Protecting America’s Farmland

On April 25th, The Washington Examiner posted an article about China’s continuing purchase of American farmland–particularly near American military bases. Even on the surface that sounds questionable.

The article reports:

A spy balloon floated over most of the continental United States. A Chinese government-linked corporation purchased a plot of land near a sensitive military base.

The recent brushes with China have crystallized a challenge for lawmakers and defense experts that has long sat in the shadows — Beijing’s steadily increasing share of U.S. land poses a serious “national security threat.”

On April 25th, Houston Public Media reported:

Senate Bill 147 was approved by Texas lawmakers Tuesday afternoon. The legislation is a watered-down version of the original proposal, which would have banned citizens of China, Iran, North Korea and Russia from buying land and homes in Texas.

…The new version would ban governmental entities, along with companies headquartered in one of the countries listed on the Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community put out by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, from buying “real property” in Texas.

That list only names China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

Were the bill to become law, citizens of the four countries who are not lawful residents, dual citizens or people seeking asylum would be able to buy homes in Texas. However, they would only be able to buy up to 20 acres of land.

The bill clarifies that “real property” means “agricultural land, an improvement located on agricultural land, a mine or quarry, a mineral in place, or a standing timber.”

The article at Houston Public Media also notes:

The measure needs to clear one more procedural vote before it’s sent to the Texas House for consideration.

According to the Associated Press, the legislation comes two years after the Texas Legislature passed a bill banning deals on infrastructure with countries like China.

It also comes after news reports of a Chinese real estate billionaire purchasing land for a wind farm in Val Verde County, the home of Laughlin Air Force Base.

The billionaire is a veteran of the People’s Liberation Army, and has ties to the Chinese Communist Party, Forbes reported in 2021.

Please follow the link above to The Washington Examiner article. It further explains the reason more states need to follow the example of Texas.

Why Tik-Tok Will Not Be Banned

On Tuesday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about the banning of Tik-Tok. It is generally acknowledged that Tik-Tok is a Chinese Communist Party vehicle for gathering information on Americans, it is doubtful that it will be banned in America. Recently, the RESTRICT Act was introduced in Congress.

The article notes:

But the RESTRICT Act never names TikTok, which has signaled its support for the law, and instead empowers the Commerce Department to prohibit any technology that “poses undue or unacceptable risk to national security.” The bill prompted criticism from Republicans for failing to ban TikTok immediately. RESTRICT Act critics such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), who has his own bill to outlaw TikTok, argue that the act could delay action against the tech company for years and relies on Biden administration officials who have voiced apprehensions about a ban, such as Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, to pull the trigger.

“There is no time for half-measures,” Rubio told the Washington Free Beacon.

Sen. J.D. Vance (R., Ohio), who supports a ban on TikTok, said last month that language in the RESTRICT Act is too broad. “You’re creating, effectively, a PATRIOT Act for the digital age,” Vance said.

The RESTRICT Act’s supporters have also botched its rollout, with cosponsor Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) showing in a late March interview with Fox News that he was unfamiliar with the bill’s provisions. According to a senior Senate Republican staffer, the botched rollout means that “anti-TikTok legislation is currently dead.” Another senior Senate aide, who worked on the RESTRICT Act, pushed back against that characterization, saying that no other bill “has this broad base of bipartisan support.”

The article notes one major reason Tik-Tok may not be banned:

Meanwhile, the White House is leaning into using TikTok and similar apps as it gears up for 2024, raising questions about whether it sincerely views the company as a national security threat. Biden’s campaign plans to “lean on hundreds of social media ‘influencers’ who will tout Biden’s record,” according to a recent report. As Chew (TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew) was testifying to Congress in March, the White House used an app owned by TikTok’s parent company to make an Instagram video.

The Biden administration is not going to ban one of the Democrat’s major weapons in the 2024 presidential campaign.

 

Friends With Whom?

On Monday, The Daily Caller posted an article about some of the people involved with the World Economic Forum. It is an unseemly group.

The article reports:

The World Economic Forum (WEF), whose annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, kicked off Monday, partners with multiple Chinese state-owned companies and several Chinese tech firms the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has allegedly weaponized against civilians, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation.

WEF, a non-governmental organization located in Geneva, Switzerland, partners with Alibaba Group, Huawei Technologies and TikTok, according to the group’s list of partnerships, all of whom are allegedly tied to the development of various technologies the Chinese government uses for intelligence or military and intelligence purposes. WEF’s board of trustees also features an individual who’s worked with Chinese organizations allegedly involved in Chinese influence operations, the DCNF found.

