Authored by Lear Zhou via The Epoch Times,

Li Zhang, a Chinese billionaire who is cofounder and CEO of Guangzhou R&F Properties, was arrested in London on Nov. 30 under a provisional warrant issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office of Northern California District.

Zhang was accused of “participating in a scheme to bribe public officials” between 2015 and 2020, according to Reuters.

Zhang, 69, is worth $2.3 billion, according to Forbes magazine. He was granted bail under 15 million pounds (approximately $18.4 million) ahead of a legal battle against extradition to the United States. He did not show up at a Dec. 12 hearing.

As part of his bail conditions, Zhang will be confined to an apartment 24 hours a day and subject to CCTV and security monitoring by a London investigation and security risk firm. He will be handcuffed to a representative of the security firm when he leaves the apartment to attend court hearings, according to South China Morning Post.

Guangzhou R&F Properties issued an announcement in its official WeChat channel, stating: “Li Zhang was accused of bribery for hosting a banquet in China and providing hotel accommodation for the former San Francisco Public Works Director.”

This was the first time R&F Properties responded on the alleged bribery accusation against Zhang. The announcement confirms that the person called “DEVELOPER 1” in the corruption case of Mohammed Nuru, the former San Francisco Public Works Director, is Zhang.

In December 2021, Nuru pleaded guilty to the charge of honest services wire fraud, including a string of briberies and corruption during his years in office, and was sentenced to seven years by U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick in August 2022.

According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office Northern District of California, Nuru admitted in the plea agreement that he “received free travel, gifts, and benefits, for working with Walter Wong to use Nuru’s official position to benefit a billionaire developer from China.”

Zhang (referred to as “DEVELOPER 1”) first surfaced in the FBI investigation into the Nuru case in the fall of 2018, when Nuru was talking on his cell phone about his then-upcoming trip to China, according to the affidavit of FBI agent James A. Folger.

On a phone call with his girlfriend, official Sandra Zuniga, in November 2018, Nuru described how he was flattered by a luxury hotel: “We get there, they take us to our rooms and everything, and everybody’s in their room, and then as soon as I come out, they’re like still outside our room. I’m like, ‘Oh man, what’s going on?’”

Nuru also said in the phone call that he did not realize how rich Zhang is before this trip to China.

He said in the call: “I’m helping him with a project here, San Francisco. So whenever he comes, I always go to see him. I didn’t know … he has this plane; I didn’t know that, how big he was, until I got to China.”

The project Nuru mentioned is 555 Fulton Street in San Francisco, developed by R&F’s U.S. affiliate Z&L Properties Inc., which was referred to in the complaints against Nuru as “Multimillion-Dollar Mixed-Use Development.” Wong was working as a consultant of that project.

The building project 555 Fulton Street in San Francisco on Dec. 20, 2022. (Lear Zhou/The Epoch Times)

On the same phone call with Zuniga, Nuru said, “He [Zhang] had a whole list of things that we need to get done.”

Nuru also mentioned that the project couldn’t get a certificate due to a possible defect in the glass windows made in Mexico.

He added, “Yup, and he’s very upset about [it] because he’s, you know, he thinks he’s lost, he’s spent so much money and … can’t see the end of the tunnel.”

The glass issue was mentioned by one of Nuru’s employees when Nuru was in China in 2018. In a phone call, Nuru directed one of his managers to solve the problem and expedite the process.

According to a report by the San Francisco Chronicle in 2019, 555 Fulton St. was in the “finalizing construction” stage after a massive delay. More than one year of the delay was caused by the developer redesigning the building’s exterior without city permission. The builder was forced to go back to the approved yet more expensive design, which had a glass exterior.

Tom Hui, former director of the Department of Building Inspection (DBI), who went to dinner with Zhang and Wong in February 2019, stepped down in March 2020 following internal investigations by then City Attorney Dennis Herrera.

It was not clear whether Hui helped with the 555 Fulton Street project’s permit. In early 2020, after Nuru was arrested and indicted, the FBI raided the DBI’s server room, according to Mission Local. Hui was not charged with any federal crimes.

The Epoch Times reached out to the U.S. Attorney’s Office of Northern California District for comment but did not receive a response.

First, it was that world-renowned incubator of policy idiocy, California, that decided that the best way to fight stimulus-driven inflation was with more stimulus, announcing this summer that it would send out up to $1,050 in “inflation relief” checks in the process of course making inflation even worse.

Then, it was Italy’s turn to announce in August that it would also inject billions in fresh stimulus to – wait for it – fight inflation (the same inflation that was the result of billions in fresh stimulus during the covid pandemic and which has led to the worst global recession and bear market since Lehman).

