Friday, January 31, 2020

HOW MUCH OF AMERICA IS MADE IN CHINA OR STOLEN BY CHINA? - SERVANT OF RED CHINA DIANNE FEINSTEIN WILL HAVE THE ANSWER

Bloomberg: 2019 a Good Year for Wealthy; Jeff Bezos Remains on Top Despite $9 Billion Loss in Divorce

For the already wealthy and those who struck gold for the first time, 2019 was a good year for the rich.

Bloomberg News’ billionaire index is reporting on the money made this past year, including Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos remaining on the top of the heap despite a divorce settlement with his ex-wife that led to a $9 billion decrease in his portfolio:
The leveraging of a giant social-media presence, a catchy tune about a family of sharks and a burgeoning collection of junkyards are just a few of the curious ways that helped make 2019 a fertile year for fortunes to blossom around the world.
Kylie Jenner became the youngest self-made billionaire this year after her company, Kylie Cosmetics, signed an exclusive partnership with Ulta Beauty Inc. She then sold a 51% stake for $600 million.
It has been almost two months since the Washington Nationals captured their first World Series championship, but people around the world are still singing along to the baseball team’s adopted rallying cry: “Baby Shark, doo-doo doo-doo doo-doo.” The Korean family that helped popularize the viral earworm are now worth about $125 million.
The new wealthy includes Willis Johnson of Oklahoma who has amassed a $1.9 billion fortune from building a network of junkyards that sell damaged automobiles, according to Bloomberg News.
Bloomberg reported that the 500 wealthiest people around the world added $1.2 trillion to their wealth, “boosting their collective net worth 25 percent to $5.9 trillion.”
“Leading the 2019 gains was France’s Bernard Arnault, who added $36.5 billion as he rose on the Bloomberg index to become the world’s third-richest person and one of three centibillionaires — those with a net worth of at least $100 billion,” Bloomberg reported.
Ironically, Bezos was one of 52 people who had a decline in their fortune, in his case because of a divorce settlement with MacKenzie Bezos who is now on the billionaires list ranking No. 25 with a net worth of $27.5 billion.
Bloomberg reported on the winners:
  • The 172 American billionaires on the Bloomberg ranking added $500 billion, with Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg up $27.3 billion and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates up $22.7 billion.
  • Representation from China continued to grow, with the nation’s contingent rising to 54, second only to the U.S. He Xiangjian, founder of China’s biggest air-conditioner exporter, was the standout performer as his wealth surged 79 percent to $23.3 billion.
  • Russia’s richest added $51 billion, a collective increase of 21 percent, as emerging-market assets from currencies to stocks and bonds rebounded in 2019 after posting big losses a year earlier.
And “losers”:
  • Rupert Murdoch’s personal fortune dropped by about $10 billion after proceeds from Walt Disney Co.’s purchase of Fox assets were distributed to his six children, making them billionaires in their own right.
  • Interactive Brokers Group Inc.’s Thomas Peterffy saw his wealth slump by $2.1 billion as investors weighed a reshaped competitive landscape for brokerage businesses after rival Charles Schwab Corp. eliminated commissions and agreed to buy TD Ameritrade Holding Corp.
  • WeWork’s Adam Neumann saw his fortune implode — at least on paper — as the struggling office-sharing company’s valuation dropped to $8 billion in October from an estimated $47 billion at the start of the year. Still, SoftBank Group Corp.’s rescue package left Neumann’s status as a billionaire intact.
And the new billionaires:
  • White Claw, the “hard seltzer” that was the hit of the summer among U.S. millennials, helped boost Anthony von Mandl’s net worth to $3.6 billion.
  • Mastering the art of fast-food deliveries proved rewarding for Jitse Groen, whose soaring Takeaway.com NV lifted his wealth to $1.5 billion.
  • The popularity of soy milk gave eight members of Hong Kong’s Lo family a combined $1.5 billion.
Coronavirus: Amazon, Microsoft Employ Thousands of China-Born Employees



