Beijing Appoints Capital Markets Veteran As Regulatory Chief Amid Stock Meltdown
China has appointed capital markets veteran Wu Qing to head the nation’s securities regulator just one day after the country’s sovereign wealth fund said it would ramp up buying shares in the open market amid a three-year rout that has wiped out a staggering $7 trillion in value off stock markets in Hong Kong and China.
Qing, who served as the head of the Shanghai Stock Exchange from 2016 to 2017, has been named the new chairman and party secretary of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), taking over from Yi Huiman, who held the post since 2019, according to South China Morning Post, citing state media Xinhua on Wednesday.
SCMP pointed out Qing was the deputy party chief of the financial center of Shanghai. He once oversaw the 2015 meltdown in China’s capital markets.
The appointment comes after regulators planned to brief President Xi Jinping on the financial market as soon as Tuesday. There was news that sovereign fund Central Huijin (translation: the plunge protectors) vowed to purchase more ETFs. And CSRC vowed to ‘guide’ (translation: coerce) institutional investors and funds to increase their A-share holdings.
The jawboning by Chinese officials is temporarily working, with the CSI 300 surging 6.5% so far this week.
For context, that lifts the broad index to one-week highs…
However, the broad index is at 2016 and 2019 lows.
Goldman’s China strategist Kinger Lau told clients this week that the country’s plunge protection team has bought approximately 70 billion yuan ($9.7 billion) of onshore Chinese shares in the past month (full note available here).
According to Fu Weigang, executive director at the Shanghai Institute of Finance and Law, Beijing’s latest measures have been “mood-boosting” and said these actions usually happen in a downturn.
Wu is immediately tasked with rebuilding trust among the country’s 220 million investors, the largest group of its kind globally, and international investors, following a three-year downturn.
Did investors short China and go long India?
Meanwhile…
When does Beijing unleash another stimulus bazooka?
Nikki Haley has failed to win the Nevada primary despite there being no other Republican candidates on the ticket.
Haley came in second place to “None of These Candidates,” losing by around 22,000 votes. Overall, she received less than a third of the votes.
The race was called at 9pm PST, with over 60 percent voting for no one. For some inexplicable reason, 2705 people voted for Mike Pence.
Donald Trump joked that Haley would soon be claiming victory:
Haley’s campaign at this point is a joke, yet she still refuses to drop out of the race.
Candidates were given the option to participate in either the primary or a caucus scheduled to take place on Thursday. Trump chose to run in the caucus, where the allocation of the state’s delegates will take place.
The AP reports that Bruce Parks, the Chair of the Washoe County Republican Party, advised voters to actively engage in the primary by choosing “none of these candidates” over Haley.
Haley’s campaign issued a statement declaring “We have not spent a dime nor an ounce of energy on Nevada. We made the decision early on that we were not going to pay $55,000 to a Trump entity to participate in a process that is rigged for Trump.”
“If your goal is to win the Republican nomination for president, you go where the delegates are. And it baffles me that Nikki Haley chose not to participate,” Trump adviser Chris LaCivita commented.
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JPMorgan Chase Plans Massive Branch Network Expansion While Small Banks Implode
Mega bank JPMorgan Chase is plotting a massive expansion of bank branches nationwide. It plans to open as many as 500 new branches, renovate 1,700 existing locations, and hire upwards of 3,500 employees over the next three years. This comes as small regional banks have spent the last year imploding (and currently continue tumbling), and many have shuttered locations.
“Chase will enter several new markets – including low-to-moderate income and rural communities with little access to traditional banking services – and will continue expanding its footprint in locations like Boston, MA, Charlotte, NC, the Greater Washington region, Minneapolis, MN, and Philadelphia, PA,” JPMorgan wrote in a press release.
JPMorgan continued: “This multi-billion dollar commitment will contribute to local economic growth through construction, ongoing community investments, and local hiring, bringing opportunity to thousands of local residents across the bank’s footprint.”
“When we open a branch, we’re not only investing in the financial health of residents, we’re committed to the health and vitality of the entire community,” said Marianne Lake, CEO of Consumer & Community Banking.
JPMorgan’s move to expand Chase locations comes as many US banks, some of which are regional banks, have spent the last decade closing locations.
According to recent S&P Global Market Intelligence data, US bank branches once stood at 100,000 in 2009. As of 2023, the figure was around 80,000.