And since stupidity is contagious, today Spain became the latest country to unveil some €10 billion ($10.65 billion) worth of measures to “ease the pain of inflation” in its third major package this year, bringing total aid to 45 billion euros since early 2022.

Spain, like all other European countries, has been grappling with a cost-of-living crisis exacerbated by the impact of the war in Ukraine on energy prices. The package includes a one-off bonus of 200 euros for about 4.2 million households with annual incomes up to 27,000 euros and the extension of tax cuts for energy bills into the first half of next year, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told reporters.

And since the bonus does nothing to alleviate the supply-driven constraints that have pushed the price of energy in Europe to the limit, all Spain – and every other European country – have done is boost the coffers of LNG/Oil exporters like Russia, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and re-exporters such as China and India.

The package follows similar announcements in March and June that included direct aid, tax cuts, soft loans and rental controls.

Amusingly, Reuters says that Europe’s desperate measures coupled with an agreement negotiated with the European Union to place a limit on gas prices for electricity production ” have had some success” and cites that “inflation for the past 12 months slowed to 6.7% in November, the lowest rate in the 27-country EU bloc.” What Reuters should be saying is that having hiked rates to the highest level in almost two decades, the ECB has assured that Europe is facing a brutal recession – if not depression – all just to own Vladimir Putin.

And while slowing inflation has indeed been aided by a fall in electricity prices, which decreased by 22.4% from a year earlier in November, largely as a result of mass hoarding of natural gas this winter, a feat that Europe will find very difficult to repeat next year, food prices have continued to hit Spaniards’ wallets, climbing 15% during October and November from a year earlier.

And yes, injecting even more “inflation-fighting” stimmies means that food (and energy) prices will only go higher unless of course those stimmies are used to boost the supply of rare commodities, which they won’t be.

Meanwhile, to deflect attention from its latest stupidity (because in one year the magicians at the ECB will be so very confused why  inflation remains so sticky and why it has to keep hiking even more as the recession transforms into a depression) the government said it will cut value added tax on essential foods such as bread, cheese, milk, fruit and vegetables and cereals to 0% from 4%, while pasta and cooking oils will have VAT slashed by half to 5%.

The funniest part: according to Pedro Sanchez, the billions in aid provided so far had helped Spain register strong economic growth this year, which he put at over 5%, above the government’s previous forecast of 4.4%, once again confirming that growth is nothing more than a measure of how much credit and/or liquidity enters the economy, either via monetary or fiscal channels; as for Spain’s real economy, it is slumping into a brutal recession along with the rest of Europe.

Authored by Peter Dahlin via The Epoch Times,

The holidays came early to Europe, with a gift for the rule of law and human rights protections offered not by some red-dressed, bearded man but rather by a court in Cyprus.

On Dec. 23, the court, which has been processing the first-ever extradition request from the Chinese regime since it ratified an extradition treaty, reached a verdict, which was very damning for China.

The Cypriot court is not the first court in Europe that has denied extraditions to China, of course, but the verdict itself, and the type of case it concerns, not only makes it precedent-setting in Cyprus, where China is already engaged in trying to have more people extradited, but likely to influence courts across the 46 countries across Europe bound by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Previously, on the rare occasion extraditions have been denied, courts have consistently relied on people’s political risks, such as adhering to Falun Gong or the more general risk of torture, when denying extradition requests from China. In this case, however, and for what is, as far as is known, the first time in Europe, the court also denied the extradition requests due to a lack of fair trials in China. To many observers, it would seem like a given due to the nature of the Chinese criminal justice system. Still, courts have consistently been hesitant to address the issue, perhaps fearing it could be used in cases in other countries with known political interference in their judicial systems. In this case, the judge was damming in assessing the high risk of deprivation of a fair trial due to the general justice system in China.

Moreover, the Cypriot court also called out the high risk of arbitrary detention, another key provision that should, if such a risk exists, block any extradition from any European country bound by the convention (ECHR).

Tourists walk past a real estate promotion billboard in Chinese, which states that buying an apartment can earn permanent resident status, on the seafront promenade in the Cypriot resort of Paphos on Jan. 24, 2013. (Yiannis Kourtoglou/AFP via Getty Images)

Similar to the Swedish Supreme Court, it also ruled that China’s diplomatic assurances would not overcome the high risk of torture, arbitrary detention, and lack of fair trial. In fact, the lack of legal basis for China to offer such assurances was a key point in my own testimony at the hearing and sparring with the prosecutor. The prosecution, which acted only on what had been fed to them by the Chinese embassy, provided one factually wrong statement after another and could, frankly, be demolished. One key point is that neither the embassy nor the foreign ministry has any legal standing to offer any assurances that are legally binding and are, therefore, meaningless.