ARLINGTON, VA - NOVEMBER 27: A passenger looks at the departures board at Ronald Reagan National Airport on the day before the Thanksgiving holiday, November 27, 2019 in Arlington, Virginia. Both the American West and Midwest are facing significant weather events that could impact travelers. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Drew Angerer/Getty
6:39

The huge and growing population of China-born professionals in the United States is prompting many major U.S. companies to ask their employees not to travel to China.
“We are restricting business travel to and from China until further notice and encouraging our employees to follow the health and safety guidelines provided by international health agencies,” an Amazon employee told Business Insider.
“Amazon is also telling employees who have recently traveled to areas in China affected by the virus to work from home for two weeks and, if they experience symptoms, to seek medical attention before coming back into the office,” Business Insider reported.
“Facebook suspended non-essential travel to mainland China and told employees who had traveled there to work from home,” the New York Times reported.
Many Chinese migrants work in elite technology companies, not in the myriad lower-tier software sweatshops around the United States. Many others work in banks and financial-sector companies, so several U.S. financial-services companies are curbing employee travel to China.
Understandably, companies do not want to talk about their employees — and especially their number of Chinese-born employees. But the workforce numbers can be estimated from government data — and those numbers suggest Amazon and Microsoft each employ more than 6,000 Chinese graduates with relatives in China.
The website, MyVisaJobs.com, uses federal data to track job opportunities for foreign graduates in the United States.
The data shows that employers nationwide nominated 11,153 Chinese-born migrants for green cards in 2019, 12,612 in 2018, 8,603 in 2017, and 7,217 in 15. Overall, or 59,870 Chinese has been nominated for green cards since 2010 by U.S. employers. Nearly all of those requests are approved by the government, after a short delay.
The MyVisaJobs data shows that Amazon and its various affiliates have nominated 2,736 Chinese employees for green cards since 2013. Not all those nominated were approved — but the companies still employed those workers.
Amazon also hired many H-1B workers from China.
The MyVisaJobs site tracks Amazon’s requests to get to H-1B visas for almost 4,000 new foreign hires in the last three years — but it does not provide the nationalities. The federal government likey approved 1,500 of the 4,000 visa requests.
The company also sought to extend or modify H-1B visas for roughly 13,000 other H-1B workers during the last three years. The Department of Homeland Security would likely have approved nearly all of the requests, but it does not reveal their nationalities.
But one-third of Amazon’s green-cards nominations go to Chinese workers, so a cautious estimate would say that one-quarter of Amazon’s H-1B visa-workers are Chinese. If that estimate is correct, then Amazon employs roughly 5,000 Chinese-born H-1B visa workers.
To minimize possible double-counting with the green card nominees, that 5,000 number should be reduced to 4,000. If one-quarter of those Chinese green card immigrants have left the company, then 3,000 are still at Amazon.
The federal government also allows companies to hire foreign graduates who get work permits via the Occupational Practical Training program.
In 2019, the federal government reported 478,732 Chinese students in the United States.
In 2018, 25,843 Chinese graduates got work-permits via the ‘STEM’ side of the Optional Training Program, alongside 70,521 Indians and 17,000 graduates from other countries. That means Chinese provide a little more than a fifth, or 22 percent, of the overall STEM-OPT population — many of whom are invited by friendly managers into good jobs at prestigious companies.
In 2018, Amazon employed 2,911 STEM-OPT graduates, suggesting a Chinese population of roughly 600 graduates.
Amazon also hired 851 graduates with ordinary OPT work-permits and 691 foreign students with “Curricular Practical Training” work permits. The numbers may add another 300 Chinese employees to Amazon’s ranks because Chinese students comprise almost one-third of all foreign graduates and students.
So a back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests Amazon employs 2,500 Chinese-born people who have been nominated for green cards, 3,000 Chinese visa-workers with H-1Bs visas, and roughly 900 Chinese-born graduates with STEM-OPT, OPT, or CPT work-permits.
That population adds up to 6,400 Chinese-born employees — nearly all of whom have parents and relatives back in China.
Microsoft also has many Chinese-born employees in the United States.
Microsoft has nominated roughly 3,400 Chinese citizens for green cards since 2010. In 2018, it employed 690 STEM-OPT graduates, 243 OPT workers, and 580 CPT workers. The company asked for 394 new H-1B workers in 2019, 1,509 in 2018, and 1,515 in 2017. It sought another 10,400 H-1B visa extensions and modifications since 2017.
Once adjusted by the same low ball fractions as in the Amazon calculation, the federal data suggests Microsoft employs at least 6,000 Chinese-born employees.
“Based on the evaluation of risk communicated by global health authorities we have advised employees in China to work from home and cancel all non-essential business travel,” a Microsoft employee told Forbes.
“We place tremendous value and focus on the well-being and safety of our employees,” Amazon told Business Insider. “Out of an abundance of caution, we are … encouraging our employees to follow the health and safety guidelines provided by international health agencies such as the CDC and WHO.”