JPMorgan’s action indicates that the banking industry’s recent trend towards online services has reached its peak (at least for now) and is reverting to traditional, physical operations. Also the mega bank is taking market share from small banks with its branch expansion.
With considerably lower efficacy rates, mRNA COVID-19 vaccines cause more deaths than save lives, according to a new study whose researchers called for a “global moratorium” on the shots and “immediate removal” from childhood immunization schedule.
The peer-reviewed study, published in the Cureus journal on Jan. 24, analyzed reports from the initial phase 3 trials of Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. These trials led to the shots being approved under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in the United States. The study also looked into several other research and reviews of the trials. It found that the vaccines had “dramatically lower” efficacy rates than the vaccine companies claimed.
Moreover, based on “conservative assumptions, the estimated harms of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines greatly outweigh the rewards: for every life saved, there were nearly 14 times more deaths caused by the modified mRNA injections.”
“Given the well-documented SAEs (serious adverse events) and unacceptable harm-to-reward ratio, we urge governments to endorse and enforce a global moratorium on these modified mRNA products until all relevant questions pertaining to causality, residual DNA, and aberrant protein production are answered.”
The authors also recommended an “immediate removal” of the COVID-19 vaccines from the childhood immunization schedule. They pointed out that children were at very low risk from the infection.
“It is unethical and unconscionable to administer an experimental vaccine to a child who has a near-zero risk of dying from COVID-19 but a well-established 2.2 percent risk of permanent heart damage based on the best prospective data available.”
Very Low Efficacy Rate
Following the first trials of Pfizer and Moderna, it was claimed that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines had a 95 percent reduction of symptomatic COVID-19. The study pointed out that this efficacy assumption was false.
Pfizer’s claim was based on the fact that only eight out of 22,000 vaccine recipients contracted COVID-19 during the trial compared to 162 out of 22,000 people in the placebo group. In total, 170 confirmed COVID-19 cases were reported in both groups.
However, the researchers pointed out that a large number of infections fell under the “suspected” COVID-19 category, which was ignored. A total of 3,410 such suspected cases were identified in the trial, which is 20 times the 170 confirmed cases.
“There were 1,594 such cases in the vaccinated group and 1,816 in the placebo. When factoring in both confirmed and suspected cases, vaccine efficacy against developing symptoms drops to only 19 percent, far below the 50 percent RR (relative risk) reduction threshold required for regulatory authorization,” the study said.
“Thus, when considering both confirmed and suspected cases, vaccine efficacy appears to have been dramatically lower than the official 95 percent claim.”
The study’s authors declared no financial support from any organization for their work. A few conflict of interest disclosures were made.
One author received a grant from Quanta Computer Inc. Another author, cardiologist Peter A. McCullough, declared employment and owning stock/stock options in The Wellness Company. A third author is the founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation (VSRF).
Lives Saved Versus Deaths
Researchers criticized the Pfizer and Moderna trial reports for “exclusive focus” on relative risk or RR measure while omitting absolute risk reduction. They argued that absolute risk reduction “gives a better indication of a drug’s clinical utility.”
“Both types of risk estimation are required to avoid reporting bias and to provide a more comprehensive perspective on vaccine efficacy. Omitting the absolute risk statistics leads to overestimation of the clinical benefits of the vaccines.”
In contrast with the 95 percent efficacy rate using the RR measure, absolute risk reduction for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were 0.7 percent and 1.1 percent, respectively, the study stated.
“An absolute risk reduction of approximately 1 percent for the COVID-19 mRNA vaccinations meant that a substantial number of individuals would need to be injected in order to prevent a single mild-to-moderate case of COVID-19.”
To prevent one case of COVID-19 infection, 142 individuals would need to be vaccinated with Pfizer’s shot, the study said. When it came to Moderna, 88 people had to be injected.
Taking into account these numbers as well as the infection fatality rates of COVID-19, the researchers concluded that roughly 52,000 people would need to be vaccinated to prevent one COVID-19-related death.
This would mean two lives saved for roughly 100,000 injections of the Pfizer vaccine. However, there is a risk of 27 deaths per 100,000 doses of Pfizer shot, the researchers calculated. As such, for every life saved by the jab, almost 14 lives would be lost due to the mRNA vaccine, the study stated.
Authors noted that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) “did not include absolute risk reduction measures” when reviewing vaccine data.
