set to plateau and then progressively fall towards 2030 and beyond," CEF China energy policy analyst Xuyang Dong said.
So how is China building and connecting panels so fast, and what's the role of nuclear in its transition?
Like building solar farms near Perth to power Sydney
Because its large cities of the eastern seaboard are dominated by apartment buildings, China hasn't seen an uptake of rooftop solar like in Australia.
To find space for all the solar panels and wind turbines required for the nation's energy needs, the planners of China's energy transition have looked west, to areas like the Gobi Desert.
The world's largest solar and wind farms are being built on the western edge of the country and connected to the east via the world's longest high-voltage transmission lines.
CHINA IS NOT AFRAID OF COLOSSAL UNDERTAKINGS —Workers install electric wires on the world's tallest transmission tower (385 metres) during construction of a high-voltage power line across the Yangtze.(China photographers)
These lines are so long they could span the length of our continent.
In Australian terms, it's the equivalent of using solar panels near Perth to power homes in Sydney.
Mr Buckley said China's approach was similar to the Australian one of developing regional "renewable energy zones" for large-scale electricity generation.
"They're doing what Australia is doing with renewable energy zones but they're doing it on steroids," he said.
What about 'firming' the grid?
One of the issues with switching a grid to intermittent renewables is ensuring a steady supply of power.
In technical terms, this is the difference between generation capacity (measured in gigawatts) and actual energy output (measured in gigawatt-hours, or generation over time).
Renewables have a "capacity factor" (the ratio of actual output to maximum potential generation) of about 25 per cent, whereas nuclear's is as high as 90 per cent.
So although China is installing solar and wind generation equivalent to five large nuclear power plants per week, their output is closer to one nuclear plant per week.
Renewables account for more than half of installed capacity in China, but only amount to about one-fifth of actual energy output over a year, the CEF's Tim Buckley said.
To "firm" or stabilise the supply of power from its renewable energy zones, China is using a mix of pumped hydro and battery storage, similar to Australia.
"They're installing 1GW per month of pumped hydro storage," Mr Buckley said.
"We're struggling to build the 2GW Snowy 2.0 in 10 years."
A generation unit at the new Xiangshuijian pumped storage power station in Wuhu, China. (China photographers)
There are some major differences between Australia's and China's approaches, though.
Somewhat counterintuitively, China has built dozens of coal-fired power stations alongside its renewable energy zones, to maintain the pace of its clean energy transition.
China was responsible for 95 per cent of the world's new coal power construction activity last year.
The new plants are partly needed to meet demand for electricity, which has gone up as more energy-hungry sectors of the economy, like transport, are electrified.
The coal-fired plants are also being used, like the batteries and pumped hydro, to provide a stable supply of power down the transmission lines from renewable energy zones, balancing out the intermittent solar and wind.
Despite these new coal plants, coal's share of total electricity generation in the country is falling.
The China Energy Council estimated renewables generation would overtake coal by the end of this year.
The CEF's Xuyang Dong said despite the country's reliance on coal, "having China go green at this speed and scale provides the world with a textbook to do the same".
"China is installing every week the equivalent of what we're doing every year."
Despite this speed, China wasn't installing renewables fast enough to meet its 2060 carbon neutrality target, she added.
"According to our analysis, [the current rate of installation] is not ambitious enough for China."
What about nuclear?
China is building new nuclear plants, although nowhere near as fast as it once intended.
In 2011, Chinese authorities announced fission reactors would become the foundation of the country's electricity generation system in the next "10 to 20 years".
But Japan's 2011 Fukushima disaster prompted a moratorium on inland nuclear plants, which have to use river water for cooling and are more vulnerable to frequent flooding.
Meanwhile, over the following decade, solar became the cheapest electricity in the world.
From 2010 to 2020, the installed cost of utility-scale solar PV declined by 81 per cent on a global average basis.
As well as cheap, it was safe, which made solar farms quicker to build than nuclear reactors.
