The War on Consciousness: Manufacturing Stupidity

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Eric Arnow
BUMBLEBUDDHIST.COM
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Diplomacy for Dummies

Recently, a stark example of the war on consciousness in the West was on full display:

https://www.rt.com/russia/592298-polyansky-western-diplomacy-primitive/

Russians have had to dumb down their speeches at the UN so other countries can understand them, deputy representative Dmitry Polyansky has said

I don’t know what media you consume for your news, but the recent press conference by President Joe Biden, where he refers to President El-Sisi as the president of Mexico comes to mind. Mexico is on the US border. President El Sisi is the current leader of Egypt, which is what…5000 miles away from the US East Coast.

Well, we can sort of excuse Mr. Biden, who is now an octogenarian for not being as sharp as a tack. Although I regularly read The Greanville Post, by editor Patrice Greanville. (He's 84).

Or watch interviews with former CIA analyst, Ray McGovern, who participated in USA/USSR arms control negotiations 50 years ago.

Seems like, some people become very wise as they get older, and some people get dumber….I mean an Arab leader coming from Mexico???

Then, we can look to the chief architects of US foreign policy such as Secretary of State, Tony Blinken. As an arch Russophobe, cites his stepfather who was saved from a Nazi concentration camp by the US. But it seems that Blinken has a selective or defective memory:

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-tony-blinken-conveniently-left-out-his-family%E2%80%99s-story-174288

Blinken told his stepfather’s story as a tale of one-sided U.S. beneficence, but Samuel Pisar remembers it differently: “I was saved by the Battle of Stalingrad, which was the turning point of the war, and the Red Army offensive,” he said in a 2010 interview with Russian media outlet RIA Novosti. “For me, during the Second World War, Russia was a savior. I consider my saviors to be the Russian and American armies. You can criticize Stalin, the Gulag, and other things that happened in Russia from 1920 to 1930, but the heroism, sacrifice, and victory of Russia in the war against Fascism cannot be questioned. It’s sacred.”

How the US Consciousness Became Corrupted and Degenerate

Krishramurti on the Crisis in Consciousness 

What the world is now with all the misery conflict destructive brutality aggression and so on..man he still as he was still brutal violent aggressive acquisitive competitive and he is built a society along these lines. ..what we are trying you know all these discussions and talks here…is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the Mind, not accept things as they are but to understand it to go into it to examine it give your heart and your mind with everybody think that you have to find out a way of living differently

My Dinner with Andre –a totalitarian system based on money, with people creating their own prison. 

‘I mean are we just like bored spoiled children who’ve just been lying in the bathtub all day just playing with their plastic duck and now they’re just thinking well what can I do?

Okay yes we’re bored we’re all bored now but has it ever occurred to you that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating  unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks and it’s not just a question of individual survival but that somebody who’s bored is asleep and somebody who’s asleep will not say no.

See I keep meeting these people I mean uh just a few days ago I met this man whom I greatly admire he’s a Swedish physicist Gustav bjor Strand and he told me that he no longer watches television he doesn’t read newspapers and he doesn’t read magazines he’s completely cut them out of his life because he really does feel the we’re living in some kind of orwellian nightmare now and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot…

When I was at Findhorn I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted his life to saving trees. He just got back from Washington lobbying to save the Redwoods he’s 84 years old he always travels with a Backpackers he never knows where he’s going to be tomorrow and when I met him at Findhorn he said to me, ‘where are you from’.

And I said New York. He said ‘ah New York yes  that’s a very interesting place do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave but never do and I said oh yes and he said why do you think they don’t leave I gave him different banal theories. He said, ‘Oh I don’t think it’s that way at all, I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves and the inmates are the guards and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built.

‘They’ve built their own prison and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners and as a result they no longer have having been lobotomized the capacity to leave leave the prison they’ve made or to even see it as a prison.’

 

Examples of Brazen Contempt for the Public Consciousness  

If You Believe the Government, ‘You’re Stupid’

December 18, 2013

Americans are taught the myth that their democracy is safeguarded by an independent press. But the government and other powerful entities have long mastered the art of manipulating the major media, even to the point of bluntly telling reporters the facts of life, as Jon Schwarz recalls.

By Jon Schwarz

Everyone who watched John Miller’s “60 Minutes” segment on the NSA should follow it up with this story involving Morley Safer, who, at 82 years old, is still a correspondent at “60 Minutes”:

In August, 1965 Safer appeared in what became one of most famous TV segments of the Vietnam War, showing U.S. troops setting fire to all the huts in a Vietnamese village with Zippo lighters and flamethrowers.

Longtime CBS News correspondent Morley Safer.

Longtime CBS News correspondent Morley Safer.

A year later in 1966, Safer wrote an article about what he’d seen firsthand during a visit to Vietnam by Arthur Sylvester, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs (i.e., the head of Pentagon PR). Sylvester met with reporters for U.S. news outlets at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon:

There was general opening banter, which Sylvester quickly brushed aside. He seemed anxious to take a stand, to say something that would jar us. He said:

“I can’t understand how you fellows can write what you do while American boys are dying out here,” he began. Then he went on to the effect that American correspondents had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good.

A network television correspondent said, “Surely, Arthur, you don’t expect the American press to be the handmaidens of government.”

“That’s exactly what I expect,” came the reply.

An agency man raised the problem that had preoccupied Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and Barry Zorthian [a press officer based in Vietnam], about the credibility of American officials. Responded the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs:

“Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that?, stupid.”

One of the most respected of all the newsmen in Vietnam,a veteran of World War II, the Indochina War and Korea, suggested that Sylvester was being deliberately provocative. Sylvester replied:

“Look, I don’t even have to talk to you people. I know how to deal with you through your editors and publishers back in the States.”

At this point, the Hon. Arthur Sylvester put his thumbs in his ears, bulged his eyes, stuck out his tongue and wiggled his fingers. [For the full article by Safer, see below.]

There are several significant aspects to this:

— A top U.S. official was honest enough to tell reporters: look, we lie to you constantly and you’re a moron if you believe anything we say. He also honestly expressed his total contempt for them and intention to manipulate news coverage by dealing directly with their management and employers.

Moreover, Sylvester (who before going to work for the Pentagon had been the Washington correspondent for the Newark News) put his beliefs into practice at key moments of history. He lied about what the U.S. knew about Soviet missiles in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and personally told the key lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident (listen to him here).