This action deviated from FDA guidelines “which state that both approaches are crucial in order to avoid the misguided use of pharmaceuticals.”
Serious Adverse Events
Researchers cited a September 2022 analysis to detail the pervasiveness of serious adverse effects (SAE) among the vaccinated group in the trials. The analysis looked at both Pfizer and Moderna trial data, discovering roughly 125 SAEs per 100,000 vaccine recipients. This indicated one SAE per 800 vaccines.
“The Pfizer trial exhibited a 36 percent higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group (compared to placebo) … The Moderna trial exhibited a 6 percent higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group,” the analysis stated.
“These findings stand in sharp contrast with the FDA’s initial claim that SAEs reported by the two pivotal trials were ‘balanced between treatment groups,’” researchers from the Jan. 24 study noted.
This discrepancy could be because the FDA only counted the number of individuals with serious adverse events rather than the total SAEs experienced by the trial subjects, they said.
Since a single person can have multiple SAEs, counting only individuals would produce a lower number than the total number of such adverse events.
“When the SAEs were viewed collectively, the risks in the vaccine group were substantially elevated beyond those previously determined by the FDA,” the researchers wrote.
The analysis found that the excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest (AESI) among the placebo group was 10.1 per 10,000 individuals. However, the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization in this group was only 2.3 per 10,000 people.
This meant that the subjects were at over four times the risk of suffering AESIs after getting vaccinated than they were of getting hospitalized from the infection. In the Moderna trial, subjects were more than two times at risk of experiencing AESI than being hospitalized.
“To put these findings in perspective, the official SAE rate for other vaccines is only 1-2 per million,” the Jan. 24 study said. The 2020 analysis’ “estimate based on the Pfizer trial data (1,250 SAEs per million) exceeds this benchmark by at least 600-fold.”
Rushed Vaccines
In the Jan. 24 study, researchers noted that the safety of mRNA products was “never assessed” in a manner consistent with scientific standards for vaccines or for gene therapy products (GPT), which they claim is “the more accurate classification” for these jabs. “Many key trial findings were either misreported or omitted entirely from published reports.”
The usual safety testing protocols and toxicology requirements were bypassed by the FDA and vaccine manufacturers. As the two trials were terminated prematurely, there was never an “unbiased assessment” of potential serious adverse events.
“It was only after the EUA that the serious biological consequences of rushing the trials became evident, with numerous cardiovascular, neurological, reproductive, hematological, malignant, and autoimmune SAEs identified and published in the peer-reviewed medical literature.”
In addition, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines produced and evaluated in the trials were not the same ones that were manufactured and administered to people around the world. The global vaccination campaign used a vaccine produced by a different process, which has been shown to have “varying degrees of DNA contamination.”
The researchers pointed out that several excess deaths, cardiac events, strokes, and other serious adverse events have wrongly been ascribed to COVID-19 rather than the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines since early 2021.
Injuries from these vaccines overlap with both post-acute COVID-19 syndrome (PACS) and severe acute COVID-19 illness, which end up often obscuring the vaccine’s contribution to such conditions. “Multiple booster injections appear to cause immune dysfunction, thereby paradoxically contributing to heightened susceptibility to COVID-19 infections with successive doses.”
For the “vast majority” of adults below 50 years of age, the perceived benefits of the mRNA vaccines were dwarfed by their “potential disabling and life-threatening harm.” The study said older adults may be at higher risk of such harm.
CDC and FDA Criticized
Commenting on the study, Mat Staver, the founder and chairman of nonprofit Liberty Counsel, said that in the paper, scientists “confirm what sound scientific research has been showing for years, that these shots have never been safe nor effective.”
“The FDA and the CDC are supposed to protect the people, but they have become the lapdog of the pharmaceutical industry. This must change.”
The CDC is currently under scrutiny for suppressing an alert for myocarditis from COVID-19 vaccination. Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle called the myocardium.
A document recently obtained by The Epoch Times shows that in May 2021, the CDC had prepared a draft alert for myocarditis related to the jabs.
The agency was supposed to send the alert to federal, state, and local public health officials and doctors nationwide through its Health Alert Network (HAN). However, the alert was never sent as some officials were worried about appearing “alarmist.”
The Epoch Times reached out to the agencies for comment.
