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.”
Virgil: We’ve Seen This Movie Before–How Communist China Is Following Nazi Germany’s Playbook Against America
13:41
In old China, the kowtow was the bow of deep respect, even prostrate obeisance, to the Emperor.
Today, Americans are seeing the distressing spectacle of huge American corporations kowtowing to a new kind of emperor, Xi Jinping, and his Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The most recent flashpoint, of course, has been the self-abasement of the Houston Rockets basketball team.
As Breitbart News put it, the Rockets and the entire National Basketball Association have “caved” to Red China. Indeed, pro basketball is so eager to kowtow to Beijing that it has imported a little bit of Chinese-style totalitarianism to the U.S. Just on Wednesday, basketball authorities engaged in the pettiest possible censorship of its live audience at a game, right before a streaming camera.
We can leave it to the subversive wits at Babylon Bee to capture the utter craziness of the moment, in which woke corporate values have displaced familiar patriotic values: “NBA Now Requiring All Players To Stand For Chinese National Anthem.”
Of course, it’s not just the NBA; it’s Activision Blizzard, it’s Apple and Google. In fact, Bloomberg News circulated a long list of American companies that have similarly bowed down to China.
So what’s going on? How is it happening that American leading economic players are now taking orders from China? How did “Yankee Imperialism” turn into “Panda Imperialism”?
Once upon a time, there was the hopeful belief that capitalism and free trade would open up China. And yet by now, we’re learned that the Chinese dictatorship hasn’t been opened up by the flow of American money, it’s been empowered by all that cash.
In the words of New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo, “A darker truth is now dawning on the world: China’s economic miracle hasn’t just failed to liberate Chinese people. It is also now routinely corrupting the rest of us outside of China.”
We might also let Chris Arnade, the ex-Wall Streeter who found his true calling as the photographer/chronicler of gritty “back row” America, tell this sorry tale his way; dripping with scorn for the “front row” of both parties, Arnade tweeted:
For years front row has scolded anyone who disagreed on China, “Actually, trading with China is good. Sure we will lose jobs here, sure they destroy the environment & abuse human rights, but it a necessary step you see. Democracy follows capitalism! Just give them time.”Democracy hasn’t followed. It has been a classic scam, one front-row elites in both parties use to push policies that screw over the working class, who are “less educated” than them.Telling them, “Actually this is for the greater good. You can’t see it. But trust us experts.”
As China expert Gordon Chang said on Sirius XM radio’s Breitbart News Tonight, the Chinese government is “weaponizing our companies against us.”
Yet it’s hard to think of a China-watcher who has gone further as a China-critiquer than Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, a pro-competition, anti-monopoly think tank in Washington, DC.
Stoller’s normal field is business and economics, and yet the threat from China is so great that he’s been sounding a loud klaxon horn, as he tweeted on October 6:
The aim of the CCP is to dominate the entire world, and to replace liberal norms with authoritarian ones. The time to act is now. We need to stop exporting movies and entertainment to China. We need to ban TikTok and do an emergency build-up of 5G capacity. Now.
We can note that TikTok is a made-in-China social media app. And we might pause to observe that if it’s bad enough that the Silicon Valley tech companies are spying on us, it’s worse when Chinese tech companies are doing the spying. And 5G, of course, is the next-gen wireless network that Huawei would like to own on behalf of its owner, the Chinese government.
So we can see: On the topic of China, Stoller sounds a lot like, say, Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump senior adviser who now helps lead The Committee on the Present Danger: China.
Yet interestingly, as he makes the case against kowtowing to China, Stoller seems to have one target above all: Joe Biden.
Red Star Star over Hollywood: Middle-Class Joe and Big Panda
On October 7, in his free e-mail newsletter, BIG, Stoller headlined a piece, “How Joe Biden Empowered China’s Censorship of the NBA.”
Stoller started by describing how the former vice president had helped Hollywood—and here again, as Virgil noted on October 5, the simple facts about Biden have been hiding in plain sight.