And word was passed to Safer’s superiors at CBS that “Unless you get Safer out of there, he’s liable to end up with a bullet in his back.”

This is such important information about how politics and the media work that it should be taught to everyone in second grade. It’s not.

— Even if regular people don’t know this story, you’d expect it to be famous within the media, and particularly famous at “60 Minutes.” You might even imagine that “If you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid” would be spray-painted on the walls of the “60 Minutes” offices. But if the performance of John Miller and his producers on the NSA segment is anything to go by, that is not the case.

It’s hard to imagine what more the U.S. government could do to get reporters to distrust it, and all for naught. John Miller likely has an office feet away from someone who’s been told by a top U.S. official that reporters are morons if they believe anything top U.S. officials say. Miller’s response? Believe everything top U.S. officials say. (Of course, given that Miller is recreating Sylvester’s career path, it may also simply be that he agrees with Sylvester on the necessity of the press being handmaidens of government.)

— Even if reporters have forgotten this story, you’d expect that it would be Exhibit A for left-wing media critics and repeated so often that it would be common knowledge in those limited circles. Yet the forces of forgetting in the U.S. are so powerful that I’d never encountered it, and I’m probably one of America’s top 25 consumers of left-wing media criticism.

I can’t find any references to it by Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Norman Solomon, Jeff Cohen, Robert Parry, Robert McChesney or Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. (William Blum does tell part of what happened in his book Killing Hope, and the key sentence appears
in some online collections of quotes about the media.)

To make it even more surprising, Safer’s story was well-known enough at the time that Indiana’s anti-war Senator Vance Hartke referred to it on the Senate floor as “the now famous article.” And references to it sometimes appeared in books about Vietnam during the late Sixties and early Seventies. But after that it evaporated.

So if something this significant can disappear from history, truly only god knows what else has been thrown down the memory hole. To try to pull it back, I’m putting the entire text of the article online for the first time below, and adding the gist to Safer’s Wikipedia page.

I’m also going to try to get John Miller to answer a straightforward question: has Morley Safer ever told him this story?

Jon Schwarz is editor of MichaelMoore.com and was research producer for ‘Capitalism: A Love Story.’ He’s also contributed to the New Yorker, New York Times, Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Slate, Saturday Night Live and NPR. [Reprinted with the author’s permission.]

Click here for an image of the article as it appeared in the Southern Illinoisan on Sept. 1, 1966.

‘Look, If You Think Any American Official Is Going to Tell You the Truth, Then You’re Stupid’

By Morley Safer
Of the Columbia Broadcasting System

There has been no war quite like it. Never have so many words been churned out, never has so much l6-mm film been exposed. And never has the reporting of a story been so much a part of the story itself.

This has been true whether you are reporting television’s first war, as I have been, or for one of the print media. Washington has been critical of American newsmen in Saigon almost continuously since 1961. That criticism has manifested itself in a number of ways,from the cancellation of newspaper subscriptions to orders to put certain correspondents on ice to downright threat.

As a friend of mine puts It, “The brass wants you to get on the team.”

To the brass, getting on the team means simply giving the United States government line in little more than handout. It means accepting what you are told without question. At times it means turning your back on facts.

I know of few reporters in Viet Nam who have “gotten on the team.” The fact is, the American people are getting an accurate picture of the war in spite of attempts by various officials,mostly in Washington,to present the facts in a different way. That is why certain correspondents have been vilified, privately and publicly.

By late winter of 1964-1965 the war was clearly becoming an American war. And with it came an American responsibility for providing and reporting facts. American officials thus were able to deal directly with reporters. The formality of “checking it out with the Vietnamese” ceased to be relevant.

In Washington the burden of responsibility of giving, controlling and managing the war news from Viet Nam fell to,and remains with,one man: Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs.

By early summer of 1965 the first set of ground rules had been laid down for reporting battles and casualties. There was no censorship but a very loose kind of honor system that put the responsibility for not breaking security on the shoulders of correspondents. The rules were vague and were therefore continually broken.

For military and civilian officials in Viet Nam there was another set of rules,rather another honor system that was not so much laid down as implied. “A policy of total candor” is a phrase used by Barry Zorthian, minister-counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Zorthian is what Time calls “the information czar” in Viet Nam.

The breaking of the vague ground rules was something that annoyed everyone. Correspondents were rocketed by their editors, and the military in Viet Nam felt that Allied lives were being endangered. So in midsummer, when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara came to Saigon and brought Sylvester with him, we all looked forward to the formulation of a clear-cut policy. Sylvester was to meet the press in an informal session to discuss mutual problems. The meeting was to take the vagueness out of the ground rules.

The Sylvester meeting was surely one of the most disheartening meetings between reporters and a news manager ever held.

It was a sticky July evening. Inside Zorthian’s villa it was cool. But Zorthian was less relaxed than usual. He was anxious for Sylvester to get an idea of the mood of the news corps. There had been some annoying moments in previous weeks that had directly involved Sylvester’s own office. In the first B-52 raids, Pentgaon releases were in direct contradiction to what had actually happened on the ground in Viet Nam.

There was general opening banter, which Sylvester quickly brushed aside. He seemed anxious to take a stand,to say something that would jar us. He said:

“I can’t understand how you fellows can write what you do while American boys are dying out here,” he began. Then he went on to the effect that American correspondents had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good.

A network television correspondent said, “Surely, Arthur, you don’t expect the American press to be the handmaidens of government.”

“That’s exactly what I expect,” came the reply.

An agency man raised the problem that had preoccupied Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and Barry Zorthian,about the credibility of American officials. Responded the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs:

“Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that?,stupid.”

One of the most respected of all the newsmen in Vietnam,a veteran of World War II, the Indochina War and Korea,suggested that Sylvester was being deliberately provocative. Sylvester replied:

“Look, I don’t even have to talk to you people. I know how to deal with you through your editors and publishers back in the States.”

At this point, the Hon. Arthur Sylvester put his thumbs in his ears, bulged his eyes, stuck out his tongue and wiggled his fingers.

A correspondent for one of the New York papers began a question. He never got beyond the first few words. Sylvester interrupted:

“Aw, come on, What does someone in New York care about the war in Viet Nam?”

We got down to immediate practical matters,the problems of communication, access to military planes, getting out to battles.

“Do you guys want to be spoon-fed? Why don’t you get out and cover the war?”