Instead of nuclear, solar is now intended to be the foundation of China's new electricity generation system.
Authorities have steadily downgraded plans for nuclear to dominate China's energy generation. At present, the goal is 18 per cent of generation by 2060.
China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said.
"That says they're all in on renewables.
"They had grand plans for nuclear to be massive but they're behind on nuclear by a decade and five years ahead of schedule on solar and wind."
How is China transitioning so fast?
In June of this year, on the eve of the Coalition's nuclear policy announcement, former Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, who's now a Smart Energy Council "international ambassador", led a delegation of Australians to the world's largest clean energy conference in Shanghai.
The annual Smart Energy Conference hosts more than 600,000 delegates across three days.
Its scale underlines China's increasing dominance of the global clean energy economy and, for some attendees, prompted unenviable comparisons with Australia's progress.
Mr Buckley, who was part of the delegation, said he was "blown away".
"China is winning this race."
The Smart Energy Conference in Shanghai showcases every aspect of the transition, from energy-efficient appliances to enormous hydrogen electrolysers.
John Grimes, the Smart Energy Council CEO who also attended, said Australia could learn from the Chinese government's ability to execute a long-term, difficult and costly transition plan, rather than relying on market forces to find a solution.
"Australia's transition is going too slow, there was a lost decade of action," he said.
"The world today spends about $7 trillion a year on coal, gas and oil and that money is going to find a new home.
"Who is going to be the economic winner in that global economic transition? It's going to be China."
He and other energy experts are frustrated with the progress of Australia's transition, including the discussion of nuclear power and the "weaponisation of dissent" from community groups over new wind farms and transmission lines.
Stephanie Bashir, CEO of the Nexa energy advisory, said Australia's transition was tangled in red tape.
"The key hold-up for a lot of projects is the slow planning approvals," Ms Bashir, who also attended the conference, said.
"In China they decide they're going to do something and then they go and do it."
The Australian Energy Market Operator's (AEMO) plan to decarbonise the grid and ensure the lights stay on when the coal-fired power stations close requires thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines and large-scale solar and wind farms.
Australia is installing about half the amount of renewables per year required under the plan.
Due to this shortfall, many experts say it's unlikely to meet its 2030 target of 82 per cent renewables in the grid and 43 per cent emissions reduction.
"We need to build 6GW each year from now until each power station closes, and so far we're only bringing online 3GW," Ms Bashir said.
"If we identify some projects are nation-building … and we need them for transition, we just have to get on with it."
Mr Buckley predicted China would accelerate its deployment of renewables.
"My forecast is it will lift 20 per cent per annum on current levels."
Science in your inbox
- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
Print this article
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
China’s superior leadership, rational system, and generous vision fuel her ascendancy
Billy Bob's Dispatches
THE WORLD THROUGH AN INDEPENDENT LEFT LENS
| Resize text-+= |
Her culture and style of governance remain incomprehensible to Western elites.
n 1936, Mao Zedong foretold the future when he prophesied the following: "When China finally wins her independence, then legitimate foreign trading interests will enjoy more opportunity than ever before. The power of production and consumption of 450,000,000 people is not a matter that can remain the exclusive interest of the Chinese, but one that must engage the many nations. Our millions of people, once really emancipated, with their great latent productive possibilities freed for creative activity in every field, can help improve the economy as well as raise the cultural level of the whole world."
In 1945 Mao said “Some people refuse to understand why the Chinese Communists do not fear capitalism but, on the contrary, develop it as much as possible. Our answer is simple: we have to replace foreign imperialist and native feudalist oppression with capitalist development because that is the inevitable course of our economy and because both the capitalist class and the proletariat benefit. What is superfluous is not native capitalism but foreign imperialism and native feudalism. On the contrary, our capitalism is indeed too little. To develop industry, enormous capital is required. Where will it come from? It can only come from two sources: the capital accumulated by the Chinese people themselves and from foreign loans, and we must welcome all foreign investments as long as they obey the laws of China and are advantageous to our economy.”
