Ethnic minorities suffer from tyranny of US electoral system by Global Times Nov 23 2021
A visitor attends the free public art exhibit Justice for George: Messages from the People at Phelps Field Park near George Floyd Memorial Square in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the US on Saturday.
“Tyranny” is a word that has always been used by US politicians to attack their so-called strategic competitors and countries with different ideologies. However, has Washington even realized that what it boasts as a “democratic electoral system” has long been plundering the legitimate rights of US ethnic minorities, forming a tyranny of the majority?
“It is almost a tyranny of the majority where the minority right to vote is being denied in many areas, in parts of the country,” United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues Fernand de Varennes said on Monday after his 15-day trip to the US. He also called for a “New Deal” in the US to overhaul legislation.
For a long time, ethnic minorities in the US have been threatened by discrimination, hate speech and hate crimes, and now even their basic rights cannot be guaranteed. Such tyranny toward ethnic minorities is the “original sin” of the US system.
In US history, to prevent ethnic minorities from voting, some states resorted to various tricks including setting up poll taxes and literacy tests in the 1890s. The US had been openly suppressing ethnic minorities’ right to vote until the 1965 Voting Rights Act prohibited states from using such methods to exclude minorities from voting, taking decades for the US ethnic minorities to obtain the right of “one person, one vote.”
“Although the US has made some adjustments, it has also used many cunning tricks to ensure white supremacy in US politics,” Li Haidong, a professor at the Institute of International Relations of the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times.
After decades, US ethnic minorities are still suffering from such tyranny. For example, Texas in October lowered the number of districts where minorities comprise a majority, despite the growth of the non-white population.
De Varennes said on Monday that Texas would harm minorities by diluting their political power and would result in “gerrymandering.” The legitimate rights of US ethnic minority groups have become victims of the two US political parties’ conflicts of interests.
It is doubtful whether the US electoral system can still represent freedom and justice. This being the case, the status quo of ethnic minorities’ voting rights is even worse. “The US’ care for minorities is far from enough, whether socially or legally. For minorities, this is a type of plunder and tyranny,” Li said.
Although de Varennes called for a “New Deal,” it is still very hard for the US, which is struggling to deal with the COVID-19 epidemic and economic hardships, to have the motivation and ability to reform.
Even with corresponding measures, it is difficult to eliminate the discrimination against ethnic minorities under the US’ systemic racism.
Ethnic minorities in the US are experiencing a tyranny. Washington has elaborately woven the tag “melting pot,” but it has already been torn into pieces by issues including the COVID-19 epidemic, the Black Lives Matter movement and the election. An increasing number of Americans are using all kinds of rhetoric to whitewash the deep-rooted problem. But how long can it last to wrap a festering wound with a tattered cloth?
China has been strengthening and speeding up the training of pilots for carrier-borne fighter jets in recent years, as part of the country’s efforts to holistically build its aircraft carrier system.
Currently, the pilots for carrier-borne fighter jets in China are selected and cultivated among soldiers in active service and new recruits.
The Chinese navy started to select the pilot trainees directly from new recruits in 2020, gradually building a young and thriving team with excellent comprehensive abilities and a longer service life.
Flying a carrier-borne fighter jet is highly demanding, just as the saying goes ‘the aircraft carrier deck is the most dangerous 4.5-acre piece of land in the world’.
Pilots needs to make a nose dive at the speed of 200 km/h and land the jet precisely on a tiny area that is drifting with the tide on a runway of only 200 meters. To make a firm stop at the end of the runway, the pilot is required to hook the jet to the arresting cables on the carrier deck at the moment of landing.
Nine years ago, on Nov. 23, 2012, China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, had its first successful fighter jet takeoff and landing. The successful flight landing also marked the debut of the J-15 as China’s first-generation multi-purpose carrier-based fighter jet.
Interesting how victims and as a nation still love Britain! It echo those Western Moon lovers in HK! How Britain stole $45 trillion from India – And lied about it. by Jason Hickel, Academic at the University of London and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India – as horrible as it may have been – was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long – the story goes – was a gesture of Britain’s benevolence.
New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik – just published by Columbia University Press – deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938.
It’s a staggering sum. For perspective, $45 trillion is 17 times more than the total annual gross domestic product of the United Kingdom today.
How did this come about?
