R - E - S - P - E - C - T, Find Out What It Means to Xi

I suppose by now we've all seen the video of Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of U.S. empire vassal state Canada, schooled by Xi Jinping at the G20 conference in Bali. Because details of their previous private talk had been leaked to the press, the Chinese President was annoyed and expressed it. Trudeau did not even bother to let the interpreter finish translating what Xi said before spouting some talking points he had memorized. To summarize, Trudeau looks forward to warm, mutually beneficial relations with China. 

Xi: "Then create the conditions."

Trudeau's talking points sounded a lot like those of  U.S. President Biden in his private meeting with Xi. According to the Associated Press, "Biden said that when it comes to China, the U.S. would 'compete vigorously, but I'm not looking for conflict' and 'I absolutely believe there need not be a new Cold War.'" He also claimed not to support Tawan independence, and to have no desire to contain Beijing.

Based on recent history, these are hollow words and empty slogans which we have no reason to believe. Not a day goes by without government-sponsored media in the West denigrating China and sabre-rattling over Taiwan (for example, here's AP's lead: "President Joe Biden objected directly to China’s 'coercive and increasingly aggressive actions' toward Taiwan during the first in-person meeting of his presidency with Xi Jinping.")

Presumably the core purpose of the meeting was to peel away China's support of Russia's defense of Crimea and the Donbas region. I doubt that happened. They did reportedly agree nukes should not be used in Ukraine.

At G20, Canada got the lecture. The times they are a changin'.

Meanwhile, countries are clamoring to join economic cooperation  group BRICS and say goodbye to dependence on the U.S. dollar. The economic sanctions the U.S. has wielded against those countries have been coming home to roost, and Russia and China (the R and C in BRICS) are already using their own currencies to for energy transactions.

Pepe Escobar's "Goodbye G20, Hello BRICS+" in The Cradle is well worth a read as a nation-by-nation analysis of who's leaving the West-dominated structures of capitalism behind and embarking on new cooperative agreements among the Global South. That link is blocked by Google this morning, but maybe your browser will let you access it. I was able to get back there on my phone to pull this quote on the G20's final statement:

The collective west, including the Japanese vassal state, was bent on including the war in Ukraine and its "economic impacts" -- especially the food and energy crisis -- in the statement. Yet without offering even a shade of context related to NATO expansion. What mattered was to blame Russia --- for everything.

It was up to this year's G20 hos Indonesia -- and the next host, India -- to exercise trademark Asian politeness and consensus building. Jakarta and New Delhi worked extremely hard to find wording that would be acceptable to both Moscow and Beijing.

Call it the Global South effect.

Some analysts have noted that China is steadily divesting from investments in dollars as a sign of one great power descending while another ascends.

Another milestone came as China came ahead of the U.S. in an international chip research venue. According to Yuki Okoshi reporting in Nikkei Asia:

This is the first time China has taken the top spot in papers accepted by the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), which is considered the Olympics of the semiconductor sector. The annual event opens in February in San Francisco.

This occurs in the context of the U.S., home to international scholars for decades now, losing researchers as brains drain back to China.

A survey by the Asian American Scholar Forum of roughly 1,300 Chinese American scientific researchers in the U.S. who are involved in computer science and engineering, math, and other sciences..found that 72% did not feel safe as an academic researcher, 61% had thought about leaving the U.S., and 65% were worried about collaborations with China..

Some scientists of Chinese origin employed by U.S. universities who have used federal grant money to conduct research in the past are reluctant to apply again: 45% of the AASF study participants..

My interpretation of what Xi said to Trudeau is: Respect us if you want to work with us. Disrespect will get you nowhere and you are no longer in a position to act like that.

My interpretation of what Biden said to Xi: Here is a bunch of empty blather we both know conceals the salient facts on the ground. Subtext: We've got you surrounded.

Source: World Beyond War

COP-OUT27 Hastens Climate Catastrophe #COP27

Source: "Estimating the military's global greenhouse gas emissions"
report by Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOB), November, 2022

Following international climate summit COP26 in Glasgow, with a parallel People's Summit I participated in, the focus on military emissions and their lethal undercount has faded in the war fever of the alleged battle for "democracy" and "freedom" in Ukraine. 

COP27, held in the especially brutal police state of Egypt (thanks, "Arab Spring" color revolution) was swarmed by both fossil fuel lobbyists and private jets. 

Activists temporarily blocked private jets from taking off for Egypt from Amsterdam as an expression of the new climate focus that says billionaires and their greenhouse gas emissions are THE problem.

I disagree.

Multi-millionaires who "lead" the big weapon systems manufacturers are THE problem when it comes to climate. Because the revolving door between U.S. government and the military-industrial complex is always spinning, and this ensures non-stop spending on war planes and bombs which both contribute massively to climate disaster. (And that's just the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg.)