Apple’s Supplier in China Says Coronavirus Won’t Hurt iPhone Production

The Associated Press
Kin Cheung/AP
2:23

Apple supplier Foxconn has stated that it has a plan in place to continue to meet all manufacturing obligations in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak in China and that iPhone production should not be affected.
Reuters reports that Apple’s Taiwan-based supplier Foxconn has stated that it plans to meet all manufacturing obligations in China as the country deals with the contagious coronavirus. Foxconn, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd, said in a statement on Tuesday:
We do not comment on our specific production practices, but we can confirm that we have measures in place to ensure that we can continue to meet all global manufacturing obligations.
Foxconn is closely monitoring the current public health challenge linked to the coronavirus and we are applying all recommended health and hygiene practices to all aspects of our operations in the affected markets. Our facilities in China are following holiday schedules and will continue to do so until all businesses have resumed standard operating hours,
Apple has closed one of its Chinese-based stores and restricted store hours in response to the coronavirus according to CEO Tim Cook. The Apple CEO added that the company was “restricting travel to business-critical travel,” for employees. Cook said in an interview with CNBC that this quarter’s earnings could be affected by the virus, stating:”There’s more uncertainty, it’s a very fluid situation.”
Media reports and stock market analysts have demonstrated concern about Foxconn’s ability to keep production up despite the coronavirus. Analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said that Apple could be in trouble if employees across Foxconn and other component manufacturing hubs in China are physically restricted. “If the China outbreak becomes more spread it could negatively impact the supply chain which would be a major investor worry,” he said
Foxconn is based in Taiwan but employs one million workers in communist China across a dozen factories making it the country’s largest private employer.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com






RED CHINA, THE INVADING SAUDIS, MUSLIM DICTATORS... these Dem pols will suck off bribes from anyone!




Mike Pompeo: Communist China ‘Central Threat of Our Times’

LONDON, ENGLAND - JANUARY 30: US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo leaves after meeting British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at 10 Downing Street on January 30, 2020 in London, England. The U.S. Secretary of State is on a two-day visit to the U.K to discuss a number of issues including …
Peter Summers/Getty Images
1:29

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters Thursday on his trip to Europe that the Communist regime in China is the “central threat of our times.
“While we still have to be enormously vigilant about terror … the Chinese Communist Party presents the central threat of our times,” Pompeo said on Thursday.
Pompeo is on a four-nation tour to the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.
In an interview with LBC Radio in the U.K. on Thursday, Pompeo was asked about the British government giving China’s Huawei a small role in building its 5G network.
Pompeo said when asked about the arrangement:
Look, we’ve said we were disappointed. We view the intrusion of the Chinese Communist Party into information technology systems as a very grave risk — a national security risk as well as a core privacy risk.
If your health records are on a system that belongs and is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, that’s not something you’d probably choose in the first instance. And so we are looking forward to working with our United Kingdom partners on the security elements of this and then working alongside them to develop what we think about this trusted network.
“It’s not about Huawei,” Pompeo said. “It’s about ensuring that the information we put our citizens’ data on is secure and safe.”
Follow Penny Starr on Twitter

FEINSTEIN HAS SPENT HER POLITICAL LIFE STALKING THE HALLS OF CONGRESS SNIFFING OUT DEALS THAT PUT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN HER POCKETS.
SHE HAS AVOIDED PROSECUTION BY VOTING AGAINST ANY ETHICS BILLS AND HER HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM'S HANDING OUT "CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION" BRIBES TO EVERY DEMOCRAT OUT THERE!