It happened through the trade system. Prior to the colonial period, Britain bought goods like textiles and rice from Indian producers and paid for them in the normal way – mostly with silver – as they did with any other country. But something changed in 1765, shortly after the East India Company took control of the subcontinent and established a monopoly over Indian trade.
Here’s how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third) to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, “buying” from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.
It was a scam – theft on a grand scale. Yet most Indians were unaware of what was going on because the agent who collected the taxes was not the same as the one who showed up to buy their goods. Had it been the same person, they surely would have smelled a rat.
Some of the stolen goods were consumed in Britain, and the rest were re-exported elsewhere. The re-export system allowed Britain to finance a flow of imports from Europe, including strategic materials like iron, tar and timber, which were essential to Britain’s industrialisation. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution depended in large part on this systematic theft from India.
On top of this, the British were able to sell the stolen goods to other countries for much more than they “bought” them for in the first place, pocketing not only 100 percent of the original value of the goods but also the markup.
After the British Raj took over in 1858, colonisers added a special new twist to the tax-and-buy system. As the East India Company’s monopoly broke down, Indian producers were allowed to export their goods directly to other countries. But Britain made sure that the payments for those goods nonetheless ended up in London.
How did this work? Basically, anyone who wanted to buy goods from India would do so using special Council Bills – a unique paper currency issued only by the British Crown. And the only way to get those bills was to buy them from London with gold or silver. So traders would pay London in gold to get the bills, and then use the bills to pay Indian producers. When Indians cashed the bills in at the local colonial office, they were “paid” in rupees out of tax revenues – money that had just been collected from them. So, once again, they were not in fact paid at all; they were defrauded.
Meanwhile, London ended up with all of the gold and silver that should have gone directly to the Indians in exchange for their exports.
This corrupt system meant that even while India was running an impressive trade surplus with the rest of the world – a surplus that lasted for three decades in the early 20th century – it showed up as a deficit in the national accounts because the real income from India’s exports was appropriated in its entirety by Britain.
Some point to this fictional “deficit” as evidence that India was a liability to Britain. But exactly the opposite is true. Britain intercepted enormous quantities of income that rightly belonged to Indian producers. India was the goose that laid the golden egg. Meanwhile, the “deficit” meant that India had no option but to borrow from Britain to finance its imports. So the entire Indian population was forced into completely unnecessary debt to their colonial overlords, further cementing British control.
Britain used the windfall from this fraudulent system to fuel the engines of imperial violence – funding the invasion of China in the 1840s and the suppression of the Indian Rebellion in 1857. And this was on top of what the Crown took directly from Indian taxpayers to pay for its wars. As Patnaik points out, “the cost of all Britain’s wars of conquest outside Indian borders were charged always wholly or mainly to Indian revenues.”
And that’s not all. Britain used this flow of tribute from India to finance the expansion of capitalism in Europe and regions of European settlement, like Canada and Australia. So not only the industrialisation of Britain but also the industrialisation of much of the Western world was facilitated by extraction from the colonies.
Patnaik identifies four distinct economic periods in colonial India from 1765 to 1938, calculates the extraction for each, and then compounds at a modest rate of interest (about 5 percent, which is lower than the market rate) from the middle of each period to the present. Adding it all up, she finds that the total drain amounts to $44.6 trillion. This figure is conservative, she says, and does not include the debts that Britain imposed on India during the Raj.
These are eye-watering sums. But the true costs of this drain cannot be calculated. If India had been able to invest its own tax revenues and foreign exchange earnings in development – as Japan did – there’s no telling how history might have turned out differently. India could very well have become an economic powerhouse. Centuries of poverty and suffering could have been prevented.
All of this is a sobering antidote to the rosy narrative promoted by certain powerful voices in Britain. The conservative historian Niall Ferguson has claimed that British rule helped “develop” India. While he was prime minister, David Cameron asserted that British rule was a net help to India.
This narrative has found considerable traction in the popular imagination: according to a 2014 YouGov poll, 50 percent of people in Britain believe that colonialism was beneficial to the colonies.
Yet during the entire 200-year history of British rule in India, there was almost no increase in per capita income. In fact, during the last half of the 19th century – the heyday of British intervention – income in India collapsed by half. The average life expectancy of Indians dropped by a fifth from 1870 to 1920. Tens of millions died needlessly of policy-induced famine.
Britain didn’t develop India. Quite the contrary – as Patnaik’s work makes clear – India developed Britain.