WEF’s partner Alibaba, an e-commerce and media firm, reportedly holds a significant financial stake in Megvii and SenseTime, two Chinese tech firms which the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security blacklisted in 2019 for allegedly developing racial profiling facial recognition technologies that the Chinese government has used in relation to China’s ongoing genocide to track ethnic minorities in China’s western province of Xinjiang, according to an ESPN report from April 2022.

This is not a group that any American leaders should be willing to embrace. Unfortunately, a number of American politicians attended this years meeting (article here).

The World Economic Forum is not a group that will ever support either America’s sovereignty or its freedom. Sending anyone from America who claims to love America to Davos is simply a waste of time and money.

Which Police Are Operating In America?

If you are an American living overseas, you don’t expect to be monitored by American police where you live. Unfortunately, that is not the expectation of Chinese citizens living in countries other than China.

On Saturday, The Daily Caller posted an article about a Chinese police station in New York City.

The article reports:

The U.S. government must immediately investigate and shutter the recently discovered overseas Chinese government police station in New York City for potential violation of U.S. laws, several experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

In 2022, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established secret police stations in over 100 cities around the world to conduct intimidation and harassment operations against overseas Chinese, human rights organization Safeguard Defenders revealed in a September report. While other countries have announced probes into the alleged police stations, the location within American Changle Association — a Chinatown community organization in New York City — continues to operate outside legal boundaries and should be shut down, experts told the DCNF (Daily Caller News Foundation).

“This is a disgrace. How in God’s name could they openly have these communist police stations in our country?” Beau Dietl, a retired NYPD detective and current head of Beau Dietl & Associates private investigation firm, told the DCNF.

The article continues:

“There has been a noticeable uptick in incidents where the Chinese government is targeting people on other nations’ soil,” Senate Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Jim Risch of Idaho, who also serves on the Senate’s intelligence committee, told the DCNF. “This shows the Chinese Communist Party is not afraid to exert its will outside of China, and we should do all that we can to counter this behavior.”

China’s overseas police stations enable the CCP to illegally monitor and oppress dissidents across the globe, Conor Healy, director of government research at the video surveillance research organization IPVM, told the DCNF. “I have met many individuals who have fled China fearing for their lives, who go on to be harassed and threatened in Canada and in the U.S.,” said Healy, who provided testimony on China’s surveillance state during the 2021 Uyghur Tribunal proceedings.

Americans have an option, we can either defend freedom when it is threatened on or shore or we can simply ignore the threats. If we continue to ignore the threats, no one will be safe in America, Please follow the link above and read the entire article. The Chinese police station in America is not a unique event.

The Rest Of The Story…

On July 6th I posted an article about oil from the United States’ Strategic Oil Reserve being shipped overseas. I was willing to give President Biden the benefit of the doubt because evidently there are international rules that govern where oil is sold. However, new information about the transactions involved is troubling.

Today The Federalist reported the following:

On Wednesday, Reuters revealed that more than 5 million barrels of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves were sent overseas as part of President Joe Biden’s latest release initiated in March.

Some of that oil went to India, some to the Netherlands, and some was sent to China where the president’s son has engaged in years of potentially criminal business activity embroiling the Biden White House in scandal since the 2020 campaign.

On July 7th, The Washington Free Beacon reported:

“The Biden administration sold roughly one million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese state-controlled gas giant that continues to purchase Russian oil, a move the Energy Department said would ‘support American consumers’ and combat ‘Putin’s price hike,’” the Beacon’s Collin Anderson reported. “Biden’s Energy Department in April announced the sale of 950,000 Strategic Petroleum Reserve barrels to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation. That company, which is commonly known as Sinopec, is wholly owned by the Chinese government.”

…Power the Future founder Daniel Turner admonished Biden for selling “raw materials to the Communist Chinese for them to use as they want.”

“We were assured Biden was releasing this oil to America so it could be refined for gasoline to drive down prices at the pump. So right off the bat, they’re just lying to the American people,” Turner told the Washington Free Beacon. “What they’re saying they did and what they did are not remotely related.”

Turner also said the decision highlights the Biden family’s “relationship with China.” Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, is tied to Sinopec. In 2015, a private equity firm he cofounded bought a $1.7 billion stake in Sinopec Marketing. Sinopec went on to enter negotiations to purchase Gazprom in March, one month after the Biden administration sanctioned the Russian gas giant.

