The president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has arrived in China on his first official visit abroad after his recent inauguration. He was received by his Chinese counterpart, President Xi Jinping, with whom he held talks agreeing to deepen mutual political trust and contribute to global security and stability.
Earlier, I stupidly tweeted out an article about the Jones Act and shipbuilding and Colin Grabow, from the Cato Institute, liked it (he was quoted in the article). I looked him up and decided to listen to this video on the shipbuilding competition between China and the US, where he and a lawyer for United Steelworkers were on the panel. China is eating their lunch, and it’s the ruling elites’ own fault, yet they scapegoat China for it. The double standards over China’s “unfair economic practices” AKA the subsidizing of their shipbuilding industry irritates me (liars irritate me even more). States give subsidies, grants, and tax breaks to corporations, all the time. Fincantieri Marinette Marine is just one example, but Wisconsin had done the same for Foxconn. Foxconn received tax breaks and $3B in subsidies, which was “the largest ever subsidy provided by a state to a foreign company”, despite not living up to their promises.
Colin Grabow wants to end the Jones Act. I’ve made at least three video clips regarding the Jones Act, two with Sal Mercogliano from What’s Going On With Shipping and one from the government-funded CSIS (I’ve posted them, below).Spoiler alert: Sal says that the problem isn’t the Jones Act.Meanwhile, both CSIS and the Cato Institute (part of the Atlas Network) blame the Jones Act. Deregulation is a wet dream of big corporations (which fund both the Cato Institute and CSIS).
Import tariffs placed on more than US$300 billion worth of Chinese goods during the Trump administration increased US prices, according to a report from a bipartisan US trade commission, confirming a widely held view among analysts of trade and tariffs that they caused “self-inflicted harm”.
As a deadly pandemic wreaks havoc in an election year, Republicans are leveling relentless attacks against China. To be sure, Beijing’s initial response to the coronavirus outbreak was littered with errors, egregious injustices and conspiracy-mongering.
Urged on by their presidential standard-bearer, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, and by nearly all of the business lobbyists who represented the core of the party’s donor class, three-quarters of House Republicans voted to extend the status of permanent normal trade relations to China. They were more than enough, when added to a minority of Democrats, to secure passage of a bill that would sail through the Senate and be signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
It all went down at the speed of light. In only a few hours on Thursday in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek, the palace was stormed, the tyrant fled and a new order was starting to take shape. Or was it?
Although Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution has already turned out to be far more violent than similar uprisings in Georgia and Ukraine, the scenarios have a striking similarity. They suggest the presence of a strong network of human, material, and financial resources in the post-Soviet space, which is able to fight successfully with the authoritarian and mostly Russia-leaning regimes.
The reaction to the sabotage of three of the four Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in four places on Monday, September 26, has focused on speculations about who did it and whether NATO will make a serious attempt to discover the answer. Yet instead of panic, there has been a great sigh of diplomatic relief, even calm. Disabling these pipelines ends the uncertainty and worries on the part of US/NATO diplomats that nearly reached a crisis proportion the previous week, when large demonstrations took place in Germany calling for the sanctions to end and to commission Nord Stream 2 to resolve the energy shortage.
By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram – Jul 26, 2022
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Jul 26 2022 (IPS) – Like so many others, Africans have long been misled. Alleged progress under imperialism has long been used to legitimize exploitation. Meanwhile, Western colonial powers have been replaced by neo-colonial governments and international institutions serving their interests.
Starting on 31 May, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov embarked on a tour of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, where he visited Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), among others. Lavrov’s main objective of these visits is to strengthen ties between Russia and GCC nations amid a global race for geopolitical dominance.
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