Japanese Shipping Giant Warns “Historic” Red Sea Crisis Could Last “Six Months Or One Year”
President Biden’s Operation Prosperity Guardian to shield commercial vessels in the Red Sea, along with US and UK bombing raids across the Middle East, have yet to stop Iran-backed Houthi rebel attacks around the Bab al-Mandab Strait.
On Tuesday morning, Houthi rebels fired “projectiles” at two commercial vessels, striking one, highlighting the ongoing risks of sailing through the Red Sea.
Japanese shipping giant Mitsui OSK Lines Ltd. issued a warning today that shipping disruptions might extend for up to a year, indicating that expectations for short-term disruptions are quickly fading.
“It’s a historic event,” President Takeshi Hashimoto said in an interview, quoted by Bloomberg.
Hashimoto said, “The situation will continue at least for the coming two or three months. And as a worst-case scenario, six months or one year.”
He pointed out that there’s enough shipping capacity to weather current supply chain disruptions. Still, he warned that if the global economy suddenly expanded, it could spark a shortage of shipping capacity.
Mitsui OSK Lines has about 800 vessels in its fleet. It said last month that all transits through the Red Sea were halted due to Houthi drone and missile attacks on commercial vessels.
Two weeks ago, MUFG Bank warned clients that “higher friction geopolitics” jeopardizes maritime chokepoints.
Here’s the problem: If regional instability risks continue to spread across the Middle East, other critical chokepoints could be affected and accelerate snarled global supply chains.
When Turkish soldier Muslum Ozdemir died during a military operation in Iraq last month, a troubling back story emerged. He was from Kahramanmaras, the epicenter of the twin earthquakes that claimed the lives of more than 50,000 people in nearly 10 provinces on 6 February last year, and survived the disaster himself.
Before long, media discovered that Ozdemir’s family, who lost their home in the quake, were still living in a tent nearly a year after the disaster. The Kahramanmaras governor’s office disputed the images. It insisted that none of the province’s displaced still had to live in tents: “We have given a container unit to every earthquake victim.”
Yet residents responded by saying that Ozdemir’s family resorted to the tent because the small container they were given to live in was at risk of being set ablaze whenever they tried to heat it. The whole incident was a reminder that the conditions in Turkey’s earthquake zone continue to be acute and are largely ignored by the media.
Several humanitarian workers and experts visited the area recently, and one after another warned that the container cities, built with good intentions, were miserable.
The units would leak water from the roof, or flood during heavy rain. There was mud all over the living spaces, and the danger of fire was very high, making everyone uncomfortable. Access to water is available but remains burdensome for many, while employment lingers as a wider question.
Yet you don’t hear much in Turkey about these conditions, or the people suffering in them. Their plight is largely absent in the local media. While that should be surprising, it isn’t. Just a month after the earthquakes, the disaster and its victims began to slip away from the public consciousness.
First, a crisis within the opposition alliance over who should run against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dominated the media in March. Then, the parliamentary and presidential elections took over in May. A new cabinet and new economic policy followed suit.
The earthquakes and their survivors were hardly seen – even on social media – when the landmark of three months came round.
It was a stark change from the 1999 earthquake that hit Izmit, 120km southeast of Istanbul, which killed nearly 19,000 people. The media coverage back then continued for at least a year, and people were reminded of the catastrophe over and over for years.
But today’s fast-paced media environment, which is also largely controlled by the government, consumes important topics and replaces them with another in a matter of hours.
Slow reconstruction
The earthquake toll is grim beyond the loss of life. The government says 227,000 buildings were destroyed or critically damaged, including historic churches, mosques, ancient sites, castles and other landmarks.
The government set upat least 215,000 temporary container homes in the disaster-hit provinces, hosting hundreds of thousands of earthquake victims. It has also provided rent aid to 349,000 households, and provided daily hot food and other services to more than four million people.
However, reconstruction efforts are going slower than expected. Erdogan himself promised in March that his government would build and deliver 319,000 residences to the victims in a year, pledging to construct a total of 650,000 in the future.
His new environment and urbanization minister, Mehmet Ozhaseki, even went a step further, promising in September a total of 850,000 residences. Yet by this week, Erdogan had only been able to deliver 46,000 housing units in the earthquake zone, saying that his government will deliver 75,000 additional residences in Hatay alone in the next two months.
“Our aim is to bring together 15,000-20,000 residences and village houses with their beneficiaries every month in the following period,” he said in Hatay, one of the worst-hit provinces. “Thus, we will have delivered 200,000 housings by the end of the year, fulfilling our promise.”
