The US Department of Commerce seldom grabs headlines or congressional scrutiny. It does not become “weaponized” against political opponents of the incumbent party. After the 2016 election, an article on Vox about incoming power-players of the Trump administration dismissed the department as a “hodgepodge of agencies,” and a “Cabinet backwater.”
Elon Musk has fans all over the ideological spectrum. People on the Left love him for popularizing electric cars with his Tesla company, or maybe for openly smoking pot on podcaster Joe Rogan’s show. Conservatives love him for his entrepreneurial dash and penchant for standing up to politicians and Big Tech censorship of the internet. And everyone loves Musk for responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and severing of its communications links by making his Starlink satellite broadband internet service available in Ukraine and donating Starlink terminals to Ukrainians. The Starlink connectivity, according to one report, may even be helping armed Ukrainian drones target Russian military vehicles.
Less is known about Musk’s business dealings in Communist China, but that might be about to change.
Globalisation is becoming an increasingly dirty word — and for good reason. Over the last two to three decades, the West’s opening up to low-cost, export-oriented economies like China has hurt the working class and made us worryingly dependent on distant and fragile supply chains.
But did all that free movement of labour, capital, goods and services make us as rich as we were promised? A stunning set of charts from American Compass provides part of the answer (and from a US perspective, obviously).
The Walt Disney Co. has announced it is suspending all business in Russia in response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The decision comes as Disney continues its close relationship with China despite the CCP’s well-established record of invasion and human rights atrocities.
While researching how Americans having been getting rich by helping the Chinese Communist Party achieve its outspoken aim of replacing the US as the “world’s No.1 power,” I came across the phrase “elite capture” — their term to describe the actions of influential people in the US towards China.
“Elite capture” can refer to different things, but to the Chinese Communist Party, China’s intelligence apparatus, or those involved in quasi-private business ventures, it is a crucial tool of their success. The idea is simple enough: by tempting another country’s elite with money, access and favors, you move them to see their interests and China’s interests as intertwined or even the same.
The Chinese are not subtle about this, and they barely try to hide it. They practice it around the world, most notably in Africa in pursuit of their Belt and Road Initiative. But elites in Western democracies have proved to be a soft touch, particularly among non-governmental elites.
“NBC’s primetime coverage of the Beijing Winter Olympics averaged 7.87 million viewers on Monday,” reports Sports Media Watch, “8.70 million on Tuesday and an all-time low 6.93 million on Wednesday[.]”
To put that 6.93 million number into perspective, 7.4 million tuned in to the cable TV show Yellowstone last November. That wasn’t even the season finale. That was the fourth episode of the fourth season.
A recent analysis of YouTube search results found that users looking for videos relating to the Genocide Games are being bombarded with Chinese propaganda videos.
China’s state-run Global Times published a summary of an interview with former President George W. Bush on Wednesday to discourage calls for a boycott of the upcoming 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi softened her previous criticisms of China’s communist regime as her husband and son scored big business deals in China, Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer’s new book reveals.
Golden State Warriors owner Chamath Palihapitiya wants fans to know he doesn’t care about China trampling on human rights.
One of the latest fads on the left is the “environmental, social and governance,” or ESG, movement, in which large companies and financial institutions promise to be environmentally sensitive, diverse, inclusive and whatever, while remaining focused on making money. In reality, ESG, especially on the investing side, seems more like window dressing and an exercise in mass hypocrisy than anything else.
Not surprisingly, those who stand to make money from the ESG ecosystem — ratings firms, corporate lawyers, audit firms, investment banks, asset managers, proxy advisers, index providers, etc. — want the federal government to create and mandate ESG standards for all companies.
While ESG advocates typically talk about the importance of climate and social issues, they ignore the reality below their rhetoric.
The big conglomerates use “diversity” as a distraction weapon while doing business with the most ruthless regime on earth, China.
The big German brands – banks, car manufacturers, chemical giants, electronics companies – made extensive use of forced laborers from occupied Eastern Europe and Jewish slaves from concentration camps in World War II. Siemens allegedly admitted to using at least 80,000 forced laborers who, it is said, “was seen as the only way to make up for the labor shortage” in the Hitler years.
Now Siemens CEO Roland Busch is lobbying against the European Union’s plans to impose an import ban on products made from Chinese forced labor, the Times said. This is despite his company’s mission today which says: “We have a zero tolerance approach to forced labor, slavery and human trafficking.”
There are even questions as to whether merchandise was fashioned with forced labor
The international community has failed regarding China and the 2022 Olympics. It’s a moral failing above all, but it’s also an administrative and symbolic failing.
Beijing’s worldwide abuses of human rights, international trade, military aggression toward neighbors and, of course, the unleashing of the Covid-19 pandemic has been allowed to fester, and gone unpunished. In return, China has been granted an international nod of approval by getting to host the 2022 International Olympic Games in Beijing, with the blessing of the International Olympic Committee and European and Western democracies.
Tesla announced it opened its first store in Xinjiang on New Year’s Eve, a week after President Joe Biden signed a law banning imports tied to forced labor in the region where the United States says the Chinese government is conducting genocide against Uyghur Muslims.
Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle company, touted the new car showroom on a Chinese social media website called Weibo. The company is led by Elon Musk, who has gone all-in on investing in China as he praises the Chinese Communist Party. All the while, the U.S. is relying on another Musk company, SpaceX, to launch satellites and astronauts into space.
It took a federal jury in Boston less than three hours to return guilty verdicts on all six felony counts against Charles Lieber, the former chair of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.
Lieber, “one of the country’s top research chemists” according to the New York Times, lied to the FBI about his participation in Beijing’s Thousand Talents Program, did not pay income tax on money from Chinese sources, and failed to report his Chinese bank account to the Internal Revenue Service.
The case against the Harvard academic was airtight. Nonetheless, members of America’s academic elite are up in arms that the Department of Justice prosecuted Lieber, and many are campaigning against law enforcement efforts.
