An important speech from 2015. Glenn Greenwald was part of the team of reporters who met with Edward Snowden in 2013 in Hong Kong to reveal USA’s NSA’s (National Security Agency) most dystopian secrets. 2015 年的重要演講。2013 年，Glenn Greenwald 是記者團隊中的一員，他於 2013 年在香港與愛德華斯諾登會面，揭露美國國家安全局最反烏托邦的秘密。
Bye bye USA, Hello Hong Kong. “After careful study, the company will start the work of delisting from NYSE and initiate preparation for listing in Hong Kong with immediate effect,”
Harvard Poll: 52% of Youth: US is failing or failed Democracy; 35% expect Civil war. If the youth are the future, we are f*cked.
A majority (52%) of young Americans believe that our democracy is either “in trouble,” or “failing”
Young Americans place the chances that they will see a second civil war in their lifetime at 35%; chances that at least one state secedes at 25% More than half (51%) of young Americans report having felt down, depressed, and hopeless 25% have had thoughts of self-harm — at least several times in the last two weeks
Current US Supreme Court is majority men going to decide on Women 1/2 century rights of abortion! What gave men that rights? 美國最高法院是多數男性決定女性 1/2 世紀的墮胎權！ 是什麼賦予男人這樣的權利？
The New Yorkers: The right to an abortion, a right Americans have known for nearly half a century, could be on the verge of vanishing. In a new piece examining the Supreme Court oral arguments in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, involving a Mississippi ban on most abortions after fifteen weeks, Amy Davidson Sorkin writes that lawyers and Justices on both sides “appeared to be past pretending that the case is about anything less.” What began as a gradual chipping away of rights in some states has evolved into a potential reversal of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, two cases “that enshrined reproductive rights and access to abortion.”
The three liberal Justices spoke passionately on Tuesday, with Elena Kagan calling access to abortion “part of the fabric of women’s existence in this country.” But their zeal was overshadowed by the strength in numbers of the six conservative Justices, including Amy Coney Barrett, who, in her questioning, offered what Davidson Sorkin calls a “glimpse of an alternative America.” In a country where polls show that the majority of adults believe abortion should be legal in most cases, Sonia Sotomayor raised the question of whether the Court will survive “the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts.” Then there is also the question, as Davidson Sorkin writes, of “whether certain Republicans, whose party has pushed opposition to reproductive rights as a usefully divisive issue, will come to regret what they have wrought.”
Campbell appeases Australia as Washington steals Canberra’s market share by Global Times Dec 02 2021
To put Australia at ease as the most loyal pawn of the US strategy toward China, some American politicians need to make hollow promises from time to time, trying to give Canberra placebos. But such so-called reassurances cannot hide one single and simple fact: The Australian government lacks real diplomatic autonomy to make choices in line with its own strategic interests.
US Indo-Pacific Coordinator Kurt Campbell on Wednesday said that Australia will not lose “sovereignty” under the AUKUS deal. “I fully understand how important sovereignty and independence is for Australia. So I don’t want to leave any sense that somehow that would be lost,” he claimed at an event hosted by the Lowy Institute. Again, Campbell targeted China by accusing the country of waging “dramatic economic warfare” against the US ally.
But seriously, how much “sovereignty” is there left for Australia to “lose”? Although Campbell called Australia a “close ally” and stressed that it is not merely an “adjunct to Washington,” Canberra has been closely following the US’ strategy and even completely turned to the US. It is much too obvious whether Australia is a close ally or an adjunct to the US.
“Under the AUKUS deal, the use of nuclear submarines technology is too sensitive for Australia to decide alone. Therefore, Australia will have to listen to the US in terms of its future strategy and tactics. It has become a pawn serving the US’ Indo-Pacific Strategy,” Guo Chunmei, an expert on Australian studies with the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times.
“Considering that some Australian politicians have made a rational and objective assessment on the Morrison administration’s China policy, Campbell had to say those hollow words to appease Australia,” she said.
In fact, Australia not only has little autonomy left, but is also being taken advantage of by the US in the name of a “close ally.” Just one day before Campbell said those words, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the US and its allies are the “biggest beneficiaries” of Australia’s trade row with China. As Washington is appeasing Canberra, it is also pointing its finger at Beijing while quietly dividing up Canberra’s interests.
Campbell and his like have spared no effort to fan the flames in China-Australia relations. By following his words, Australia itself will have to bear the cost in the end. Washington does not have to shoulder any responsibility and can even profit from it. Anyone can see the US’ trick, but Australia is still obsessed with it.