IN THE November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.

“All in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red China than other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan  AMERICAN THINKER.com


Senator Who Employed Chinese Spy Endorses Joe Biden for President

Win McNamee/Getty Images
  9 Oct 20192,419
5:44

A high-profile U.S. senator with professional and personal ties to China — including once employing one of its spies — is backing former Vice President Joe Biden amid mounting questions over his son’s business dealings with the communist regime.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a former chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced her endorsement of the former vice president on Tuesday, claiming to have witnessed Biden’s “fortitude” and leadership during their overlapping tenures in Congress.
Feinstein said in a statement:
I’ve worked closely with Vice President Biden and I’ve seen firsthand his legislative ability, his statesmanship, and most importantly his moral fortitud. During his time in Congress and in the White House, Joe Biden has been a tireless fighter for hard working American families.
The endorsement comes as Biden’s presidential campaign is besieged by scandal regarding the lucrative business dealings his youngest son, Hunter, had with foreign governments.
Only hours before Feinstein’s endorsement, the Chinese government announced it would not investigate how Hunter Biden ended up at the center of one its top private equity firms. The Chinese foreign ministry made the decision after President Donald Trump publicly called for a probe of Hunter Biden’s dealings with Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). In particular, Trump has noted that the circumstances surrounding BHR’s creation could have posed a conflict of interest for Joe Biden.
As Peter Schweizer, senior contributor at Breitbart News, revealed in his bestselling book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Hunter Biden inked the multibillion-dollar deal that created BHR with a subsidiary of the state-owned Bank of China in 2013.
The timing of the lucrative deal has been brought into question as it came only 12 days after Hunter visited China with his father aboard Air Force Two. Officially, the then-vice president was visiting the country amid escalating tensions over islands in the South China Sea and decided to bring his granddaughter and son along. In a March 2018 interview with Breitbart News Tonight, however, Schweizer detailed the political machinations that preceded Hunter Biden’s $1.5 billion venture with China:
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. 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. For basically not challenging them, and Japan and other countries are quite upset about this.
Since its creation, BHR has invested heavily in energy and defense projects across the globe. As of June, Hunter Biden was still involved with BHR, sitting on its board of directors and owning a minority stake of the fund estimated to be worth more than $430,000.
Such dealings at the center of politics and business, while perhaps not illegal, are not exclusive to the Biden family alone. As a few noted at the time of Feinstein’s endorsement, the senator and her husband have their own close ties to the communist country.
During her tenure as mayor of San Francisco in the late-1970s and early-1980s, Feinstein took advantage of the newly normalized diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China by establishing one of the first sister city partnership between San Francisco and Shanghai. Through that partnership, Feinstein led trade delegations to China in which she and her husband, Richard Blum, became acquainted with some of the country’s most prominent political leaders.
As the Federalist noted in August 2018, Feinstein and her husband leveraged those relationships to boost their own wealth. In 1986, Feinstein and Jiang Zemin — the then-mayor of Shanghai, who would later ascend to the presidency of the People’s Republic of China — “designated several corporate entities for fostering commercial relations.” One of those firms was Shanghai Pacific Partners, which employed Blum as a director. Blum reportedly had an interest of upwards of $500,000 in a project backed by Shanghai Pacific Partners.
After Feinstein was elected to the Senate in 1992, Blum continued profiting off their ties to China. A the same time, the freshman lawmaker was pitching herself as a “China hand” to colleagues, even once claiming “that in my last life maybe I was Chinese.” Through her seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Feinstein led the fight on a number of initiatives seen as being favorable to China, including granting the country permanent most-favored-nation trading status in 2000.
Despite Feinstein and her husband having a close relationship with Jiang, the Chinese government targeted the senator as part of its espionage operations. In the early 2000s, the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) recruited a longtime employee of the senator to gather information about the inner workings of her congressional and district offices. Feinstein only learned of the staffer’s duplicity in 2013, after he’d already been on her payroll for more than 20 years.
“While this person, who was a liaison to the local Chinese community, was fired, charges were never filed against him,” Politico reported in 2018, speculating that because “the staffer was providing political intelligence and not classified information—making prosecution far more difficult.”
Apart from the convoluted history of the senator’s ties to China, the political timing of Feinstein’s endorsement also caught many off guard. The California Democrat, who hosted a fundraiser on Biden’s behalf last week alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) daughter, is only the most recent figure from the Democrat establishment to openly pledge support for the former vice president. Feinstein’s endorsement, however, was not totally expected, especially since her seamate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), is mounting a bid of her own for the Democrat nomination. In fact, earlier this year, Feinsten flirted with the notion of remaining neutral in the 2020 contest out of respect for Harris.
Compounding the political picture is that most polls show Biden no longer the favorite to win California, having fallen behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
Feinstein, however, did not address any of that when endorsing the former vice president on Tuesday. Instead, the senator offered platitudes about Biden’s work to enhance gun control and how his campaign was a “fight to restore the soul of the nation.”