Of course, Mao’s desire to integrate into the global economy was put on hold due to the unilaterally imposed Western trade embargo and the Sino-Soviet split. But Mao did not give up on his vision of global economic integration and he continually raised the issue of ending the trade embargo during the 136 ambassadorial level meetings that took place in Geneva (1954-1958) and later Warsaw (1958-1970). Mao’s efforts finally paid off as Nixon and Kissinger officially agreed to end the Western trade embargo in 1972.
After Mao’s death, Deng took full advantage of the newly available trade opportunities and re-oriented China’s economy in order to maximize direct foreign investment. It is nearly impossible to summarize the unprecedented skyrocketing of every conceivable metric that China has achieved over the last several decades, but here are some highlights that may provide some awareness of China’s amazing accomplishment: Wages have tripled every ten years for forty years in a row. Education spending has doubled every eight years for forty years in a row. 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty (“poverty” as defined by the World Bank). According to the “Lived Change Index”, between 1990 and 2019, China experienced the highest increase in per-capita GDP of any country on earth (which is even more impressive when one considers China’s large population and the fact that Poland in the number two position, only grew by a factor of nine, while China, in the top spot, grew by more than a factor of thirty!!!).
China’s planned socialist economy did not allow massive slums to sprawl as they always do as an unwanted consequence of capitalist development and economic growth. Instead, China built hundreds of cities from scratch, including twenty cities that house over a million citizens. China developed the world's greatest high-speed rail network, they became the world's leading manufacturer of green energy as well as the world’s greatest user of green energy. China developed a world-class education system that leads the world in the number of patents and published research papers. Perhaps most importantly, China is working with the developing world and offering them a hand up, instead of a knee on their necks (as is offered by the Western imperialists). China is helping the under-developed world to develop and is sharing their expertise and know-how, and providing assistance with large infrastructure projects that are desperately needed to improve lives and bring prosperity. Additionally, China provides low-interest loans that finance, facilitate, and enable, all the development described above.
 The Chinese have pushed furthest the notion of the city as a product. One of the most important aspects of China’s recent economic development is the profusion of new cities being built from scratch. These aren’t expansions of existing communities but fully master-planned, manufactured centers of economic and social life, often built on newly developed land such as artificial islands or reclaimed desert. On some estimates, China has built more than 600 new cities since the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Some of these manufactured cities have been extraordinary successes. Shenzhen rose from a rice paddy into one of the world’s most dynamic metropolises—its economy is the size of South Korea’s—in just three or four decades. But even Shenzhen pales, compared with the plans for Xiongan in Hebei province, a new city that covers over 770 square miles, more than twice the size of New York City. (Bruno Maçães, The City in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, City-Journal, Autumn 2019) |
The West is not happy with any of this. After ending the trade embargo in 1972, the West had hoped to affect regime change culminating in the failed color revolution in Tiananmen Square. The West has worked tirelessly to infiltrate China’s political apparatus and get their political puppets in power in order to implement policies that benefit Western interests. This is the basic MO of Western imperialism, but it has failed in China. Wikileaks reported on a leaked diplomatic cable that laments Xi Jinping is “untainted by corruption”, “Mr. Clean”, “low key, humble, and self-effacing”, “a good guy”, and ideologically “redder than red”. None of these traits make Xi someone that the West can use to further their own malign interests, quite the contrary in fact. This is why Xi is reviled in the Western press and presented as a dictatorial human rights abuser who routinely harvests the organs of religious folks, when he’s not selling fentanyl to Appalachia or genociding Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
But, Mao’s vision has come true and it is coming more true with each passing day, much to the consternation of the West. Western hegemony is being destroyed by a rising China and there is no clear solution to this problem. Since China is so integral to the global economy, it will not be easy to sanction or isolate China economically. Since the Chinese market is so lucrative, it is difficult to get greedy Western capitalists on board with the policy of decoupling urged by Western strategists. You may remember how Trump was mercilessly mocked by the entirety of the liberal press when he tweeted:
“We don’t need China and, frankly, would be far better off without them… Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”
In order to attain a decoupling from China, Biden has adopted a more sophisticated approach. Unlike Trump, Biden has harnessed his media allies to promote the manufactured narrative that Western strategists hope will help achieve China’s economic isolation. This new strategy is predicated on the hypocritical trashing of decades of “free trade” rhetoric as well as decades of faux environmentalism and a pretend desire to increase our use of renewable energy including solar panels, batteries, and electric cars. In true Orwellian fashion, the Biden administration is trusting that everyone will simply forget about the decades of propaganda extolling free trade as being in the best interest of everyone because it lowers prices, breeds competition, and benefits consumers by increasing access to goods. We are to immediately forget that fossil fuels will soon render our planet unlivable. As imperialist imperatives change so do their narratives.