What does this require of Britain today? An apology? Absolutely. Reparations? Perhaps – although there is not enough money in all of Britain to cover the sums that Patnaik identifies. In the meantime, we can start by setting the story straight. We need to recognise that Britain retained control of India not out of benevolence but for the sake of plunder and that Britain’s industrial rise didn’t emerge sui generis from the steam engine and strong institutions, as our schoolbooks would have it, but depended on violent theft from other lands and other peoples.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article erroneously had the beginning of the British Raj as 1847. The correct year is 1858.
Jason Hickel Academic at the University of London and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Dr Jason Hickel is an academic at the University of London and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. His most recent book is “The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions,” published by Penguin in May 2017.
A Critical Analysis Of A Report By The Newlines Institute And The Raoul Wallenberg Center on Xinjiang China by Gordon Dumoulin, Jan Oberg and Thore Vestby, Nov 23 2021
On March 8, 2021, the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington published a report, The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention in cooperation with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in Montreal.
It states that ”This report is the first independent expert application of the 1948 Genocide Convention to the ongoing treatment of the Uyghurs in China. It was undertaken by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, in cooperation with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, in response to emerging accounts of serious and systematic atrocities in Xinjiang province, particularly directed against the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority, to ascertain whether the People’s Republic of China is in breach of the Genocide Convention under international law.”
The Report – hereafter The Report – has been produced with the contributions of, and upon consultation with, numerous independent experts, including 33 who have agreed to be identified publicly, as it is stated.
The purpose of this TFF analysis is to examine the status of the Newlines Institute and the circle of scholars and others who have produced and contributed to it and their connections. It also takes a closer look at The Report’s methods and content as well as the sources on which The Report bases its extremely serious conclusion, namely that the Chinese state is responsible for committing genocide and violates the central provisions of the said Convention in its policies in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) intentionally.
TFF wants to make it very clear from the outset that we do not take a stand on whether or not what happens in Xinjiang is a genocide. As of principle, we would not state such an opinion unless we had also been on the ground in Xinjiang. The sole purpose is to examine what this first independent scholarly documentation – which was covered immediately by a wide range of Western mainstream media – is based on.
We first present the Executive Summary of our findings and then expand on a series of more specific themes and perspectives.
Executive summary
The Report and the two institutes behind it are not ”independent”, and the report does not present new materials. Co-produced with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, it’s the product of cooperation among individuals from at least six, more or less inter-connected, interest groups, or milieus, which are more Near– than Non-governmental – namely: Christian fundamentalism + hawkish conservative US foreign policy circles + Muslim Brotherhood circles + extreme anti-Communism + pro-Israel lobby circles + the politicising human rights machinery (in which human rights concerns tend to serve various types of interventions by the United States of America). For a report published by independent scholars from an independent institute, this is problematic.
The somewhat haphazardly edited Report may have been published to back up former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s ”determination” on January 19, 2021, that what goes in Xinjiang is an ongoing genocide. No evidence accompanied it. Pompeo is known, in his capacity of CIA director and in his own words (2019), to be proud that ”we lied, cheated and stole – we had entire training courses – and it reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.” (Watch him say that 29:15 into this conversation). Mike Pompeo is also known as a Conservative Christian who, while at the West Point Military Academy, was ”brought to Jesus Christ”, and he is known to be extremely critical of China.
The Report comes through as containing both fake or dubious but also, significantly and systematically, biased choices of sources and as deliberately leaving out fundamentally important perspectives, theories, concepts and facts. For an institute that professes to be based on solid scholarship and values, this is problematic.
The Report appears – whether knowingly or intentionally or not – as supportive of hardline US foreign policy and as exploiting human rights concerns to promote a confrontational policy vis-a-vis China. It certainly does not conform to the values of mutual understanding and peace that the Newlines Institute states that it is based on.
The Report conveys propaganda in the specific sense of treating China as the subject of all evil but omitting that an understanding of China’s policies must also include its relations, including the conflictual relations it has with the US. China is seen as an independent variable and, therefore, The Report can not produce any comparative perspective. To put it crudely: If what China does in Xinjiang is a genocide, are there other actors/governments who should also be determined as pursuing genocidal policies? Or, how does the Chinese ”war on terror” inside Xinjiang and its human costs compare with the US-led Global War On Terror, GWOT, and its human costs?