Obviously some of the decisions made have not been in the best interests of Americans, and some of the decisions made have probably enriched the pockets of Hunter Biden. However, I predict there will be no consequences. It is too close to the mid-terms, and there are too many Republicans who are afraid to challenge any of the corruption in the Biden administration. It is a shame there are not enough principled Democrats or Republicans to speak out against obvious corruption.

It’s Long Past Time To Reconsider Our Relationship With China

The Daily Wire recently posted an article about organ donations in China.

The article reports:

Dr. Enver Tohti, a former physician in China, remembers the day with horror. The whistleblower said his chief surgeon approached him and asked, “Do you want to do something wild?” The surgeon then took Dr. Tohti and other medical professionals to the site of a public execution, pointed to one of the criminals, and told him, “As quick as possible, remove the liver and two kidneys.” 

“Then, I saw he was alive,” Dr. Tohti, who is now an Uber driver in London, recently told Vice TV. 

Stories of China harvesting organs from live “donors” have proliferated for decades, but a new and credible scholarly article has exposed concrete evidence that China has engaged in the gruesome practice. Researchers Matthew P. Robertson of Australia and Jacob Lavee of Israel combed through 2,838 papers on Chinese organ transplantation published in medical journals, covering prisoner organ donations between 1980 and 2015. They published their findings on April 4 in an article titled “Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China,” in the American Journal of Transplantation, a peer-reviewed journal.

The article continues:

Robertson told me it is important that the media not misreport their data about live organ transplants. “It’s not that there were only 71 of this sort,” he said. “It’s 71 that we found.” 

He and his co-author are almost certainly undercounting the incidences when CCP officials killed prisoners by removing their beating hearts, because they counted only those officially documented in medical journals. “We don’t know how many transplants actually end up in a medical paper,” said Robertson. “It could be one in 100; it could be one in 1,000; it could be 1 in 10.” 

Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but estimates abound — and none of the numbers add up. In 2019, the China Tribunal found that Chinese physicians likely performed 60,000 to 90,000 organ transplants a year from 2000 to 2014, but the number of eligible organ donors registered in 2017 numbered only 5,146. Another estimate places the number of organs taken from Falun Gong practitioners at 41,500 over a five-year period. For his part, Robertson said once Chinese Communist Party officials perfected the process, they employed this form of organ removal “probably with all heart transplants” in the nation.

The article concludes:

These allegations also illustrate the legacy media’s perpetually favorable coverage of the People’s Republic of China. “China used to harvest organs from prisoners. Under pressure, that practice is finally ending,” The Washington Post told its readers in 2017. “China vows to battle corruption in organ harvesting,” reported the Associated Press a year earlier. But human rights attorney Hamid Sabi told the UN Human Rights Council in 2019 that forced organ harvesting in China “continues today.” 

Such silence makes it all the more important for Western media outlets to cover these atrocities. “China and their advocates will do everything they can to belittle or discredit” such findings, said Andrew Bremberg, a former ambassador and now CEO of Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. “And all too often, people in the U.S. and the West will do their best to ignore” them. 

But in order for such human rights abuses to end, the West must act. Thanks to Robertson and Lavee’s research, some of the doctors who took part in China’s forced organ harvesting are now known, Bremberg said. “But we don’t know all of their relationships with U.S. or other Western-based hospitals or universities, or whether they collaborate or publish with other Western academics.”

A bipartisan collection of legislators — Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Chris Coons (D-DE) and Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ), Tom Suozzi (D-NY), and Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) — introduced the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act last March. The bill would allow U.S. officials to identify and sanction those involved in organ harvesting, including revoking their passports. 

“It’s past time to hold Beijing accountable for these heinous acts,” said Sen. Cotton.

This is not an acceptable practice and needs to be addressed. No country engaged in the practice of live organ harvesting should be allowed to trade on any world markets. The only way to end this ghoulish practice is to hit China in the pocketbook.

Unwarranted Fear

On Friday, The Epoch Times posted an article about the Omicron variant of the coronavirus (just for the record, moronic is an anagram of Omicron).

The article reports:

The World Health Organization (WHO) has informed The Epoch Times that it has not documented any deaths from the Omicron variant of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19.

According to the WHO, “for Omicron, we have not had any deaths reported, but it is still early in the clinical course of disease and this may change.”