So Stoller cranked his wayback machine…not very far at all, merely to May 2, 2014, when the Washington Post ran an article, “How Biden helped Hollywood unlock China.” The piece was positive, of course, focusing on how great it was that the intrepid vice president had persuaded the Chinese to accept more American movies into their home market. Indeed, the article featured a photo of a smiling Biden and a smiling Xi, holding up a t-shirt that read, in English, “Fostering Goodwill Between America & China.” (Hunter Biden, then an active player in Chinese commerce, wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the piece.)
Yet if the Post was happy about Biden’s China-dealing, Stoller is not. As he wrote in his newsletter, “What Biden … didn’t consider was the leverage over studio output that that [sic] increased dependency on the Chinese market gave to the Chinese government.”
In other words, yes, the Chinese agreed to put money in Hollywood’s pocket. And yet at the same time, the Chinese bought influence on Hollywood’s product.
In 2015, the U.S. Government’s Economic and Security Review Commission released a report, the headline of which says it all: “Directed by Hollywood, Edited by China: How China’s Censorship and Influence Affect Films Worldwide.”
Or as Breitbart News’s John Nolte wrote on October 8, the Chinese have been shaping a long list of recent films, including Red Dawn, Gravity, and Top Gun: Maverick. Quoth Nolte: “Hollywood literally sold its artistic soul to the Communist Chinese.”
Speaking of soul-selling, we can add that young Hunter Biden it still active in Chinese business. Just on October 9, three reporters for the Financial Times—one in D.C., one in Beijing, and one in Kiev—teamed up to account for the younger Biden’s business dabblings. And while the reportorial trio could not possibly get to the bottom of everything Hunter has been up to, this much is known:
In addition to his ties to Ukraine through Burisma, the scandal-plagued gas company, and politically connected business ventures in the US, public records show that Hunter Biden still sits on the board of BHR Partners, a private investment fund backed by a number of Chinese state entities including Bank of China, China Postal Savings Bank and China Development Bank.
And the next day, October 10, came this curious headline in the same Financial Times: “Trump adviser says China provided information about Hunter Biden: Michael Pillsbury claims Beijing supplied background on alleged $1.5bn payment.” The article provided few details, so we’ll have to stay tuned on that one; in the meantime, we can observe that $1.5 billion is a lot of money. In fact, Pillsbury seems to have backed away from some of his assertions; no doubt the matter will continue to be sorted out in the days to come.
Yet if we step back from the immediate pushing and pulling of the news and spin cycle, we can see that maybe there’s a reason why Joe Biden has been so dismissive of the economic and strategic threat from China; as he said on May 1, “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man. … I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what: they’re not competition for us.”
Given Joe’s la-de-da attitude, it’s easy to see why Hunter is so popular in China; to the master string-pullers in Beijing, the cultivation of the son seems to be paying off in a large harvest of good will from the father.
So it’s no wonder that Noah Smith, a center-left columnist for Bloomberg News, was moved to tweet on October 8 about the upcoming presidential election, “If I were the Chinese government, I’d definitely be pulling for Biden.”
The Threat from China: We’ve Seen This Before
In addition to his criticism of Biden’s China-chumminess on economic grounds, Stoller sees China as a profound military and ideological threat, of the type we haven’t seen in more than seven decades. As he tweeted on October 7, “China is an expansionist fascist state.” [emphasis added] Adding, “At what point will we wake up?”
Then Stoller went even further, directly comparing the People’s Republic of China to not just fascists, but to actual Nazis—to Hitler’s Third Reich in Germany.
That’s a strong charge, so let’s let Stoller make his case: Returning to the issue of China and Hollywood, Stoller wrote, “In the 1930s, the Nazis sought, through the size of the Germany market, to prevent Hollywood from making movies critical of the Hitler regime, with some success.” In other words, Hollywood was at least partly dissuaded from making anti-Nazi movies.
This dark history has been well-recorded; here’s The Hollywood Reporter on July 31, 2013: “The Chilling History of How Hollywood Helped Hitler.” As writer Ben Urwand explained, “The big studios, desperate to protect German business, let Nazis censor scripts, remove credits from Jews, get movies stopped and even force one MGM executive to divorce his Jewish wife.”
Later that year, Urwand published a book from Harvard University Press: The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler.