"The policy agendas of today's leading Democrats including Medicare for All; the Green New Deal; open borders; and their approach to issues such as social justice, economic and tax policy, foreign policy, gun control, and energy policy, plus so many others, are rarely held up to comprehensive public examination and scrutiny by the mainstream media in any truly meaningful way."

 

Is today's Democratic Party deceiving the people?

 

Bill Gertz is an author of eight books and an award-winning national security journalist and currently is the national security columnist for The Washington Times.  His recently published book, Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China's Drive for Global Supremacy provides valuable insights revealing why Chinese communist leaders and their increasing totalitarian system of government pose such a menacing threat to the world and how they are actively undermining American democracy and freedom. 
While the book is focused on modern China, valuable lessons can be learned about the dangers of totalitarianism and political corruption operating anywhere in the world.  Especially noteworthy is material presented in Chapter 1 — "How Communists Lie," specifically by Guo Wengui, who is a Chinese billionaire and political exile and former insider who left China in 2014.  The first chapter includes quotes by Guo Wengui exposing how the Chinese communist system operates in deceitful ways.
Guo Wengui is a controversial public figure operating from his current home in NYC.  He is a leading and well known activist opposing the Chinese communist government through several different methods, including social media, public appearances and meeting with prominent Western opinion-makers and politicians.  Opinions today widely differ about his actual status, his background, and his true intentions.  However, he knows the communist system well as a former political insider and the ideology behind it, so the ideas offered by him are valuable to consider.
Guo Wengui starts by reminding us that China is a communist country and that communism attempts to build a utopian society, therefore the very basis of the system is false.  As a consequence, he persuasively states that in fact, communists are professional liars, because they will never realize what they promise.  It is in fact impossible to do so.  He states that traditional Western culture is built on the morality of right and wrong.  On the other hand, he asserts that in the communist system, truth and lies are interchangeable.  As an example, if the truth furthers the ideological cause, it will be used, and when outright lies are expedient, there is no unwillingness to use them. 
Guo Wengui labels today's Chinese political system as a kleptocracy concerned and primarily motivated by fulfilling the interests of a comparatively small elite rather than the well-being of the Chinese people.  These selected few elites are all exclusively high-ranking members of the Communist Party.  Totalitarian systems such as the one that exists today in China strive to take total control of the everyday lives of their citizens, including their thoughts and attitudes as well as their daily activities.  The Chinese Communist Party regularly uses its state-controlled mass and social media to maintain absolute political control, often relying on outright deceit.
As I read this characterization of the workings of the Chinese Communist Party and its leaders, it led me to thinking more about current political conditions closer to home.
In our country, the most powerful collective mechanism for the people to come together on a regular basis and have the right to choose the political agenda and the type of country we want to live in is by voting.  The American voter goes to the polls with the expectation that our elected representatives will work to deliver solutions to the issues and challenges facing our country.  Since his inauguration, President Trump has worked tirelessly to implement his agenda and has been exceptionally successful in doing so.  Various positive results have occurred in a wide variety of areas ranging from the economy, immigration, and trade policy to national security.  
