|
Brexit Promoters Lament Predictable Brexit Results
It is only one month until the United Kingdom of Britain leaves the European Union. There is still no deal about the future relations between the two entities and the time is running out. But even if a deal about the economic issues is finalized and signed there will still be many changes and inconveniences.
One argument with which the British government promoted Brexit was the "end of free movement". Most people who voted for Brexit probably thought that this would mean the closing of a one-way street that only affects migrants to Britain from lower tier countries. Now they are waking up to the fact that Brexit is closing down a two way road.
Furious British expats blast EU's new post-Brexit travel rules which will ban them from spending more than three months at a time at their holiday home from January
- Travel rules will change after end of the post-Brexit 'standstill' transition period
- After January 1 UK tourists visiting EU countries will be restricted to 90 day stays
- The rules have prompted a backlash from Britons who own holiday home in EU
These are not 'new' EU rules. Starting January 1 Britons will be allowed on vacation in the EU for a maximum of 90 days in every six month period. These are the long existing rules for non-EU citizens if their country has no agreement for bilateral free movement with the EU.
The Daily Mail, which now laments the issue, campaigned for years for the UK to become one of those countries. It is now outraged about the consequences.
There will be more such 'surprises' which Brexit promoters will lament about even when these were utterly predictable.
Now, as Brexit becomes reality, people are finally waking up to the myriad of problems it will create for UK car maker, farmers, logistics and everyone:
Cont. reading: Brexit Promoters Lament Predictable Brexit Results
The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-94
Iran’s Top Nuclear Scientist Assassinated As Israel Tries To Provoke War
Today the top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fahrizade was assassinated in a complex terror attack while driving on a highway in Absard, a small city just east of Tehran. An explosion stopped his car. Then shots were fired at him from two directions.
bigger
Between 2010 and 2012 four other nuclear scientist in Iran were assassinated in similar ways.
There is little doubt about who is responsible for this attack:
Fakhrizadeh was named by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2018 as the director of Iran’s nuclear weapons project.
When Netanyahu revealed then that Israel had removed from a warehouse in Tehran a vast archive of Iran’s own material detailing with its nuclear weapons program, he said: “Remember that name, Fakhrizadeh.”
bigger
According to the IAEA Iran did not and does not have a nuclear weapons program. More than 20 years back some Iranian scientists did an organizational study about what they would have to do to create a nuclear weapons program. But politics intervened and the program was never launched.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has since its establishment rejected all weapons of mass destruction out of religious reasons. Its leader Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa the prohibits any attempts to develop, produce or otherwise introduce such weapons.
While a terror attack against its top nuclear scientist can be seen as an act of war Iran is unlikely to openly take revenge for it. Doing such would only play into Netanyahoo's hands as he attempts to goad the U.S. into an attack on Iran.
The assassination of Mohsen Fahrizade does not aim at Iran's nuclear program. Its purpose is to assassinate the nuclear deal with Iran before president elect Joe Biden comes into office.
There are expectations, which I don't have, that Biden will rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran. The Trump administration had left the deal and had re-introduced severe sanctions against the country. President Trump retweeted news of today's assassination. If Biden really wants to revive the deal he should immediately condemn today's assassination. Obama did similar when the other scientist were killed.
There are still 55 days until Trump leaves the office. Netanyahoo will use that time to launch more provocation.
The Vaccine Competition Will Be Ruthless
Debs is dead writes:
[T]he pushback against AstraZeneca including the latest link which is all speculation mixed with the same trash talk wall st analysts have been making, is a blatant move by big pharma to edge AstraZeneca out of the market.
There is more testing to be done on the AstraZeneca vaccine. Yes the discovery of a half dose followed by a full dose seeming to be more efficacious was the result of a distribution accident in one particular cohort comprised of Englanders under 55, AstraZeneca have realised that and have undertaken to extend the 50/100 trial across all age groups and ethnicities in the next testing round.
