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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2019-25
In today's WaPo: Guaidó says opposition overestimated military support for uprising No kidding!
Caitlin Johnstone – Venezuela: Establishment Talking Points Translation Key
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Other stuff:
Tim Shorrock on the North Korean embassy raid:
Did the CIA Orchestrate an Attack on the North Korean Embassy in Spain? – The Nation
A mostly good roundup on the 737 MAX by The Verge: Redline – The many human errors that brought down the Boeing 737 MAX. But is this really a 'human error'?
The episode underscores what The Seattle Times found after a review of documents and interviews with more than a dozen current and former Boeing engineers who have been involved in airplane certification in recent years, including on the 737 MAX: Many engineers, employed by Boeing while officially designated to be the FAA’s eyes and ears, faced heavy pressure from Boeing managers to limit safety analysis and testing so the company could meet its schedule and keep down costs.
That pressure increased when the FAA stopped dealing directly with those designated employees — called “Authorized Representatives” or ARs — and let Boeing managers determine what was presented to the regulatory agency.
Who could have known? Capt. Sullenberger: "in this ultra-cost-competitive global aviation industry, when it comes to costs, nothing is more costly than an accident. Nothing."
Bloomberg has a rage against Chinese made computer equipment. A 2018 story, The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies, was denied by everyone involved, including Apple and Amazon who use the Chinese made computers. Recently Bloomberg made claims about a "backdoor" in Huawei equipment: The West Finally Has Its Huawei Smoking Gun. The "backdoor" turned out to be a diagnostics Telnet port on the non-public (LAN) side of some 3G access equipment. A non-issue that was found and fixed in 2011/2012. The always snarky Register responds: Sinister secret backdoor found in networking gear perfect for government espionage: The Chinese are – oh no, wait, it's Cisco again – Better ban this gear from non-US core networks, right?
NASA did not renew its contract for rides on the Russian Soyuz missiles to the International Space Station: Russia to End U.S. Space Station Rides in April, Pressuring NASA. It was not concerned as SpaceX and Boeing were under contract to build new vehicles to transport U.S. astronauts. But now both projects are late and SpaceX just destroyed its crew capsule during a ground test. That will cause more delays. Will the 50% U.S. made space stations no longer have U.S. astronauts?
Bonus:
“The younger generation now tells me how tough things are, give me a break … I have no empathy” – Joe Biden (video)
Excellent campaign slogan Joe. Excellent:
bigger
Use as open thread …
@78 mh-mtl
Interesting discussion. Here’s what I’m trying to puzzle out.
The equation according to Macleod is that any region in the world that starts attracting capital to itself – and thus away from the US and its dollar – thereby becomes a target for US weapons of instability, to discourage capital from that region.
This is what happened in the South-East Asian crisis of 1997, started by a run on the Thai currency. But this was also seen and analyzed by a chief strategist of China’s security state, Qiao Liang, who is still around and still calling the plays as they happen. So China knows deep in its bones that by attracting capital to its BRI, it is also attracting the destabilizing weapons of the US.
So yes, there is the trade war and also the financial war. But it seems the trade war is a subset of the larger war of destruction – using all financial weapons, especially crashing the currencies of target countries, but also to include the heavier covert and even military options if required.
Of these, Trump appears to have his hand on the weapon of sanctions. But as Alasdair Cooke shows in this piece linked by karlof1 in a different thread, the institutions of the US that use this weapon are actually warning against its use for regime change.
The premier author of sanctions use, David Cohen, says:
“The logic of coercive sanctions does not hold, however, when the objective of sanctions is regime change. Put simply, because the cost of relinquishing power will always exceed the benefit of sanctions relief, a targeted state cannot conceivably accede to a demand for regime change”
In other words, Trump is using the one weapon they’ve left to his hand (and perhaps which they may take away from future presidents) by going full-throttle and trying to make a difference. But sanctions cannot achieve the aim of regime change – not in Venezuela or Iran, or anywhere else – because they were never designed for that purpose.
This somewhat implies that Trump either doesn’t have control of those methods that ARE designed for regime change, or that lesser goals are actually in play, underneath the grandstanding. As we know, this is the eternal question in our discussions here.
But the equation I want to suggest is that the weapons available to Trump are ineffective, and the weapons that are effective, are not subject to Trump’s control.
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Meanwhile, China is a target for destabilizing, because it is now attracting too much investment capital, away from the US. This would actually serve as the overarching casus belli for the US, if we were trying to understand the automatic reaction of the US state against other countries.
Macleod illustrates that China is somewhat immune to all the financial weapons that the US can bring to bear against it – and this is what I think is most important here. Trump’s tariffs, a weapon of the White House, have served to diminish global trade, to the detriment of the US.
The more effective weapons – and probably not launched by Trump but by the permanent state of the US – will not be effective against China, however, because China has a different economic system:
The Chinese have long been on a financial war footing, as shown by Qiao Liang’s analysis of how America needs global portfolio flows and what they are prepared to do to attract them. Western thinking that the Chinese and their Russian allies are vulnerable to American hegemony has been disproved time and again. Financial analysts consistently fail to understand the Chinese are not muppets.
China will not be provoked, and by standing firm, they are sure to protect Hong Kong and get on with diverting investment flows from a failing US economy into its Belt and Road Initiative. This will force a financial crisis on the Americans of their own making.
That was my emphasis, but I share it gladly 🙂
The summation is this. China is not at the same stage of capitalism as the US, which is at the end stage of capitalism/imperialism according to the Marxist view. China is nothing like close to that stage, and because socialism is such a core foundation of the economic system, may never reach such a stage.
If Macleod is correct, we get to watch the weapons at work on Hong Kong, and fail. If this long and rambling surmise is correct, we get to watch the waning of US capitalism continue, and China’s economic rise continue, all pretty much unabated.
Posted by: Grieved | May 7 2019 3:45 utc | 81
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