The new buzzword is “overproduction”. China has “broken the rules” by subsidizing its green energy industries. Of course, this is just more hypocrisy as Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law in August of 2022, invested a trillion dollars into our own domestic green energy industries. All of a sudden things have changed 180 degrees. Free trade is now bad, green energy is now bad, and subsidizing domestic industries is now bad (except for when we do it).
So, China must be sanctioned with tariffs because they have “overproduced” green energy which has caused the price of solar panels, batteries, and electric cars to be “too low”. There is now “too much” green energy. China has “overproduced” green energy. It’s almost as if every US household has all their useful surfaces covered in solar panels and yet there are extra solar panels just lying around the yard and on the side of the house cluttering everything up. There’s only one solution to this clutter caused by China’s “overproduction”. Biden is putting a 100% tariff on Chinese electric cars so US consumers will have to pay double what they otherwise would. Solar panels from China will cost US consumers 50% more than what they otherwise would. So much for promoting free trade and green energy. It’s almost as if Biden doesn’t give a fuck about the interests of the working class and is solely interested in making sure China responds with tariffs of their own. And Biden and his media allies are prepared to spin the most hypocritical, irrational, and counter-intuitive narratives, in order to implement their imperialist strategy.
My guess is that Biden hopes to stoke a trade war and that he is ready with additional tariffs and sanctions immediately following China’s response to this current round of tariffs. In this way, Biden hopes to go back and forth with escalating rounds of tariffs and sanctions, eventually making it unprofitable for Western companies to do business in China. What else can Western strategists do when greedy capitalists who have no class consciousness or concern for the imperatives of imperialism refuse to decouple from China’s immensely lucrative market? Initiate a trade war and make sure that it becomes unprofitable to do business with China, seems like their only option.
Additionally, the speed of the green energy revolution will also be tremendously slowed down and reliance on fossil fuels will remain unnecessarily high. This is just a bad policy and bad strategy for an empire in decline that lacks the competence necessary to shift from confrontation to cooperation. Indeed by choosing confrontation the US ruling cliques show their appalling mediocrity and political myopia by not properly appreciating the political pacification benefits derived from assuring a decent consumption floor to the beleaguered working class. Until this fundamental shift takes place, and civilised collaboration replaces economic war, the ruling Western Establishment will continue to escalate its violent, immoral, and counterproductive efforts to maintain its supremacy while asking the global working class to make all the sacrifices on their behalf.
Lili News 029
- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Editor-at-large Billy Bob is a dedicated anti-imperialist activist and blogger. He hosts the Blowback roundatable. You can reach him at his Facebook page HERE.
Editor-at-large Billy Bob is a dedicated anti-imperialist activist and blogger. He hosts the Blowback roundatable. You can reach him at his Facebook page HERE. First iteration 20 May, 2024
Print this article
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.
Unfortunately, most people take this site for granted.
DONATIONS HAVE ALMOST DRIED UP…
PLEASE send what you can today!