“Australia has a sense of insecurity and strategic anxiety, and the US does not have as much dominant power as before. Therefore, Washington hopes to take advantage of allies and partners to confront China. Australia has been passively, or proactively, tied to the US chariot. Canberra is led by Washington strategically, and rational voices in Australia are muted to some extent,” Guo said.
However, Australia will not really be respected by flattering the US. For example, the US has taken the chance to steal Australia’s market share, and it also limited exports of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines when the epidemic was raging in Australia. Worse, US President Joe Biden even seemed to forget Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s name in September, calling him “that fellow down under.” Is it really worthwhile for Australia to forsake its autonomy to serve the US just because of Washington’s lip service?
Under US hegemony, Australia has enjoyed the benefits and status far exceeding its political and economic value, at the cost of losing sovereignty. But this is like the “Sword of Damocles” – when and if the US turns its back on the “close ally” and even stabs it in the back, Australia will be powerless and confused after losing the support of its “big brother.”
The BBC misrepresented my views this morning, and I admit I’m stunned. I’m a big fan of the BBC. Living in Taiwan and Hong Kong, in the 1970s doing fieldwork across Africa in the 1980s, I used to listen to the BBC World Service on my shortwave radio and I trusted them to present nuanced and balanced analysis.
Last night I had a call from London. I picked up to find a BBC reporter who wanted my views on Chinese “debt trap diplomacy.” Apparently the head of Britain’s intelligence service, Richard Moore, had given the BBC an interview in which he said that the Chinese have deliberately used debt as leverage to acquire strategic assets. We spoke for awhile on background and I outlined why this idea had little basis in fact, drawing on my extensive research with Meg Rithmire about the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka and other cases, and that of other researchers. I gave examples from Montenegro, Kenya, Zambia, and other places where these fears have been trumpeted in the media, but without evidence to support them. He said that another reporter would call me in an hour and record an interview.
An hour later, a woman called and simply asked me to speak for a minute about this idea: a quick explanation of what debt trap diplomacy is believed to be, an example from Sri Lanka or elsewhere, and why the evidence doesn’t support the story. I briefly explained all of this, she recorded it, and we hung up.
This morning I’ve been getting messages from British colleagues who’ve been doing research on Chinese investment overseas and who know my research. One said that the recording “seemed to have been edited to make it sound like you were possibly supporting the debt diplomacy narrative, which of course misrepresents your nuanced commentary on this available elsewhere.”
I quickly listened to the BBC recording (my clip is about 1 hr 50 minutes into the program) and was horrified to find that the only clip they took from the interview was my explanation of the “idea” of debt trap diplomacy and the “conventional wisdom” about the case in Sri Lanka. They completely discarded all the evidence I presented after that about why that conventional wisdom was not correct. Then, they brought in a former adviser to the Trump administration whom he interviewed at some length about the China threat, but again providing no evidence about “debt trap diplomacy” aside from this: “we’ve charted it globally and it’s fairly widespread”. She also repeated the claim that the Chinese bring in all their own workers.
The reporter leading the story clearly had his mind made up already about the point of view he wanted to present. My little clip was prefaced by a question I was never asked: “What can we do to combat this?” he said, rather than a question that would have made room for a more balanced discussion of this claim. It all reminds me, rather depressingly, about the widespread belief that the Chinese were acquiring large amounts of land in Africa to grow food to send back to China. I spent three years doing field research on that myth and wrote an Oxford University Press book debunking it. No one makes that claim anymore–not due to me, I think, but simply because a more interesting “threat narrative” has now gripped the media’s mind. Sigh.
US, The sick man of democracy hosts a democracy summit. The Washington summit next week is the very symptom of what is so terribly wrong with American democracy, rather than what is wrong with democracy generally around the world that needs a course correction by American politicians
The best democracy is not necessarily the most powerful. The most powerful democracy is not necessarily the most representative or functional, though by sheer dominance, it may well claim to be so.
Right from the start, a summit of democracy to be held in Washington next week and led by US President Joe Biden deserves a good deal of scepticism. It sounds more like a ganging up. Against whom? I think we all know who the usual suspects are.
The practice of democracy starts at home. Though if that is failing, politicians may invoke an external enemy or enemies to distract the public. It’s true that there is a democratic deficit, if by that, there are fewer “democracies” today than 10 or 20 years ago. But still, the Washington summit has invited more than 140 countries; that’s almost three quarters of the total number of nations. Not all democracies are the same. Some are better or more functional than others; some are in name only but it’s still useful to count them up. As Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.”
There are two unspoken assumptions behind the Washington summit that deserve to be challenged because they are, as far as I can see, unsound and untrue. Being a long-time Kantian-Hegelian student, let me write them as two theses and then I will present my own antitheses.