When reached for comment by The Epoch Times, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sent its report on the Omicron variant in the United States from Dec. 1 through 8. It shows that there were no documented deaths from Omicron during that period.

The WHO’s latest weekly epidemiological update for Dec. 7 showed that all 212 Omicron cases documented across eighteen European Union (EU) countries were either mild or asymptomatic.

“While South Africa saw an 82 percent increase in hospital admissions due to COVID-19 (from 502 to 912) during the week 28 November–4 December 2021, it is not yet known the proportion of these with the Omicron variant,” the report noted.

Omicron has also been detected in the United States, first in California and later in Colorado, New York, Maryland, Utah, and many other states.

The first American patient with the variant was identified in San Francisco, testing positive for COVID-19 on Nov. 29 after returning from a trip to South Africa on Nov. 22.

The article concludes:

“No one here in South Africa is known to have been [hospitalized] with the Omicron variant, nor is anyone here believed to have fallen seriously ill with it.”

More recently, Dr. Coetzee told ThePrint that Omicron symptoms have been mild in both vaccinated and unvaccinated patients.

“In the beginning of any wave, children and younger people are the first to be affected,” she told ThePrint. “As the wave progresses, more elderly, people with comorbidities, start getting affected. When that happens, we will know exactly how many severe cases there are.”

Viruses are serious. People who are vulnerable need to be protected and cared for. However, we do not need to go into a panic every time a new variant shows up. Every year we deal with new variants of the flu. It is not the end of the world. It’s time to end the endless panic and fear mongering.

Will Future Reparations Be Paid?

In the past year of so, we have heard a lot about paying reparations to black residents of America because their ancestors were sold as slaves. But what about putting a nail in the coffin of modern-day slavery? On Thursday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about modern-day slavery in China and the efforts by some Congressmen to end it.

The article reports:

Senate Democrats are blocking legislation that would prohibit imports from China made with Uyghur slave labor, in response to pressure from Biden administration officials who fear the bill would torpedo climate negotiations with the Chinese government, congressional sources told the Washington Free Beacon.

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a bill sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) that has long been circulating in Congress and is backed by the human rights community and opponents of China’s forced labor camps, was included in a package of 25 amendments to the annual defense authorization bill, according to a list distributed by Senate leadership on Wednesday.

But Democrats excluded the amendment from a vote late Wednesday night, after members of the party privately objected to it, sources told the Free Beacon. Earlier in the evening, Democrats tried to use a procedural mechanism that would have allowed a vote on the act but stripped it from the final authorization bill, according to a hotline memo from Senate leadership.

The pushback from Senate Democrats comes amid efforts by senior Biden administration officials to quietly kill the bill over concerns it will hinder the White House’s climate agenda and limit solar panel imports from China. Presidential climate envoy John Kerry, among others, has been lobbying House members against the bill, the Free Beacon reported last month. The bill is widely backed by the human rights community and easily attracted Republican support in the narrowly Democrat-controlled Senate. Congressional officials tell the Free Beacon that the new opposition to the measure among Democrats is a product of the Biden administration’s lobbying efforts.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer offered conflicting explanations for the holdup on Wednesday, with his office initially suggesting to the Free Beacon that Republicans were blocking a vote on the amendment.

The anti-slavery act has “been on the list of amendments Senate Democrats proposed the Senate to vote on that the Republicans have been objecting to … so you should ask the Senate Republicans why they’re blocking the vote,” Schumer spokesman Justin Goodman told the Free Beacon.

The article concludes:

Michael Sobolik, a fellow in Indo-Pacific studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, said the Senate Democratic opposition to the amendment was the “latest episode in a series of concessions to the Chinese Communist Party.”

“With their words, the administration and its congressional allies insist that America can simultaneously cooperate and compete with Beijing,” said Sobolik. “By their actions, they are dismissing potential complicity in an ongoing genocide to pocket dubious climate concessions from a regime with a track record of lying and breaking promises. That’s the opposite of ‘responsible competition.'”

I wish we could afford to pay all of our representatives and politicians in Washington as well as China pays them.

While Homeland Security Is Watching Parents…

Hot Air posted an article yesterday about Xiaoming Zhang, a civilian professor at the Air War College, headquartered at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. Professor Zhang has plead guilty to making false statements to a federal agent. He faces a maximum of five years in prison for lying about his relationship with a Chinese official to a federal agent.