It was a jarring and insulting remark. Most of the people in that room has spent as much time on actual operations as most GI’s.

The relationship between reporters and public information officers in Saigon, or the other hand, has been a good, healthy one. The relationship in the field is better, and in dealing with the men who fight the war it is very good indeed.

ABOUT THE ARTICLE

Arthur Sylvester, assistant secretary of defense in charge of public affairs, said Wednesday that no government official should lie when giving out information about the country.

He said it was all right to withhold information to safeguard the country. He was testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This article is one correspondent’s report of Sylvester’s statement about truth in public affairs one year ago.

THIS article is excerpted from “Dateline 1966: Covering War,” a publication of the Overseas Press Club of America.

Post Views: 1,256

https://consortiumnews.com/2013/12/18/if-you-believe-the-goverment-youre-stupid/

From the book The Game of Death, by Albert E Kahn and Michael Sayer

Deliberately dumbing down the population starting with public education

III. WAR ON THE MIND

BY ALBERT E KAHN

Chapter 3 from The Game of Death

IN THE early summer of 1949 an extraordinary document, which bode portentous changes in the lives of countless young Americans, was published in the United States. Entitled American Education and International Tensions and printed in the form of a 54-page booklet, the document consisted of a report issued under the auspices of the National Education Association, the largest and most influential educational body in the country.

The report advanced the startling thesis that the time had come to revamp completely the traditional function of the nation’s schools as institutions of objective instruction and free inquiry, and to convert them into agencies of political indoctrination and instruments for producing un-questioning adherence to the official policies of the U. S. Government. (And its semi-official doctrine, capitalism—Ed).

CIA and the role of manipulating culture

https://www.thecollector.com/abstract-expressionism-waging-a-cultural-cold-war-2/

The Cold War was very ideologically charged: it was a battle between opposing political systems. It is therefore only natural that the spread of culture played such an important role. The CIA employed the most effective sort of propaganda, the sort which influences the minds of people without them realizing it. Eventually, their covert methods made Abstract Expressionism so popular that it became quite difficult for an artist to find success working in any other style.

They want to destroy social consciousness by eliminating Socialist Realism as an art genre.

 

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/artcurious-cia-art-excerpt-1909623

 

When the US government established the CIA in 1947, it included a division known as the Propaganda Assets Inventory, a branch of psychological warfare intended to boost pro-American messaging during the Cold War. In the following excerpt from the new book ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History, author Jennifer Dasal explores how the intelligence agency curated exhibitions of abstract art to wage its ideological war. 

Further examples of Lies by ‘The Empire of Lies’

  • Merciless Red skinned savages: Howard Zinn
  • Spanish American War—“You supply the photograph and I’ll supply the war.” “Remember the Maine”
  • WWI Lusitania, Huns stabbing babies. Edward Bernays—getting women to smoke. Then getting them to go to war.
  • WWII Pearl Harbor was anticipated but people were told it was unprovoked.
  • Beginning of Cold War—After Germany was defeated, attention turned towards defeating the USSR. So the support for Russia during WWII suddenly switched to anti Communism.
  • Operation Unthinkable. Winston Churchill praised Stalin during WWII, until England was no longer in danger, then turned against Russia, its original adversary.
  • Vietnam War—Gulf of Tonkin “North Vietnam attacked our ship” Except that it didn’t
  • First Gulf War. “Babies thrown out of incubators”
  • Second Iraq War Weapons of Mass Destruction. Didn’t exist
  • Afghan War 4 incompetent pilots outsmart the entire US airforce and take down 3 buildings.
  • Libya War—fake news about Libyan soldiers given viaga, Chinese military budget vs US.
  • Ukraine War started with the coup against Yanukovych, massacre in Odessa unreported, attacks for 8 years against Donbass unreported. Russian draft treaties to get Nato to honor its treaties spurned, with missiles duplicating Cuban Missile crisis minutes away from Russia. But war is “unprovoked”.

Past and Present Truth tellers:

Here are some suggestions of people who told the truth:

  • Harriet Tubman,
  • Mark Twain—Huckleberry Finn, etc. of the Anti imperialist League,
  • IF Stone,
  • George Seldes,
  • Ida Tarbell,
  • anti war newspapers at US military bases during the Vietnam War,
  • Mark Lane, Rush to Judgement, and numerous independent analyses of JFK assassination.
  • Manufacturing Consent,
  • Peoples History of the United States,
  • The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush.
  • Crossing the Rubicon, by Mike Ruppert
  • Books by Albert E Kahn

The Key question: Whenever we get a news report, ask two questions: 1. Really? And 2. Who benefits?

https://thegrayzone.com/

www.informationclearinghouse.info

www.consortiumnews.com

www.globalresearch.ca

www.greanvillepost.com

https://www.youtube.com/@ClassWarFilms

Creators:

The Duran

Caitlin Johnstone

Jeff J. Brown

Aaron Mate

Gabor Mate

Norman Finkelstein

Michael Hudson

Ben Norton Geopolitical Economy Report

Julian Assange

And many journalists like Gary Webb, Mike Ruppert

 

How to Win the War on Consciousness–Develop Critical Thinking

 

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.065.than.html

Harking back 2500 years, we see that this is not a new problem. The story goes that the Buddha was traveling around India, and came to a village of the Kalama people. There were confused because sometimes some guru would show up and explain why they should follow him. Later on, another guru would come to town, and tell the people that the first guru was wrong and that they should follow this guy.

So when Siddhartha Gotama (the Buddha) came to their town, they asked his opinion. Rather than telling them ‘The Truth’, in response to this question, he answered the following:

Which of these venerable brahmans & contemplatives are speaking the truth, and which ones are lying?”

“Of course you are uncertain, Kalamas. Of course you are in doubt. When there are reasons for doubt, uncertainty is born. So in this case, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’

When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering’— then you should abandon them.

Note by the translator:

Traditions are not to be followed simply because they are traditions. Reports (such as historical accounts or news) are not to be followed simply because the source seems reliable. One’s own preferences are not to be followed simply because they seem logical or resonate with one’s feelings.

Instead, any view or belief must be tested by the results it yields when put into practice; and — to guard against the possibility of any bias or limitations in one’s understanding of those results — they must further be checked against the experience of people who are wise. The ability to question and test one’s beliefs in an appropriate way is called appropriate attention.

