How China got a U.S. senator to do its political bidding
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
A foreign country should not be allowed so much access. This kind of reminds me how in one of the Wikileak emails, Clinton removed a country from a list of human rights violators for a mere donation. China is far far worse than a small country and this is peanuts in the grand scheme of things. I sincerely don't understand why no one can publically reprimand China for turning into a dystopian dictatorship before our eyes. Xi orders complete video and cellphone surveillance, black bagging without trial, abolishes term limits, makes disappear any rival billionaire or elite, and no one says a darn thing. Instead, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerburg are in the front row clapping. Literally. Xi announces all this and they congratulate him and clap in the front row.
We take a lot of tech freedoms for granted.
I can't stop but wondering if there is a startup opportunity here. What if it was possible to create a market to buy and sell politicians which was more efficient? May be we can dress it up little better... How about buy and sell "political cause"? Unlimited money allowed for each auctioning! Each political cause can then have underlying actual politician that gets part of the proceeds via campaign donations but all parties get to remain anonymous. No need to debate gun laws. Who ever is able to beat auction gets their say.
To me it looks like US Congress is dirt cheap. [...] No
need to debate gun laws. Who ever is able to beat auction
gets their say.
A senator won't take a bribe that lets them buy campaign ads that get them 3000 votes if it requires them to take a position that loses them 4000 votes.
So it's cheap to bribe a politician to support some trivial matter that won't make the news, like not auditing the use of subsidised water for agriculture; but expensive to bribe a politician on matters voters will find out about and care about, like abortion and gun control.
This is part of what gives groups like the NRA their power; by keeping their members informed, they convert trivial, cheap-to-bribe issues into important, expensive-to-bribe issues.
Could you dig that up so we can see it?
The Politifact article states that it's false that Algeria was removed from the "terror watch list". That's not what the grandparent poster actually claimed - the GP is talking about human rights violations.
It IS true (the same politifact article even mentions this) that Algeria paid $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation and immediately got a lot more state department access to lobby on their human rights record.
Israel has enormous influence over the whole of congress.
http://original.antiwar.com/smith-grant/2017/07/17/aipac-sti...
Mearsheimer and Walt is still the big book on the subject:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Fore...
The US give Israel billions of dollars in foreign aid every year. Allows them to disgregard UN resolutions and prevents the recognition of Palestine.
Israel has nuclear weapons and is outside the Non proliferation treaty and yet the US goes crazy about other countries that try to get weapons.
Meanwhile AIPAC isn't even registered as something foreign.
This can be happily discussed online and in every non US country it amazes people how a tiny country like Israel can get the US to support them no matter what they do.
Now even Jerusalem is recognized as the capital of Israel, by one country in the whole world.
No, Israel has enormous support by Americans so it gets a lot of support by Congress. No surprises there, that is how a democracy should function.
> The US give Israel billions of dollars in foreign aid every year.
Because they are a democratic ally with a stable government in a highly volatile region. Of course, there can be legitimate debate if that level of funding is a good idea, but it is entirely within reason. Additionally, much of the funding was in exchange for repeated concessions from Israel in peace talks which were always rebuffed and rejected by Palestinian leadership.
> Allows them to disgregard UN resolutions and prevents the recognition of Palestine.
...by which they are uniquely singled out and targeted by countries with tremendous human rights violations such as Syria, Iran, etc.
> Israel has nuclear weapons and is outside the Non proliferation treaty and yet the US goes crazy about other countries that try to get weapons.
Because Israel is a stable democracy under existential threat by it's neighbors, as opposed to, say, Iran or North Korea which are destabilizers.
> Meanwhile AIPAC isn't even registered as something foreign.
Because it isn't. AIPAC is made up of and supported by American citizens. And this is where these arguments begin to take an undertone of antisemitism. The assumption that AIPAC is a foreign organization implies that it's members (primarily Jews) are foreign by virtue of being Jewish.
> Now even Jerusalem is recognized as the capital of Israel, by one country in the whole world.
Because it is their capital. America recognizes Seoul as capital of South Korea and Pyongyang as capital of North Korea, does it not?
Jews may be small in number but I would bet dollars to Latka’s that they vote.
If Tech issues brought people out to vote like guns or Israel I bet we would have more engineers in Congress.
At the time the US insisted on carrying out inspections of the Negev facility to ensure that weapons were not being developed. In the event they eventually stopped as they felt that their inspections were not particularly effective.
I hope it's seen as no less controversial today!
