Ten weeks
of protests, some huge, a few violent, culminated Monday with a shutdown of the
Hong Kong airport.
Ominously,
Beijing described the violent weekend demonstrations as "deranged"
acts that are "the first signs of terrorism," and vowed a merciless
crackdown on the perpetrators.
China is
being pushed toward a decision it does not want to make: to use military force,
as in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago, to crush the uprising. For that would
reveal the character of President Xi Jinping's Communist dictatorship, as well
as Beijing's long-term plans for this semi-autonomous city of almost 7.5
million.
Yet this
is not the only internal or border concern of Xi's regime.
Millions
of Muslim Uighurs in China's west are in concentration camps undergoing
"re-education" to change their way of thinking on loyalty, secession
and the creation of a new East Turkestan.
In June,
a Chinese vessel rammed and sank a Philippine fishing boat, leaving its 22
crewmen to drown. The fishermen were rescued by a Vietnamese boat.
President
Rodrigo Duterte's reluctance to resist China's fortification in the South China
Sea of the rocks and reefs Manila claims are within its own territorial waters
has turned Philippine nationalism anti-China.
China's
claim to Taiwan is being defied by Taipei, which just bought $2.2 billion in
U.S. military equipment including Abrams tanks and Stinger missiles.
Any Taiwanese
declaration of independence, China has warned, means war.
While
Taiwan's request to buy U.S. F-16s has not yet been approved, in a rare visit,
Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen stopped over in the U.S. recently, before
traveling on to Caribbean countries that retain diplomatic relations with
Taipei. Beijing has expressed its outrage at the U.S. arms sales and Tsai's
unofficial visit.
The
vaunted Chinese economy is growing, at best, at half the double-digit rate of a
decade ago, not enough to create the jobs needed for hundreds of millions in
the countryside seeking work.
And talks
have been suspended in the U.S.-China trade dispute, at the heart of which,
says White House aide Peter Navarro, are Beijing's "seven deadly
sins" in dealing with the United States:
China
steals our intellectual property via cybertheft, forces U.S. companies in China
to transfer technology, hacks our computers, dumps into our markets to put U.S.
companies out of business, subsidizes state-owned enterprises to compete with
U.S. firms, manipulates its currency, and, despite our protests, ships to the
USA the fentanyl drug that has become a major killer of Americans.
Such
practices have enabled China to run up annual trade surpluses of $300 billion
to $400 billion at our expense, and, says Navarro, have caused the loss of
70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S.
Moreover,
China has used the accumulated wealth of its huge trade surpluses to finance
its drive for hegemony in Asia and beyond.
With
President Donald Trump threatening 10% tariffs on $300 billion more in Chinese
exports to the U.S., Xi must decide if he is willing to end his trade-war
tactics against the U.S., which have gone on during the Clinton, Bush and Obama
administrations. If he refuses, will he accept the de-coupling of our two
economies?
Only
Trump has taken on the Middle Kingdom.
If the
American people and Congress are willing to play hardball and accept
sacrifices, we can win this face-off. The U.S. buys five times as much from
China as we sell to China. The big loser in this confrontation, if we stay the
course, will not be the USA.
For three
years, the U.S. establishment has not ceased to howl about Russia's theft of
emails of the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign.
Yet the
greatest cybercrime of the century was Beijing's theft in 2014 of the personnel
files of 22 million applicants and employees of the U.S. government, many of
them holding top-secret clearances.
Compromised
by this theft, said then FBI Director James Comey, was a "treasure trove
of information about everybody who has worked for, tried to work for, or works
for the United States government."
"A
very big deal from a national security ... and counterintelligence
perspective," said Comey. And Xi's China, not Putin's Russia, committed
the crime. Yet America's elites appear to have forgotten this far graver act of
cyberaggresion.
Undeniably,
Russia is a rival. But Putin's economy is the size of Italy's while China's
economy challenges our own. And China's population is 10 times that of Russia,
and four times that of the USA.
Manifestly,
China is the greater menace.
Are
Americans willing to make the necessary sacrifices to force China to abide by
the rules of reciprocal trade?