The ability to recognize and choose wise people as mentors is called having admirable friends. According to Iti 16-17, these are, respectively, the most important internal and external factors for attaining the goal of the practice.

Think for Yourself–Put No One’s Head Above Your Own

In other words, Think for yourselves, and seek multiple sources, such as those noted above (but not only these) in order to decide what is true or false, or what is right or wrong.

Peace and Enlightenment Store

Peace and Enlightenment Shop

About the Author

Please read the author's complete bio. It's a journey filled with memorable, edifying and surprising moments. Much to be learned from Eric Arnow's experiences in search of truth. 

Read it HERE. 

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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How America Impoverished the 90%

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Godfree Roberts
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How America Impoverished the 90%

Their poverty is a feature, not a bug

GODFREE ROBERTS
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON SEP 16, 2023
 
 
 
 

The doctrine of developmentalism – that countries develop best by educating their people, fostering strong domestic markets and imposing high tariffs on imports – enjoyed a golden age postwar. By 1969, says Naomi Klein, the Southern Cone looked more European than Third World. Workers in new factories formed strong unions that negotiated middle-class salaries and their children went off to study at new public universities. By the Fifties, Argentina had the largest middle class in South America, while Uruguay provided free health care to its 95% literate people.

Ike’s War On Development

Since developmentalism is rooted in equality, justice and independence, the US painted it as the first step towards godless communism, forever tarnishing it in Americans minds. Then, in 1953, President Eisenhower launched the war on development by appointing the Dulles brothers – who had represented the Cuban Sugar Cane Co. and United Fruit Co. – as Secretary of State and CIA Director.

When Iran elected a fervent developmentalist President, Mohammad Mossadegh, Eisenhower and the Dulles set out to destroy him and his country, a project that remains a White House priority.

Despite his good image for having "warned us" about the MIC, Eisenhower like all US presidents was an unapologetic meddling imperialist.

Empty calories

Ike’s anti-development policy was called Capitalist Modernization Theory: [According to this], Western societies are inherently progressive in ways older civilizations can never be, and the wealth they generate is distributed unevenly because some people work harder than others. But the only road to economic evolution and social modernization leads through free trade, individual effort and capitalism, and those who stray from the path will be destroyed.

So thorough was the anti-developmentalist campaign that the US carried its attack to the UN, where it blocked all resolutions recognizing food, shelter and national development as human rights. Learning of this a horrified Harold Pinter wrote,

The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis. "U.S. foreign policy is best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.” – Nobel Prize lecture, 1958.

To keep developmentalism dormant, the US systematically destroyed developing economies and assassinated defiant leaders. To this day, the Joint Chiefs reassure the nation that they are ready to nuke China for having the audacity to develop its economy.

Enter the Dragon

Maurice Meisner,

Starting with an industrial base smaller than that of Belgium's in 1952, the China that for so long was ridiculed as "the sick man of Asia" emerged at the end of the Mao period as one of the six largest industrial producers in the world, comparable to the industrialization of Germany, Japan, and Russia.

  • In Germany the rate of economic growth 1880-1914 was 33% per decade.

  • In Japan from 1874-1929 the rate of increase per decade was 43%.

  • The Soviet Union from 1928-58 achieved a decadal increase of 54%.

  • In Mao’s China from 1952-72 the decadal rate was 64%.

By maintaining Mao’s breakneck pace for seventy years, China has created the largest and most complete (war-fighting) economy on earth – so resilient that, in the face of embargoes and threats, its trade has grown by $1 trillion under the embargoes and the economy by $1.6 trillion this year alone.

 

Washington’s last stand?

China’s development represents a defeat far more consequential than America’s combined losses in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Ukraine. China not only defied America and developed, but is supplanting it as leader of the world.

Godfree Roberts' SUBSTACK depository is at https://substack.com/@herecomeschina. His bio box can be seen at the bottom of this page. 

Addendum

Even the CIA-redacted Wikipedia accepts, however grudgingly, that China has accomplished  a virtual miracle in a much shorter time than ANY capitalist nation in history thanks to its socialist core. The quote below testifies to this:

[4][5] which still stands in 2022.[6][7][8]

The Chinese definition of extreme poverty is more stringent than that of the World Bank: earning less than $2.30 a day at purchasing power parity (PPP).[9]Growth has fuelled a substantial increase in per-capita income lifting people out of extreme poverty. China's per capita income has increased fivefold between 1990 and 2000, from $200 to $1,000. Between 2000 and 2010, per capita income also rose at the same rate, from $1,000 to $5,000, moving China into the ranks of middle-income countries.

(See Poverty in China, Wikipedia)

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•The Tiananmen Story—as it really was. (Part 1)

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GODFREE ROBERTS

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Tiananmen, Part 1

Prelude to a riot.

GODFREE ROBERTS
JAN 31, 2024
 
 
 
 
 

In 1980, with fanfare and high hopes, Deng Xiaoping launched his ‘decade of reform and opening’ and foreign media, businessmen and politicians saw only blue skies. But Deng was unqualified to manage the transition to capitalism – as our media hopefully labeled it – and he resigned before decade’s end. Says Dongpin Han, a student at the time,

Official corruption had disrupted China’s economy. The government, facing bankruptcy, had printed more money in 1984 than in the previous thirty-five years combined. Prices of commodities, previously State-controlled and stable, exploded. Meat rose five hundred percent. My parents had saved two thousand yuan. They’d bought their first house for four hundred yuan then, overnight, their savings lost 90 percent of their value. My mother rushed to the store and bought two hundred feet of plain cloth. Her neighbor bought four hundred pounds of salt and another bought forty TV sets. They believed that war-era inflation had returned and their money would become worthless. People started publicly denouncing corrupt officials and their children’s promotion to high office. Beijing’s Consumer Price Index had jumped 30% in 1988 and salaried workers panicked when they could no longer afford staples. State-owned enterprises were pressured to cut costs. Mao’s iron rice bowl–job security and social benefits ranging from medical care to subsidized housing–were suddenly at risk”. 

 

Harvard’s Elizabeth Perry:

The Cultural Revolution left a significant mark on popular protests in post-Mao China. Repertoires of collective political action popularized during the Cultural Revolution—such as singing revolutionary songs, marches, rallies, and hunger strikes—had a great impact on the 1989 protest movement. The haunting specter of the Cultural Revolution also had a crucial impact on the Deng regime’s interpretation of—and thereby reaction to—the movement..