JUST USE THE BUTTON BELOW
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
The View from Abroad: Notes on the World’s Motherlode of Moral Hypocrisy
Fred Reed
FRED COMES AT YOU FROM A RIGHTWING POINT OF VIEW, BUT MANY THINGS HE SAYS DESPERATELY NEED TO BE SAID.
mong the more nauseating elements of what has become the American national character is the moral preening, the lecturing of others on the virtuousness of the Exceptional Nation, on America’s incontinent goodness and sense of superiority. The world isn’t buying it. The internet makes fraud impossible.
New York City: An actual homeless person, not an staged shot. You can't make this up. (Getty Images)
This essay was first published on May 25, 2021
Start with the domestic. The whole world can see, in what calls itself the richest country in the world, squalid, diseased, often rat-infested encampments of tens of thousands the homeless on the sidewalks of city after city: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Austin, on and on. In New York they live in subway stations, often on the trains. Forgotten diseases return. This must cause astonishment in civilized countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, China.
Next, crime, levels of which constitute a measure of civilization. American lawlessness is a wonder of the world. Over seven hundred killed annually in Chicago, three hundred in Baltimore, with perhaps three times as many shot but not killed. Similar numbers per capita can be adduced for many other cities. Equally elevated figures exist for assault, rape, carjacking, mugging, shoplifting. To citizens of Taiwan or South Korea these numbers must look more appropriate to civil war in Sudan than a country that regards itself as an example to the world.
America talks of its commitment to human rights. Yet the world just watched agape as some four hundred cities exploded in looting, arson, and vandalism citing abuse of human rights by the police. Uighurs? As the world can easily see, and does, the black population lives generation after generation in crime-infested, drug-ridden semi literacy. Racial relations are terrible, probably worsening, and so bad that whites dare not walk in black regions. The frequent horrific racial attacks by blacks on whites are carefully kept out of the American mass media, but the world can see them in foreign publications such as the Daily Telegraph.
The fetid, necrotic, and hopeless ghettos are widespread. Consider Newark, Camden, Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, St Louis, Cincinnati, New Orleans, just to begin.
Human rights? America’s unending race riots appear in graphic detail all around the world. Cities burn, over and over, decade after decade, as American politicians speak of their values, which they seem to want the rest of the world to adopt.
Race relations in the most moral, preachy, and indispensable nation, two examples of many, many dozens that could be given:
Felicity, love, and love in Georgia
[Who can figure this kerfuffle? The Tweet was filed by a supposedly charitable Christian! Fact is we don't know what actually happened here, but the attacker is already classified as an animal. ]
-
[And this one too, is incendiary for racial relations. But the social context is missing, except the killer is older and black.—Ed]
Public disaffection is rampant in America. Washington is so afraid of its citizens that it called in over twenty thousand soldiers to assure calm when Biden was inaugurated. The whole earth watched, some in shock, others in amusement, as infuriated citizens stormed the Capitol. During a recent trial in Minneapolis, troops were needed to protect the proceedings from an angry population, with stores boarding up in fear of looting. Can anyone imagine this in Tokyo?
And of course, few around the world can have failed to notice the disparity between China’s quick and effective response to the epidemic and the chaos, verging on anarchy of the American, in which no one appeared to be in charge and much of the population refuses to cooperate with the government.
Americans are not an historically aware people and so have little idea of how or why they are regarded as they are abroad. Consider Mexico, where I live. People here know of the Mexican-American War (of which, preposterously many Americans have never heard) as well as the bombardment of Veracruz and Pershing’s incursion. Peoples remember their defeats and humiliations as the victors do not. Mexicans know they are powerless against America, resent it intensely. Latin Americans in general know of the almost endless list of invasions, coups, dictators installed, economic exploitation that Americans have never heard of. Today they see the persecution of Cuba, the attempt to starve Venezuela into giving Washington control of its oil, the coups and murder attempts against Maduro, the coup in Bolivia, other attempts in Ukraine and Byelorussia, on and on.