Do you expect a Josh Rogin to write a critical article on israel? Do you really expect washington post to publish negative articles on israel?
The editor of washingtonpost is martin baron, a child of israeli immigrants to the US.
The guy who wrote the op-ed and the editor both have ties to israel. What are the chances of a negative article regarding israel?
Uh, the Israeli news media is even more dominated by Jewish owners, investors, editors, and journalists (and caters to a more Jewish audience), and they have no problem ciriticizing the Israeli government from all imaginable sides.
On the opposite, the fact that criticism towards Israeli policies is much more pronounced and direct inside Israeli media than it is in the media of a completely independent country, is a clear sign that the debate is artificially stifled.
But not support for the claims that the reason is Jewish actors in media rather than, say, a combination of a broad consensus on US geopolitical interests and widespread and deep bias against Arabs and Muslims in the US.
While criticism of Israel is muted in the US press, it isn't inversely correlated, AFAICT, with outlets that have Jewish investors, Jewish editors, or even with the particular piece being written by a Jewish journalist/columnist.
Unless you meant something else, just more garbage.
This is just flat out wrong. There was a rumor going around that a donation got Algeria taken off of a list of state sponsors of terror.
The problem is that it was never on that list in the first place.
"The main functions of diplomats are: representation and protection of the interests and nationals of the sending state; initiation and facilitation of strategic agreements; treaties and conventions; promotion of information; trade and commerce; technology" [1]
Why are we permitting lobbyists to usurp this role?
Why do we allow lobbying to exist at all? Because politicians make the laws, and lobbyists enrich them. If someone said "hey, would you like to have other people give you free gifts every day, or would you like to make that illegal?" - what is your response going to be?
Lobbying will literally be the downfall of our democracy. Here's hoping other countries learn from that brutal mistake.
Good example, Max Baucus shorted various financial companies for petty/risky wins as he was helping construct the 2008 bailout. He then later became the ambassador to China :(
> Financial markets were experiencing the greatest volatility on record. Trillions of dollars in stock profits were being washed away. But for Bachus it was different. According to his financial disclosure statements, Bachus netted as much as $50,000 in capital gains by aggressively playing the market during this volatile period. And he netted tens of thousands more in early 2009, when financial reforms were put in place. What makes these results impressive is the fact that options trading is extremely risky. There is a rule of thumb in the financial industry that 75% of options are worthless when it comes time to redeem them, and that 80% of options traders lose money.
http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/excerpt-peter-schweizers-bo...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/congress-insiders-above-the-law...
Perhaps, but there was no indication of corruption in the article.
Nations should never be able to do this, rise in prominence completely unobjected. You see examples of this throughout history, whenever one nation starts to expand its power and influence, another nation or group of nations tends to deploy power to check the rise.
Accession of new geopolitical powers is therefore an extremely rare event, a complete failure of the nation's rivals to provide an adequate check. Those checks go all the way to declaration of war if it becomes necessary.
We're seeing that with China, and no one is quite sure why. Russia is falling in line with Chinese interests, the US is just keeping mum, in the same way Europe kept mum for decades while the US rose in prominence.
My theory has to do with nuclear weapons making the 'buck-stops-here' solution politically infeasible. Nuclear weapons didn't meaningfully change conventional warfare, but it threw a monkey wrench into international diplomacy, creating a situation in which China can push relentlessly hard to rise without a corresponding check.
The news paints an exaggeration of reality as we know it.
- The US allowed China into the WTO, urged by globalist corporations who thought it would be massively to their benefit. That was the spark that sent their economy skyrocketing. Their economy had been growing at a healthy clip, however immediately after joining the WTO it doubled in size in just five years from $1.4t to $2.8t. It is still widely believed, perhaps naively hoped for, by major US corporations and financial interests that China can be a growth opportunity for investment and trade. That keeps the criticism more subdued than it otherwise would have been (and that appears to be gradually fading, as it becomes obvious China is running an almost strictly mercantilist economic nationalism strategy).
- China repaid some of the trade imbalance, which provided them with vast piles of dollars, by buying up a small chunk of US debt. China recognized it as being in their self-interest, just as it was with Japan, providing some additional influence. That bought them a small amount of political cover.