The most dangerous assault on our system of government today is the orchestrated efforts by the Democratic Party to actively work in a series of campaigns to invalidate the results of the 2016 election.  Democrats actively resist, impugn, and call into question without exception any policy initiative by the Trump administration.  The Democrats currently promote an environment of resistance by outright deception indicating a determination not to offer any compromise on issues.  In addition, they do not seem to display any regard for the consequences of their actions on our country.
Extending over more than three years, on December 18, these efforts led to the House voting along party lines on two articles to impeach President Trump.  The House voted 230-197 to charge Trump with abuse and 229-198 to charge him with obstruction of Congress.  A key indicator of the continued magnitude of their determination to remove the president from office is that only three Democrats joined in to vote in opposition to one or both of the charges against the president.
All of this is occurring within an environment where there is no actual evidence of any impeachable offenses ever being committed by the president or any members of his administration.  However, there is being uncovered on virtually a daily basis extensive evidence of unprecedented political corruption and subversive activities authorized and conducted by high-ranking members of the Obama administration, with all of them directed at destroying candidate and then President Trump.   
The move to impeach President Trump is occurring as Democratic Party moves rapidly left politically openly advocating adopting socialism in America in an apparent attempt to radically transform the very nature of our country and system of government.  The growing appeal of socialism in this country can be attributed to many factors.  The brand of socialism presented by many of today's leading Democratic politicians has an alluring and emotional appeal to many people.  It is portrayed as a political system consisting of fair and equitable solutions to many of our most challenging political, economic, and social issues.
The policy agendas of today's leading Democrats including Medicare for All; the Green New Deal; open borders; and their approach to issues such as social justice, economic and tax policy, foreign policy, gun control, and energy policy, plus so many others, are rarely held up to comprehensive public examination and scrutiny by the mainstream media in any truly meaningful way. 
China today is on a path under paramount leader Xi Jinping and an increasingly powerful Communist Party of evolving its political system to be even more totalitarian, ready and willing to go to greater lengths and measures to control virtually every aspect of its citizens' lives.
In our country, is the Democrats' socialist vision and associated policies for America fake, and can they ever deliver on what they promise, and will their agenda ultimately be of benefit or detriment to the American people?  Do they threaten our freedoms in an attempt to further control our lives by implementing a significantly larger government apparatus that will include much greater regulation of a citizen's daily activities?  Are they moving us on a path toward totalitarianism similar to the one evolving in China today?
The difference in our country is that our future can still be determined by the voters in 2020.  At this time in our history and with an increasingly left-leaning radical Democratic Party and their agenda, the results of the next election will profoundly define the future direction of our nation and way of life.