Also despite the fact that the big pharma mRNA vaccines have published no peer reviewed results, AstraZeneca report that they have sent a peer reviewed study of their complete test results thus far, to the Lancet and they expect these to be published in the next edition of the journal – likely within the next few days.
However many people whine, bitch about all others, then salute the results of Russian & Chinese vaccines the simple fact is a great many communities will be denied access to Russian or Chinese vaccines – that is a reality. Some of these states are in no shape to subscribe to the mRNA vaccines without 'aid' (i.e. ripoff loans) because their health budgets are still having to cover the double Tamiflu scam (they had to sign contracts to replace 'expired' Tamiflu stocks used or not after 3 years) and the more recent Remdesivir scam, all perpetrated by Gilead.
In the real world that means if the AstraZeneca vaccine is more than 60% efficacious (which is better than any flu vaccine – 95% is new big pharma BS IMO) and has no major side effects (one case of MS tells us nothing for the reason I outlined above), then it will be that or nothing for a sizeable slab of the world's population.
If everyone falls for big pharma's transparent attempt to stop this possible vaccine in its tracks, prior to testing completion, then that will mean no vaccine for billions of our fellow humans, so rather than joining in the big pharma sabotage, it makes better sense to consider that vaccine more objectively than de Noli, that Harvard minion of corporations seems to do.
Of course for some theoretical Marxist whose crazed ramblings remind me of the immature garbage one could hear around any Lisbon praça, circa 1975, that will mean little. As the humans of Mozambique, Angola and in particular since I lost friends there , Timor Leste, discovered to their cost.
I agree with the above.
Sure, AstraZeneca has not communicated well. They should have published their trial protocols. They should have been more explicit about their dosing 'mistake'. But the results of their trials are encouraging and the explanation for the higher efficacy with a lower first dose, see below, makes sense.
Cont. reading: The Vaccine Competition Will Be Ruthless
Open Thread 2020-93
Israel Is (Again) Pushing For War On Iran
There is a campaign to push U.S. president Donald Trump into attacking Iran before he leaves his office. It is likely that Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahoo, with the help of Secretary of State Mike Pompous, is the brain behind it.
The campaign started on November 16 with a New York Times piece which claimed that Trump had asked for options to bomb Iran:
President Trump asked senior advisers in an Oval Office meeting on Thursday whether he had options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks. The meeting occurred a day after international inspectors reported a significant increase in the country’s stockpile of nuclear material, four current and former U.S. officials said on Monday.
A range of senior advisers dissuaded the president from moving ahead with a military strike. The advisers — including Vice President Mike Pence; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Christopher C. Miller, the acting defense secretary; and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — warned that a strike against Iran’s facilities could easily escalate into a broader conflict in the last weeks of Mr. Trump’s presidency.
It is unlikely that Trump will want to ruin his legacy by launching another war in the Middle East. He will want to run again for president in 2024. 'America first', avoiding wars that are of no value for the U.S., was and is one of his major selling points.
There is precedence for such an Israeli campaign. Back in 2008 Netanyahoo had also tried to push the outgoing Bush administration towards a war on Iran:
During the last days of the Bush administration in 2008, Israeli officials, concerned that the incoming Obama administration would seek to block it from striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, sought bunker-busting bombs, bombers and intelligence assistance from the United States for an Israeli-led strike.
Vice President Dick Cheney later wrote in his memoir that he supported the idea. President George W. Bush did not, …
While Israel has the capabilities to attack Iran it would never dare to do so without explicit U.S. backing.
Mike Pompous, the Cheney in the current attempt to drag the U.S. along, also wants to run for president – if not in 2024 then later. He is 56 years old and can wait a few more years. He is currently trying to catch the Evangelical vote and Zionist campaign support by pleasing Israel as much as possible:
Cont. reading: Israel Is (Again) Pushing For War On Iran
Another Look At Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy Team
The choices the incoming president Joe Biden has made so far are not great at all. The people he so far selected are staunch interventionists who will want to continue the wars they have started during their previous time in office.