I've been following this thread for years and compiling a collection of links I find especially useful. Groups like the Veterans for Peace Climate Crisis and Militarism Project and researchers like Dr. Neta Crawford continue to focus on the military aspect of the larger climate problem: wealthy nations cause the crisis while people living the Global South suffer the most dire impacts.

CEOBS researchers have taken on the task of monitoring military emissions by nation, reporting on this in a database we can all use.

Since U.S. military spending is so excessive compared with all other nations, it's not surprising that the Pentagon fears what the chart at the top of this blog post would look like if military emissions were included in the national total.

It used to be said that the first casualty of war is truth.

In the 21st century, the first casualty of war might be climate.

The Emperor's New Clothes Are Awfully Revealing

Not since the days when I helped plan satirical plays for a gravel pit in West Athens, Maine have I laughed so hard. The simultaneous meltdown of Twitter's ability to verify its high profile users and the resulting outburst of creative fun have been a welcome relief from the relentless bad news of the day: bait-and-switch on a few crumbs of student loan forgiveness, simultaneous CIA regime change operations aimed at Russia, China, and Iran, and cold weather approaching while hundreds of thousands in the U.S. are without homes.

The closest thing the U.S. empire has to an emperor is the SpaceX CEO, a man who inexplicably bought a highly successful social media platform in order to .. run it into the ground? It's likely he thought it would bend to his will because, hey, he's a billionaire and that's how things work. But it turns out that's not how free or even partially free speech works. 

In a shocking revelation that legitimacy cannot be purchased (who would have guessed?) the sale of the blue check mark quickly turned into a free for all where, as one wag put it, kids spent their lunch money to impersonate Fortune 500 companies. And this tanked their stocks!

Another thrilling example of an evil, bloodsucking corporation lampooned financially with humor:

Verification on sale for $7.99 a month quickly led to a hall of mirrors as accounts scrambled to claim to be who they said they were (or weren't, as the case may be).

Needless to say, the emperor himself came in for a lot of impersonation as did his once valuable platform.

Social media is a newish phenomenon, unlike building cars or even rocket ships. But one of its most well-established tenets is: if you're getting a service for free, then YOU are the product. Because the owners of the platform can sell access to you to their advertisers. Charging you to be the product exhibits the confusion of those who think anything can be monetized to their advantage.

Did I mention that while taking an ax to the free-content-from-famous-people model that built Twitter, the new owner also decided to fire 50% of the workers? The speed with which this was done violated labor laws in several states. 

And the new normal at Twitter may entail generating income by selling users' personal data in ways that are prohibited by law. But not to worry -- the emperor's personal lawyers assured his remaining employees that they would be safe from legal repercussions if they followed his orders.  I doubt that many of Twitter's remaining workers were dumb enough to fall for that. 

It takes a special kind of wealth and worldly success to engender the hubris to make these kinds of blunders. 

Did I mention that the emperor also tweeted the day before the midterms to vote Republican? But, like many of his tweets as supreme leader of the bird, he took that one back down.

Pessimists are predicting that, without the terminated software engineers to keep the bird aloft, it will lose more feathers each day until it eventually sinks to Earth. Notwithstanding the fact that many who were fired were offered their jobs back almost immediately, you won't be surprised to hear that many considered themselves well out of the chaos and declined. (A slew of  top executives were either fired or resigned, too.)

Free speech used to mean oration and publishing in the press. Then social media came along offering a ton of freedom and reach until the tech bros got cozy with government and began restricting the flow of information quietly, behind the scenes. The emperor's need to brag went against this tacit agreement about how things are done. He was supposedly good at making money but his new attire reveals his butt hanging out there, slowly twisting in the wind.

I'm old enough to know that most things come to an end no matter how much you love them. The In Spite of Life Players retired from the gravel pit to be seen no more. I still miss them, and I will miss Twitter. 

But, it was fun while it lasted.

One last joke before we go:

Mission Creep: Armistice Day To Veterans Day

The U.S. has always been an incredibly violent society. Founded on genocide of Native people (ongoing to this day) and slavery (ditto), what chance was there for us to not turn Armistice Day into Veterans Day? 

The survivors of the first industrialized war, one where even the wealthy sent their sons to be slaughtered, did not think the price of an entire generation of young men worth it. How many believed they were sending their beloveds off to stop barbarity in its tracks? How many knew that the fight had broken out over competition for the rich colonies of the rapidly failing Ottoman Empire?

As my friend Abby's grandmother said after returning home from organizing against incipient World War I, the whole thing was about Mosul Oil.

