Friday, April 3, 2020

REALITY OF GOLBALISM - PETER NAVARRO SAYS U.S. IS DANGEROUSLY OVER-DEPENDENT ON FOREIGN IMPORTS - CANCEL THE DEBT TO CHINA FOR STARTS



Peter Navarro: U.S. Is ‘Dangerously Over-Dependent’ on Foreign Imports

White House
Volume 90%
3:33

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro says the Chinese coronavirus crisis is vindicating President Trump’s economic nationalist agenda, underscoring how “dangerously over-dependent” the nation is on global supply chains overseas.
In a press briefing on Thursday, Navarro said the coronavirus crisis is exposing decades of free trade policy that has readily enabled U.S. corporations to outsource and offshore their supply chains while gutting America’s industrial base. Navarro said:
One of the things that this crisis has taught us … is that we are dangerously over-dependent on a global supply chain for our medicines like penicillin, our medical supplies like masks, and our medical equipment like ventilators. We have right now, as we speak, over 50 countries that have already imposed some form of export restrictions in their country against the rest of the world.
“What we’re learning from that is that no matter [what] treaties you have, no matter how many alliances, no matter how many phone calls, when push comes to shove, you run the risk as a nation of not having what you need,” Navarro said.
Navarro also detailed the Trump administration’s upcoming “Buy American” executive order, which he said will be implemented only after the coronavirus crisis has concluded to ensure existing supply chains are not further disrupted:
And if there’s any vindication, it’s the president’s Buy American, secure borders, and a strong manufacturing base philosophy, strategy, and belief it is this crisis because it underscores everything that we see there. [Emphasis added]
So the Buy American order, which is going through process, would do a couple of things. It would — not during this crisis because we don’t want to disrupt anything, I want to be very clear about that — but going forward, after this is over, the VA, DOD, HHS, and this government buys American for essential medicines, our medical countermeasures, and the medical supplies and equipment we need. At the same time, it will deregulate so we can get the FDA and EPA to facilitate domestic manufacturing and innovate. [Emphasis added]
The key here … is having advanced manufacturing on U.S. soil that can leapfrog other countries so we don’t have to worry about competing against cheap sweatshop labor, lax environmental regulations, different tax regimes, and the massive subsidies of foreign governments who are actually directly attacking our industrial base. [Emphasis added]
Navarro said “never again” should the U.S. “have to depend on the rest of the world for essential medicines and countermeasures.”
The results of U.S. free trade with China have meant the U.S. currently depends on China to produce an estimated 97 percent of all antibiotics and 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients that are needed to manufacture drugs in the U.S.
Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was enacted and China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO), nearly five million American manufacturing jobs have been eliminated from the American economy — 3.4 million of which are due to U.S. free trade with China. The mass elimination of working- and middle-class jobs and depressed U.S. wages due to NAFTA and China’s entering the WTO have coincided with a 600 percent increase in trade deficits.

ews. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.



Facing Slave Labor Reports, China Claims 98% of Large Industrial Businesses Are Back at Work