Tony Blinken will become Secretary of State. (It was probably thought to be too hard to get Senate confirmation for the similar bad Susan Rice.) In 2013 the Washington Post described his high flying pedigree:
Blinken is deputy national security adviser to President Obama, who has also invoked the Holocaust as his administration wrestles, often painfully, with how to respond to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons. One of the government’s key players in drafting Syria policy, the 51-year-old Blinken has Clinton administration credentials and deep ties to Vice President Biden and the foreign policy and national security establishment in Washington. He has drawn attention in Situation Room photos, including the iconic one during the May 2011 raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound, for his stylishly wavy salt-and-pepper hair. But what sets him apart from the other intellectual powerhouses in the inner sanctum is a life story that reads like a Jewish high-society screenplay that the onetime aspiring film producer may have once dreamed of making. There’s his father, a giant in venture capital; his mother, the arts patron; and his stepfather, who survived the Holocaust to become of one of the most influential lawyers on the global stage. It is a bildungsroman for young Blinken — playing in a Parisian jazz band, debating politics with statesmen — with a supporting cast of characters that includes, among others, Leonard Bernstein, John Lennon, Mark Rothko, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Abel Ferrara and Christo.
The man is a war mongering psycho:
Blinken surprised some in the Situation Room by breaking with Biden to support military action in Libya, administration officials said, and he advocated for American action in Syria after Obama’s reelection. These sources said that Blinken was less enthusiastic than Biden about Obama’s decision to seek congressional approval for a strike in Syria, but is now — perhaps out of necessity — onboard and a backer of diplomatic negotiations with Russia. While less of an ideologue than Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (a job for which he was considered), he not surprisingly shares her belief that global powers such as the United States have a “responsibility to protect” against atrocities.
He has since shown no remorse about those foreign policy failures:
Cont. reading: Another Look At Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy Team
Pandemic Freedom
On Thursday the U.S. will celebrate Thanksgiving. That will cause an increase in the number of Covid-19 cases and in the number of deaths.
The states could have intervened but did little to prevent this from happening. The politicians are reluctant to act because the U.S. public at large follows an ideology that is incompatible with a pandemic.
The CDC warns of Thanksgiving celebrations:
As cases continue to increase rapidly across the United States, the safest way to celebrate Thanksgiving is to celebrate at home with the people you live with.
Gatherings with family and friends who do not live with you can increase the chances of getting or spreading COVID-19 or the flu.
In my view that warning is not strong enough.
There should be more draconian measures and restrictions of freedom to prevent higher Covid-19 casualties.
In October Canada already celebrated its version of Thanksgiving. The result was a notable acceleration of the pandemic.
Source: George Rutherford, UCSF – bigger
More can be done and more should be done to prevent this from happening in the United States.
But there are people who argue even against stronger warnings:
Cont. reading: Pandemic Freedom
The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-92
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
> It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.
Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”
The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.” <
—
Other issues:
Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-92
How ‘Western’ Media Select Their Foreign Correspondents
Did you ever wonder why ‘western’ mainstream media get stories about Russia and other foreign countries so wrong?
It is simple. They hire the most brainwashed, biased and cynical writers they can get for the job. Those who are corrupt enough to tell any lie required to support the world view of their editors and media owners.
They are quite upfront about it.
Here is evidence in form of a New York Times job description for a foreign correspondent position in Moscow:
Russia Correspondent
Job Description
Vladimir Putin’s Russia remains one of the biggest stories in the world.
It sends out hit squads armed with nerve agents against its enemies, most recently the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony in the West to tarnish its democratic systems, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It has deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out in his villa.
If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news: We will have an opening for a new correspondent as Andy Higgins takes over as our next Eastern Europe Bureau Chief early next year.
bigger
To be allowed to write for the Times one must see the Russian Federation as a country that is ruled by just one man.