The article includes a portion of his resume:

Before teaching at the Air War College, he taught at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, USA and Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas. On October 30, 2003, the Texas A&M University Press published his book “Red Wings Over the Yalu: China, the Soviet Union, and the Air War in Korea.” On January 1, 2004, China International Press published his book “China’s Tibet.” (b)(c)
In 2010, Air University published his article “The Art of Military Discovery: Chinese Air and Space Power Implications for the USAF,” which he co-wrote with U.S. Air Force colonel Sean D. McClung. (d)
On February 1, 2018, the University of North Carolina Press published his book “Deng Xiaoping’s Long War: The Military Conflict between China and Vietnam, 1979-1991 (The New Cold War History).”

The article notes:

This isn’t a case of a naturalized American citizen being duped by the Communist Chinese. This is a case of espionage committed purposefully after Zhang realized the foreign official, a Chinese Communist, was gathering sensitive information from him. He knew, yet he continued the relationship. This is not the first such case of the Chinese government infiltrating college campuses, using relationships with American professors for information. Some professors are paid by the Chinese government and get into trouble when they fail to disclose financial ties. It is a national security risk and during the Trump administration, the China Initiative began. It is a program that targets economic espionage and intellectual property theft, especially at research labs and universities.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. Unfortunately this is not an unusual situation. There are numerous foreign agents working in American colleges that need to be sent home. Unfortunately our Justice Department is more concerned about parents who want to know what their children are being taught.

 

When You Are Trying To Solve A Problem Not Everyone Understands

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been pretty open about its eventual goal to dominate the world economically and politically. One of the major obstacles in their way in America and its free market economy. In recent years, the CCP has worked very hard to infiltrate American universities and educate future leaders about the ‘problems’ inherent in a free-market economy. The CCP has been buying silver reserves with the goal in mind of eventually ending the U.S. dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. The CCP has also quietly been cornering the market on the rare earth minerals and other natural resources needed to fuel the computer age. They are not sitting quietly by waiting for America to fall–they plan to help America fall.

Just the News posted an article today about some Congressmen who are planning to slow down some of the CCP’s progress in taking over America.

The article reports:

Members recently advanced legislation that warns that such purchases also increases China’s involvement in the American food system, posing a national security risk.

More broadly, Congress has recently taken up the issue of American reliance on China in industries including semiconductors and minerals – both of which are key parts of the U.S. supply chain.

Washington GOP Rep. Dan Newhouse says the situation is “leading us toward the creation of a Chinese-owned agricultural land monopoly.”

Newhouse drafted an amendment recently added to an Agriculture-FDA spending bill that attempts to blocks new agricultural acquisitions by companies that are controlled, in part or in whole, by the Chinese Communist Party.

Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren also supports legislative efforts similar to Newhouse’s amendment.

However, Rep. Grace Meng, a New York Democrat, says Newhouse’s amendment will “perpetuate already rising anti-Asian hate.”

She argued that if the focus of the amendment were truly about security, buyers from other foreign nations would be subjected to similar restrictions.

What Representative Meng does not understand is that China is the only foreign nation attempting to gain control of America’s food production. I don’t think wanting to keep the CCP out of American food production has anything to do with anti-Asian hate–I think it is an example of watching what is going on and predicting the next step. We have already experienced a microchip shortage, let’s not have a food shortage.

A Dark Prediction

Yesterday The Epoch Times posted an article about some of the plans that will impact America’s currency.

The article reports:

A controversial plan to boost global liquidity means the days of the U.S. dollar being the undisputed king of the international monetary system may be coming to a close, experts told The Epoch Times.

Losing that status could contribute to a serious crisis for the United States involving a dramatic loss of economic purchasing power, a geopolitical realignment and everything associated with those shocks.

The Biden administration-backed International Monetary Fund (IMF) proposal to issue an unprecedented $650 billion U.S. dollars’ worth of new “Special Drawing Rights” (SDRs) this year alone will also help re-shape the international financial system.

That is more than twice the total amount of SDRs created by the IMF throughout its entire history.

The SDR is a sort of proto-global currency, based on a basket of leading currencies, dubbed an “international reserve asset” by the IMF. Each government receives an amount of SDRs proportional to its stake in the international organization.

The unprecedented new issuance, which has the support of both Beijing and Washington, will contribute to sidelining the U.S. dollar’s role as the global reserve currency, analysts warned. The Chinese Communist Party is expected to be a leading beneficiary.

