Saturday, May 4, 2019

JOE BIDEN'S RED CHINA EXPANDS MILITARY REACH FROM SOUTH CHINA SEA TO ARCTIC CIRCLE - How much was in it for Uncle Joe?


Pentagon: China Expanding Military Reach from South China Sea to Arctic Circle



The Associated Press
Zhang Jiansong/Xinhua via AP
JOHN HAYWARD
36
3:56

The Defense Department released a report on Thursday that warned China is dramatically upgrading its military capabilities and expanding its ability to project power, from Taiwan and the contested islands of the South China Sea to the Arctic Circle.

The Pentagon report said China has aggressively used technology theft to rapidly modernize its military forces, as summarized by CNN:
“China uses a variety of methods to acquire foreign military and dual-use technologies, including targeted foreign direct investment, cyber theft, and exploitation of private Chinese nationals’ access to these technologies, as well as harnessing its intelligence services, computer intrusions, and other illicit approaches,” the Congressionally mandated Department of Defense report said.
“China obtains foreign technology through imports, foreign direct investment, the establishment of foreign research and development (R&D) centers, joint ventures, research and academic partnerships, talent recruitment, and industrial and cyber espionage,” the report added.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, recently warned Congress that US companies that did business in China were often indirectly benefiting the Chinese military, citing Google as an example.
The report said that China had used these techniques to acquire sensitive, dual-use, or military-grade equipment from the United States, including aviation and antisubmarine warfare technologies.
The Pentagon said China’s real-world military development has been focused on enhancing its ability to project power through naval warships, long-range bombers, and advanced missiles, including hypersonic weapons that would be extremely difficult to track or intercept with current technology. This development was accompanied by advances in cyber espionage intended to turn the Internet into a force multiplier.
The report highlighted China’s use of a “maritime militia” of fishing boats with paramilitary crews to slowly, inexorably annex disputed islands in the South China Sea as an example of how Beijing infuses its political agenda with just enough military muscle to avoid a direct confrontation with its most powerful adversaries.
If push soon comes to shove, however, the Pentagon cautioned Chinese forces are “increasingly able to project power” and “contest U.S. military superiority.”
One exercise of Chinese power projection deemed particularly interesting by U.S. analysts is the Arctic, where Beijing plans to establish protected shipping lanes as part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The Defense Department foresaw China establishing military bases around the world to secure Belt and Road trade routes, including a surface and submarine presence in the Arctic.                                           
“Civilian research could support a strengthened Chinese military presence in the Arctic Ocean, which could include deploying submarines to the region as a deterrent against nuclear attacks,” the Pentagon report said.
The Pentagon anticipated China will field between 65 and 70 submarines by 2020, roughly a dozen of them nuclear-powered. That undersea fleet should be large enough to provide China with a “continuous nuclear deterrence at sea,” essentially meaning some of China’s weapons will be constantly deployed on submarines that could not easily be destroyed by an enemy first strike.
The report considered several scenarios for China using military force against Taiwan. Even with its upgraded military capability, China seems unlikely to launch an all-out invasion as long as the Taiwanese keep their defenses strong and do not force the issue by declaring full independence, but several lesser users of force are possible, such as China attempting to pressure Taiwan into reunification.
“China could use missile attacks and precision air strikes against air defense systems, including airbases, radar sites, missiles, space assets, and communications facilities to degrade Taiwan’s defenses, neutralize Taiwan’s leadership, or break the Taiwan people’s resolve,” the report said.

AsiaNational SecurityBelt and Road InitiativeChinadefense departmentPentagonSouth China SeaTaiwan


Bernie Sanders attacks Biden from the right on China trade

Vermont Senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has attacked former Vice President Joe Biden for remarks on China and trade. In language that would not be out of place coming from President Donald Trump, Sanders accused Biden of downplaying the economic threat represented by China and criticized him for supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the normalization of trade relations with Beijing.
Biden, considered the early frontrunner for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, said at a campaign event Wednesday in Iowa, “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man.” He added, “They’re not bad folks. But guess what, they’re not competition for us.”
Biden spokesman Andrew Bates later stated that the Biden had meant “it’s never a good bet to bet against America and the fundamental strength, resilience, and ingenuity of its people.”
In a response the same day, Sanders criticized Biden from the right, saying in a tweet, “Since the China trade deal (in 2000) I voted against, America has lost over 3 million manufacturing jobs. It’s wrong to pretend that China isn’t one of our major economic competitors. When we are in the White House we will win that competition by fixing our trade policies.”
Sanders’ crude economic nationalism is not new. He has long linked his populist rhetoric to policies of trade war and anti-immigrant chauvinism. He fully supports the efforts of the trade union bureaucracy to pit US workers against their class brothers and sisters around the world and infect American workers with nationalism—the better to subordinate them to “their” corporate exploiters within the US.
Just two weeks ago, Sanders denounced “open borders” at a campaign event in Iowa, warning that decriminalizing undocumented immigrants would lead to “impoverished people” around the world flooding into the US.
Trump also criticized Biden for his comments on China. In an interview with Fox News on Thursday, he hailed the tariffs that his administration has imposed on Chinese goods, while saying of Biden, “But for somebody to be so naïve and say China is not a problem, if Biden actually said that, that’s a very dumb statement.”

