‘Profiles in Corruption’ Hits #1 on Amazon 10 Days Before Book Release
2:28
The highly anticipated investigative bombshell book Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite hit #1 on Amazon Saturday, despite the fact that the book’s official release is still over a week away.
When Axios and Breitbart News first reported about the book’s unveiling by publisher HarperCollins on Thursday, Profiles in Corruption was #822,128 on Amazon. Less than 48 hours later, the book zoomed to #1 across all book genres.
Very little is publicly known about the book’s contents. Government Accountability Institute President and Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer and his investigative team spent a year and a half researching it. A source close to the publisher said the book’s contents will “upend official Washington” and that Schweizer’s prior bombshell revelations about Hunter Biden were “just the tip of the iceberg.” The book is said to contain brand new evidence that five members of Joe Biden’s family—the “Biden Five”—scored “tens of millions of dollars” in taxpayer cash and guaranteed loans.
Mike Allen of Axios, who exclusively announced HarperCollins’ forthcoming release of Profiles in Corruption, reported that the book’s table of contents includes chapters on leading progressives, including:
- Joe Biden
- Eric Garcetti
- Cory Booker
- Elizabeth Warren
- Sherrod Brown
- Bernie Sanders
- Amy Klobuchar
If Schweizer’s next book is anything like his four previous consecutive New York Times bestsellers, Washington will feel its shockwaves. Secret Empires exposed Joe and Hunter Biden’s Ukraine and China dealings, touching off a firestorm of coverage about Hunter Biden’s $83,000 a month work on behalf of Ukranian energy giant Burisma while Joe Biden led U.S.-Ukraine policy as vice president. Clinton Cash sparked an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation and uncovered the Uranium One scandal. Extortion led to lawmakers retiring. And Throw Them All Out pulled back the curtain on insider trading by members of Congress and led to the passage of the STOCK (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge) Act.
Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite is scheduled to hit bookstores January 21.
House Democrats to forward Trump impeachment articles, setting stage for Senate trial
2:28
The highly anticipated investigative bombshell book Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite hit #1 on Amazon Saturday, despite the fact that the book’s official release is still over a week away.
When Axios and Breitbart News first reported about the book’s unveiling by publisher HarperCollins on Thursday, Profiles in Corruption was #822,128 on Amazon. Less than 48 hours later, the book zoomed to #1 across all book genres.
Very little is publicly known about the book’s contents. Government Accountability Institute President and Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer and his investigative team spent a year and a half researching it. A source close to the publisher said the book’s contents will “upend official Washington” and that Schweizer’s prior bombshell revelations about Hunter Biden were “just the tip of the iceberg.” The book is said to contain brand new evidence that five members of Joe Biden’s family—the “Biden Five”—scored “tens of millions of dollars” in taxpayer cash and guaranteed loans.
Mike Allen of Axios, who exclusively announced HarperCollins’ forthcoming release of Profiles in Corruption, reported that the book’s table of contents includes chapters on leading progressives, including:
- Joe Biden
- Eric Garcetti
- Cory Booker
- Elizabeth Warren
- Sherrod Brown
- Bernie Sanders
- Amy Klobuchar
If Schweizer’s next book is anything like his four previous consecutive New York Times bestsellers, Washington will feel its shockwaves. Secret Empires exposed Joe and Hunter Biden’s Ukraine and China dealings, touching off a firestorm of coverage about Hunter Biden’s $83,000 a month work on behalf of Ukranian energy giant Burisma while Joe Biden led U.S.-Ukraine policy as vice president. Clinton Cash sparked an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation and uncovered the Uranium One scandal. Extortion led to lawmakers retiring. And Throw Them All Out pulled back the curtain on insider trading by members of Congress and led to the passage of the STOCK (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge) Act.
Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite is scheduled to hit bookstores January 21.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Friday that she would begin the process of transmitting articles of impeachment against President Trump to the Senate this week. She sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to every House Democrat saying the meeting of the House Democratic caucus set for Tuesday morning would take the final steps.
Pelosi initially indicated that the caucus meeting would discuss which House members would serve as impeachment managers and schedule the vote to select them—the final action required before the beginning of a Senate trial of Trump—leading to reports that the trial could begin as early as Thursday.
But on Sunday, in an interview on the ABC program “This Week,” she seemed to hedge her bets, saying that at the caucus meeting, “we would vote to send them over, and we will determine in our meeting when we send them over.” That could delay the opening of the Senate trial until later in the month.