The bleak reality of growing socioeconomic disparity, environmental degradation, massive layoffs of workers in state-owned enterprises, evisceration of social protections, rampant official corruption, illicit appropriation of public property, and exploitation of rural migrant labor has led to the unraveling of the broad but fragile consensus regarding the direction and rationality of post-Mao reforms that dominated Chinese intellectual discussions of the 1980s.

Amid soaring inflation, widespread corruption and elite privilege, graduates had found themselves in the worst employment market since the War. Only those with political connections got hired, and then earned less than high school matriculants. Government subsidies and professors’ incomes were slashed and parents, students and faculty demanded⁠ ‘more money for education and higher pay for scholars’. Famed scholar Ding Shisun told an interviewer, “People ask me whether as Beijing University president I fear student protests? I tell them what I fear most is not having enough money,” and students in Tiananmen Square satirically offered to shine congressmens' shoes.

Deng’s withdrawal of Mao’s tuition subsidies crushed the dreams of millions, while his decision to maintain them for African students touched off race riots in Nanjing, where students rampaged through the Africans’ quarters. Beijing students carried banners ("No Offend Chinese Women,” "Kill the foreigners!”), screamed insults at Deng, and marched on Party leaders’ living quarters at Zhongnanhai.  

Workers echoed students’complaints. One explained that everyone in her industry had much less opportunity to participate within the system than in the 1970s, when meetings were called for every problem and people could raise opinions that today would result in their dismissal. By the Fall, State-owned companies had dumped millions of workers into an unprepared labor market, where inflation consumed their six months severance pay in six weeks.

Demands

 

When the deposed Hu Yaobang died suddenly in mid-April, demonstrators released their demands:

  4. Report truthfully all the events from the death of Hu Yaobang to the student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

Ten days later, students and workers began massive demonstrations in Beijing and Shanghai, denouncing Deng, “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, so long as the cat resigns”.

Part 2, What About the Workers? will be released soon.

 

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Staring At Starvation

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

INDRAJIT
indi.ca
Views from the third world. Earth.
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Staring At Starvation

The people in Gaza are being starved to death. It's just a medieval siege with modern machinery. It's barbarism via bureaucracy. It's not just 'Israel', it's the entire White Empire, America and all its bitches. They've cut off funds for the UNRWA that delivers food, while delivering even more bombs to the people literally bombing food supplies. The US Ambassador to the UN openly calls for a 'final solution'. They are intentionally starving two million people to death, half of them children, while the world watches. While we all watch, helplessly.

In truth, this isn't even the first starvation White Empire has executed recently. Empire regularly uses food as a weapon, and as a message to those that dare defy it. There was the starvation of Yemen for nearly a decade. The denial of aid to Syria even after a devastating earthquake. The theft of foreign exchange from Afghanistan as they retreated. 'Israel' is really just Empire acting as it always does, just more mask-off with its atrocities.

Ever since World War II—when America got away with massive war crimes against civilians—war crimes have been their strategy. They call their 'strategic bombing' but it's really just slaughtering civilians, discriminately. From Dresden to Korea to Vietnam to Iraq to Palestine they hit civilians on purpose. It uses less soldiers than actually fighting, and they can still use expensive bombs, so it makes plenty money.

Another part of their cowardly strategy is sanctions, which is just the white word for sieges. Sanctions have been used to cut Cuba for decades, including cutting them off from ventilators during COVID. They were also used against Iraq for decades, killing tens of thousands of children. They have been used across the world, collectively punishing civilians to try and overthrow governments.

Neither the bombing nor the sanctions work (America loses every war), but they keep doing it anyway. At this point, cruelty is the strategy. The Empire has really been on autopilot since World War II, bombing endlessly.

Now its garrison state near the gas station is replaying the greatest atrocities of World War II. Gaza was just a big concentration camp before the war, where 'Israel' controlled all entries and exits and 'strategically' restricted calorie supplies. Now it's an extermination camp. They're literally gassing their own people in tunnels, field executing Palestinians in front of their families, sniping children going for water, and then bombing the ambulances that come to help them. It's atrocity upon atrocity, so regular that it becomes mind-numbing. Any one of these events would have been a headline just a year ago, but now they can commit 100 war crimes in a day and it's just normal. This is the world we live in and it's broadcast across the world daily. If this isn't terrorism I don't know what is. It's terrifying.

I feel so sad staring at this every day. And then I feel bad when I look away. Today I saw a five-year-old child telling her cat not to eat her. Because animals really are eating decomposing bodies in the streets. I can't not think of this when I see my own children. Can they see the sadness in me, every time I give them something to eat? My children eat so much, they're always snacking. The whole family gives them food, and yet they're always eating. What would I even do if I had nothing to give them? If I had to risk death to get it? And how would I explain that this was no natural disaster, but that people were actively trying to kill them? The trauma inflicted on the Palestinian people is not constrained by territory. It's felt by anybody with empathy, and felt keenly.

So are we just going to sit here, for another month or two, until peoples bodies start shutting down? Will we even know, since 'Israel' has targeted journalists for extermination first, along with the weakest? The elderly, the people that need dialysis, the disabled, the diabetics. The 'Israelis' are targeting the same people as the Nazis did, the 'burdens'. Also like the Nazis their stated and executed goal is to eliminate an entire 'problem' population. I used to wonder why this happened, but I don't anymore.

The Genocide of Palestine started immediately after the Nazis fell. The British kept running concentration camps in Kenya, and France continued genociding Algerians, and America kept killing people everywhere. These western countries continued rejecting Jewish refugees and instead executed the Nazi's penultimate solution of just getting the Jews out of Europe. They simply filed Jews into their white supremacism, above Arabs, and told them have at it. The genocide of the Jews was cynically manipulated into the one Genocide™ that everyone was supposed to feel bad about, while the practice of genocide continued unabated. Just with more hypocrisy.

This is where we live now. The hypocrites of the West are unmasked as just delusional Nazis. The truth is that they've been doing this ever since World War II ended, but for some reason people believed their lies over our own eyes. Now the scales are fallen, as we see the Horseman Famine galloping over the bodies of men, women, and children. We're witnessing a televised famine, and people are debating like this has some complexity. There's no complexity. We all eat. We all try our best to feed our children. And these people are starving. Worse yet, being starved. And we're all sitting here staring. I don't even know what to say to conclude this. It's not ending.