Like Trump, Sanders has hailed his anti-free trade record. This week he boasted of his votes against NAFTA and normalization of trade with China. On Monday, he released his trade platform, calling for renegotiation of all US trade agreements and demanding that China be labeled a currency manipulator, something Trump has threatened but pulled back from carrying out up to now. Officially naming a country a currency manipulator is tantamount to full-scale trade war. Such a declaration triggers a whole series of punitive trade measures against the targeted country.
Sanders, who calls himself a “democratic socialist,” has sought to outflank Trump from the right on trade issues. At an April 13 rally, he denounced Trump for being insufficiently aggressive in his trade war drive against China and other countries. “For once in your life,” he said, “keep your campaign promises…go back to the drawing board.”
On Monday, after releasing his trade plan, he said: “We need a president who will actually fight for American workers, keep their promises, and stand up to the giant corporations who close down plants to send jobs overseas.”
By equating the defense of “American jobs” with economic attacks on countries such as China and blaming plant closures, layoffs and wage-cutting on trade policies rather than capitalism, Sanders aids the effort of the ruling class to create a war fever and prepare the way for military conflict with nuclear-armed powers such as China.
While he has tried to tap into anti-war sentiment by saying, “I voted against the war in Iraq. [Biden] voted for it,” Sanders has no qualms about using the military in pursuit of US imperialism’s interests. During the 2016 campaign, he stated that he would use “drones, all that and more.”
Notwithstanding his rhetorical criticisms of big business, Sanders’ goal is to prevent the independent movement of the working class by diverting its struggles behind the Democratic Party. In this, he is aided by pseudo-left organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
The DSA functions as a faction of the Democratic Party, attempting to provide a phony left veneer to this party of Wall Street and the CIA. That is why it is dedicating its efforts to promoting the campaign of Sanders in the 2020 elections.

Obama Adviser Downplays Biden’s Ukraine Corruption as ‘Conservative Oppo’ by Peter Schweizer


US Vice President Joe Biden (R) speaks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko before he addresses a joint meeting of Congress at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, September 18, 2014. Poroshenko pleaded with Washington Thursday to provide his country with "special," non-NATO security status to help beef up its defenses …
NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
MATTHEW BOYLE
  Washington, D.C.68
3:35

One of former President Barack Obama’s most senior advisers, Dan Pfeiffer, is downplaying reporting by the New York Times on former Vice President Joe Biden’s Ukraine corruption, as the scandal widens and severely threatens Biden’s 2020 White House chances.

On Wednesday, the Times published a piece that details how Biden faces “conflict of interest questions” with regard to the Ukraine that President Donald Trump and his allies are promoting as political attacks on Biden.
The Times’ Ken Vogel and Iuliia Mendel wrote on Wednesday:
It was a foreign policy role Joseph R. Biden Jr. enthusiastically embraced during his vice presidency: browbeating Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt government to clean up its act. And one of his most memorable performances came on a trip to Kiev in March 2016, when he threatened to withhold $1 billion in United States loan guarantees if Ukraine’s leaders did not dismiss the country’s top prosecutor, who had been accused of turning a blind eye to corruption in his own office and among the political elite.
The pressure campaign worked. The prosecutor general, long a target of criticism from other Western nations and international lenders, was soon voted out by the Ukrainian Parliament. Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s younger son, who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.”
In response to the report, former New York City Mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani tweeted it out, calling for an investigation into Biden’s activities in Ukraine.


In response to someone else highlighting that tweet, Pfeiffer tweeted out a dismissive message of the contents of the report from the Times.

It's happening all over again

Peter Schweizer does oppo research funded by conservative interests --> NYT credulously writes it up --> Trump and his allies bully the DOJ into investigating --> Trump claims his opponent is corrupt




He specifically suggested that the entire report is based on “oppo research funded by conservative interests” put together by Breitbart News senior editor-at-large Peter Schweizer–the president of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI)–and then published by the New York Times and pushed by Trump’s team.
“It’s happening all over again,” Pfeiffer said, a reference to how a lot of the information in Clinton Cash came out in the 2016 presidential election demonstrating corruption by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Notably, however, Pfeiffer did not address the actual facts in the Times story or the facts about Biden’s push as vice president to engage in activities in Ukraine that benefited his son’s business interests.
Vogel and Mendel wrote in the Times:
The broad outlines of how the Bidens’ roles intersected in Ukraine have been known for some time. The former vice president’s campaign said that he had always acted to carry out United States policy without regard to any activities of his son, that he had never discussed the matter with Hunter Biden and that he learned of his son’s role with the Ukrainian energy company from news reports. But new details about Hunter Biden’s involvement, and a decision this year by the current Ukrainian prosecutor general to reverse himself and reopen an investigation into Burisma, have pushed the issue back into the spotlight just as the senior Mr. Biden is beginning his 2020 presidential campaign. They show how Hunter Biden and his American business partners were part of a broad effort by Burisma to bring in well-connected Democrats during a period when the company was facing investigations backed not just by domestic Ukrainian forces but by officials in the Obama administration. Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma prompted concerns among State Department officials at the time that the connection could complicate Vice President Biden’s diplomacy in Ukraine, former officials said.
Vogel made clear in his own tweets on the matter that the Times has been investigating Biden’s corruption in Ukraine for many years, and has published stories on it dating back to 2015.


Schweizer, too, told Breitbart News that while he is glad the New York Times is following up on this and investigating the Bidens, he had no contact with the Times reporters on it ahead of publication–and they did this investigation on their own.
“This is a story—corruption that must not be ignored–not oppo research,” Schweizer said. “Very glad to see the New York Times is reporting on this, but I had no contact with Vogel while he was working on this story and we never discussed it.”


Schweizer has been working on exposing the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine and in China and elsewhere for years. He has uncovered many details, and provided many reports on it–including his latest book Secret Empires.

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