- China has largely stayed out of several prominent spheres of US military dominace, including in the Americas, the Middle East and Europe. That may change of course, as China has begun pushing its military outwards. [1]
- The US has a slightly unusual liking of China, which goes back a century or more. The US protected China from being nuked by Russia in 1969 [2]. The US destroyed the Empire of Japan and fought side by side with the Chinese to push the Japanese out of mainland Asia. The US was primary in working with China to open its economy, including work done by politicians like Nixon / Kissinger, and US companies / investors. The US is among the few global powers of the last 500 years that didn't seek to invade, conquer or humiliate China, but instead traded massively with them and invested massively into them (despite the fact that they were hard Communists and the US Capitalist). There's some kind of kinship (despite the occasional adversarial tones) between the two nations, the US maybe sees some of itself in China's rise. On the economic side there was actually less hysteria in the US about China's rise to global power than there was with Japan during the 1970s and 1980s (with Japan actually overtaking the US GDP per capita figures by 1987), despite China's climb being far more dramatic.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/07/china-djibo...
[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7720461...
In the first place, politics is more often the driver of economics than the other way around. No way would American political leaders sacrifice the good of the nation for the good of individual corporations. To allow China to do this literally means they're sleeping at the wheel. Americans have always been fiercely America-first, up to and well beyond the point of being willing to go to war over it.
This is, quite literally, the one job that a lot of people in government have, to come up with foreign policy strategies and assess the situation and recommend policy to political leadership. Those people are still there, doing their jobs, assessing and recommending. Yet we still have not started pursuing an effective strategy for containing China. Why?
Your other theme, that Americans just somehow like China, doesn't really hold water either. Americans had a similar like for Russians, but that didn't stop us from fighting a decades-long proxy war with them.
American leaders just seem legitimately confused over the direction the nation should be going, allowing China to fill a leadership void. It almost seems like we're just tired of global hegemony.
- The US does use subversion to ferment political instability, more or less using the same channels it did to overthrow nationalist governments around the world like Chile, Guatemala, Iran etc. The CIA trained the previous Tibetan regimes' aristocrats in Colorado and paradropped them back in China for a failed guerrilla rebellion Bay of Pigs style. - The CIA/NED actively throws millions at insurrections in China such as in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Tibet etc. They're not hiding it in their website either. - The US may be less worried about China to start with since US military bases and its geopolitical allies surrounds China in every which possible (or relevant) way. China more or less does maritime trading at US's discretion. - Arguably, Nixon/US didn't exactly care about China more or less the same way the US didn't care about South Vietnamese market economy. Nixon personally just wanted to score a leverage on USSR. [https://books.google.com/books/about/Nixon_in_China.html?id=...] - US imperialism in China in the 19th century was fairly standard
Why we are not threatening China at the moment is a complete mystery.
Political leaders will talk shit about china while more powerful big businesses are essentially reliant on trade with china. There is nothing to keep in check because nobody wants to keep china in check.
Another thing is you seem to imply that they need to be kept in check. Centralized powers are better at keeping themselves in check then a decentralized power. No other powerful country in the world right now can even attempt to implement population control the way China did it. If the US becomes an environmental apocalypse in the future its because they couldn't take drastic measures the same way China did with their one child policy. I am aware that there were unintended consequences of the one child policy but i am referring to the underlying motives and capability of carrying out such policies, something that is impossible for the US to do. If anything the US is the runaway power that needs to be kept in check.
How do you define the good of the country? Only against the interests of other countries. What's in the best interests of the US is against the interests of China. That's what this stuff means. And it's a strong enough model to have prevailed for over a thousand years. Foreign policy experts are all over themselves right now wondering what the hell is going on and nobody really has a good answer.
The United States has historically been the global hegemony that dictates how much other nations can get away with. That's something that usually sinks into the minds of the entire population and infuses them with the willingness and desire to fight, not just to safeguard that status, but also to punish insults to that status, even if they're just perceived.
The EU is not an insult to American status. Neither is Russia, Africa, or South America. China is. They're creating global status for themselves that the US has historically held to be within it's purview. It's creating alternatives for countless small nations other than acceding to American dominance.
American politicians are more than capable of setting the economic agenda. They've done this in the past. Why are they not doing this now, in response to geopolitical imperative that's held for every single other nation in the same position has for as long as we can study dominant nations for? China should have expected the American inquisition. The inquisition never came. So they get bolder and bolder. This is far beyond business. This is pride.
America got to rise because the powers in Europe were too busy infighting to recognize the growing nation. Once the world wars concluded, they got their act together and are acting as a bloc to balance the US. The world learned to not ignore rising powers just because they're thousands of miles away.