China computer factory
STR/Getty
5:50

The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, boasted on Thursday that over 98 percent of “industrial enterprises above designated size” had returned to manufacturing, despite the ongoing Chinese coronavirus outbreak in the country.
Dictator Xi Jinping has repeatedly claimed that the Chinese outbreak, which has now become a pandemic, ended in mid-March, despite ample evidence of ongoing contagious within the authoritarian country. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a pandemic the day after Xi announced, in Wuhan, that China’s grief had ended.
Estimates based on the number of urns, each carrying one set of human remains, distributed out of Wuhan’s seven cemeteries this weekend suggest that between 30,000 and 40,000 people died this year since the lockdown began in January. China claims a little over 3,000 deaths due to Wuhan coronavirus nationwide.
The People’s Daily announcement of a Chinese economic miracle followed reports that the Communist Party is flooding empty factories with slaves relocated from Xinjiang’s concentration camps, housing between 1 million and 3 million ethnic minority Muslims, mostly Uyghurs, at their peak. Reports citing factory managers also indicate that manufacturing medical supplies, which many customer countries have complained are faulty and, thus, useless, is proving extremely profitable for Beijing.
“An average of 98.6 percent of industrial enterprises above designated size and 76 percent of the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across China have resumed work by March 28,” the People’s Daily reported on Thursday, citing a Chinese Communist Party official. “At present, China’s industrial fundamentals have become stable, and the basic trend of steady long-term growth for China’s economy remains unchanged.”
The government asserted that, among those industries seeing over 90 percent of their employee capacity return are electronics, iron and steel but that, even including car manufacturing and textiles, factories have over 70 percent of the employees they need.
The use of the word “returned” implies that the employees forced to leave their posts either by quarantines or illnesses are the same ones taking up those jobs. Due to estimates of the true death toll in China as a result of the pandemic and videos of hundreds of Uyghur Muslims being forcibly moved into factories nationwide, however, it is likely that the people working these factories now are not the ones there before the outbreak.
The number of factories returning to work, if true, adds to the evidence offered by the Communist Party’s Global Times propaganda newspaper last week that China is keeping its industrial “engine roaring.” The Times claimed that significant demand for medical supplies and personal protective gear, particularly from Europe, was still higher than the amount of the goods China currently had available to sell, but that its factories were working to “ensure global medical supplies amid the pandemic.”
Manufacturing medical or sanitary masks appears to be one of the most profitable enterprises, according to a report published last week by Hong Kong’s RTHK broadcast.
“The profit of a mask now is at least several cents compared to less than one in the past. Printing 60,000 or 70,000 masks a day is equivalent to printing money,” Shi Xinghui, the manager of an N95 mask manufacturer in southern Guangdong province, told the outlet.
Another factory owner, Qi Guangtu, estimated that a mask manufacturing machine could pay for itself in about a fortnight.
These profits may be even higher if the factories are using slave labor. Multiple human rights outlets, including Bitter Winter and Radio Free Asia (RFA), have published videos showing hundreds of Uyghurs transported far from their native Xinjiang province to work in factories. Bitter Winter speculated that the videos appeared on Chinese social media outlets like TikTok because the government hoped to use them as propaganda, praising the Uyghurs for “willingly” choosing to work the factories.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a think-tank based on the continent, published a report in March titled “Uyghurs for Sale” that revealed China “facilitated the mass transfer of Uyghur and other ethnic minority citizens from the far west region of Xinjiang to factories across the country.” China incentivized its manufacturers to take in Uyghur slaves through government programs that offered financial benefits if taking in the Uyghurs. The advertising selling Uyghur slaves began appearing on Chinese websites, encouraged by the government, shortly after Beijing declared that its victims in the Xinjiang concentration camps, which it claimed were “vocational training centers,” had “graduated” from their “training.”
Survivors of the camps have testified that the “training” they experienced included systematic rape, torture, slavery, communist indoctrination, forced sterilization, forced abortions, and being forced to watch acts of murder and rape. Some said they were subject to medical tests typically used in analyzing organ donors, suggesting that the Communist Party is harvesting organs from its political prisoners and selling them on the black market.
Chinese state media have boasted of doctors using lung transplants to treat coronavirus patients, alarming human rights activists who have compiled evidence of live organ harvesting from political prisoners.
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.




Blackburn: China ‘Should Waive Some of Our Debt’ — ‘They Have Made a Global Pandemic Worse’

3:06

According to the latest data from the U.S. Treasury Department, the United States owes nearly $1.08 trillion to Mainland China. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) argues China should consider waiving some of that debt given the communist nation’s role in the spread of the COVID-19/coronavirus.
During an interview that aired on Huntsville, AL radio WVNN’s “The Jeff Poor Show,” when asked, Blackburn explained ways to hold China accountable for the global pandemic, noting her effort to officially recognize China’s role and the debtor relationship the United States has with China.
“Indeed there is,” Blackburn replied. “One of the things is my Senate Resolution 553, which it expresses the sense of the Senate — that we know this came from Wuhan, China, and that they hid the information and were not transparent, that they blocked the World Health Organization and the CDC from coming into help. They tried to blame it on the U.S. military. And we hold them accountable.”
For the losses accrued from the pandemic, Blackburn called on China to forgive a portion of the debt owed to them.
“I will tell you I think we need to look at the fact that China owns over a trillion dollars of our debt,” she said. “They like investing in us. Why do they like that? Because we are a safe debt for them — a safe place for them to put their money. And knowing that they have made a global pandemic worse than it ever would have been because of their action — they should waive some of our debt. They have caused us a tremendous amount of loss of life, loss of businesses, suffering, inconvenience, shutting down our economy.”
Another component the Tennessee Republican argued for on the accountability front was to bring elements of manufacturing back from China to the United States.
“These are all things that we should take into consideration — bringing our manufacturing back, not only our pharmaceutical manufacturing — I was working with one of my colleagues today,” Blackburn explained. “There are other things we can bring back and put America back in the manufacturing business.”
“I told the Vice President the other night — I said, ‘Look, we should take my bill and some others that are focused on manufacturing and call it the MAMA Act — Make America Manufacture Again,'” she said. “And bring these jobs back to U.S. shores. I think we can do that. And I’ll tell you this — I think the American people want to see us do this.”
Blackburn dismissed the notion that U.S. debt to China gave it leverage over the United States.
“I don’t think it gives them any leverage against us because they want us to continue to be a safe place for them to put their money,” she said. “What it does do is point out the fact that China caused this. We have borrowed $2 trillion to stabilize our economy. China will turn around and buy that debt. They’ll buy that. That’s where they’ll park their money. They’ll buy those bonds. They’re going to end up enriching themselves through a problem that they caused.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor




China Is Preparing to Start a War with America



Sometime in June 2001, while browsing the Wall Street Journal, I stumbled upon an item on an inside page all the way at the bottom.  It was no more than 75 words in a box.  It covered a CIA security announcement concerning an increase in internet and cell phone traffic among suspected terrorists from suspect areas in the Arab world.  I canceled a Fourth of July trip downtown because of it. 
I assumed that if an attack was coming, it would be on America's premium self-celebratory holiday, the Fourth of July. 
When nothing happened, I took off my tinfoil hat, ascribing my worries to my suspicion of Islam — suspicions I had carefully curated from prior events such as the first World Trade Center attack, the Cole, the embassy bombings, and the killing of Americans soldiers in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut.
It has become accepted knowledge that America's intelligence agencies missed 9/11 warning signs — but that's not entirely true.  Signs were seen, but they impelled no action.  We were so convinced that the fall of the Soviet Union as the end of history precluded any need for urgency.  Yet, even if there had been, no one, at that point, knew how to react.
I don't think I need to remind everyone of what happened on 09/11/2001.
I share this vignette as a means of showing that there are always signs.  We, for whatever reason, miss them, or we ignore them for political purposes, or we refuse to believe them because they contradict the core tenets of our belief system.
I believe that China's actions today may be telegraphing an intent we are choosing to ignore.  They show all the signs of a nation preparing to attack America.  China seeks a bespoke world run by China with "Chinese characteristics" — a dream that under Trump was drifting away.
China appears to be laying the groundwork for a "justified" attack on the United States, perhaps in the South China Sea or perhaps elsewhere.  It will be a military attack, not an act of terrorism, and the excuse will be America's deliberate transmission of COVID-19 in Wuhan. 
When the Chinese became accusatory, it's telling that they didn't blame the CIA, always the usual suspect.  No, they blamed it on American soldiers. 
American military deliberately infecting China is an act of war worthy of a military response.  
In October, the 2019 World Military Games were held in Wuhan.  Chinese media triumphantly trumpeted the Americans winning just eight medals, while China won 239.  It was then that we supposedly infected Wuhan citizens with the "American virus."
China is now defenestrating foreign media, sending home reporters from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post at just the opportune moment.  No nation wants journalists around when it is planning a sneak attack.
And with its economy ravaged by Trump's trade war and the virus shutdown, and now back at full production, while America's economy is in total shutdown and in the grip of an active pandemic, there will never be a better time to attack.
Here in America, the Democrats along with corporate media eagerly buy China's lies surrounding the nascence of the worldwide pandemic, the propaganda blaming America, the stories of Chinese benevolence, and the efficiency of Chinese methods in getting control of the virus at home.  They are actively supporting China's version of the truth.  China has every reason to believe they will continue to do so.  
When or if China attacks, the left (the Dems, Antifa, and BLM) will flood the streets with anti-war protesters designed to stop America from responding to China's attacks.  After all, don't we deserve it?  We elected Trump, didn't we?
China claims there are no new infections when there is ample evidence that that claim is a lie.  But the Chinese know that by the time people understand, it will be too late.  They will have struck, and any new cases will be used to bolster their casus belli.  Those Chinese who perish in the interim of silence will have died for the fatherland.
Conservative media have been neither as naïve nor as malicious as their mainstream brethren, often writing that China's behavior, with the denials and accusations, is merely a clumsy and foolish attempt to convince the world.
I don't see it this way.  I think China is doing this to convince its own citizens more than anyone else.  The Chinese communists can survive the world's condemnations, especially if they defeat America, but they live and die by controlling their own population.  When they attack an American naval ship in the South China Sea, they won't need to worry about the support of their own nation because they will have convinced the people that America started the war and a peaceful and beneficent China was reluctantly, and only as a last resort, defending itself.
China is facing a demographic time bomb and has ten years to rewrite the facts on the ground.  It is facing a quandary of epic proportions.  It won't be long before it has the oldest population on the planet.  Those people will be old before they are rich.
China's business model is existentially flawed.  It has extraordinary debt that is multiples of its GDP, having grown exponentially through government funding of empty cities, military buildup, high-speed rail to nowhere, a Belt and Road initiative that's becoming obvious to partner countries as a means of colonialist extortion, and various other nonproductive government lending to CCP members.  Its vaunted reserves will soon disappear. 
China is also a nation, thanks to the "one child" initiative, that has hundreds of millions of young men with no prospect of marriage.  Hundreds of millions of "incel" men make for either an angry and expendable fighting force or a bane upon society.
China is on the clock.  Today, it is formidable, with a sophisticated and capable military.  The Chinese may be able to win a confrontation, even a war, with the United States.  Under Obama's policy of surrender, China had a chance of overtaking us economically while growing its military until its primacy was a fait accompli.  But Trump killed that dream with his trade war, exposing the inherent weaknesses of the Chinese economy.  And should the aftermath of the pandemic play out without interference, China's position in the world will be irreparably damaged.
What does China have to lose? 
Time is not on China's side.  Unless the Chinese destroy us on the field of battle soon, the clock will run out, and the dream of the coming "Chinese century" will be just that: a dream.
Everything they are doing points to them preparing to do so.
For China, there will never be a better time to start a war with America.
Please follow the author on Twitter at @williamlgensert.