One must be a fervent believer in MI6 produced Novichok hogwash. One must also believe in Russiagate and in the multiple idiocies it produced even after all of them have been debunked.
One must know that vote counts in Russia are always wrong while U.S. vote counting is the most reliable ever. Russian private military contractors (which one must know to be evil men) are ‘secretly deployed’ to wherever the editors claim them to be. Russia’s hospitals are of course always much worse than ours.
Even when it is easy to check that Vladimir Putin (the most evil man ever) is at work in the Kremlin the job will require one to claim that he is hiding in a villa.
Most people writing for the Times will actually not believe the above nonsense. But the description is not for a position that requires one to weigh and report the facts. It is for a job that requires one to lie. That the Times lists all the recent nonsense about Russia right at the top of the job description makes it clear that only people who support those past lies will be considered adequate to tell future lies about Russia.
No honest unbiased person will want such a job. But as it comes with social prestige, a good paycheck and a probably nice flat in Moscow the New York Times will surely find a number of people who are willing to sell their souls to take it.
Interestingly the job advertisement does not list Russian language capabilities as a requirement. It only says that ‘Fluency in Russian is preferred’.
‘Western’ mainstream media are filled with such biased, cynical and self-censoring correspondents who have little if any knowledge of the country they are reporting from. It is therefore not astonishing that ‘western’ populations as well as their politicians have often no knowledge of what is really happening in the world.
h/t Bryan MacDonald
The Forever War In Afghanistan Will Soon Re-escalate
Recent headlines on Afghanistan:
Everyone wants the troops to leave Afghanistan except the Pentagon brass and the CIA. They have prevailed over two presidents and are now ready to manipulate a third one into intensifying the war.
Consider:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Why are we continuing to train these Afghanis who then shoot our soldiers in the back? Afghanistan is a complete waste. Time to come home!
4:05 PM · Aug 21, 2012
Barack Obama @BarackObama
VP Biden on Afghanistan: "We are leaving in 2014. Period."
4:05am · 12 Oct 2012
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
I agree with Pres. Obama on Afghanistan. We should have a speedy withdrawal. Why should we keep wasting our money — rebuild the U.S.!
9:59 PM · Jan 14, 2013
Barack Obama @BarackObama
President Obama: "By the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will be over."
3:58am · 13 Feb 2013
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
We should leave Afghanistan immediately. No more wasted lives. If we have to go back in, we go in hard & quick. Rebuild the US first.
8:10 PM · Mar 1, 2013
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
We should have the small remaining number of our BRAVE Men and Women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas!
1:28 AM · Oct 8, 2020
M.K. Bhadrakumar explains why the Pentagon prevailed over two presidents:
Cont. reading: The Forever War In Afghanistan Will Soon Re-escalate
How Not To Challenge China
The headline of a recent Bloomberg column by one Tyler Cowen is:
Covid Is Increasing America’s Lead Over China.
Its remarkable only for its fervent nationalistic delusion.
This paragraph stands out:
There is one other factor that people are loathe to discuss (with one exception). Yes, the U.S. has botched its response to Covid-19. At the same time, its experience shows that America as a nation can in fact tolerate casualties, too many in fact. It had long been standard Chinese doctrine that Americans are “soft” and unwilling to take on much risk. If you were a Chinese war game planner, might you now reconsider that assumption?
This comes at the same day as a similar delusional State Department policy planning paper sees the light.
The Elements of the China Challenge (pdf)
Axios calls it a "Kennan-style paper". In 1946 George Kennan, then Deputy Chief of Mission of the United States to the USSR, wrote his 'Long Telegram' that defined U.S. Cold War policy towards the Soviet Union for the next decades:
Kennan described dealing with Soviet Communism as "undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face". In the first two sections, he posited concepts that became the foundation of American Cold War policy:
- The Soviets perceived themselves at perpetual war with capitalism;
- The Soviets viewed left-wing, but non-communist, groups in other countries as an even worse enemy of itself than the capitalist ones;
- The Soviets would use controllable Marxists in the capitalist world as allies;
- Soviet aggression was fundamentally not aligned with the views of the Russian people or with economic reality, but rooted in historic Russian nationalism and neurosis;
- The Soviet government's structure inhibited objective or accurate pictures of internal and external reality.