Look, the US is willing to check North Korea, which serves no real threat to anything but perceived American interests. Yet we're willing to make national news every little thing Kim Jong-Un does, and seriously rattle our sabers against him. Why is North Korea on our radar, but not China?
It's got nothing to do with business. This is pure politics. The only entity capable of drumming up the resources to check China is us, and we're not doing it. By all analyses that have served us well for a thousand years, we're not doing it. Are we just waking up, just now getting ready to perceive the threat? Or is there something else going on? Does America just not care about the position in the world that previous generations spent their entire lives building?
>Why is North Korea on our radar, but not China?
This one is kind of obvious. America and N. Korea aren't business partners also N. Korea acts like a unpredictable child with nuclear weapons, China does not.
If by business you mean "imposing onerous terms on other people, up to and including literal slavery," I'd agree. The unfairness of the terms is what makes the superpower. Without the unfairness, then balance can be maintained. Superpowers do business on their terms, not anyone else's.
It takes national pride to consistently do the work to maintain a competitive advantage. You see the same thing in business with trying to maintain an edge. It's not something you can do using your normal effort. You have to work smart and hard.
> America and N. Korea aren't business partners
America and N. Korea could be business partners. The only thing that keeps this from happening is American obstinacy. North Korea would happily do business with the US. In fact, the whole reason for North Korea's nuclear brinkmanship is precisely because we have slapped onerous sanctions on them and refuse to allow anyone else but China to trade with them. There are dozens of nuclear-capable nations out there, more popping up by the decade. We don't treat Pakistan like we do N. Korea. Opening up the spigots of American and global trade will turn North Korea into South Korea in just a few decades. But we're instead applying containment strategies to them like they killed our dog or something. North Korea doesn't really need to be contained. They're just not powerful enough.
China does. This is what we should be doing with China, perhaps in addition to North Korea, but not in spite of. We should be pushing back much more rigorously in the South China Sea, keeping our relations with small nations in China's periphery open instead of stagnating, pushing hard for our trade agenda instead of allowing China's to take lead.
But we're not even doing those basic steps.
Look I'm not even offering a moral argument here. I've been using 'should' in the "balls should roll downhill." We should be doing it, not we ought to be. What I'm saying is that this is how foreign policy is done. Has been done, for a thousand years. I'm not saying we ought to be starting an arms race with China. I'm saying that by all rights, by all historical analyses, China looks like a rival, not like a partner. But we're not treating her like one, and just allowing her to accede to the world stage completely unchallenged.
Good thing? Bad thing? That's up to history to decide. What's not is the fact that this is completely unprecedented.
>America and N. Korea could be business partners.
Nuclear weapons testing is the entire reason why they are banned as business partners. It needs to be contained because it's a trump card that a relatively backwards country can use to level the playing field of war.
Additionally, even before the trade sanctions were enabled (2006) the weak North Korean economy would make the country a pitiful and basically non-relevant business partner to the US. China, as N. Koreas' lone trade partner, has the GDP to lift N. Korea up to a relatively prosperous nation but that hasn't happened due to the internal issues with the N. Korean economy itself.
>Look I'm not even offering a moral argument here. I've been using 'should' in the "balls should roll downhill." We should be doing it, not we ought to be. What I'm saying is that this is how foreign policy is done. Has been done, for a thousand years. I'm not saying we ought to be starting an arms race with China. I'm saying that by all rights, by all historical analyses, China looks like a rival, not like a partner. But we're not treating her like one, and just allowing her to accede to the world stage completely unchallenged.
China is a rival politically. But globalization today has made that rivalry all but a front to the true nature of the US and China relationship. US and China are economic partners and rivals in the olympic games and comparing GDP numbers.
The most powerful entities in the united states are not politically elected leaders. The most powerful entities are for profit corporations. Essentially just massive conglomerates of individuals grouped together into a massive entity to work together in business. When you group people together in such a way, an interesting thing happens, the individual morals and desires and "National Pride" of a person get lost in the aggregation of people and what you get is an entity that acts like a psychopathic person on an insane quest to do anything for profit.
Big businesses or aka corporations are the driving forces and most powerful individuals in the world today. It is the desires of these corporations that largely drive economic policies and foreign affairs.
When you look at motive, when you examine the rationale behind why a country does one thing instead of another thing, you have to incorporate Big business into the psychology of your analysis. It looks like your analysis doesn't include this as a factor. If you did, it'd be obvious why the US isn't challenging china.
Also Russia, Ukraine, Saudi.