759,493 People Entered US From China During Coronavirus Outbreak

 

6

The question isn't why do we have a pandemic. The correct question is why don't we have a much worse pandemic.
Travel data of passengers arriving in the United States from China during the critical period in December, January and February, when the disease took hold in that country, shows a stunning 759,493 people entered the U.S.
"This is an astonishing number in a short period of time, illustrating how globalized our world has become. Just as people can hop continents with amazing ease, the infections they carry can too," said Dr. Vinayak Kumar, an internal medicine resident at the Mayo Clinic and a contributor to the ABC News Medical Unit.
The United States doesn't have to be globalized. That's a choice. A bad choice.
Those travelers from China included more than 228,000 Americans returning home and hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals arriving for business, academics, tourism or to visit family.
None of the Chinese nationals should have been allowed into the country. And the Americans should have been quarantined outside the mainland United States.
If we had done it, our economy wouldn't be on life support and hospitals wouldn't be full of people on ventilators.
"The numbers are clearly alarming," Dr. Simone Wildes, an infectious disease specialist at South Shore Health, told ABC News. "It shows that globalization is here, and we have to be better prepared to deal with the impact this will have on all our lives in so many ways."
Added Wildes: "It is difficult to estimate the portion of travelers coming from China to the U.S. with COVID-19, but fair to speculate that a large number might have been infected at the time of travel."
We deal with it by securing our borders and our airports. This is what happens when we fail to do that.
President Donald Trump restricted travel from China effective Feb. 2, which likely saved lives. But by the time the president acted, much of the damage had already been unleashed, and some 18,000 Americans returned home from China in February and March, after the restrictions were in place. It's unclear how intensive, if at all, the screening was for the Americans coming home at that point.
There was no screening and the State Department knowingly brought back infected people into the mainland United States.
"We should recognize that any time there is an emergent event, there is a very good opportunity for global impact," Brownstein said. "We need to be thinking about emergent diseases as a global concern rather than [something] happening in a particular part of the world."
Just the opposite. We need to be thinking about how to protect our part of the world from the world.



"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.

 Silicon Valley, and the Chinese Connection to Coronavirus Infection


By James Fulford

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

 

  

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 fortitude (NO, IT’S NOT A JOKE, BUT THEN FEINSTEIN IS THE MOST SELF-SERVING CORRUPT POL IN U.S. HISTORY). During his time in Congress and in the White House, Joe Biden has been a tireless fighter for hard working (ILLEGALS) MEXICAN families.
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