The case in Sweden, which was for what was then “the most wanted” man by China, saw a similar line of arguments. I was there, along with the human rights group Safeguard Defenders, to drive home the point in the testimony. In that case, the Swedish prosecution actually tried to get assurances from the only two bodies with the legal standing to issue them—the Supreme Procuratorate and the Supreme Court—but the Chinese side never responded to them and doomed their own case.

For Cyprus—a small country that depends economically on countries such as Russia and China and recently ratified an extradition treaty—to make such a strong and clear decision in its first-ever concluded extradition case is a major victory for the island nation. This is especially important as Beijing has undertaken a range of actions to undermine the judicial process by trying to force the target to give up his resistance, arresting several family members in China, threatening his wife (in Cyprus), and most recently, issuing an INTERPOL Red Notice on his wife. This decision makes it clear that such attempts to subvert the judicial sovereignty of a European country are unacceptable.

With two more cases pending in Cyprus, with a case not fully concluded in Poland, and more cases in Italy, Portugal, and Spain—all of them also bound by the ECHR—the small district court in Larnaca has done Europe and the European Union a great favor, and truly offered a Christmas gift for human rights protections to us all.

Now it’s time for larger European countries to follow suit and honor their legally-biding commitments to the rule of law and protection of human rights and deny Chinese extradition requests. The only way to gain leverage to get Beijing to improve its abysmal legal system is to uphold our higher standards and force the Chinese regime to adapt to them if it wants to pursue criminals and seek judicial cooperation.

Authored by Chris Hedges,

The Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking their support for the war industry in moral language stretching back to Korea and Vietnam, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was as lionized as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

All the wars they support and fund are “good” wars. All the enemies they fight, the latest being Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, are incarnations of evil. The photo of a beaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding up a signed Ukrainian battle flag behind Zelensky as he addressed Congress was another example of the Democratic Party’s abject subservience to the war machine.

The Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America but for the weapons manufacturers and the Pentagon. No weapons system is too costly. No war, no matter how disastrous, goes unfunded. No military budget is too big, including the $858 billion in military spending allocated for the current fiscal year, an increase of $45 billion above what the Biden administration requested.

The historian Arnold Toynbee cited unchecked militarism as the fatal disease of empires, arguing that they ultimately commit suicide.

There once was a wing of the Democratic Party that questioned and stood up to the war industry: Senators J. William Fulbright, George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel, William Proxmire and House member Dennis Kucinich. But that opposition evaporated along with the antiwar movement. When 30 members of the party’s progressive caucus recently issued a call for Biden to negotiate with Putin, they were forced by the party leadership and a warmongering media to back down and rescind their letter. Not that any of them, with the exception of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have voted against the billions of dollars in weaponry sent to Ukraine or the bloated military budget. Rashida Tlaib voted present.

The opposition to the perpetual funding of the war in Ukraine has come primarily from Republicans, 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House, several, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, unhinged conspiracy theorists. Only nine Republicans in the House joined the Democrats in supporting the $1.7 trillion spending bill needed to prevent the government from shutting down, which included approval of $847 billion for the military — the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction. In the Senate, 29 Republicans opposed the spending bill. The Democrats, including nearly all 100 members of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus, lined up dutifully for endless war.

This lust for war is dangerous, pushing us into a potential war with Russia and, perhaps later, with China — each a nuclear power. It is also economically ruinous. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven U.S. debt to over $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spend more on the military than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. Congress is also on track to provide an extra $21.7 billion to the Pentagon — above the already expanded annual budget — to resupply Ukraine.

“But those contracts are just the leading edge of what is shaping up to be a big new defense buildup,” The New York Times reported.

“Military spending next year is on track to reach its highest level in inflation-adjusted terms since the peaks in the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars between 2008 and 2011, and the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II — a level that is more than the budgets for the next 10 largest cabinet agencies combined.”

The Democratic Party, which, under the Clinton administration aggressively courted corporate donors, has surrendered its willingness to challenge, however tepidly, the war industry.

“As soon as the Democratic Party made a determination, it could have been 35 or 40 years ago, that they were going to take corporate contributions, that wiped out any distinction between the two parties,” Dennis Kucinich said when I interviewed him on my show for The Real News Network.