Our current POTUS seems will not be influenced by China.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/chin...
Who knew that even Australia, both the premier privately AND the government bribed the US president ?
I wonder what they pay for ...
http://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/australian-economy/au...
Ukranian billionaires: (who, by the way definitely did not earn his wealth. In a way, this guy got it from Putin, or at least certainly approved by Putin)
http://prn.fm/clinton-foundations-deep-financial-ties-to-ukr...
Norway's government:
https://www.thelocal.no/20160704/norways-funding-of-clinton-...
Irish "businessman" (who got his wealth from government monopolies, I might add)
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/denis-o-brien-and-d...
Googling around you find many others, like the beheader-in-chief, the king of Saudi Arabia. Chinese politicians. More Russian oligarchs. Etc.
And here is what they paid for:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/emails-foundation-resource...
And VERY well paid jobs for the extended family:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/8561/7-things-you-need-know-a...
An example of thier projects an extremely expensive "public" library garden, which comes with a "private residence" and a mini-golf course. The Clintons stay there "on an off", according to the NY Post. (needless to say, most of it was financed, not even by the Clinton foundation itself but by local government)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hrCZbMUYzE
https://nypost.com/2016/10/02/bill-clintons-executive-suite-...
No worries, the Bushes have something similar, and Obama is constructing his version.
Perhaps you have sources that aren't part of an insane right-wing echo chamber? Oh wait, no, of course you don't, or you would have posted them. Must be some of that Deep State infecting the MSM (am I doing this "right")?
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/25/arts/design/an-earnest-bui...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2014-10-17/bill-clin...
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2001/mar/12/20010312-02...
http://www.greenroofs.com/projects/pview.php?id=190
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11...
https://www.npr.org/2017/03/01/517840118/arkansas-weighs-whe...
But, in this case, if it were put to a vote, probably the senator's constituents in Montana would want him to do exactly what he's doing?
“I want to rent this apartment but I don’t use the oven so I dont want to pay for that portion.”
“I want a whopper from BK on a bun from Mickey D’s, And I only want to pay for one burger with that combination.”
“I want iOS on my new Galaxy.”
I’m sorry for mocking you but I find your stipulation for paying for journalistic content absurd. However, this is not the first time I’ve heard similar conditions requested for things that are not the speaker’s to place conditions on. I’m wondering where this line of thinking comes from. I seem to hear it from the younger generation (20s/early 30s). (I’m not tying to be purposefully ageist or overgeneralize.)
Just like I don't buy lucky charms because I don't like all the things in there. That doesn't mean I think they're depriving me of something to which I'm entitled. It just means they're not getting my money.
2) News organizations have a long history of generating revenue by advertisement, and this is especially the case for many highly trafficked websites.
3) The owners of the newspaper benefit from a wider reach, because it allows them to better influence the public.
4) News websites, in many cases, either used to be free or still are.
5) The price of a full subscription may not be fair for someone who only wants to be able to read the occasional article linked from HN/reddit/friends.
It is ridiculous to think that beef export, in particular, should be held hostage to concerns about injustice in Tibet while the rest of the economy happily bubbles along doing billions and billions in business with China. If WaPo dislikes Montana beef people so much, why not get them kicked off the federal lands they destroy while paying pennies to rent? Ranchers like me who have to actually pay for the land their cattle graze, could support that.
Hah!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_China
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/china...
It is pretty well documented what China is doing to Tibet, its people, its natural resources and its culture. Building roads and trains are NOT for Tibetan people. They are there to enable mass migration, putting out massive military infrastructures and shuttle the natural resources out of Tibet. Britain also built such infrastructure in its colonies for exact same reasons.
China has completely swamped Tibet with overflow of Chinese people who look down on native Tibetans, take away all well paying jobs and positions of power and force native populations to lose their own culture and adopt Chinese culture instead. There is virtually no differences between British colonization and Chinese occupation of Tibet. Thanks to toothless world leadership, Chinese economy and little importance of Tibet as country, all these is being ignored and accepted. This is all documented in tremendous details. How can you deny this? Are you in China and unable to access all these material?
Did you knew that China does not allow foreigners to go to Tibet unless they get "special permit"? And you know who would never get "special permit"? Journalists! They don't even want others to know how bad things are anymore like in North Korea. Just munch on that fact for a second.
> virtually no differences between British colonization and Chinese occupation of Tibet.
There is one huge difference. The British already successfully got away with it. Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada are the resulting trophies. Almost got South Africa too.