Or will
Trump be forced by political realities to accept the long-term and ruinous
relationship we have followed since granting China permanent MFN status in
2001?
This
issue is likely to decide the destiny of our relations and the future of Asia,
if not the world.
Patrick
J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That
Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever." To find out more
about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and
cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.
Eight
Things to Know About the Biden Family’s Culture of Corruption
14 Aug 2019386
10:50
The family
of former Vice President Joe Biden has earned millions of dollars since the
start of his political career, often from dealings with heavy political
overtones.
Biden, the frontrunner among 2020
Democrats, often touts his middle-class bonafides on the campaign trail.
Although Biden did not become a multi-millionaire until he left the White House in 2017, the same cannot be
said of his family. In fact, several members of the Biden clan became immensely
wealthy over the span of the former vice president’s 40-year political career.
Breitbart News is providing an in-depth breakdown of a few
instances in which Joe Biden’s political career and his family’s financial
interests seemed to intersect.
1. Joe Biden’s younger brother,
James Biden, secured generous bank loans.
In the wake of Joe Biden’s upset election to the U.S. Senate in
1972, his younger brother James was able to secure a series of generous bank
loans to start a Delaware night club.
Although James Biden had no business experience and a net worth
of less than $10,000 at the time, he was able to arrange more than $160,000 in
start-up capital for the venture. When the nightclub proved to be unsuccessful,
generating more than $500,000 of debt by 1975, James Biden and his business
partners were thrown a life-line by a Pennsylvania bank that loaned him a
further $300,000.
During the same time period James Biden was receiving the
extensive lines of credit, Joe Biden was sitting on the Senate Banking
Committee, which had purview over the financial sector. A specific jurisdiction
of the committee was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which
provides bailouts to banks if they should become over-leveraged.
2. Joe Biden’s top campaign
contributor hired his youngest son Hunter right out of law school.
Shortly after Joe Biden was
reelected to the U.S. Senate in 1996, his largest campaign contributor, the
credit card issuer MBNA Corp., hired his son for an undisclosed role. The job
raised eyebrows from good government groups because MBNA employees had just
donated $63,000 to Joe Biden’s reelection campaign in what appeared to be
a coordinated
Clouding the picture even further was that, at the
time, Hunter Biden was a 26-year-old recent graduate of Yale Law
School with no prior banking or business experience. Both father and son
defended the job offer, claiming nothing improper had or would result because
of the arrangement.
“Unfortunately, no matter where I
went to work, some people would make an issue of it,” the younger Biden told the
Delaware News Journal in November 1996 when the job was
announced.
Despite his role being unknown at the time of his hiring, when
Hunter Biden left the company in 1998 to join the Clinton-era Commerce
Department it was as a senior vice president.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Joe Biden was championing
bankruptcy reform legislation endorsed by financial interests and credit card
companies like MBNA.
3. An MBNA executive purchased
Biden’s house for the full asking price in a deal that appeared facilitated by
the company.
A senior MBNA executive purchased
Biden’s 10,000 square foot colonial mansion in the Wilmington, Delaware,
suburbs for the asking price of $1.2 million in February 1996 . The sale garnered
notice because larger and newer homes in the vicinity sold for less. The issue
became a minor campaign problem for Biden’s reelection but was quickly
dismissed when the senator provided local media appraisal forms showing his
home was worth the value for what it was sold.
Byron York, however, investigated the matter in an exposé for the American Spectator
“In comparison, it appears [the MBNA executive] simply paid
Biden’s full asking price,” York wrote. “And, according to people familiar with
the situation, the house needed quite a bit of work; contractors and their
trucks descended on the house for months after the purchase.”
As York also noted, it appeared that MBNA may have played a role
in facilitating the purchase. Documents filed with the Securities and Exchange
Commission show that “in 1996 MBNA reimbursed [the executive] $330,115 for
expenses arising from the move.” Of that total, $210,000 “was to make up for a
loss [the executive] suffered on the sale of his Maryland home.”
4. Hunter Biden remained on
MBNA’s payroll while Joe Biden was writing bankruptcy reform legislation.