Kennan later said that his paper was misunderstood and that the hostile containment policies that were based on it were wrong and self defeating.
But the China paper which the State Department published is not comparable to the 'Long Telegram'. It is a propaganda piece that reflects the naive views of the outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompous.
Pompous' premise is that the Chinese people hate the Communist Party of China that runs the country and that China is not a democracy. But that is not what the people of China believe:
Cont. reading: How Not To Challenge China
Open Thread 2020-91
Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy Team
As this blog is often concerned with U.S. foreign policy and the damage it causes, a look at Biden's foreign policy team seems adequate.
In short – it is awful.
Susan Rice of Benghazi fame, National Security Advisor under Obama, is said to become Secretary of State.
Michele Flournoy, co-founder of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), will become Secretary of Defense. Flournoy is a hawk. CNAS is financed by donations from the who-is-who of the military industrial complex. She also co-founded WestExec Advisors, a consultancy that pulls strings to help companies to win Pentagon contracts.
Also at WestExec Advisors was Tony Blinken who is set to become the National Security Advisor. He was National Security Advisor for then Vice President Biden, Deputy National Security Advisor for Obama and Deputy Secretary of State.
All three, together with Joe Biden, promoted the 2003 war on Iraq and supported the wars the Obama administration launched or continued against some seven countries.
They will continue to wage those wars and will probably add a few new ones.
Biden has said that he will re-instate the nuclear agreement with Iran but with 'amendments'. A realistic analysis shows that Iran is likely to reject any modification of the original deal:
The Biden administration will face the harsh reality that the amendments to the JCPOA that it needs to make its return to the agreement politically viable are unacceptable to Iran. The new US administration will more than likely find itself in a situation in which sanctions, including those on oil exports, must be maintained in an effort to pressure Iran to yield to US demands to modify the JCPOA.
There will be much pressure from the liberal hawks to finish the war they had launched against Syria by again intensifying it. Trump had ended the CIA's Jihadi supply program. The Biden team may well reintroduce such a scheme.
Susan Rice has criticized Trump's Doha deal with the Taliban. Under a Biden administration U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan are therefore likely to again increase.
One possible change may come in the U.S. support for the Saudi war on Yemen. The Democrats dislike Mohammad bin Salman and may try to use the Yemen issue to push him out of his Crown Prince position.
Biden and his team have supported the coup attempt in Venezuela. They only criticized it for not being done right and will probably come up with their own bloody 'solution'.
After four years of Russiagate nonsense, which Susan Rice had helped to launch, it is impossible to again 'reset' the relations with Russia. Biden could immediately agree to renew the New START treaty which limits strategic nuclear weapons but it is more likely that he will want to add, like with Iran's nuclear deal, certain 'amendments' which will be hard to negotiate. Under Biden the Ukraine may be pushed into another war against its eastern citizens. Belarus will remain on the 'regime change' target list.
Asia is the place where Biden's policies may be less confrontational than Trump's:
China would heave a big sigh of relief if Biden picks Rice as his secretary of state. Beijing knows her well, as she had a hands-on role in remoulding the relationship from engagement to selective competition, which could well be the post-Trump China policies.
For the Indian audience, which is obsessive about Biden’s China policy, I would recommend the following YouTube on Rice’s oral history where she narrates her experience as NSA on how the US and China could effectively coordinate despite their strategic rivalry and how China actually helped America battle Ebola.
Interestingly, the recording was made in April this year amidst the “Wuhan virus” pandemic in the US and Trump’s trade and tech war with China. Simply put, Rice highlighted a productive relationship with Beijing while probably sharing the more Sino-skeptic sentiment of many of America’s foreign policy experts and lawmakers.