Given the problems we point out in this analysis, one must be deeply concerned about the Western mainstream media’s systematically uncritical reception and coverage of the Newlines-Wallenberg Report. They gave it immediate and prominent attention, but we have found none of the media checking the sources of The Report or questioning that it is an ”independent” institute and the ”first ’independent’ expert application of the 1948 Genocide Convention.”
What we have found in The Report makes us believe that if this is the highest-quality documentation of a genocide in Xinjiang available, one may seriously doubt whether what goes on in Xinjiang is a genocide. And, most likely, determining it as such will only have negative consequences for US-China relations and even for the United States itself.
What we have also found is that The Report is a rather illustrative example of the discourse and interest circles that characterise what we call the MIMAC, the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex – building and expanding on the concept used for the first time by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who called it a Military-Industrial Complex, MIC, in his farewell speech in 1961.
The Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research, TFF, Lund, Sweden •
TFF@transnational.org • The Transnational • Ph +46 (0)738 525200
Times Magazine: In June 2019, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi described the Hong Kong demonstrations as “a beautiful sight to behold.” 時代雜誌：2019 年 6 月，眾議院議長南希佩洛西將香港的示威活動描述為“一道美麗的風景線”.
California Prop 47 Legalize Theft, Robbery and etc Under $950! Next time your package left outside your door got stolen, don’t complain! Does that mean we can steal from each other? The world must have gone mad! 加州第 47 號提案將盜竊、搶劫等低於 950 美元合法化！ 下次您放在門外的包裹被盜時，請不要抱怨！ 這是否意味著我們可以互相偷竊？ 這個世界一定瘋了！
The $250 billion “Innovation and Competition Act” leverages industrial policy to ratchet up militarization and potentially instigate global conflict. By Aída Chávez, Nov 22 2021
Hybrid war funding will institutionalize cold war with China. Biden continues the work of Obama and Trump.
Congress is itching to pass a sweeping bipartisan package that threatens to enshrine a new Cold War, this time against China, and they’re counting on the American public’s inattention to get it through by the end of the year. After months of stalling in the House, and a failed attempt to attach the legislation to the annual defense bill, majority leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi struck a deal this week for a bicameral conference on the anti-China legislation.
The US Innovation and Competition Act is a massive piece of legislation purporting to make the United States more “competitive” with China economically, politically, and technologically. Mainstream media outlets and lawmakers have framed the bill as the most expansive industrial policy legislation in US history, and as being crucial for countering China’s economic rise.
But this $250 billion “innovation” bill is nothing more than a dangerous escalation in a multipronged offensive against China. The Innovation and Competition Act leverages industrial policy to ratchet up US militarization and potentially instigate global conflict—all while hindering the global fight against climate change . And just as the “War on Terror” led to a systematic assault on Muslims and people of color, an unbridled security state, and mass domestic surveillance, the language of national security and competition that will arise around a new Cold War could serve to justify racist and repressive policies here at home.
The Innovation and Competition Act would ramp up militarization in the Indo-Pacific, undermine nuclear arms control, and dedicate hundreds of millions of additional dollars to expanding US military presence in the region. Entire sections of the bill are dedicated to deepening defense cooperation in Latin America and the Caribbean, authorizing $12 million annually from 2021 to 2026 for the International Military Education and Training Program, as well as other countries in the Indo-Pacific region, including India and the Philippines. It would also increase Taiwan and Japan’s military capacity. The USICA would “dramatically change the status quo on Taiwan in a way I think is super-dangerous,” one House Democratic staffer told The Nation.
Domestically, the bill would establish an anti-China bureaucratic apparatus tasked with hunting down “undue” Chinese influence in the United States, which critics warn would exacerbate the racial profiling of Chinese Americans and Chinese nationals living in the US and inflame anti-Asian racism. A provision in the Innovation and Competition Act would enact a policy “to enable the people of the United States, including the private sector, civil society, universities and other academic institutions, State and local legislators, and other relevant actors to identify and remain vigilant to the risks posed by undue influence” of the Communist Party of China in the US and to “implement measures to mitigate the risks.” It allocates $300 million a year for 2022 to 2026 to create a “Countering Chinese Influence Fund,” and would also mandate a comptroller report on the activities of US Sister City participants who partner with countries like China. (There are over 100 US sister cities shared with China.)