Whatever the exact timing, Pelosi evidently failed to obtain any concessions from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on issuing new subpoenas for new witnesses and documents beyond those already used by the House Judiciary Committee in drafting the two articles of impeachment adopted by the House on December 18.
McConnell announced last week that he had 51 Republican votes in the Senate to begin the trial without new witnesses or documents, and to revisit the issue after House impeachment managers and attorneys for President Trump presented their cases. Given the 53-47 Republican majority, at least four Republican votes would be required to change the rules governing the trial.
Senate Democrats have named four officials as witnesses they want to be called: acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, former National Security Adviser John Bolton and two lower-level aides, Robert Blair and Michael Duffey. All four would likely testify about Trump’s decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine rather than his demand that the Ukrainian government announce an anti-corruption investigation into a potential Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.
The Democrats’ list of witnesses underscores the right-wing character of the charges brought in the House impeachment inquiry. It confirms that the real driving force of impeachment is not the professed indignation of the Democrats over Trump’s use of his presidential powers to gain an advantage over a political rival, but rather the concerns within the CIA, Pentagon and State Department over the disruption of a longstanding effort to use Ukraine as a base of military operations and provocations against Russia.
Pelosi reiterated these concerns in her interview on ABC with George Stephanopoulos. She seemed to concede in advance that Trump would not be removed from office by the Senate, but declared that “we have confidence in our case, that it’s impeachable, and this president is impeached for life, regardless of any gamesmanship on the part of Mitch McConnell.”
She continued, “Everything that he has done, whether it’s in Syria vis-a-vis the Turks, whether it’s been in Ukraine in terms of withholding assistance as they try to fight the Russians, his denial about their role in our election then and now—all roads lead to Putin. And sometimes I wonder about Mitch McConnell too, what’s he—why is he an accomplice to all of that.”
While Trump declares that the congressional Democratic leadership could not be briefed in advance about the assassination of Iranian General Suleimani because they would have leaked it—implying that they are traitors—Pelosi suggests that not only Trump, but also Mitch McConnell are agents or “accomplices” of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Once a Senate trial begins, the upper chamber will operate under unusual procedures, including sessions six days a week with all other business set aside until the trial’s conclusion. Chief Justice John Roberts will preside and senators are barred from speaking or even asking questions. Instead, they must submit questions in writing to Roberts, who will read them out.
The five senators who are currently candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, Michael Bennet, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, would essentially be taken off the campaign trail for the duration of the Senate trial. Four of the five, all but Bennet, are actively contesting the Iowa caucuses, where voting takes place on February 3.
McConnell has insisted on applying the same rules to the trial of President Trump in 2020 that were used in the 1999 Senate trial of President Bill Clinton, which gave 24 hours of trial time to the House impeachment managers and an equal amount of time for the president’s defense, followed by 16 hours of questioning by senators, conducted through the chief justice.
In the Clinton trial, the Senate voted to subpoena three witnesses, who had already testified before the House. In the case of Trump, the Democrats are seeking the testimony of witnesses who refused to testify voluntarily before the House committees that conducted the impeachment inquiry.
There is a particular focus on John Bolton, who was described by other witnesses as adamantly opposed to any delay in the release of military aid to Ukraine. At one point Bolton reportedly described Trump’s efforts to obtain political assistance from Ukraine as a “drug deal.”
Bolton unexpectedly announced January 6 that he would be willing to testify before the Senate if he were subpoenaed. He refused to testify voluntarily before the House, and the House Intelligence Committee decided not to issue a subpoena after Bolton’s lawyer suggested he would fight it in court.
President Trump declared Friday that he would invoke executive privilege to block Bolton’s testimony in the event the Senate decided to subpoena him. He claimed this was not because Bolton’s testimony would be damaging, but to preserve confidentiality “for the sake of the office.”
Several Republican senators considered to be possible defectors on a procedural vote, including Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah, have expressed interest in having Bolton testify at the trial.
"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?
Senator
Who Employed Chinese Spy Endorses Joe Biden for President
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.
China,
Not Russia, the Greater Threat
Feinstein’s Ties to China Extend
Beyond Chinese Spy
https://www.theepochtimes.com/feinsteins-ties-to-china-extend-beyond-chinese-spy_2616284.html
Conciliatory to Communists
Bridges to Communist China
Human Rights
"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.
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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