It’s time to take another look at the end goal of Cloward-Piven. A website called “James 4 America‘ explains:

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called “crisis strategy” or “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

America’s role as the global reserve currency is what has kept us afloat during the runaway spending Congress had undertaken during the past sixty years. There was never any thought given to the amount of debt they were creating and who would eventually have to pay that debt off. Eventually the chickens were bound to come home to roost. It looks like eventually is getting very close.

 

 

A Scary Statement

Yesterday One America News posted an article about a recent statement made by Charles Munger, Vice Chairman of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway.

The article reports:

Charles Munger, Vice Chairman of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, has suggested the U.S. needs to act more like the Chinese Communist Party when it comes to banking. In an interview on Wednesday, the 97-year-old billionaire claimed American free enterprise led to mass suffering from the 2008 crash.

When asked about the mysterious disappearance of Alibaba CEO Jack Ma as an issue with Chinese economics, Munger doubled down on his pro CCP rhetoric.

“Well yes, but Jack Ma’s one of the swingers. So they just cut his, they said to hell with you,” he expressed. “He basically gave a speech when he said to one party state, you guys are a bunch of jerks, don’t know what you’re doing and I know what I’m doing and I’m going to do it better.”

…Munger went on to criticize the U.S. free-market economy by saying too many people have the ability to “go to this gross excess,” which he argued the Chinese Communist Party takes beneficial preventative measures against.

Mr. Munger needs to be reminded that it is not the government’s job to prevent “gross excess.” It should also be noted that it is very unlikely that Mr. Munger would be allowed to amass a billion dollars under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party or that he would be able to achieve success based on the merits of his own efforts rather than simply finding political favor. The man has obviously forgotten that the very freedom he is condemning is what allowed him to become the success that he became. Would Mr. Munger like to live under the policies of the  Chinese Communist Party as an ordinary citizen?

Who Is Funding American Magazines?

The Washington Free Beacon is reporting today that the Chinese government is funding content published in Time magazine.

The article reports:

Time magazine failed to disclose Chinese government funding for content published in its most recent print edition.

The magazine’s June 21-28 double issue included an insert from China Daily, a media outlet controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Disclosures on the insert label it as an advertisement from China Daily in Beijing and note that additional “information is on file with the DOJ, Washington DC.” Chinese government funding for China Daily is not mentioned. China Daily registers with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a law aimed at tracking foreign government influence.

Advocacy groups have criticized news outlets for partnering with China Daily out of concerns that the organization is spreading propaganda in the West. Some companies, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, have ended content-sharing deals with China Daily because it is controlled by the Chinese government. The outlet has paid millions of dollars to publish content in Western magazines’ and newspapers’ print and online editions.

Time began working with China Daily last year. Foreign-agent disclosures filed by China Daily in May show the outlet paid Time $700,000 over the past six months, by far the highest outlay to any American news company. In addition to the print inserts, the magazine publishes sponsored China Daily content on its website, which also does not acknowledge Chinese government funding.

Much of the China Daily content does not appear to be aggressive Chinese propaganda, with many of the articles portraying life in China and Chinese culture in a positive light. But some of the paid China Daily content has drawn criticism from advocacy groups because of its clear political agenda.

The article also noted:

China Daily also sponsored content in the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Foreign Policy magazine, according to foreign agent disclosures. Two Tibetan advocacy groups criticized Foreign Policy over a series of China Daily articles last month that touted Communist Party policies in Tibet. The International Campaign for Tibet called the articles an “affront” to Tibetans who oppose Communist Party rule.

Let’s be clear. The articles do not have to be aggressive Chinese propaganda–all they have to do is paint an idyllic picture of life in Communist China. As young Americans see the illusion of a utopian society where they get free education and have all of their needs met by the state, they are misled about the lack of freedom that goes along with those ‘benefits.’ The Chinese have engaged in a propaganda war with America for some time now. Chinese money has been flowing into American colleges for years, and recently a few professors have been arrested for spying for China. When you read an article in the mainstream media, you need to know if someone is paying for it.

The Enemy Within

Yesterday The Epoch Times reported the following:

Hundreds of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members are embedded within the Chinese divisions of major U.S. corporations, from IBM to PepsiCo to 3M, a leaked CCP-member database revealed.

The existence of Party units within foreign companies in China is hardly surprising, given that the regime mandates any organization with at least three CCP members to form a Party branch. But the 1.95 million CCP member list, which includes names, levels of education, ethnicity, and the Party branches they belong to, was to date the biggest revelation on the scale of the CCP’s influence on international companies.