None of this is unprecedented, of course. The United States has a long history of treating Asian Americans and immigrants with unfounded suspicion and enforcing racism through policy. In Chae Chan Ping v. United States, a 1889 Supreme Court decision that upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act, Washington justified the racist policies “on grounds that Chinese immigrants were ‘agents’ of China and that their mere presence in the country was akin to war, even if no actual hostilities were taking place,” as Columbia University history professor Mae Ngai wrote in March. And in recent years, US intelligence agencies have increased surveillance and targeting of students and academics of Chinese descent. “I think what we can expect is that we’re going to have a much more supercharged version of what we’ve been seeing over the past few years,” said Anlin Wang, a member of Democratic Socialists of America and Reclaim Philadelphia.
Senate Democrats passed the Innovation and Competition Act over the summer with overwhelming bipartisan support, and many of the most troubling aspects of the bill also have broad support in the House. Representative Gregory Meeks, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has his own version of the legislation, and pushed against the chamber’s “rubber-stamping” the Senate version. His version, the EAGLE Act, is meant to be less aggressive and better on climate. But it doesn’t meaningfully change the substance of the policy, and has less support among Republicans than the Senate version.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was the only senator who caucuses with Democrats to vote against the bill. Not long after the vote, Sanders expanded on his position in the pages of Foreign Affairs, imploring DC leaders not to start another Cold War. “Instead of extolling the virtues of free trade and openness toward China, the establishment beats the drums for a new Cold War, casting China as an existential threat to the United States,” Sanders wrote. “We are already hearing politicians and representatives of the military-industrial complex using this as the latest pretext for larger and larger defense budgets.”
This hawkish consensus on China has been years in the making, and President Joe Biden shows no intention of diverging from it. Despite his declaration at the United Nations that “we are not seeking a new Cold War” with China or a “world divided into rigid blocs,” the Biden administration has been just as aggressive in his approach to China as former Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama. Members of both parties, including most liberals and many progressives, are eager to fuel conflict between the two nuclear powers. Republican Senator Jim Inhofe has said that “we’re in the most dangerous time in our lifetime.” On the Democratic side, there are lawmakers like Representative Elaine Luria, a former Navy officer who rakes in campaign cash from some of the biggest defense contractor PACs. Luria doesn’t just want bigger military budgets; she wants Congress to pre-authorize war with China.
For months, Pentagon officials, lawmakers, and the national media have focused on China’s growing military capabilities to make the case that the country poses the biggest military threat to the United States and the world. But discussion of the so-called Chinese threat is rarely ever in touch with reality. There is only one country that maintains nearly 800 military bases in at least 80 countries around the world, spends more on the military than the next seven countries combined, and has used nuclear weapons in war. The same country has been directly responsible for countless military interventions. And it isn’t China.
Democratic Socialists of America’s International Committee is among the groups organizing against the looming passage of the US Innovation and Competition Act, and broader US escalation against China. Grayson Lanza, a member of the Asia and Oceania subcommittee and cochair of Orlando’s DSA chapter, echoed the idea that one of the biggest dangers of the bill is that it would create a permanent apparatus for antagonizing China.
“As a Floridian, I’m very in tune with the kind of bureaucracy that develops for the specific targeting of countries, for sanctions and antagonism,” Lanza said, referring to the influence that the anti-Cuban bureaucracy has had both in his state and on the federal level. “Once this gets put into place, and there’s a little bit of momentum behind it, you can’t really undo it. People’s jobs, their careers are going to be based around you, the United States, being an enemy of China.”
There’s also the “profound unfairness” of Washington’s allocating our resources and money into antagonizing China when US infrastructure is crumbling and Americans are without health care and paid leave, Lanza added. It’s a significant amount of money going not just to foreign militaries, but to reinforcing US propaganda networks abroad. One of the measures in the bill, for example, would train journalists “on investigative techniques necessary” to report on China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
“Maybe you don’t like China, but do you really think this is a worthy investment of your tax dollar? Probably not,” Lanza said. “Most people want their money spent on them. They want to see it in their communities. They want to see it in their infrastructure. They want to see it in their schools.”
In a statement this week against the $778 billion Pentagon budget, Sanders criticized the Innovation and Competition Act for including $52 billion in “corporate welfare, with no strings attached, for a handful of extremely profitable microchip companies” and a $10 billion “handout” to Jeff Bezos for space exploration. “Isn’t it strange how even as we end the longest war in our nation’s history, concerns about the deficit and national debt seem to melt away under the influence of the powerful Military Industrial Complex?” Sanders said.
Johnson Choi Biz 