Allah be with the people of Palestine, and with the Resistance. Death to America and death to 'Israel'. They are the enemy of all things living. Indeed, the very concept of living. A dying empire has nothing but death to offer, but that it has aplenty.

Indrajit

Call me Indrajit

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China’s Economy: Doing Well or Big Trouble Ahead?

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Jeff J. Brown

EDITOR'S NOTE
F.W. Engdahl, a widely respected geopolitical analyst, recently wrote an essay offering a gloomy view of China's near economic future.  Engdahl was forecasting something like a serious recession or even an economic implosion. Since many progressive people around the globe pin their hopes on China and Russia to build a peaceful, multipolar, and genuinely democratic order, one that would show conclusively the superiority of socialism over predatory neoliberalism, Engdahl's piece caused a great deal of confusion and consternation. Fortunately, our senior editor, Jeff J. Brown (who also happens to be the editor-in-chief of the China Rising blog, and also founder of the new Seek Truth From Fact Foundation) is a highly qualified expert on Chinese and Asian questions in general, and has written several books on the subject, also saw the Engdahl forecast and prepared a comment. Both views can be found below. It should be noted that alarms about the "real estate bubble collapse" have been around for a while. The US news program 60 Minutes (CBS) produced a segment, highly critical, of course, 10 years ago. (See appendix) While the debate may continue, we hope this page will help to clarify some of the urgent concerns expressed by some of our readers and associates. Meantime, our special thanks to our colleague Regis Tremblay, himself a veteran anti-imperialist/peace activist, for bringing this topic to our attention. 
—PG

Why China Can’t Pull the World Out of a New Great Depression 
By William Engdahl  |  First run on  16 May, 2023

Chinese economy Real estate

Empty mall. Maybe the customers will come, maybe not, but the use value is always there.

Over the past two decades since China was admitted into the WTO, its national industrial base has made unprecedented strides to emerge as the world’s leading economic producer in many major areas. The academic debates over whether China’s GDP is larger than that of the USA are misplaced. GDP is largely worthless as a measure of a real economy. When measured in real physical economic production, China has left the USA and everyone else in the dust. Therefore, the future course of industrial production in China is vital to the future of the world economy. Globalization of the world economy made it so.

Steel production is still the single best indicator of a growing real economy. In 2021, China produced more that twelve times the tonnage steel as the USA, over one billion tons. The USA, once world leader, managed a piddly 86 million tons. In tons of coal, China produces some 50% of world total coal. She controls 70% of world rare earth mining and over 90% of its processing, thanks to bizarre US policy actions going back several decades. China today is far the world’s largest motor vehicle producer, almost three times the size of the US at 27 million units annually, one third of world total in 2022. China is by far the largest producer of the essential cement for construction, and is the world’s leading aluminum producer.  At 40 million tons in 2022, this compares to not even one million tons in the USA. It is also the world’s largest copper consumer. The list goes on.

This is merely to suggest how essential the economy of China has been to world economic growth over the past two decades. A mere four decades ago China was insignificant in world real economic terms. So, if China goes into deep economic contraction, the effect this time will be global. And this is just what is now underway. Important to note, the contraction began well before the severe three-years of China’s zero covid lockdown. Simply put, China since the so-called Great Financial Crisis of 2008 managed to create a financial bubble the size of which the world has never before experienced. That bubble began to deflate, beginning in real estate, around 2019. The scale is systemic and is only beginning.

Colossal Deleveraging and Hidden Debt

A huge problem with China’s economic model over the past two decades has been the fact that it has been a debt-based finance model massively concentrated on real estate speculation beyond what the economy can digest. 

Fully 25 to 30% of the total Chinese GDP is from real estate investment in homes, apartments, offices.  That’s significant. The problem is that real estate, especially apartments in China, for more than two decades, appeared to be a guaranteed money maker for owners as well as builders and banks and above all, local government officials. Prices rose annually in the double digits, sometimes by 20%. Millions of middle-class Chinese bought not just one, but two or more apartments, using the second as investment for future retirement. China’s land is owned by the Communist Party, at the local level. It is leased long-term to construction firms who then borrow to build.

Here it gets murky. For CP local government officials, revenue from local real estate land leasing and their infrastructure projects is their major revenue source. Until now municipal property taxes are forbidden despite a huge pressure from local officials. 

In the months of 2018 and 2019 China real estate prices peaked. Since then, they have been in a prolonged decline. China has a unique and very abuse-prone real estate model. Typically, a buyer must pre-pay the full purchase price when a developer has merely begun the construction. “Buy today as the price will be even more tomorrow” was the mantra. He takes a mortgage, usually from local banks, to do that. If the builder does not complete on time, the buyer must still pay their mortgage. Even if the developer goes bankrupt as is now happening, leaving abandoned unfinished housing behind. No other country uses that model. Typically, in Western countries a small deposit on a home to reserve until completion is enough. The mortgage comes when the property is finished. Not in China.

So long as China home prices were constantly rising, it seemingly worked and the home market expanded. When that price inflation stopped, for a variety of reasons, and exacerbated by the ultra-severe covid lockdowns, what was then a colossal real estate bubble began to implode. According to economist Robert Pettis at Beijing University, “Since the beginning of the property crisis in September and October 2021, property prices have declined in more than two-thirds of China’s seventy largest cities (and probably all of the smaller ones), while, more importantly, sales of new apartments this year (2022) have collapsed.” [1][i]

The major turn took place in 2021 with the default of China Evergrande Group on its dollar bonds. It was then the world’s most indebted real estate conglomerate with debts of well over $300 billion. In 2018 Evergrande was deemed, “the most valuable real estate group in the world,” according to Wikipedia. That was on paper. By time of default, it also owned theme parks, an EV auto company, resorts and enough land to house 10 million people. Until Beijing refused to bailout Evergrande, in a belated bid to cool the bubble, Chinese lenders had made loans based on the assumption that large borrowers would be bailed out—Too Big To Fail. Beijing learned all the wrong lessons from US banks after Lehman Bros.