All together the Biden/Harris regime will be a continuation of the Obama regime. It's foreign policies will have awful consequences for a lot of people on this planet.
Domestically Biden/Harris will revive all the bad feelings that led to the election of Donald Trump. The demographics of the election show no sign of a permanent majority for Democrats.
It is therefore highly probable that Trump, or a more competent and thereby more dangerous populist republican, will again win in 2024.
The Great Revenge – How Tony Fauci F*cked Donald Trump
In January 2017 the CIA claimed that Russia had kompromat on Trump. Trump shot back at the CIA. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer then warned the incoming president:
"You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you," Schumer, a New York Democrat, told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. "So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this."
As the years after the warning passed by it proved to have been valid. The CIA 'whistle blowers' put a great effort into sabotaging Trump's presidency. But they were largely unsuccessful.
The CIA failed to sabotaged Trump's reelection. It was the health community, including parts of Trump's administration, which did that.
Trump had especially angered Dr. Fauci, the well known infectious-disease expert and member of the government's coronavirus taskforce. Fauci's advise had been ignored and efforts were made to hold him back from making public pronouncements.
On November 1, two days before the election, Fauci gave a widely distributed interview to the Washington Post:
President Trump’s repeated assertions the United States is “rounding the turn” on the novel coronavirus have increasingly alarmed the government's top health experts, who say the country is heading into a long and potentially deadly winter with an unprepared government unwilling to make tough choices.
“We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. It’s not a good situation,” Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious-disease expert, said in a wide-ranging interview late Friday. “All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”
Fauci's interview was not the first intervention he made. In October two leading vaccine companies were ready to announce the success of their vaccine trials. But with at least the knowledge of Fauci and the Federal Drug Administration both companies deviated from their clinical protocols to intentionally move their success announcement to a date after the election.
During the summer Trump had been hopeful that a vaccine against the Covid-19 disease could be announced before the election. It would have been proof that his strategy to (not) fight the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic had at least one success. The announcement of a vaccine was part of President Trump's planned 'October surprises' to win the election.
Cont. reading: The Great Revenge – How Tony Fauci F*cked Donald Trump
The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-90
Al-Qaeda’s Number 2 Killed In 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 … 2017, 2020
From the mouth of Mossad:
The United States and Israel worked together to track and kill a senior al-Qaida operative in Iran earlier this year, a bold intelligence operation by the two allied nations that came as the Trump administration was ramping up pressure on Tehran.
Four current and former U.S. officials said Abu Mohammed al-Masri, al-Qaida’s No. 2, was killed by assassins in the Iranian capital in August. The U.S. provided intelligence to the Israelis on where they could find al-Masri and the alias he was using at the time, while Israeli agents carried out the killing, according to two of the officials. The two other officials confirmed al-Masri’s killing but could not provide specific details.
The story is laughable. If any important al-Qaeda guy had been killed last August Trump would have screamed about it during his campaign from the top of his lungs.
Twelve years ago we already joked about all the fake "Al-Qaeda No.2 killed" stories which appeared in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008.
There have since been quite a few more of these:
Being Al-Qaeda's number 2 is a dangerous job!
As No.2 one might be media-killed anytime the U.S. seeks a pretext to ramp up sanctions on Iran.
The Huge New Trade Deal ‘Western’ Media Do Not Like To Talk About
Tomorrow a new trade agreement between 15 Asian states will be signed. It will soon be seen as a milestone in the global economic history. But only very few 'western' media have taken note of it or of the huge consequences the new agreement will have.
The agreement is also a huge victory for China over U.S. hegemony in Asia:
Fifteen Asia-Pacific nations including China and Japan plan to sign the world’s biggest free trade deal this weekend. The FTA will cut tariffs, strengthen supply chains with common rules of origin, and codify new e-commerce rules.
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is expected to be announced at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit, which Vietnam is hosting virtually. It will involve the ten member states of the ASEAN bloc – Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – as well as their trade partners Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea.