“Because in Washington, he or she who pays the piper plays the tune. That’s what’s happened. There isn’t that much of a difference in terms of the two parties when it comes to war.”

In his 1970 book “The Pentagon Propaganda Machine,” Fulbright describes how the Pentagon and the arms industry pour millions into shaping public opinion through public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, control over Hollywood and domination of the commercial media. Military analysts on cable news are universally former military and intelligence officials who sit on boards or work as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star army general and military analyst for NBC News, was also an employee of Defense Solutions, a military sales and project management firm. He, like most of these shills for war, personally profited from the sales of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On the eve of every congressional vote on the Pentagon budget, lobbyists from businesses tied to the war industry meet with Congress members and their staff to push them to vote for the budget to protect jobs in their district or state. This pressure, coupled with the mantra amplified by the media that opposition to profligate war funding is unpatriotic, keeps elected officials in bondage. These politicians also depend on the lavish donations from the weapons manufacturers to fund their campaigns.

Seymour Melman, in his book “Pentagon Capitalism,” documented the way militarized societies destroy their domestic economies. Billions are spent on the research and development of weapons systems while renewable energy technologies languish. Universities are flooded with military-related grants while they struggle to find money for environmental studies and the humanities. Bridges, roads, levees, rail, ports, electric grids, sewage treatment plants and drinking water infrastructures are structurally deficient and antiquated. Schools are in disrepair and lack sufficient teachers and staff. Unable to stem the COVID-19 pandemic, the for-profit health care industry forces families, including those with insurance, into bankruptcy. Domestic manufacturing, especially with the offshoring of jobs to China, Vietnam, Mexico and other nations, collapses. Families are drowning in personal debt, with 63 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned.

Melman, who coined the term “permanent war economy,” noted that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its discretionary budget on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military-industrial establishment is nothing more than gilded corporate welfare. Military systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are guaranteed. For example, this November, the Army awarded Raytheon Technologies alone more than $2 billion in contracts, on top of over $190 million awarded in August, to deliver missile systems to expand or replenish weapons sent to Ukraine. Despite a depressed market for most other businesses, stock prices of Lockheed and Northrop Grumman have risen by more than 36 and 50 percent this year.

Tech giants, including Amazon, which supplies surveillance and facial recognition software to the police and FBI, have been absorbed into the permanent war economy. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle were awarded multibillion-dollar cloud computing contracts for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and are eligible to receive $9 billion in Pentagon contracts to provide the military with “globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge,” through mid-2028.

Foreign aid is given to countries such as Israel, with more than $150 billion in bilateral assistance since its founding in 1948, or Egypt, which has received over $80 billion since 1978 — aid that requires foreign governments to buy weapons systems from the U.S. The U.S. public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and purchases them for foreign governments. Such a  circular system mocks the idea of a free-market economy. These weapons soon become obsolete and are replaced by updated and usually more costly weapons systems. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.

“The truth of the matter is that we’re in a heavily militarized society driven by greed, lust for profit, and wars are being created just to keep fueling that,” Kucinich told me.

In 2014, the U.S. backed a coup in Ukraine that installed a government that included neo-Nazis and was antagonistic to Russia. The coup triggered a civil war when the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, the Donbass, sought to secede from the country, resulting in over 14,000 people dead and nearly 150,000 displaced, before Russia invaded in February. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to Jacques Baud, a former NATO security advisor who also worked for Swiss intelligence, was instigated by the escalation of Ukraine’s war on the Donbass. It also followed the Biden administration’s rejection of proposals sent by the Kremlin in late 2021, which might have averted Russia’s invasion the following year.

This invasion has led to widespread U.S. and E.U. sanctions on Russia, which have boomeranged onto Europe. Inflation ravages Europe with the sharp curtailment of shipments of Russian oil and gas. Industry, especially in Germany, is crippled.  In most of Europe, it is a winter of shortages, spiraling prices and misery.

“This whole thing is blowing up in the face of the West,” Kucinich warned. “We forced Russia to pivot to Asia, as well as Brazil, India, China, South Africa and Saudi Arabia. There’s a whole new world being formed. The catalyst of it is the misjudgment that occurred about Ukraine and the effort to try to control Ukraine in 2014 that most people aren’t aware of.”

By not opposing a Democratic Party whose primary business is war, liberals become the sterile, defeated dreamers in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground.”

A former convict, Dostoevsky did not fear evil. He feared a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront evil. And war, to steal a line from my latest book, is the greatest evil.

