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In 1956, the CIA came up with what they thought was a rather clever plan.
The agency wanted to conduct a major spying operation on the Soviet Union.
But sending a military plane into someone else’s country would be an act of war.
So the agency decided to send a spy plane high above the clouds—to a height of 21 kilometers above the ground.
Their special high-altitude plane, called a U-2, would simply be too far up to be spotted by Russian radar.
They decided to try it.
On the fourth of July that year, 1956, a CIA pilot took a plane illegally into Soviet airspace. It flew over Moscow and St. Petersburg, had a look round, and then went home, unmolested. Mission accomplished.
They repeated this many times over the following years.
AGENT POWERS’ PROBLEM On May 1, 1960, a CIA pilot found himself with a long-haul job to do. Francis Gary Powers was an agent whose cover story, even to his own family, had been that he was a NASA meteorologist studying the weather.
The “weatherman” had to fly from a US military base in Pakistan to another one in Norway – even then, the world was covered with hubs for US armed forces.
He was flying a U-2, so believed he could fly over the Soviet Union. He’d be travelling across 4,667 kilometers (2,900 miles) of Soviet airspace.
This was both illegal and an act of war, but the US had long decided that international law did not apply to them.
The CIA plane was promptly shot down by a Soviet surface-to-air missile in the Ural Mountains of Russia.
INTERNATIONAL INCIDENT When the Russians complained that they had had to shoot down a US aircraft which was very clearly well inside their territory, the US government spun a tale that the U-2 had been conducting a routine weather flight outside Soviet airspace.
But there had been a malfunction of the oxygen delivery system in the cabin, they said. The weatherman blacked out and the plane had – entirely accidentally – drifted over into Soviet air space.
And that’s when the Russians had blown it up.
Whole thing was a mistake.
TRUTH COMES OUT The Russians considered this—and then sent a reply which shocked the US leadership. The Soviets said they were in possession of both the pilot and the remains of the plane.
Gary Powers had clearly not blacked out—he had parachuted to land, and was alive and well.
And the damaged aircraft, which was fitted for spying, not monitoring the weather, had been recovered too.
The Russians had been watching the spy plane program all along, for years—and had missiles that could bring down the CIA aircraft.
This was deeply embarrassing to the US, since its CIA program was exposed, and it had been caught lying to the world.
OPPORTUNITY FOR PEACE But Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev wanted peace. He suggested that the United States could simply apologize and pledge to make no further illegal incursions.
Furthermore, he said that if U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower denied any knowledge of the spy planes program, he would accept that.
But Eisenhower did not like being caught in a lie—and turned even more hostile. He responded that he personally knew full well about the illegal spy plane incursions from day one.
Furthermore, he considered that flying into Soviet airspace was a necessary element in maintaining the US’s national defense—and CIA pilots would continue to violate Soviet airspace whenever they liked.
East-west relations crashed.
This was one of a number of incidents in which Russia clearly tried to turn a bad incident into an opportunity to make a positive agreement, but the US chose to escalate hostilities instead.
By 1960, the US military-media-industrial complex was already taking control of the nation.
Full details of the U-2 spy plane incident are in the archives of the US Office of the Historian. Link provided separately.
American logistic expert reports from China video: How Pandas are driving countries and companies to ditch the dollar. Why borrow in US at 5-7% interest when China is charging 2-3% interest!? 美國物流專家在中國報道視頴有中英文字幕：各國與企業如何因熊貓債券而棄用美元. 既然中國的利率只有2-3%，為什麼要在美國以5-7%的利率借貸!?
Countries and firms are borrowing billions of dollars by directly accessing China’s debt markets, which offer some of the lowest interest rates in the world.
Panda Bonds are available to some borrowers of Chinese renminbi, to finance business operations in Mainland China, even by banks and companies outside China.
Chinese regulators maintain strict safeguards on who can borrow and use RMB abroad, and for what purposes.
Companies are swapping US Dollar-denominated debt for Chinese capital, and cutting borrowing costs by over half, while reducing FX volatility and and eliminating risks of sanction and asset seizure.