The new economic bloc will thus represent around a third of the world’s gross domestic product and population.
It will become the first-ever free trade agreement to include China, Japan, and South Korea – Asia’s first, second and fourth-largest economies.
The economies of the RCEP members are growing faster than the rest of the world. The agreement is likely to accelerate their growth.
bigger
India is the only country that was invited but is missing in the deal. Its Hindu-fascist Modi regime had bet on the U.S. led anti-Chinese QUAD initiative pressed for by Trump and Pompeo and thereby lost out in trade terms:
Cont. reading: The Huge New Trade Deal ‘Western’ Media Do Not Like To Talk About
Deep State Member Admits Sabotage Of Trump’s Policies
Katie Bo Williams @KatieBoWill – 11:46 UTC · Nov 13, 2020
In a particularly frank moment during an exit interview, departing Syria envoy Jim Jeffrey acknowledged to me that when it came to troop levels there, “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there."
Jeffrey was always a part of the 'deep state' that tried to sabotage Trump's policies.
As Williams writes:
Four years after signing the now-infamous “Never Trump” letter condemning then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as a danger to America, retiring diplomat Jim Jeffrey is recommending that the incoming Biden administration stick with Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East.
But even as he praises the president’s support of what he describes as a successful “realpolitik” approach to the region, he acknowledges that his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria.
“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said in an interview. The actual number of troops in northeast Syria is “a lot more than” the two hundred troops Trump agreed to leave there in 2019.
…
“What Syria withdrawal? There was never a Syria withdrawal,” Jeffrey said. “When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, [Trump] was inclined to pull out. In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay. And we succeeded both times. That’s the story.”
…
Officially, Trump last year agreed to keep about 200 U.S. troops stationed in northeast Syria to “secure” oil fields held by the United States’ Kurdish allies in the fight against ISIS. It is generally accepted that the actual number is now higher than that — anonymous officials put the number at about 900 today — but the precise figure is classified and remains unknown even, it appears, to members of Trump’s administration keen to end the so-called “forever wars.”
That the Pentagon, the State Department and the various secret services were and are lying to Trump is not new. That one of their guys now openly admits this is refreshing.
As Trump now knows this, and recently installed his people in the Pentagon, he may draw the right conclusions from it not only for Syria but also for Afghanistan.
President Donald Trump’s decapitation strike on the Pentagon this week is raising fears that the U.S. will accelerate the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, putting newly installed leaders on a collision course with top generals and others who are urging a more deliberate drawdown.
Current and former administration officials say Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper Monday in part over his opposition to accelerating troop drawdowns worldwide, and especially in Afghanistan. The upheaval accelerated on Tuesday with the resignation of three high-level civilians and the installation of loyalists who are expected to ram through Trump's agenda, and continued on Wednesday when retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, an outspoken critic of the war in Afghanistan, was brought on as senior adviser to new acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller.
Any move to accelerate withdrawals would set up a clash with the nation’s top generals and other civilians, who have argued publicly against leaving Afghanistan too quickly while the security situation remains volatile. It would also complicate President-elect Joe Biden’s pledge to leave a small number of troops in the country to guard against terror attacks.
“A precipitous and what appears to be near total withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan — not on a conditions-based approach advocated by our military, political and intelligence leadership but rather on an old campaign promise by President Trump now carried out by hyperpartisan Trump loyalists installed in a last-minute purge of DoD — is both reckless and will not make America safer,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA senior operations officer.
The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan began on October 7 2001. Nineteen years and an obviously lost war later the removal of U.S. troops from the country is still 'precipitous'?
Macgregor and Sec Def Miller should draw up a direct order to the commanding general of U.S. Central Command that tells him to remove all troops from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq within the next 30 days. Trump must sign it. Should CentCom fail to follow the order by the Commander in Chief its leader must be replaced and court martialed.
That is how the chain of command should actually work. It would be nice to see it for once happening that way.
Open Thread 2020-89
|