Yet as is so often the case, that the facts are there isn’t enough; someone has to come along and connect the dots, turning historical data points into a media-friendly narrative for the present day. And that’s what Stoller has done, by linking Hollywood’s servitude to Hitler in the 1930s to Hollywood’s kowtow to Xi Jinping today.
In fact, Stoller goes even further in his Nazi analogizing, venturing from the glittery world of movie-making to the dead-serious world of munitions-making.
Joined by Lucas Kunce, an ex-Marine, Stoller recently published a long discussion of Nazi efforts to penetrate the U.S. in The American Conservative; the two co-authors detailed Hitler’s determination, in the 1930s, to hollow out our industrial base.
Perhaps belatedly, the Roosevelt administration was alert to the threat. In 1941, the assistant attorney general for the antitrust division, Norman Littell, delivered a speech entitled, “The German Invasion of American Business.” The Nazis, Littell argued, were using legal techniques—including patent laws, stock ownership, dummy corporations, and cartel arrangements—to extend their power into the U.S. and weaken American industry.
As Littell put it, “The distinction between bombing a vital plant out of existence from an airplane and preventing that plant from coming into existence in the first place [through cartel arrangements] is largely a difference in the amount of noise involved.”
Stoller and Kunce added a fearsome litany of Hitlerian maleficence:
Nazis used their American subsidiary corporations to spy on U.S. industrial capacity and steal technology, such as walkie-talkies, intertank and ground-air radio communication systems, and shortwave sets developed by the U.S. Army and Navy. They used patents or cartel arrangements to restrict the production of stainless steel, tungsten-carbide, and fuel injection equipment. According to the U.S. military after the war, I.G. Farben, the Nazi chemical monopoly, had influence over American production of “synthetic gas and oils, dyestuffs, explosives, synthetic rubber (‘Buna’), menthol, cellophane, and other products,” and sought to keep the United States “entirely dependent” on Germany for certain types of electrical equipment.
If all that industrial skullduggery sounds sort of familiar, that’s because the Chinese have been doing it, too—with the full acquiescence of some recent American presidents. Indeed, just on October 1, Stoller headlined another of his pieces, “How Bill Clinton and American Financiers Armed China.”
Is America Finally Waking Up?
Although he paints a pessimistic picture of Chinese penetration in the here and now, Stoller is actually optimistic in the longer run. As he puts it, “China’s biggest asset in gaining power was how most people in the West just didn’t realize that the CCP aimed to use it.” He adds, “Now China’s cover is blown.”
Still, Stoller is not complacent; he calls for all-out mobilization:
In the commercial sector, rebuilding the industrial base will require an aggressive national mobilization strategy. This means aggressive investment by government to rebuild manufacturing capacity, selective tariffs to protect against Chinese or foreign predation, regulation to stop financial predation by Wall Street, and anti-monopoly enforcement to block the exploitation of market power.
As it happens, more than two years ago, Virgil declared that the threat from China amounted to a “Sputnik Moment,” requiring just that sort of mobilization. So it’s with a sense of relief that he hears more voices chorusing the same message.
In fact, on October 9, Bloomberg News’s Shawn Donnan described the deterioration of U.S.-Chinese relations, taking note of “how the popular conversation about China is spreading,” then adding, “The moves against Chinese tech companies reflect growing bipartisan anxiety in Washington about China’s crackdown in Xinjiang. But it’s the worsening situation in Hong Kong that is really helping to crystallize things.”
Indeed, that same day, the Trump administration blacklisted eight Chinese companies involved in the systemic suppression of the Uyghurs in China’s western Xinjiang province; one might assume that there are a few thousand more such companies involved, but at least it’s a start.
So maybe now is the right time for Americans to take a serious look at retired Air Force Gen. Rob Spalding’s sobering new book, Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept. Spalding, a former top China strategist at the Pentagon, has been a frequent guest on Breitbart’s Sirius XM show.
Yes, the road ahead is daunting. Yet at least Americans are waking up to the clear and present danger.
Except, of course, for Sleepy Joe Biden, who, as we have seen, has his own family reasons for staying drowsy as the threat from China grows.
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