Erdogan added that Turkey last year trimmed $25bn from the budget to spend on reconstruction efforts and said his government aims to return the affected cities to their old, vibrant selves.
Hatay is the scene of the most glaring and controversial issue in Turkey’s reconstruction: Antakya. The ancient city center, known as Antioch in antiquity, is largely destroyed. Many mosques, churches and landmarks dating back centuries are no more.
Tugce Tezer, an urban planner specializing on Antakya, said during a panel on Saturday in Istanbul that several ministries were involved in reconstruction, with different architectural plans in motion for the city, leading to inconsistent efforts. She complained that, for example, rubble-collection contractors have been improperly dealing with poisonous asbestos-filled cement, polluting the immediate environment where people still live and work.
After the quake, the government cut a deal with the contractors, allowing them to collect anything of worth in the building materials found in the rubble, such as iron.
Despite the agreement specifying that process can only be done in certain areas outside the cities, far from population centers, many firms nonetheless sort through the material in situ, without using any water, releasing the chemical material that can shorten lives with possible lung diseases.
“The rubble is unfortunately discharged in Hatay’s beautiful valleys,” Tezer said. “They are burying agricultural areas and meadows, destroying what makes Antakya, which is primarily an agricultural production centre.”
Antakya plans in doubt
There is now a consortium that leads the reconstruction and restoration efforts in Antakya’s old city, spearheaded by the Turkey Design Foundation and its partners, Turkish architecture firm DB Mimarlik and the UK-based Foster + Partners, as well as London-based Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).
The consortium is drafting a master plan as well as detailed reconstruction work for Antakya’s old city. But there is also a separate area in downtown Antakya on the west side of the Orontes River that has been declared a “reserve section” by the government.
Approximately 50,000 displaced residents from this reserve section may now have their land redesigned and rebuilt by the government, and it’s not certain they will be rehoused in the same area. The law makes it clear that beneficiaries could get a residence of the same value and size somewhere else in Hatay, rather than in the reserve area they have been displaced from.
There’s no indication what kind of project will be built in this reserve section, which was designated before the earthquakes. Municipalities across Hatay formally approved the zoning plans drafted before the disaster, which were unusually supported by all political parties represented in the local assemblies.
Sarkan Koc, a city planner in Hatay, has said that the approved plans for redevelopment in the province only require buildings to be resistant to 7 magnitude earthquakes, while one of the initial shocks on 6 February hit 7.8, indicating that the plans were unserious. Many note that no one has so far held any public official accountable for the collapse of swathes of buildings in southern Turkey.
According to Human Rights Watch, trials of real estate developers, building controllers, and technical personnel have opened in recent months.
“But not a single public official, elected mayor, or city council member has yet faced trial for their role in approving numerous construction projects that fell far short of safe building standards or for failing to take measures to protect people living in buildings known to have structural problems in a region with a high risk of seismic activity,” it said.
Erdogan also suggested that local elections in March would further slow efforts to repair the catastrophic damage. The president accused the opposition-affiliated mayor of Hatay, Lutfu Savas, of not coordinating enough with the central government, exposing partisan political tensions as the crucial local elections draws near.
“I am telling you a fact right now: if the central government and the local government do not join hands and are not in solidarity, nothing will come to that city,” Erdogan said. “Did it come to Hatay? Currently, Hatay is left like a stranger, Hatay is saddened, and unfortunately, the current local government in Hatay is ruined after this earthquake incident. Where is the mayor?”
Was Zelensky’s Top General Just Whisked Off To Become Ambassador To UK?
The near future fate of Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny continues to be subject of rampant speculation, after President Zelensky belatedly confirmed that he’s about to embark in a major shake-up of military leadership.
Already it’s been widely reported that Gen. Zaluzhny is resisting Zelensky’s move to force the top general out, and there are also reports suggesting it could trigger mutiny as many of the military’s ultra-nationalist hardline units are very loyal to him personally.
While there have been an number of leaks going in different directions, and contradictory reports concerning what’s next, it’s likely that if Zelensky was able to successfully fire him, Zaluzhny would be moved to another government position, in order to placate his loyalists.
One fresh reports cites a Ukrainian lawmaker who says Zaluzhny will quickly be appointed Ukraine’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom, and that he would be whisked out of the country and head to London “within days”. If accurate, this would presumably be a measure to ensure there would be no rebellion within the military chain of command.