Most of the members in the database are from the country’s southeastern coastal metropolis of Shanghai.

New York-headquartered tech firm IBM has at least two dozen Party units with 808 members in China.

3M, a manufacturer of consumer and health care goods, including N95 respirators and other medical products critical to preventing COVID-19 spread, employs at least 230 CCP members within five Party units.

PepsiCo, the multinational snack and beverage company, has 45 employees listed under the company’s Party branch committee.

The article concludes:

Xu Tao, the hotel’s Party branch secretary, said that he had tried to “incorporate political things into activities accepted by both Chinese and Western employees” to give Westerner staff the impression that “Party branch work are infusing more Chinese elements into the Westin brand and thus make the hotel more locally competitive,” according to a report by state media Xinhua. Xu had organized events to have workers stitch national flags together and to study the “spirit of the Long March,” the CCP army’s retreat in the 1930s.

The “membership in the Chinese Communist Party makes those people devoted not to the nation of China, or to the people of China, but to the political party of the CCP,” said Journalist Gertz. He called such efforts the CCP’s “ideological drive” to “basically take over the world.”

“They [CCP members] see themselves as besieged by the capitalist world, they see themselves as, basically, at ideological war with a non-communist world,” he said on The Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders program.

“Now the West, the free world, needs to wake up and start fighting back against the Chinese Communist Party.”

3M declined to comment. IBM, PepsiCo, Dow Chemical, Marriott, Nielsen, Mars, MetLife, Boeing, and Pfizer didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.

The CCP has funded our colleges to influence the way our future leaders are educated and infiltrated our major corporations in order to further their goals–not American’s goals, but the CCP’s goals. Please follow the link to read the entire article. I don’t know how much time we have to turn this around, but it is a grave threat to our country and to our freedom.

Playing Politics With National Security

It is troubling that someone on the House Intelligence Committee was in bed (literally) with a Chinese Communist Party spy. It is even more troubling that those in the House leadership on the Democrat side chose to keep that information secret.

The Conservative Treehouse posted an article yesterday about one disturbing aspect of this situation.

The article notes:

….. As noted in this interview segment Nancy Pelosi is claiming she was briefed on the Chinese spy compromise around Swalwell with McCarthy. However, simultaneously House Leader Kevin McCarthy states he found out through the media. Keep in mind McCarthy has only been part of the ‘Gang of Eight’ since Jan 2019 (he as minority leader and Pelosi taking over from Paul Ryan as House Speaker).

A Pelosi briefing prior to 2019 was in her role as Minority leader with Ryan as speaker (Nunes/Schiff as Chair/Ranking on HPSCI). Therefore either Pelosi was briefed outside the Go8 structure, or she is lying about briefing with McCarthy. While Pelosi is a notorious liar, the former explanation of a defensive briefing seems more likely.

That means U.S. intelligence officials during the Obama administration kept the Swalwell compromise secret and outside the Gang-of-Eight. Accepting that reality is further evidence the U.S. intel apparatus -writ large- was operating through the prism of politics.

This is yet another illustration of how the deep state works–they are willing to compromise national security in order to do anything that reflects negatively on one of their own.

A Much Needed Executive Order

There are a lot of reasons why people strongly dislike President Trump. A lot of the dislike is the result of the lies told about him in the mainstream media. If you believe President Trump is a racist, you might want to look into his history and the awards he has received for not being racist. Among other things, President Trump literally fought city hall to allow African-Americans and Jews to join Mar-a-lago. I suspect you won’t find a report of that on the mainstream media. Aside from the horrific picture the mainstream media has painted of this man, there are a lot of status quo financial interests that his presidency threatens. Corruption and payoffs in Washington have been part of the game for a long time, and obviously President Trump is not playing. A recent Executive Order is one example of why the Washington insiders hate President Trump.

The Epoch Times posted an article today with the headline, “US Invested Billions Into Companies With Ties to Chinese Military.”

The article reports:

President Donald Trump’s latest executive order bars U.S. investors from holding ownership stakes in a list of 31 Chinese companies designated to have ties with various Chinese Communist Party (CCP) military apparatuses.

This order, while somewhat limited in scope, ensnares several well-known Chinese companies including non-public companies such as Huawei and publicly traded companies such as China Mobile and Hangzhou Hikvision. The 31 companies were previously designated by the Pentagon as being “owned or controlled” by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the official name of the Chinese military. (The list of companies can be found here and here.)