Throughout the early 2000s, Hunter
Biden remained on MBNA’s payroll as a consultant while his father was writing
and pushing the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of
2005. The arrangement, which did not become public until
after the law was passed, started in 2001 after Hunter Biden had left his
position in the Commerce Dept. MBNA was paid monthly consulting fees, with some
claiming they ranged upwards of $100,000, to advise the company on online
banking issues.
The 2005 bankruptcy
tightened regulations to make it extremely more difficult to declare
bankruptcy. It was heavily favored by MBNA and other giants in the banking and
finance sectors. Many consumer protection advocates, including Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D-MA), have claimed the bill benefited special interests at the
expense of consumers. Some have even suggested the law only served to
hasten and aggravate the recession of the late 2000s.
As previously reported by the New
York Times
Biden “was one of five Democrats in
March 2005 who voted against a proposal to require credit card companies to
provide more effective warnings to consumers about the consequences of paying
only the minimum amount due each month,” the Times
5. Joe Biden paid his family
members with campaign cash.
During his failed 2008 presidential
campaign, Joe Biden paid more than $2 million to his family members and their business. According to
the Washington Times,
6. James and Hunter Biden
sought to monetize off Joe Biden’s political standing.
In 2006, close to when Joe Biden assumed the chairmanship of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launched his second presidential
campaign, James and Hunter Biden purchased a hedge fund called Paradigm Global
Advisors. Although neither man had a strong background in finance, James and
Hunter Biden reportedly believed they could leverage Joe Biden’s political
connections to their benefits.
“Don’t worry about investors,” James
Biden purportedly told Paradigm’s senior leadership upon taking over the fund,
as reported by Politico
Paradigm’s executives claim that James and Hunter Biden saw the
hedge fund as a way to “take money from rich foreigners who could not legally
give money” to Joe Biden’s campaign account.
“We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash
ready to invest in this company,” James Biden allegedly told Paradigm’s staff.
Hunter and James also tried to solicit labor unions to invest
their pension funds in Paradigm by relying on Joe Biden’s long record of
advocating in favor of collective bargaining.
The efforts proved to unsuccessful, though, with James and
Hunter Biden choosing to strip and sell the company off by 2010 after a number
of bad decisions, including partnering with a Ponzi scheme.
7. James Biden’s received a
$1.5 billion contract to build houses in Iraq while Joe Biden was overseeing
the region.
After his foray into the world of
high finance ended disastrously, James Biden joined
Although the company had been losing money for some time, James
Biden’s arrival resulted in something of a reversal in fortune. Within six
months of James Biden joining the firm, Hillstone was the recipient of $1.5
billion dollar contract to build 100,000 houses in war-torn Iraq. The deal,
which was never finalized because outside funding failed to materialize,
quickly caught attention as Joe Biden was overseeing the Obama administration’s
policy in the region.
Both the Obama White House and Hillstone denied Joe Biden had
anything to do with the deal, pointing to the fact the contract was awarded
through a South Korean group working to build homes in Iraq. Despite the
denials, Irvin Richter, the founder of Hill International, did admit James
Biden may have had something to do with the deal.
“Listen, his name helps him get in
the door, but it doesn’t help him get business,” Richter told Fox Business in 2012 when
discussing James Biden. “People who have important names tend to get in the
door easier but it doesn’t mean success. If he had the name Obama he would get
in the door easier.”
Complicating matters was the fact
James Biden was likely to get rich if the deal went through. Fox Business reported that a group
of minority partners, which included James Biden, owned 49 percent of Hillstone.
The other 51 percent was owned by the company’s parent group, Hill
International. Given Hillstone’s profit breakdown structure, James Biden and
the other minority partners would have been eligible to split more than $735
million after the deal was completed
8. Hunter Biden’s firm scored a
$1.5 billion deal with the Bank of China only days after Joe Biden and his
youngest son visited the country.