Below are statements cited and translated in Russian media by Ukrainian lawmaker Yevgeny Shevchenko:
“I would like to say that according to my sources, Zaluzhny has agreed to be the ambassador to Great Britain. He is highly likely to go there and we know that those who leave the country as ambassadors are political retirees. None of them has ever returned to their former positions, this is Ukraine’s tradition. I hate to disappoint any Zaluzhny fans,” he said in an interview with Vadim Karasev, director of Ukraine’s Institute of Global Strategies.
But it’s at this point anything but confirmed that Zaluzhny has actually agreed to peacefully exit as defense chief and take up the ambassadorship.
For example UK media reported the following on Tuesday:
Sources told the Financial Times that Mr Zelensky offered the military chief two alternative roles last Monday, including ambassador to the UK, a position that has been unfilled since last year, but that General Zaluzhny refused them.
As we detailed earlier, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh believes, as we do, that the open disagreement is much more than a “tabloid war” – but that it’s really all about opening serious peace negotiations with Moscow.
Zaluzhny’s ‘realist’ camp is seen as more in favor, while Zelensky has ruled out ceasefire talks entirely while demanding Russia even given up claims over Crimea (which realistically is simply never going to happen). The top general starting months ago reportedly angered Zelensky and his top officials by giving interviews with Western press wherein he admitted there will be no “beautiful breakthrough” in the war against Russia.
Polish farmers are set to join the continent-wide revolt against the EU by launching a massive nationwide strike and blockade later this week.
Farmer protests have exploded in multiple different countries against the EU’s green agenda and the flooding of markets with cheap grain from Ukraine, which is bankrupting the agricultural industry.
While the EU continues to pour millions of euros into Ukraine to prop up their economy, European farmers have been hit with tax hikes and emissions caps that threaten to destroy their livelihoods.
They cannot compete with the cheap price of imported Ukraine grain and in some cases are being ordered not to farm at all.
In France, there is a farmer suicide every other day as the EU deploys high-tech surveillance drones as a tool of enforcement which in some cases means the farmers cannot even cut back bushes and hedgerows without permission.
In Poland, the Trade Union of Individual Farmers said, “Our patience has run out” as they announced a general strike across the whole country.
“We ask our compatriots for understanding and awareness of the situation we all find ourselves in. We are fighting for our common good, which is to prevent the collapse and bankruptcy of Polish family farms, often multi-generational. Where possible, we ask to avoid travel in the affected areas,” the group stated.
From February 9, farmers will launch a blockade of all Polish border crossings with Ukraine, as well as highway blockades in numerous provinces.
“The situation is exacerbated by alarming statements from Brussels,” reports Remix News.
“The European Union will need €1.5 trillion per year in investments to achieve its net-zero emissions goal by 2050, according to research supported by EU lawmakers, as reported by Reuters. This week, the European Commission is expected to recommend that the EU reduce its net emissions by 90 percent by 2040 compared to 1990 levels; it will also outline a massive increase in investments needed to set Europe on the path to achieving zero net emissions by 2050.”
Another organization of farmers already blocked a key border crossing with Ukraine although they backed down after their demands were met.
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In the 1930s, the world had three powers that aspired to dominate the world: the communists of the Soviet Union under Stalin, who sought a worldwide proletariat revolution that redistributed wealth to the masses; the Nazis of Germany under Hitler, who sought to establish a global top-down fascist regime; and the United States under FDR, who sought to spread free-market capitalism throughout the world.
Today, the world has five globalist elites with worldwide aspirations—communist China and Islamists have joined refashioned successors of the three of the 1930s. As in the 1930s, the elites form alliances and cooperate in numerous areas, often to crush opposition from their own subjects.
The fall of the Soviet Union didn’t extinguish Karl Marx’s aspiration to abolish private property and the family in favor of the egalitarian economic model: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” Its most visual proponents today are found in the U.S. Democratic Party’s progressive wing, championed by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Today’s socialists, hueing to cultural Marxism and identity politics, have won over academia, much of the government bureaucracy, and much of the press. They’re anti-family, anti-capitalists who want workers to control and governments to own public utilities and other major industries. Their success in transforming the U.S. culture to intersectionality, gender fluidity, and identity politics can be seen in numerous public opinion polls, such as a recent Harvard Harris poll of attitudes among the coming generation: 79 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds support the “ideology that white people are oppressors and nonwhite people and people of certain groups have been oppressed and as a result should be favored today at universities and for employment.”