FEINSTEIN HAS SPENT HER POLITICAL LIFE STALKING THE HALLS OF CONGRESS SNIFFING OUT DEALS THAT PUT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN HER POCKETS.
SHE HAS AVOIDED PROSECUTION BY VOTING AGAINST ANY ETHICS BILLS AND HER HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM'S HANDING OUT "CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION" BRIBES TO EVERY DEMOCRAT OUT THERE!




IN THE November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.

“All in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red China than other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan  AMERICAN THINKER.com


Senator Who Employed Chinese Spy Endorses Joe Biden for President

Win McNamee/Getty Images
  9 Oct 20192,419
5:44

A high-profile U.S. senator with professional and personal ties to China — including once employing one of its spies — is backing former Vice President Joe Biden amid mounting questions over his son’s business dealings with the communist regime.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a former chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced her endorsement of the former vice president on Tuesday, claiming to have witnessed Biden’s “fortitude” and leadership during their overlapping tenures in Congress.
Feinstein said in a statement:
I’ve worked closely with Vice President Biden and I’ve seen firsthand his legislative ability, his statesmanship, and most importantly his moral fortitud. During his time in Congress and in the White House, Joe Biden has been a tireless fighter for hard working American families.
The endorsement comes as Biden’s presidential campaign is besieged by scandal regarding the lucrative business dealings his youngest son, Hunter, had with foreign governments.
Only hours before Feinstein’s endorsement, the Chinese government announced it would not investigate how Hunter Biden ended up at the center of one its top private equity firms. The Chinese foreign ministry made the decision after President Donald Trump publicly called for a probe of Hunter Biden’s dealings with Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). In particular, Trump has noted that the circumstances surrounding BHR’s creation could have posed a conflict of interest for Joe Biden.
As Peter Schweizer, senior contributor at Breitbart News, revealed in his bestselling book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Hunter Biden inked the multibillion-dollar deal that created BHR with a subsidiary of the state-owned Bank of China in 2013.
The timing of the lucrative deal has been brought into question as it came only 12 days after Hunter visited China with his father aboard Air Force Two. Officially, the then-vice president was visiting the country amid escalating tensions over islands in the South China Sea and decided to bring his granddaughter and son along. In a March 2018 interview with Breitbart News Tonight, however, Schweizer detailed the political machinations that preceded Hunter Biden’s $1.5 billion venture with China:
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. 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. For basically not challenging them, and Japan and other countries are quite upset about this.
Since its creation, BHR has invested heavily in energy and defense projects across the globe. As of June, Hunter Biden was still involved with BHR, sitting on its board of directors and owning a minority stake of the fund estimated to be worth more than $430,000.
Such dealings at the center of politics and business, while perhaps not illegal, are not exclusive to the Biden family alone. As a few noted at the time of Feinstein’s endorsement, the senator and her husband have their own close ties to the communist country.
During her tenure as mayor of San Francisco in the late-1970s and early-1980s, Feinstein took advantage of the newly normalized diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China by establishing one of the first sister city partnership between San Francisco and Shanghai. Through that partnership, Feinstein led trade delegations to China in which she and her husband, Richard Blum, became acquainted with some of the country’s most prominent political leaders.
As the Federalist noted in August 2018, Feinstein and her husband leveraged those relationships to boost their own wealth. In 1986, Feinstein and Jiang Zemin — the then-mayor of Shanghai, who would later ascend to the presidency of the People’s Republic of China — “designated several corporate entities for fostering commercial relations.” One of those firms was Shanghai Pacific Partners, which employed Blum as a director. Blum reportedly had an interest of upwards of $500,000 in a project backed by Shanghai Pacific Partners.
After Feinstein was elected to the Senate in 1992, Blum continued profiting off their ties to China. A the same time, the freshman lawmaker was pitching herself as a “China hand” to colleagues, even once claiming “that in my last life maybe I was Chinese.” Through her seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Feinstein led the fight on a number of initiatives seen as being favorable to China, including granting the country permanent most-favored-nation trading status in 2000.
Despite Feinstein and her husband having a close relationship with Jiang, the Chinese government targeted the senator as part of its espionage operations. In the early 2000s, the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) recruited a longtime employee of the senator to gather information about the inner workings of her congressional and district offices. Feinstein only learned of the staffer’s duplicity in 2013, after he’d already been on her payroll for more than 20 years.
“While this person, who was a liaison to the local Chinese community, was fired, charges were never filed against him,” Politico reported in 2018, speculating that because “the staffer was providing political intelligence and not classified information—making prosecution far more difficult.”
Apart from the convoluted history of the senator’s ties to China, the political timing of Feinstein’s endorsement also caught many off guard. The California Democrat, who hosted a fundraiser on Biden’s behalf last week alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) daughter, is only the most recent figure from the Democrat establishment to openly pledge support for the former vice president. Feinstein’s endorsement, however, was not totally expected, especially since her seamate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), is mounting a bid of her own for the Democrat nomination. In fact, earlier this year, Feinsten flirted with the notion of remaining neutral in the 2020 contest out of respect for Harris.
Compounding the political picture is that most polls show Biden no longer the favorite to win California, having fallen behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
Feinstein, however, did not address any of that when endorsing the former vice president on Tuesday. Instead, the senator offered platitudes about Biden’s work to enhance gun control and how his campaign was a “fight to restore the soul of the nation.”

China, Not Russia, the Greater Threat

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.

Feinstein’s Ties to China Extend Beyond Chinese Spy

https://www.theepochtimes.com/feinsteins-ties-to-china-extend-beyond-chinese-spy_2616284.html

 

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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