In a SiriusXM Breitbart News Tonight interview from last
year, Schweizer explained how the Biden-China deal unfolded:
“In December of 2013, Vice President Joe Biden flies to Asia for
a trip, and the centerpiece for that trip is a visit to Beijing, China,” said
Schweizer. “To put this into context, in 2013, the Chinese have just exerted
air rights over the South Pacific, the South China Sea. They basically have
said, ‘If you want to fly in this area, you have to get Chinese approval. We are
claiming sovereignty over this territory.’ Highly controversial in Japan, in
the Philippines, and in other countries. Joe Biden is supposed to be going
there to confront the Chinese. Well, he gets widely criticized on that trip for
going soft on China. So basically, no challenging them, and Japan and other
countries are quite upset about this.”
Feinstein’s Ties to China Extend
Beyond Chinese Spy
August 6,
2018 Last Updated: August 7, 2018
Senate
Judiciary Committee Chairman Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein speaks during a
Committee hearing on Cambridge Analytica and data privacy in the Dirksen Senate
Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on May 16, 2018. (MANDEL
NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)
News Analysis
Last week’s revelations that a Chinese spy served on the staff
of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for almost 20 years, should be shocking no
one.
The unidentified agent, who was in place as recently as five
years ago, was Feinstein’s driver. He also served as a “gofer” in her Bay Area
office and a “liaison to the Asian-American community.” He sometimes attended
functions at the Chinese consulate, as a stand-in for the senator.
At the time the spy was discovered by the FBI, Feinstein was
chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee. Feinstein says she forced the
agent into retirement, but no other staff were informed of the circumstances
behind his exit, and no charges were filed.
Feinstein had been warned two decades ago that she might be
targeted by Chinese intelligence.
The senator issued a statement on March 10, 1997, that the FBI
had warned her and five other senators that the Chinese government might try to
“funnel illegal contributions to her campaign and other Congressional
campaigns, but she said the information had not influenced her position or her
vote on any issue,” according to The New York Times.
“[Feinstein] said that while ‘the information was vague and
nonspecific,’ she had concluded that she should ‘be very cautious’ in dealing
with Asian-American contributors,” the NY Times report stated.
Feinstein would obviously be of interest to Chinese intelligence
for the classified information she might possess through her position on the
intelligence committee.
She might also be the target of “influence operations”—a subtler
approach, by which Chinese operatives would try to steer Feinstein into promoting
policies that might benefit the Chinese regime.
According to the article, “For many years, Ms. Feinstein has
tried to promote friendship and trade with China, and she has countered critics
of the Chinese human-rights record by emphasizing what she described in a
Senate speech last year as ‘major improvements in human rights’ there.”
Conciliatory to Communists
Feinstein’s conciliatory approach to communist governments began
in the mid-1950s, when she served in the Stanford University student
government.
Before her senior year, Dianne Goldman, as she was then known,
traveled to Europe on a student trip led by Stanford political science
professor, James T. Watkins. The agenda included a possible meeting with
Yugoslav communist revolutionary Marshal Josip Broz Tito.
In January 1955, a vigorous debate erupted on the Stanford
student executive, over whether to support a proposed visit of seven Soviet
journalists to the United States.
According to Stanford Daily reports of the time, executive
member Sam Palmer asserted that “nothing can be lost in allowing them to come
over.”
He was supported by both Goldman and Don Peck, who claimed that
it was important to show “Russia that the United States is not an Iron Curtain
country—that we are willing to let Communists enter.”
The ayes won, and Goldman went on to personally host the
delegation from the Soviet Writers Union when they toured Stanford’s campus
later that year.
Thirty years later, while serving as mayor of San Francisco,
Feinstein issued an official city proclamation in support of that year’s World
Festival of Youth and Students, held in Moscow.
This international propaganda event was organized by the
Soviet-controlled World Federation of Democratic Youth and was supported in the
United States by the Communist Party USA and similar groups.
Feinstein traveled to Moscow in December of that year as part of
a trade delegation of 450 U.S. businessmen and public officials.
A little over a year later, on Jan. 27, 1987, Soviet Consul
General Valentin Kamenev presented Feinstein with a Soviet streetcar: “A
streetcar named desire.” Also present at the ceremony was Viktor Zhelezny,
deputy chief of public transport for the Russian Republic.