As an adult on 9/11, I watched my own country turn into a jingoistic herd of war mad flag wavers. 

Youngsters who remember nothing of that day know this: you dare not be called unpatriotic. Support the troops became a posture that no official hoping to be elected could afford to omit.

The droves of people who sat by while their military invaded Afghanistan were traumatized by seeing the twin towers burn again and again and again, with soon-to-be corpses sailing out of the windows.

Photo of airplane maintenance worker was edited by me to obscure a homophobic slur.

They'd woken up a bit by the war in Iraq. Millions bought the twin lies that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, and that he was a madman with weapons of mass destruction he aimed to use. But the people who oppose wars when a Republican is Commander-in-Chief came out in droves to object to the impending shock and awe unleashed on civilians in Bagdhad (and, later, Mosul).

By the time Obama was in office, continuing those wars and upping the ante by drone bombing civilians around the globe while his government admittedly "tortured some folks," satisfied Democrats had gone back to reading the New York Times and believing it. 

That satirical newspaper The Onion was consistently more fact-based than legacy media did not seem like a reason to give up their prestige. Educated, liberal, and peering myopically through a tiny peephole deemed to be "world news" was where they were comfortable.

In the same way that big money crept in and hollowed out organizations that had once challenged the powerful, alternative media was infected. Common Dreams, Democracy Now!, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The Intercept -- arguably once worthy of attention, now worse than useless. Worse because they hide their defense of oligarchs behind platitudes of either wokeness or limited investigations careful not to drill down far enough to see the levers of entrenched power at work. Many people are fooled by this strategy. The old are fooled by it because they value their comfort. And conformity for social animals is usually comfortable. The young are fooled by it because they want to belong and for their efforts to matter. 

What happens to the few who don't get fooled?

My ex once explained to me that historically the Ottoman Empire would send agents out into the provinces, e.g. Greece, where he was born, to find rebellious youth. Preteens or young teens with a penchant for kicking over the established order were evident living as a religious minorities under a repressive imperial government. These young men were lured into distant, luxurious jobs for life in the imperial service. The price: castration. 

A thousand NGOs now employ once idealistic young people to go through the motions of halting climate catastrophe, "saving democracy," or upholding civil rights. Entire careers are built on not achieving the stated goals.

The Ottomans thrashing in their imperial death throes unleashed the first genocide of the 20th century, marching a million Armenians to death in the Syrian desert.

The U.S. thrashing in its imperial death throes already has attempted genocide on its bloody hands. As its ability to control its vassal states and far-flung colonies unravels, it becomes increasingly dangerous (I know, hard to believe). But the nuclear weapons it claims others want to use in a first-strike are gleaming in their bays, and the bombers that could drop them are fanning out around the globe. 

Today, legacy media outlets will glorify the imperial forces, now expanded even to outer space as a "warfighting domain." Politicians will weep, embracing the mangled bodies of warriors. Little children will be paraded before their father's coffins, draped in flags.

And liberals will cling to their comfort here in the heart of the empire, unless of course the final bomb is dropped. Then they will emerge from the radioactive dust like hikabusha before them to testify to the need for an armistice that endures.

Tale Of Two Broken Accords: Oslo And Minsk

"Tens of thousands of Italians marched through Rome on Saturday calling for peace in Ukraine and urging Italy to stop sending weapons" © Stefano Ronchini / ipa-agency.ne/Stefano Ronchini / ipa-agency.net  Source: MSN

Many people understand that war is hell. That's why they clamor for negotiated settlements that move belligerents back from the battlefield and set them on a path to reconciliation.

The Oslo Accords established a two-state solution to Israel's violent occupation of Palestinian homelands and at the time was hailed as a major achievement.

Then came facts on the ground for the last several decades. 

It would by now be virtually impossible to create a State of Palestine that was not hopelessly Balkanized into tiny, unconnected territories. At the time of Oslo, many expressed doubt and believed that only a truly democratic one-state solution could work. (Full disclosure: I'm in that camp.)

The insanely belligerent and corrupt Israeli PM Netanyahu has won the recent elections and stands poised to bring even more violence and suffering to the long-occupied Palestinians.  And Israel is a nuclear weapons nation. With lots of nuclear threats and innuendoes being thrown around these days, it's important to keep that in mind.

So we can expect to see a continuation of Israel's attacks on Palestinians in blockaded Gaza

My grandparent’s and his brother’s land that provide for over 20 families was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes this morning in #Gaza pic.twitter.com/eeIAJxRkGl

— Asmaa AbuMezied (@AAbumezied) November 4, 2022

https://twitter.com/AAbumezied/status/1588449241743384576

in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank

Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) is responding to emerging critical health needs in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, resulting from escalating violence characterised by repeated Israeli military raids on Palestinian towns and cities, routine use of https://t.co/y13Gp1mqpA

— it is #Palestine, nothing else (@JamalKhanfer) November 4, 2022

 

https://twitter.com/JamalKhanfer/status/1588587107605532679

and Israel bombing Syria and Lebanon, other nations altogether.