It came out that Evergrande had created a colossal Ponzi fraud over the years. They were not unique. Following a speculative property boom after 2010, poorly-regulated local governments across China turned increasingly to real estate to boost income and fulfill the Beijing GDP growth targets, a de facto monetary version of Soviet central planning. Inflating local real estate values was a way of meeting local GDP targets. Local officials were given their share of annual GDP contribution to be met. Real estate became the ideal vehicle to meet GDP targets and generate local revenues. As long as prices were rising, banks and increasingly unregulated local “shadow banks” joined in the “win-win” bonanza.  According to the South China Morning Post, by 2020 and the start of covid severe lockdowns, land sales and real estate taxes’ contribution to local government fiscal revenue reached a peak of 37.6 per cent. [1][ii] 

The Evergrande partial default set off a panic in China real estate that officials desperately, and unsuccessfully, have tried to control. It was merely the first major casualty in what is a systemic meltdown. Beijing authorities imposed sharp limits on real estate lending in a vain attempt to contain the implosion, the so-called Three Red Lines. That made the implosion of the property bubble worse. In 2022 China new home sales plunged 22% over 2021. As of February 2023, China home prices had fallen for 16 straight months. Sales by the country’s top 100 developers last year were only 60% of 2021 levels. Land sales, which typically account for more than 40% of local government revenue, have collapsed. [1][iii]

Empty Houses and unemployment rising

Until the bubble began to burst in 2022 with the Evergrande default, Chinese real estate prices had risen several times higher, relative to household income, than in the USA. More alarming, two decades of rampant price inflation had created literal ghost cities and millions of empty apartments. As of 2021 an estimated 65 million apartments in China were empty, enough to house the French nation. [1][iv] This was a result of two decades or more of municipalities and developers building beyond actual demand, as citizens bought for investment, not living. One estimate is that between one-fifth and one-quarter of the total China housing stock, especially in more desirable cities, was owned by speculative buyers who had no intention of living in them or renting them out. In Chinese culture, a used apartment is considered unattractive.[1][v] With falling prices, these homes become unpayable.

The unprecedented 3-year covid lockdowns that ended abruptly last December did not help matters. Thousands of foreign manufacturers including Apple, Foxconn, Samsung and Sony, have begun to leave China for other locations in Asia or even Mexico, fueling a growing unemployment crisis which feeds the housing crisis in a self-feeding cycle. 

As a result of this slow-motion implosion across China, for the first time since the great expansion unemployment is becoming very serious. This March, youth unemployment officially was over 20%. Millions of recent university graduates are unable to find work and Beijing has begun to send them to work in the rural countryside, reminiscent of the Mao era. This bodes ill for future home sales. A contracting bubble has a vicious dynamic.

Until about the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, real estate investment was largely productive. It filled a huge deficit in quality housing as a new middle class grew more affluent. After about 2010 that began to shift to bubble status as millions of middle-class and rich Chinese began to buy second and even third homes for pure speculation as prices were rising in double digits. The degree of central supervision of local government finances was loose. 

Over recent years, to avoid central clampdown by Beijing authorities fearful of a new debt bubble imploding, local governments, often with hidden collusion from the giant state banks, created a non-bank economy, “shadow banks,” all off-balance sheet. As one result, despite actions by Beijing regulators to control the property meltdown and prevent contagion, total debt, public and private, in China by February 2023 according to Bloomberg reached an alarming 280% of GDP. [1][vi]

Commodity.com reports total state debt of China in 2023 is more than $9.4 trillion. But that excluded local government financing vehicles (LGFVs). Chinese local governments rely on off-balance sheet LGFVs to raise funds for local public construction—housing, high-speed rails, ports, airports. The debts of all these LGFVs are estimated to be roughly $27 trillion more. The official figure for total state debt also excluded debt of state banks and state companies, which is also clearly considerable, but unpublished. That total debt is also without the unknown size of local shadow banks which China’s National Institute of Finance and Development in 2018 estimated at some $6 trillion more. The result of all these omissions is a headline figure meant to reassure Western financial markets that China has manageable public and private debt. It doesn’t. All told, very roughly we can calculate a mammoth debt accumulation of well more than $42 trillion, a staggering sum for an economy which only three decades ago was at a level of an underdeveloped economy.  [1][vii] 

A major vehicle used to finance local budgets is unguaranteed and largely unregulated municipal investment bonds. Unlike traditional municipal debt in western countries, the Chinese local LGFVs are not able to use tax revenues to fund their bond interest or principal payments. So, local governments would tap into a growing housing market by leasing their long-term land to developers to fund their bond payments.  This created a system where a sustained fall in housing construction, sales and prices now creates a systemic threat. This is now underway across China. In just two decades China has created the world’s second largest corporate debt market behind the USA, and far the most of that is in unregulated municipal bond debt. 

As a result of this unique mixing of local governmental fiscal policies with local housing markets, a substantial drop in housing or land prices has greatly increased the risk level of local government default on its debts. In July 2022 Zunyi City in Guizhou defaulted on a major bond, leading to a collapse of the entire unregulated local bond market, as local bond issuance collapsed by 85% after that. The bonds were a way to refinance local debt and that channel now is all but closed, despite Beijing liquidity injections early 2023. Investors were mostly local ordinary Chinese seeking to earn on savings. This past April officials of Guiyang, also in Guizhou, told Beijing it was unable to finance its debts accumulated over a decade in construction projects including housing. [1][viii]  This opens the next phase of debt implosion. Several China municipalities reportedly have been slashing wages, cutting transportation services and reducing fuel subsidies in a desperate bid to avoid default.

National Security redefined

Transparency of financial data has always been a problem in China. Thirty years ago the country had no developed financial markets. So long as the economy was expanding however, it was not a priority. Now it is, but too late. 

A signal of how severe the situation is becoming, the Beijing authorities have begun to limit release of local and corporate financial data to foreign firms, calling it a “national security” issue. 

This May, Dalian Wanda Group, another major Chinese real estate conglomerate with investments in US cinema chains, Australian real estate and beyond, revealed talks with its major bankers to restructure huge debts amid a liquidity crisis. The UK Financial Times on May 9 reported that hopes of a post-covid China recovery are vanishing: “Chinese iron ore prices dropped to their lowest levels in five months, as weak demand adds to evidence that the country’s economic rebound from tough coronavirus lockdowns may be faltering… the optimism and activity that followed the end of lockdown have waned, leading to a ‘collapse’ in the steel market.” 

This all means the prospect of the Chinese economy being a growth locomotive to lift the rest of the world from looming depression is virtually nil at this point. The massive Belt and Road Initiative is mired in hundreds of billions of dollars in loans to countries unable to service the debt, as world interest rates rise and growth stalls. Attempts to boost domestic China growth by relying on a consumer boom are doomed presently for obvious reasons noted, as is the call by Xi Jinping to make 5G, AI and such technologies the basis of a new boom, as US sanctions greatly hamper China IT advances.

