Tag: Investment

[2014] China and the Middle East: More Than Oil

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

China and the Middle East: More Than Oil

While China’s heavy dependence on Middle Eastern oil is an established fact, less is known about China’s early efforts to establish broad energy ties with the Middle East. Back in 1983, before the Chinese economy really took off, the overseas construction arm of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) moved into the Kuwaiti market and later won an oil storage reconstruction project in 1995. Beijing also signed the Strategic Oil Cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia in 1999, which laid the foundation for Saudi Arabia to become and remain China’s largest oil supplier. In exchange for stable crude supply, China has courted Saudi investment for expanding its refining capacity. One example is China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation’s (SINOPEC) meeting with Saudi Aramco to discuss a stake in a $1.2-billion refinery in the Chinese city of Qingdao. The two sides further joined hands in a $3.5-billion venture in Fujian province that included greater refinery capacity.4

Netanyahu Is Leading Israel Into Civil War Between Jews and Palestinians + More

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Netanyahu Is Leading Israel Into Civil War Between Jews and Palestinians

What is indisputable, though, is his greatest decades-long magic trick: Building an almost impermeable bubble around Israeli Jews to shield and blind them from both entrenched oppression of, and escalating violence against, the Palestinians, both inside the 1967 borders and beyond them.

A whole generation of Jewish Israelis, raised in the safest (for them) Israel ever, have grown up with no awareness of the Green Line at all. They heard stories about the intifadas but for them, the conflict was ‘well-maintained’ and mostly out of sight and mind. The Abraham Accords, with the eager, unconditional embrace of Gulf states, seemed to prove that the there was no ‘Palestinian issue’ anymore.

What they couldn’t see from their segregated world was that for Palestinians, the conflict never ended.

More Israeli-Palestinian News:

Hypocrisy kills

Israel’s War Cabinet Approves Escalated Aggression on Gaza

Inflation and financial risk

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Is inflation coming back in the major capitalist economies? As the US economy (in particular) and other major economies begin to rebound from the COVID slump of 2020, the talk among mainstream economists is whether inflation in the prices for goods and services in those economies is going to accelerate to the point where central banks have to tighten monetary policy (ie stop injecting credit into the banking system and raise interest rates). And if that were to happen, would it cause a collapse in the stock and bond markets and bankruptcies for many weaker companies as the cost of servicing corporate debt rises?

Inflation and financial risk

Critics of Biden as being a ‘progressive’ are mistaken. Understanding what ‘progressive’ means isn’t so easy.

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

The difference between “progressive” and “liberal” gets to the core of what politics in the real world is actually about, and of whether the nation is being controlled by the public (a democracy), or instead is controlled by the tiny percentage of the population who are enormously wealthy (an aristocracy — a capitalistic dictatorship, or also called “fascism” — so that the public are actually the nation’s subjects, instead of the nation’s citizens). Whereas progressivism is 100% supportive of democracy, liberalism is supportive of control by an elite, but one that supposedly represents the interests of the public. There is a big difference between progressivism and liberalism. Most simply phrased: Aristocrats always control the public by employing the popular mythology so as to motivate the majority to accept their own subordination to the aristocracy; and, whereas liberals support that, progressives don’t. This deception by the aristocracy minimizes the amount of physical coercion that will be needed in order for them to control the public. Progressives reject any mythology, and oppose any aristocracy. Liberals simply do not. Conservatives are the aristocracy. The noblesse oblige conservatives are the liberal aristocrats who say that they serve the public interest, but the other aristocrats say that they have no such obligation, and that their being an aristocrat proves their worthiness. And that is the way things function, in the real world. The ‘news’-media are important in deceiving the public so as to enable the aristocracy to control, and this is the reason why aristocrats buy ‘news’-media even regardless of whether those ‘news’-media are directly profitable: owning the ‘news’-media is providing a major service to the entire aristocracy, and therefore becomes repaid to such an owner in many other ways — all aristocrats want to please that member. It’s gratitude to a fellow-aristocrat, and that check can be cashed in many different ways.

Critics of Biden as being a ‘progressive’ are mistaken. Understanding what ‘progressive’ means isn’t so easy.