Today’s Fascists
The fascist economic model was a hybrid form of capitalism, with a competitive free market at the shop-keeper level and government-supported cartels and oligopolies in major industries—Nazi Germany had 2,100 cartel agreements alone, most famously involving giants such as I.G. Farben in chemicals, Siemens and AEG in electricals, and Krupp in armaments.
This concentration of industry, which placed big business at the commanding heights of the fascist economy, was also favored by U.S. industrialists. In 1931, General Electric president Gerard Swope, with the endorsement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, called for the compulsory cartelization of all major American corporations into federally controlled trade associations for each industry. General Motors president William Knudsen, after meeting Goering, talked of Germany as “the miracle of the 20th century.”
Today, proponents of a fascist-style economy, or corporatism, are organized under the mantle of the World Economic Forum, which is funded by 1,000 member corporations—typically multinationals with sales of $5 billion or more—and sympathetic governments. It seeks a new model of governance called “Stakeholder Capitalism” that would reduce the influence of the electorate in favor of a Great Reset plan called Global Redesign in which a coalition of multinational corporations in league with governments have an outsized role in managing the world economy. Elected officials would work with corporations and fund them to deliver desirable outcomes without being the ultimate decision-makers.
Under the paternalistic power structure that it touts, the mandate of corporations would be broadened to include corporate social responsibility, rather than being narrowly limited to earning profits for shareholders. Property would be controlled by managerial elites. The slogan, “You’ll own nothing and be happy,” crystallizes the WEF’s sentiment. Leaders of the WEF include Bill Gates, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, and the heads of Big Pharma and Big Tech, all of whom have demonstrated their ability to set public policy that rewards their organizations.
American Foreign Policy Hawks
After John F. Kennedy’s debacle in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s unpopular war in Vietnam, the peace movement in the United States pushed the Democratic Party to shun its traditional use of military force to counter the spread of communism and promote democracy abroad. In reaction, hawkish liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans found common cause in advocating for a strong interventionist military. Known as neo-conservatives, they intervened through the CIA, the U.S. military, and NATO to counter anti-Americanism throughout the world. The muscular presence of today’s foreign policy hawks can be seen in Ukraine, the Middle East, and East Asia.
Although neocons became known primarily for their stance on foreign policy—Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” encapsulates their ideology—they were best described as establishment centrists who first came together in opposition to the counterculture of the left, which included hippies, peaceniks, and radical social programs such as LBJ’s Great Society. Opposition to Donald Trump within the Republican Party was largely led by the foreign policy hawks, who objected to his brash style as well as his ambivalence toward NATO and his intention to withdraw U.S. troops from overseas bases.
Islamists
During World War II, Muslim Turkey was allied with Nazi Germany, as were Arabs under the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who in 1941 met Hitler in Germany and attempted to form an Arab Legion allied with the Axis powers. Muslim countries, energized by the revival of Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, were focused on regional aspirations during World War II.
The last half of the 20th century saw jihadism evolve from a regional to a global phenomenon, initially due to the Soviet Union, which in the 1960s invented American “imperial Zionism” and sponsored Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization to counter the West in the Middle East. The 1970s saw the overthrow of the Shah of Iran by Khomeini’s Iranian Revolution, the 1980s the Beirut bombings and the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan, and the 1990s the first attack on the World Trade Center and the beginning of large-scale immigration of Muslims into the United States. The Jihadist goal of global domination became clear and credible to the West after the attacks by al-Qaida on Sept. 11, 2001.
Communist China
Over the millennia, China was a regional power, often at war with its immediate neighbors in Russia and Asia, and often inward-looking. At the start of the 21st century, China began its dominance on a global scale with its membership in the World Trade Organization, which created an industrial giant that de-industrialized much of the West. As China’s prowess increased, it infiltrated Western economies by acquiring Western corporations, by populating and funding universities, and by influencing the election of government officials in other countries.
The new China with global ambitions became especially evident with Xi Jinping’s 2013 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which involves some 150 countries accounting for two-thirds of the world’s population, and China’s expressed desire to become the world’s largest economy by 2049, the 100th anniversary of Mao’s founding of the People’s Republic of China.
