AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

BRUCE LERRO—Like you, we think that an economy should produce real goods and services. But the kind of capitalism that has caused the crisis is not about provisioning goods and services. These days, capitalists spend most of their time making profits on stocks, bonds and derivatives, with little physical production of anything. Yet mainstream economists make no distinction between “finance” capital and profits made on production.

JEFF J. BROWN—For most of us, likely including Meng, there is a huge difference in perception between dealing with immigration (CBSA) and police (RCMP) officers. Immigration greets us at the airport and stamps our passports, asking mostly innocuous questions about our visits.

Yet, not realized by most of us, immigration can serve court ordered arrests. Thus, why did the RCMP officers, who were standing right there, not arrest Meng directly? I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count. It was likely to give Meng the impression that she only had a problem with her Canadian paperwork, since she had  been a legal resident of Vancouver since 2001, not that she was being set up for extradition to the USA on criminal charges.

Notice in the above timeline, CBSA held and questioned Meng for 2.5 hours (11:45 a.m. – 2:15 p.m.), where,

Meng is (again interviewed by an agent for 14 minutes and is) questioned about her role with Huawei. During this time Meng is compelled to hand over the passcodes to her electronic devices.

This timeline strongly suggests an illegal sting operation to get Meng to innocently spill the beans to immigration about her case and Huawei, give up all her passwords to the electronic devices that CBSA took and later turned        over to RCMP, not to mention the devices of Meng’s still anonymous travel companion from Hong Kong. 

MoA—Tomorrow a new trade agreement between 15 Asian states will be signed. It will soon be seen as a milestone in the global economic history. But only very few ‘western’ media have taken note of it or of the huge consequences the new agreement will have. The agreement is also a huge victory for China over U.S. hegemony in Asia:

MoA—Four years after signing the now-infamous “Never Trump” letter condemning then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as a danger to America, retiring diplomat Jim Jeffrey is recommending that the incoming Biden administration stick with Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East. But even as he praises the president’s support of what he describes as a successful “realpolitik” approach to the region, he acknowledges that his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria. “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said in an interview. The actual number of troops in northeast Syria is “a lot more than” the two hundred troops Trump agreed to leave there in 2019.

Joe Biden is not likely to lift the blatantly illegal US siege of Venezuela, says Leo Flores on The Grayzone. In fact, his imperialist posture toward Caracas may signify a worsening f tensions between the two countries and their allies. In this episode, Red Lines host Anya Parampil speaks with Leo Flores, the Latin American Campaign Coordinator for CODEPINK, about what the election of Joe Biden will mean for US Venezuela policy. They also discuss Venezuela’s upcoming parliamentary elections and the fractured state of the country’s opposition.