Thesis 1: The global advance of democracy since the end of the Cold War is backsliding and it needs the United States to reverse it.
Antithesis 1: If there is indeed a backsliding, the US is more responsible than any authoritarian government or dictatorship.
Thesis 2: The US is the most important democracy in the world and its leadership is paramount.
Antithesis 2: Democracy itself is backsliding in the US and it is no model to anyone.
Taken the two antitheses together, I contend that the US is damaging democracy at home and aboard.
ANTITHESIS 1 The US and its allies have experienced much of the democratic backsliding since 2010, indeed at double the rate of non-allies, in terms of such factors as judicial independence and electoral fairness. That’s according to data compiled by V-Dem, a Swedish non-profit that tracks the levels of democracy of nations based on quantifiable indicators, and analysed by The New York Times.
The vast majority of US allies and aligned nations experienced no democratic improvement in the past decade, though many non-allies did, the report finds.
“The revelations … suggest that much of the world’s backsliding is not imposed on democracies by foreign powers,” the V-Dem/NYT report says, “but rather is a rot rising within the world’s most powerful network of mostly democratic alliances.”
Institutional decline caused by divisive domestic politics and cultish leaders is partly to blame. More often, it’s the rise of illiberal democracy as seen in such countries as Turkey, Hungary, Israel and the Philippines. To the list we can certainly add the US, with its militarisation of police forces, a corrupt and brutal prison system, systemic racism and disenfranchisement of minorities, especially blacks. Voting rights have been curtailed and the courts are politicised with appointed judges, from lower courts all the way to the Supreme Court.
V-Dem’s liberal democracy index uses dozens of metrics to collate into a score from 0 to 1. The New York Times report says: “During the 1990s, the United States and its allies accounted for 9 per cent of the overall increases in democracy scores worldwide. In other words, they were responsible for 9 per cent of global democratic growth. “[In] that decade, allied countries accounted for only 5 per cent of global decreases – they backslid very little.” But things got worse.
The report continues: “Those numbers worsened a little in the 2000s. Then, in the 2010s, they became disastrous. The US and its allies accounted for only 5 per cent of worldwide increases in democracy. But a staggering 36 per cent of all backsliding occurred in US-aligned countries.
“On average, allied countries saw the quality of their democracies decline by nearly double the rate of non-allies, according to V-Dem’s figures … The data contradicts assumptions in Washington that this trend is driven by Russia and China, whose neighbours and partners have seen their scores change very little.”
Now, it’s fair to say democratic backsliding has mostly domestic causes in those US-allied countries, so you can’t blame it all on Uncle Sam. But what we do need to establish is that countries close to the US have experienced the most democratic decline; those closer to China, Russia and Iran have not.
At the very least, we need to revise long-held assumptions about the spread of democracy and the US role in it.
ANTITHESIS 2 A majority of young Americans aged 18 to 29 already share the belief stated in this antithesis. A new survey of this age group by the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School finds more than half believe US democracy has either “failed” or is “in trouble”.
About 35 per cent thought there could be a second civil war in their lifetime, while a quarter said there could be a US state seceding within their lifetime. Meanwhile, 39 per cent described the country as a “democracy in trouble” and another 13 per cent of called it a “failed democracy”.
Of the more than 2,100 young Americans surveyed, only 7 per cent believed the US was a “healthy democracy”, while another 27 per cent considered it a “somewhat functioning democracy”.
Members of this generation of young Americans are not only the most educated but also among the most economically disadvantaged. They can see that many other countries, democratic or not, western or eastern, offer a much better deal to their citizens than their own government and society. It’s absurd for them to say the US is the best in this or that, except in military hardware and perhaps hi-tech.
If democracy needs improvement or to be shored up, there is much work to be done at home rather than aboard.
Overseas, for many foreigners including yours truly, “democracy” has been the fig leaf for the US to advance and maintain its global hegemony. Even if its interventions abroad were sincere, the imposition of democracy by force has generally been a failure. It has destabilised more countries and societies than freeing them. And those few cases of undoubted success, such as post-war Japan, Germany and South Korea may have more to do with their own domestic developments than US influence.
Given all these reasons, I argue that the Washington summit next week is the very symptom of what is so terribly wrong with American democracy, rather than what is wrong with democracy generally around the world that needs a course correction by Americans.
Alex Lo has been a Post columnist since 2012, covering major issues affecting Hong Kong and the rest of China. A journalist for 25 years, he has worked for various publications in Hong Kong and Toronto as a news reporter and editor. He has also lectured in journalism at the University of Hong Kong.
Johnson Choi Biz 