Many countries have endured American manipulation exploitation, invasion. Americans seldom know of these things, but the countries involved do. For example, China remembers that American (and European) gunboats seized Chinese ports, forced the opium trade on the country, and that American troops have rampaged through Beijing, looting, raping, and killing for sport. There was the burning of the Summer Palace (look it up if you haven’t heard of it.) During the Cold War, Americans saw themselves as on a moral crusade against Communism. The Chinese saw it as a crusade against China. Which is how the “trade war” looks to them now.
How does America appear to much of the world today? As a brutal, utterly unprincipled, destructive, out of control monster wreaking havoc on any country that doesn’t submit.
If this seems to you extreme, you are probably a normal American. But try for a second, if only as an exercise in mental gymnastics, to see how it looks from abroad.
Below: A segment from CBS Sunday. The comfortable upper-middle class in the media deign to take a look at the homeless, US society's "losers"
America killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and wrecked it for generations, has killed and killed and killed for almost twenty years in Afghanistan. Supervised the destruction of Libya, currently occupies much of Syria and kills there too, bombs Somalia, supports a grisly Saudi war against Yemen. In an earlier generation it killed millions in Southeast Asia.
At this writing America is the only country of note steadfastly supporting Israel’s search for lebensraum in the West Bank and its conversion of the Gaza Strip into the Warsaw Ghetto, with the IDF inflicting its usual devastation.
Human rights? The world saw the godawful photos of torture in America’s prison at Abu Ghraib. They know of the continuation of “enhanced interrogation,” in Guantanamo. These things could be seen, and were, everywhere from Kathmandu to Finland and all over the Moslem world, where they served to spur enlistment. The American media carefully do not speak of the horrors of the torture camps, or of the death and mutilation caused by the wars. Web sites in other countries are not as reticent. No, the pols speak ok American values.
Which leads to a question I often hear in Mexico: “Why don’t the gringos worry about their own problems instead of causing new ones for the rest of us?”
Write Fred at jet.possum@gmail.com Put the letters pdq anywhere in the subject line to avoid autodeletion .
Fred Reed, who has referred to Oprah Winfrey as looking “like five hundred pounds of bear liver in a plastic bag,” takes a jaundiced and highly irreverent view of all things sacred-journalism, marriage, affirmative action, federal scams, governmental uselessness, women, men, fellow reporters, and popular culture. On the other hand, he has a kind word for drunks, bar girls, and children. Neither a liberal nor a conservative-he describes these as “twin halves of the national lobotomy”-he is just Fred. He figures it is enough. Anything more would be multiple-personality disorder. Fred has spent many years doing things your mother wouldn’t want you to do, such as living in alleys in Taipei, Bangkok, and Saigon, with some of the strangest people ever to crawl this weary earth. Once a war correspondent in Viet Nam and Cambodia, then for years a police reporter in places the media don’t admit exist, he spent most of a decade writing a syndicated column on matters military. While he tends to write with wit, he has seen, he says, a lot of ugly things, and doesn’t like the people responsible. He says so. Fred may charm or offend, but he’ll keep your attention. “Funny, sharply observant and often deeply poignant, Fred Reed writes what a hell of a lot of Americans are thinking, but are afraid these days to say. He is delightfully beyond category for anyone with an open mind, which is probably why he lives in Mexico, far enough away that the politically correct of both camps cannot strangle him.” –Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting with Jesus
Lili News 029
- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
If you find the above useful, pass it on! Become an "influence multiplier"!
| Did you sign up yet for our FREE bulletin? It's super easy! Sign up to receive our FREE bulletin. Get TGP selections in your mailbox. No obligation of any kind. All addresses secure and never sold or commercialised. |
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post
YOU ARE FREE TO REPRODUCE THIS ARTICLE PROVIDED YOU GIVE PROPER CREDIT TO THE GREANVILLE POST
VIA A BACK LIVE LINK.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License