The UK and US are two of the richest developed countries in the world—GDP is up, stock markets are up, property prices are up—so why do more and more ordinary people feel like they’re getting poorer and more insecure? In this episode of World News Research Institute, we lay out official data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Federal Reserve, the Congressional Budget Office, and the UK’s Office for National Statistics, and cross-reference it with the Resolution Foundation’s research on secular stagnation. We’ll walk you through it from the ground up: this isn’t a case of “the country has no money”—it’s a distribution problem of “the country has plenty of money, but the money and the risks are flowing to different people.” We’ll look at America’s high-income, high-risk model, and the UK’s slow stagnation, and finally arrive at a shared problem: when growth and distribution become disconnected, ordinary people’s trust in the entire system gradually begins to erode.
英美係全球最富有嘅兩個發達國家，GDP 升、股市升、樓價升，但點解愈嚟愈多普通人覺得自己愈住愈窮、愈嚟愈冇安全感？呢一集《世界新聞研究所》攤開美國經濟分析局、美國聯儲局、美國國會預算辦公室同英國國家統計局嘅官方數據，再對照 Resolution Foundation 嘅長期停滯研究，同你由頭拆一次：呢個唔係「國家冇錢」嘅問題，而係「國家好有錢，但錢同風險流去咗唔同人身上」嘅分配問題。我哋會睇美國嘅高收入高風險、英國嘅慢慢停滯，最後落到一個共同問題，當增長同分配斷開，普通人對成個制度嘅信任，會慢慢動搖。
New Zealand TV Video: U.S. AI Chip Market Share Drops to Zero! Allies Switch Sides: “Without China, We Cannot Survive!” China’s AI Supercomputing Breaks Through on Two Fronts. 新西蘭電視台視頻: 美AI芯片市佔歸零！盟友倒戈：失去中國我們無法存在！中国AI超算雙破局
Small elite group chooses person they want to rule. (The people get no say.)
Small elite group tells democratically elected Prime Minster to resign. (The people get no say.)
Small elite group notices that their chosen man needs to be MP first, so they make that happen. (The people get no say.)
Small elite group tells the people who will be their leader. (The people get no say.)
Similar scenarios have happened REPEATEDLY in the UK.
HONG KONG ‘UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE’ – Now compare that with the system of universal suffrage that Beijing offered Hong Kong in 2013.
Electoral college of people’s representatives, made up of all major parties, puts forward a selection of candidates.
Every legal citizen gets two votes, one for their local representative, one for the overall leader of Hong Kong.
All seats in the Legislative Council (Hong Kong’s parliament) go to democratically elected people, including the top job.
(The Beijing-endorsed universal suffrage system proposed for Hong Kong was popular with the public, but it was, bizarrely, rejected by a certain group of politicians. This caused a return to the British colonial mixed system. We now know the people who rejected it were supported by US political interference groups.)
If a war breaks out between US and China, the 5 millions Chinese will face the same fates as the Japanese Americans during WWII. 如果美國與中國之間爆發戰爭，那五百萬美國華人將會面臨與二戰期間日裔美國人相同的命運。
The decision to incarcerate Japanese Americans in California during WWII was not based on individual suspicion, but on race and geography, driven by a combination of wartime hysteria & racism.
Who was sent to the camps: Strictly Based on Race & Ancestry: Anyone with Japanese ancestry was targeted, regardless of citizenship (about 2/3 were U.S. citizens). California defined this as having 1/16th or more Japanese lineage, anyone with “one drop of Japanese blood” qualified.
They lost everything: bank accounts, homes, all businesses, farms, investments. After the war they had nothing!
Video: “Before coming to China, I arrogantly mocked China’s technology as backward. But after arriving in China, I couldn’t help but tear up! A Porsche executive led a team on a tour of Shenzhen, and upon returning home, he issued a public apology late into the night: ‘We have utterly lost.’ 影片有中英文字幕: “来华前我傲慢嘲讽中国科技落后，来到中国我忍不住落泪！德国保时捷高管带队游深圳，回国连夜公开道歉：我们彻底输了