Endnotes:

[i] Michael Pettis, What’s in Store for China’s Mortgage Market?, August 12, 2022,

https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/87664

[ii] Luna Sun, China cracks down on ‘characteristic towns’ that misused land, real estate while racking up massive debt, 6 November, 2021, https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3155055/china-cracks-down-characteristic-towns-misused-land-real

[1][iii] Laura He, China s property crash is prompting banks to offer mortgages to 70 year olds, February 20, 2023     https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/17/economy/china-mortgage-age-95-property-market-intl-hnk/index.html

[1][iv] Lina Batarags, China has at least 65 million empty homes — enough to house the population of France. It offers a glimpse into the country's massive housing-market problem, Business Insider, October 14, 2021,https://www.businessinsider.com/china-empty-homes-real-estate-evergrande-housing-market-problem-2021-10 .

[1][v] Michael Pettis, What Does Evergrande Meltdown Mean for China?,  September, 20, 2021,https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/85391

[1][vi] Bloomberg, China’s Debt-to-GDP Ratio Rises to Record 279.7% on Credit Boom, 8 May, 2023,https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-08/china-s-debt-to-gdp-ratio-rises-to-record-279-7-on-credit-boom#xj4y7vzkg

[1][vii] Commodity.com, China’s National Debt Clock: What’s the Current Figure (and What’s Included), May 12, 2023,

https://commodity.com/data/china/debt-clock/

[1][viii] The Economist, China’s local-debt crisis is about to get nasty, May 4, 2023,https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/05/04/chinas-local-debt-crisis-is-about-to-get-nasty

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(s)
Frederick William Engdahl (born August 9, 1944) is an American writer based in Germany. He identifies himself as an "economic researcher, historian and freelance journalist." Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, Engdahl is the son of F. William Engdahl Sr., and Ruth Aalund (b. Rishoff). Engdahl grew up in Texasand earned a degree in politics from Princeton University in 1966 (BA) followed by graduate study in comparative economics at the University of Stockholm from 1969 to 1970. He then worked as an economist and freelance journalist in New York and in Europe.

Commentary by Jeff J. Brown

I actually subscribed to F. William Engdahl, so I had already seen this and read this article. He usually does really excellent work, but sometimes he really gets off down a rabbit hole. And this is definitely one. A deep rabbit hole. Unless you go to China and see China, and see how it works and see how the economy is working and experience it internally, and understand how the government works, how the real estate market works, how the banks work, how the insurance companies work, how the infrastructure [is set up, it's hard to understand what's really happening].

It's too easy for people like Engdahl to think that China is just like the United States or Europe, and it's not. The land is all people-owned. The banks are all people-owned. The insurance companies are all people-owned. Much of the large scale industry is all people-owned. So plus you have a much more honest, caring government that's actually trying to help the people instead of trying to kill it [or bamboozle it]. It's just also wrongheaded. China's debt is absolutely a fraction of what it is for the United States and Europe. And so that is a non issue. I cover this all the time. Evergrande. It's a blessing for the people of China that Evergrande went belly up. What's going to happen is China—Baba Beijing—my name for the chinese government... The leadership will move in. They will take it into receivership. They will strip out the useful assets that can be put into state owned companies, and the investors are going to get the shaft. And that includes overseas investors. And also know that's just the way it is. The thousands of people who had apartments that were not finished or whatever, Baba Beijing will make sure that those apartments are finished. They will find diligent partners to finish those apartments. They will keep the citizens whole, and the investors are going to take the hit, be they Chinese, which is most of them, or overseas. So that's the way it works.

I was just there in May for an entire month. I was there in most of the month of the end of September and most of October. And you just have to see it to believe it. And I don't think he's ever been there, and he's just wrong on so many accounts. And I don't have time to go through line by line, but I just want to give you this overview and to see that when you own the land, when you own the banks, when the people own the land, the banks, the insurance companies, the major industries, all the public infrastructure, and you have an honest, hardworking, Confucian government committed [the results are much different].

Mao Zedong served the people. Of course, there's some corruption and they're cleaning it up. They put millions of, they punished millions of people in the last ten years. Some have even been executed for high financial crimes. Thousands are in jail. So they are kicking ass and taking names. And you just spend one day walking around anywhere in China, and the place is humping, bumping, hopping, going, moving, producing. You can just feel the economic energy when you're in China. And it has got the fastest growing economy. Big economy. Well, maybe India might be a little bit bigger this year, but it's the biggest economy in the world in PPP terms, and I'm not worried about it at all. And I'm sorry that Engdahl published this.

More to read about China's real estate sector:

https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2022/11/21/chinas-real-estate-sector-is-a-bursting-bubble-collapse-here-we-come-really-china-rising-radio-sinoland-221121/

On China supposedly going to implode with debt:

https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2023/09/16/china-is-going-to-collapse-not-really-heres-why-it-cannot-happen-china-rising-radio-sinoland-230916/

(Jan. 30, 2024)

APPENDIX
(CBS News)

China's real estate bubble

CBS News
China's economy has become the second largest in the world, but its rapid growth may have created the largest housing bubble in history. Lesley Stahl reports.

“He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust.”
— Thomas Aquinas

ABOUT JEFF BROWN

Jeff J. Brown is a geopolitical analyst, journalist, lecturer and the author of The China Trilogy. It consists of 44 Days Backpacking in China - The Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century, with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in Its Looking Glass (2013); Punto Press released China Rising - Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (2016); and for Badak Merah, Jeff authored China Is Communist, Dammit! – Dawn of the Red Dynasty (2017).
Jeff can be reached at China Rising, jeff@brownlanglois.com, Facebook, Twitter and Wechat/Whatsapp: +86-13823544196.

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The battle against the Big Lie killing the world will not be won by you just reading this article. It will be won when you pass it on to at least 2 other people, requesting they do the same.

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Since the overpaid corporate media whores will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality. Put this effort to use by becoming an influence multiplier. Repost this material everywhere you can. Send it to your friends and kin. Discuss it with your workmates. Liberation from this infernal and mendacious system is in your hands.
—The Editor, The Greanville Post
—The Editor, The Greanville Post
 

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