Bridges to Communist China
Building bridges to the People’s Republic of China, however,
seems to have been an even higher priority for Feinstein.
One of Feinstein’s first acts on becoming mayor of San Francisco
in January 1979, was to visit Shanghai to establish sister-city relations.
The next apparent priority was re-establishing passenger airline
service between China and the United States. Service was restored on Jan. 8,
1981, after a “32-year hiatus when a Boeing 747 with 139 Chinese passengers
arrived exactly on time at San Francisco International Airport,” according to
The New York Times.
Feinstein and Chinese Consul General Hu Ding-yi held a
ribbon-cutting ceremony, “which included a cake, decorated with ‘CAAC [Civil
Aviation Administration of China] Welcome to San Francisco,’ and two bottles of
champagne.” Feinstein described the landing as “an historic and exciting
occasion.”
Feinstein went on to visit Shanghai several times in her
official capacity and built a close personal relationship with then-Mayor Jiang
Zemin.
According to the San Jose Mercury: “He [Jiang] once invited her
and her husband to see Mao Tse-tung’s bedroom in his old residence, the first
foreigners to do so. Feinstein had entertained Jiang in San Francisco, dancing
with him as he sang ‘When We Were Young.'”
This relationship proved fruitful in 1999, when President Bill
Clinton was pushing to bring China into the World Trade Organization.
A visit to Washington that year by Chinese Prime Minister Zhu
Rongji, which many had hoped would seal the deal, produced nothing. Relations
got even worse after U.S. bombers accidentally destroyed the Chinese Embassy in
Belgrade that May.
Feinstein, stepped in to offer assistance to the administration.
She volunteered to use her personal relationship with now-Chinese regime leader
Jiang, to get negotiations back on track.
In August 1999, the White House dispatched Feinstein to China,
with a hand-written note to Jiang from President Clinton, urging a resumption
of talks.
“Senator Feinstein played a critical role in paving the way for
this critical trade agreement,” White House press officer Elizabeth Newman
said.
Feinstein and Jiang met Aug. 16 in the Chinese coastal city of
Dalian, where the senator handed over President Clinton’s letter.
In an interview with the San Jose Mercury in November 1999,
Feinstein said, that she felt the only way China would enter into WTO
negotiations again was with the backing of Jiang.
Feinstein said, in offering her services as an intermediary to
Clinton and national security adviser Sandy Berger, “I said I’d be prepared to
do it if they felt it would be helpful, and they said they did think it would
be helpful and please do it.”
Jiang was “receptive and particularly pleased that Clinton had
taken the time to personally write a note to him,’’ Feinstein said.
“I think he listened, and we had substantial discussions on the
subject. … I was successful in getting the Chinese interested in beginning to
resume negotiations on the subject,” Feinstein said in the November 1999
interview.
Human Rights
Significantly, Feinstein said she expected approval of the new
trade status, which would remove the “annual congressional review that many
believe continues to put pressure on China to reform its economy and
human-rights record.”
In other words, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would get the
trade status it coveted, without having to do anything of significance to
improve its abysmal human-rights record.
China was admitted to the World Trade Organization and has used
that trade access to build the world’s second-strongest economy, and a
world-class military.
If anything, the CCP’s human-rights record is worse today.
Certainly, their repressive technologies are far more powerful.
At the time, Feinstein’s colleague, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)
expressed grave concerns about the deal.
“Once they get permanent (normal trade relations status), all
leverage from the US on behalf of business is over because they have what they
want permanently,” Pelosi said, in the San Jose Mercury article. “They have
violated their agreements in terms of proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, they have violated their agreements in terms of trade, they have
violated their agreements on international covenants on human rights. Why is
that we think they are then going to honor their commitments they make for
WTO?”
All in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese
government.
Feinstein has done more for the CCP than other any serving U.S.
politician.
Correction: A previous version
of this article misstated who led Dianne Feinstein’s student trip to Europe.
The trip was led by Stanford political science professor, James T. Watkins. The
Epoch Times regrets the error.
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