China is no longer viewed as a benign giant. French President Emmanuel Macron warned that BRI could make partner countries “vassal states,” and many in the United States now view China as America’s number one military and geopolitical threat.
Strange-bedfellow Cooperation
The five globalist groups are ideologically incompatible, each seeking the ultimate defeat of the other four. Within the United States, each has a degree of influence through lobbying and public relations activities, but none has the clout to unilaterally impose its will over a skeptical electorate. In response, globalists ally in strange-bedfellow groupings to bend policy to meet their objectives.
For example, the de facto open-immigration policy promoted by the progressive wing of today’s U.S. socialists is hugely unpopular with the American public as well as America’s foreign-policy elite because it threatens national security, increases crime, and undermines the country’s social fabric. Yet open immigration persists because it serves the interests of various globalist elites.
Big business corporatists benefit because the large numbers of immigrants flooding the labor markets lower their labor costs. Islamists benefit because open immigration permits the infiltration of terrorists as well as large numbers of Muslims who can influence domestic politics through protests. Communist China benefits because open immigration enables espionage—according to the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, a majority of the illegal Chinese immigrants are men of military age with ties to the Chinese Communist Party and its military.
Likewise, climate policies harm the general public but benefit most of the global elites, albeit for different reasons. Socialists and fascists/corporatists, who each have their own brand of world government, promote climate policies because they lend themselves to global criteria for the regulation of industry and human behavior. Communist China, as the chief supplier of renewable energy equipment, benefits economically. Islamists also benefit economically as Western countries curb their own production and lose market share to the Muslim fossil-fuel exporting countries that fund the Islamists. And almost everyone favors climate policies for their virtue-signalling merit.
Likewise, critical race theory harms the general public but benefits the socialists, for whom it is a raison d’etre; the Islamists, by validating the accusation of Islamophobia; and communist China, by allowing it to point to U.S. moral failings whenever China is accused of violating the human rights of its own ethnic minorities.
Because radical social innovations in the West—whether gender fluidity or Black Lives Matter or critical race theories—undermine the West’s cohesion, all the enemies of the West support their infiltration into Western society. That, and a distaste for a citizenry exercising individual freedoms, sums up what the five globalist elites have in common.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
Russia Releases $9M In Frozen N.Korean Assets, Alleged To Be Helping Kim Skirt UN Sanctions
Russia-North Korea ties have continued to deepen amid the backdrop of the Ukraine war and corresponding US-led sanctions. Already it’s believed Pyongyang has provided Russia with huge shipments of missies and ammunition, especially artillery, likely shipped by train.
The New York Times reports Tuesday that the Russian government has released $9 million in frozen North Korean assets, following Kim Jong-Un’s delivering on arms for Moscow. While the Russian bank which cleared the release hasn’t been named, it’s believed to be $9 million out of a total $30 million which was frozen.
The move is likely part of broader efforts to implement Pyongyang’s ultimate ‘wish list’ of lasting methods and banking ties to skirt UN sanctions, imposed over past banned nuclear weapons testing.
The NY Times writes, “In addition, a North Korean front company recently opened an account at another Russian bank, the intelligence officials say, evidence that Moscow may be helping Pyongyang get around U.N. sanctions that prohibit most banks from doing business with North Korea.”
North Korea has for years been almost completely isolated from the international banking system, and has been lashing out of late in response to increased US military drills on the peninsula, conducting missile tests on a near weekly basis.
“The new bank account is held in South Ossetia, a self-proclaimed independent state in the Caucasus region that has close connections with Russia, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters,” the Times continues.
Moscow is still expected to move cautiously and not be too brazen over how it helps North Korea given it is a permanent member of the UN Security Council. On this point, the NYT report observes:
For Russia, the financial transactions may be more palatable than supplying military expertise and nuclear and other technology.
Even though the two countries “could be friends with benefits now,” said Soo Kim, a former C.I.A. analyst on North Korea, their trust is not so great that Russia would “give away its valued secrets.”
Back in September, Kim Jong Un met with President Vladimir Putin in the far eastern city of Vladivostok, and even toured weapons and satellite facilities.
Kim had issued statements at the time signaling enthusiastic backing for Russia’s resistance to NATO in the context of the war in Ukriane. “We are confident that the Russian army and people will win a great victory in the just fight to punish evil groups who pursue hegemony, expansion, and ambition,” Kim had said.