The action could be a sign of things to come for Chinese companies with close ties to the CCP; U.S. capital could prove increasingly hard to come by. In addition, examining the foreign ownership base of these companies reveals that a number of them are partially owned by prominent U.S. investment firms, insurance companies, and pension funds.

Four more years of President Trump will not be kind to these investments. A Joe Biden presidency will allow business as usual to continue despite the threat to national security.

The article reports:

An analysis by The Epoch Times of ownership of these 31 Chinese companies reveals that billions of U.S. capital have already flowed into shares of these companies, all of which allegedly have ties to the CCP military or intelligence agencies.

Of the 16 publicly-traded firms either on the list or are subsidiaries and related parties of companies on the list, U.S. entities currently hold shares worth approximately $14.9 billion, based on closing prices as of Nov. 20 and latest available public filings data compiled by Bloomberg.

The vast majority of the $15 billion is invested in two of China’s biggest telecommunications giants. The first is China Mobile Ltd. with $8.1 billion invested via both the New York-listed ADR shares as well as the Hong Kong-listed shares. The company with the second-largest amount of U.S. capital is New York-listed China Telecom Corp with $2.3 billion of investments. Both firms are believed to have links to the PLA, according to the U.S. defense department.

Third on the list is surveillance equipment manufacturer Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. Ltd., with $1.7 billion of investments from U.S.-domiciled sources. Hikvision has been criticized in the West for producing equipment used to monitor Uighur Muslims in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.

Unsurprisingly, investment advisors and fund management firms are the biggest single group investing into these Chinese companies—with $13.5 billion invested—by way of their actively managed mutual funds or passively managed exchange-traded funds (ETFs). They are followed by government and pension funds with $466 million invested, and hedge funds with $406 million invested. Other investor classes with large stakes include insurance companies (for their own accounts) and banks and brokers (likely on behalf of client accounts).

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It really makes you wonder about the loyalty to America of some of our financial people.

Know Your Sources

Yesterday The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about the British magazine the Economist.

The article reports:

The Economist provided sympathetic coverage of a Chinese tech giant widely considered a national security risk without disclosing the publication’s lucrative business relationship with the firm that spanned nearly a decade.

Huawei Technologies commissioned the Economist‘s business consulting division to advance its policy agendas and deflect cybersecurity concerns raised by Western governments. The influential British magazine produced reports on a wide range of subjects—including a report on broadband access in the United Kingdom that Huawei credits to have influenced British policy. The publication has also run numerous Huawei advertisements, and its editors have cohosted several global forums with the company, helping the tech firm boost its public image as it faced growing scrutiny from the developed world for its close ties with the Chinese government.

The Economist defended Huawei in a front-page cover story in 2012—the year the publication’s consulting division started working with the company—that accused Western countries of using cybersecurity concerns as a pretense to oppose legitimate competition from Huawei. The publication’s coverage of the tech company has become less overtly pro-Huawei in recent years, but the Economist‘s coverage of the company is seen as friendly enough that Huawei’s PR division has cited several of the magazine’s articles to deflect criticism.

The article concludes:

While the Economist‘s coverage of Huawei has become more skeptical of the Chinese firm over the years, the magazine continues to criticize U.S. efforts to sanction Huawei. The company has been all too happy to cite some of the Economist‘s coverage in its “facts” section, which seeks to assuage concerns about Huawei. Its CEO, Ren Zhengfei, also gave open-ended interviews with the publication in December 2019 and January 2020, the latter with the Economist‘s editor in chief.

None of the Economist‘s coverage of Huawei mentioned the publication’s long-standing business relationship with the tech firm.

Nile Gardiner, a foreign policy expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said that Huawei’s relationship with the Economist appears to be part of its multifaceted campaign to influence British and European public opinion.

“Huawei has a large propaganda operation in Europe and invests vast sums of money to influence thinking in Europe,” he said. “It is very disappointing that some European media organizations and businesses chose to collaborate with an entity that is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.”

This relationship is important to note because it illustrates one way the Chinese Communist Party peddles influence. All of the shenanigans we see going on between the Biden family and the CCP generally relate to gaining access and peddling influence. The CCP uses its money and businesses to infiltrate western media and politics to gain advantages in trade and policy decisions. The thing to remember is that no business is successful in China unless it follows the wishes of the Communist Party.