[PRESSTV] Political commentator Ian Williams says the deadly US drone strike in Libya could be another attack on civilians that Washington misrepresents as suspected militants.
h/t Instapundit
[NYPost] Six months ago, the Chinese walked away from the trade negotiations.
The move caught nearly everyone by surprise.
...But I think the real reason that China backtracked is named "Joe Biden." The former vice president had just ended months of speculation over his political future by announcing he was running for president on April 25.
...They had decided to run out the clock on President Trump’s first term, convinced that they would get a much better deal from a future President Biden.
Who can blame them? Biden has a long history of being a friendly voice for US-China relations. The Chinese side had every reason to expect that Biden, like Obama, would turn a blind eye to the theft of American jobs, factories, and intellectual property by an increasingly arrogant and rapacious PRC.
...But Beijing had another reason to bet on Biden: they had given sweetheart deals to his son, Hunter Biden.
As Peter Schweizer has documented in his book, "Secret Empires," the vice president took his son along on Air Force Two when he flew to Beijing in December 2013.
Not long after the father and son duo returned to the US, Hunter Biden’s small firm received a $1 billion private equity deal from the Chinese government. This was later increased to a cool one-and-a-half billion.
...At the time, the former vice president seemed like a sure bet ‐ not just to Beijing but to many on this side of the Pacific. The early polls suggested that he was a shoo-in for the Democrat nomination, and the odds-on favorite to beat Trump.
Betting the farm on Biden, the Chinese likely stiffed Trump’s negotiators.
Now they seem to be having second thoughts. Negotiators are crisscrossing the Pacific again, and the Chinese have placed a couple of big orders for farm products.
...Meanwhile, this being Trump, there is a price to pay for such perfidy. The tariffs are a little higher now and the terms of any future agreement will be even tougher.
Vice President Mike Pence did not mince words on Thursday when he said that the US will continue to insist that China make significant reforms to its economic system, including abandoning trade barriers, forced technology transfers and predatory subsidies for "national champion" businesses.
And Trump himself has made clear that, if no agreement is reached by the time of the 2020 election, Beijing will have an even steeper hill to climb during his second term.
[American Thinker] There has recently been much weeping and gnashing of teeth over President Donald Trump's trade war with the People's Republic of China. The ire of this piece will be focused on those avaricious and morally blinded elements of the right who for a few trinkets can be persuaded ‐ nay, bribed ‐ to overlook the perversity of the Marxist butchers of Beijing. Truth be told, the very opening of Western trade with that most odious despotism was itself as morally idiotic as it was strategically idiotic, but it could at least have been somewhat excused as the attempt at convoluted intrigue against the Bolsheviks in Moscow. Nowadays, it is only the allure of filthy blood-soaked lucre and the intoxicating ideological fumes emanating from globalism that animate the defense of this "free trade" with the current masters of China.
...Every single Western dollar spent on the Chinese market feeds the dragon that is the CCP, which has feasted on the lion's share of all these riches, throwing the few crumbs left over to its proles. All this influx of Western capital has put weapons in the hands of China's army and secret police forces, funds its North Korean puppets and insidious fellow confederates such as the Iranians, and even trickles down to pay the petty criminals who lawlessly beat freedom-loving Hong Kongers while their own native police look on approvingly. It puts glittering jewels on the soft necks and well-manicured hands of the legions of concubines who dot like grains of sand the well-furnished harems kept by CCP bigwigs. This, they tell us, we must swallow for the sake of "free trade" and a "global market." Well, for some of us, the taste of it all is so revolting that we instantly vomit up the little we manage to swallow.
Donald Trump in his animalistic and instinctive way understands this, specifically as it relates to the economic perfidy of native job destruction via Chinese offshoring. The $64,000 question is thus, can any free man in the West compete with an Eastern counterpart, especially one under brutal communist discipline? The answer is no, he cannot, and more importantly, no, he should not. It was the utterance of blasphemies such as these among others that propelled Mr. Trump both to the nomination of the Republican Party and to the presidency of this nation. Those who sneer at such things will lose their condescending smirks as they begin to take a serious account of the exponentially growing number of conservatives who no longer fear excommunication for questioning the movement's blind faith in free trade uber alles. IMO, nowadays "Free trade" is in the same class as "Human Rights", and "Religious Freedom"
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.