The Minsk II agreement established a game plan for resolving civil war in Ukraine.

Tens of thousands of civilians and combatants had been killed by missile strikes and more hands-on violence from militias operating freely in the Donbas border region with Russia following a 2014 CIA-sponsored coup in Kyiv. Years later, Ukraine's President Zelensky was elected on a platform promising to implement Minsk and end the death toll. Then the neo-Nazis enabled by the U.S. and NATO got to him. I suspect he was threatened with assasination unless he signed on to his country serving as the killing grounds for proxy war to weaken Russia. 

One wonders why nations sign on to accords and then immediately show no intention of fulfilling them?

It could be a stalling tactic to temporarily reduce international pressure to de-escalate.

Or it could be a case where those who signed on are ousted either by coup or elections, and succeeded by those with a lust for war.

Or maybe diplomatic efforts like accords are doomed in the face of the profit motive provided by modern industrialized killing?

Workers hold the key to stopping wars no matter what the motives of those waging them. 

An international general strike would make wars literally impossible.

I pray we are seeing signs of this developing, especially in Europe where the economic impact of the war on Russia via Ukraine has been most intense. Certainly we are seeing signs of alarm from rulers enacting laws that actually criminalize gathering.

Giorgia Meloni's government establishes a new crime that includes a 6-year prison sentence if 50 people gather together, putting in danger safety or public health. Disguised as an anti-rave party rule, it aims to repress freedom, protests and dissent in today’s polarized Italy.

— Francesca Bria (@francesca_bria) November 1, 2022

https://twitter.com/francesca_bria/status/1587481003962015746

Okay, so don't gather. Stay inside and refuse to work helping the war machine grind on. Mutual aid could not only make this strategy survivable but also strengthen solidarity among the people. Build it on the foundation of a shared desire to not be burned to a crisp by wars escalated via nuclear weapons.

Alleged Peace Voter 2022 Campaign Endorses Warmongering Democratic Congresswoman Pingree

A peace advocacy organization that I used to be part of -- and that used to actually advocate for peace -- has endorsed Rep. Chellie Pingree for re-election. The organization explained in its November newsletter:

Peace Action Maine is a proud affiliate of Peace Action and supporter of their PeaceVoter2022 Campaign. Again, as in the past, PA has endorsed Rep. Pingree . Today PAM (a c4) announces: "Rep. Chellie Pingree is an experienced, thoughtful, and effective legislator who knows how to speak and act clearly and precisely on the issues facing our district and the nation as a whole. Among her colleagues in Congress, her track record on questions of war and peace, programs of social and economic uplift, and environmental protection is especially good. For those reasons, Peace Action Maine gladly supports her bid for re-election."

"Especially good" in this context means that Pingree:

* Signed the Progressive Caucus letter to President Biden suggesting negotiations with Russia commence immediately -- and then retracted it!

* Voted yes on every bill sending billions in weapons to Ukraine at U.S. taxpayer expense. Many of these weapons have gone to neo-Nazi miltias allied with the Ukranian government, and many have found their way from Ukraine onto the black market.

Source: https://justfacts.votesmart.org/candidate/key-votes/6586/chellie-pingree/89/foreign-aid

* Voted yes on recent gargantuan funding bills for the Pentagon and its other wars, including Space Force, and NSA spying programs.

Source: https://justfacts.votesmart.org/candidate/key-votes/6586/chellie-pingree/89/defense/

In what sense is this candidate a peace candidate?

She isn't. But she's a Democrat, and that's what matters to the millions who only oppose U.S. wars when a Republican is in the White House.

My photo of Maine peace lobbyists meeting with Rep. Chellie Pingree in Portland during her first term of office, 2009.

I've birddogged Pingree on her support for military spending for years. You can see some examples here and here.

My attempts to reach out to Peace Action Maine's leadership to engage on the topic of their support for Pingree and, previously, support for the U.S./NATO proxy war on Russia via Ukraine, have met with silence.

I'm going to be returning the two PeaceWorker awards I've received from Peace Action Maine in years gone by, most recently for writing this blog. 

It is embarrassing to be called a PeaceWorker alongside the likes of Chellie Pingree. 

And it is extremely dangerous to be so beholden to weapons manufacturers that you obediently go along with the party line ("No negotiations! More weapons!") as we teeter on the brink of a nuclear WW3.