On the evening of 26 December, China released new guidelines to significantly relax its Covid control policy for domestic infections and inbound travelers, effective 8 January 2023. As reported previously, key measures include i) removing quarantine requirements for Covid cases, ii) abandoning the risk district classification system, and iii) shifting to a de facto “0+0” regime for inbound travelers. In a note from Goldman’s China strategy chief, Hui Shan, he writes that while the new guidelines as a major step towards the full reopening, he cautions on the increased challenges to China’s medical system in the near term. He adds that the frontloaded China reopening timetable adds conviction to the bank’s below-consensus forecast for Q4 GDP growth (+1.7% yoy) and above-consensus 2023 GDP forecast (+5.2% yoy)

1. Key takeaways from the new guidelines

On the evening of 26 December, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) released new guidelines to significantly relax its Covid control policy for domestic infections and inbound travelers (Exhibit 1).

The new guidelines are as follows:

• On the management of Covid: China will immediately rename the term “Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia” (新冠肺炎) to “Novel Coronavirus Infection” (新型冠状 病毒感染). It will downgrade the management of the disease from the current top-level Category A to less strict Category B, effective 8 January 2023, after which China will no longer impose quarantine measures for Covid cases, will no longer trace their close contacts, and will no longer identify high/low-risk districts of Covid.
• On policies for inbound travelers: China will abandon the requirements of frequent testing and centralized quarantine for inbound travelers (although a negative 48hr PCR test result before departure to China is still required). Inbound travelers will be allowed to enter the community immediately upon health declaration, and various restrictions on the international routes of airlines will be removed. China also pledged to make it easier for foreigners to obtain inbound travel visas, and gradually normalize domestic residents’ outbound travel.
• On medical preparations: China pledged to further strengthen its medical preparations to cope with the reopening, including pushing up the vaccination rate for the elderly population, improving the supply of Covid-related medicines and test kits, expanding intensive care units (ICUs), and enhancing the supply of medical resources in the rural areas.

2. Another significant step towards full reopening

China has rapidly relaxed its Covid policies since November, featured by the Covid “20 measures” on 11 November, “10 measures” on 7 December, and the new guidelines on 26 December. China’s new guidelines, which will de facto reopen borders and abandon quarantines, are a significant step towards the full reopening (or, the “living with Covid” mode).

According to Goldman, the most important change in the guidelines lies with cross-border policies, which implies a de facto “0+0” regime for eligible inbound travelers starting from 8 January 2023 (vs. the current “5+3”). That said, on the domestic front, the downgrade of Covid management and removal of quarantine requirements appear to be an “after the fact” adjustment, as in practice many people who have tested positive have been allowed to go to work and enter public places in recent weeks.

However, amid the rapid reopening, the challenge to China’s medical system may have been significantly escalated, especially for less developed inland and rural areas amid the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday. This highlights the urgency of more and faster policy efforts to boost elderly vaccination and other medical resource supply (e.g., ICU beds, oral pills, and medical staff).

3. Implications for growth and markets

High-frequency mobility data (Exhibit 2) and December Emerging Industries PMI (EPMI) pointed to weaker growth momentum during the frontloaded “exit wave”, on the back of surging infections, a temporary labor shortage and increased supply chain disruptions. Although the NHC stopped the release of Covid case data, experience from Hong Kong and Taiwan suggests daily new cases may peak in late December or January in mainland China (Exhibit 3). According to Goldman, this adds conviction to the bank’s below-consensus forecast for Q4 GDP growth (+1.7% yoy) countered by above-consensus 2023 GDP forecast (+5.2% yoy).

Furthermore, Goldman also maintain the view that China reopening is positive for CNY, and that improved growth expectations in 2023 might outweigh unfavorable factors such as deterioration in goods and services trade balances. On FX, the bank expects small appreciation of the USDCNY over the 12-month horizon to 6.90.

On the spillover effects of China reopening, Hong Kong and Thailand may benefit the most from the international tourism channel if China removes visa restrictions and outbound travel gradually normalizes.

More in a full note from Goldman available to professional subs.

Authored by Nathan Harden via RealClear Wire,

A new survey suggests that younger parents don’t share the same values or priorities for civics education as their older peers. According to the survey, conducted by RealClear Opinion Research and funded by the conservative Jack Miller Center, nearly nine out of ten Americans agree that teaching children about our nation’s founding principles is “very important.” But seven out of ten don’t think schools are doing a good job of it.

The survey was conducted in November and included responses from more than one thousand likely voters on topics related to education, civics instruction, and the American founding. As first reported by my colleague, RealClearPolitics reporter Phil Wegmann, their answers revealed that both Republicans and Democrats value civics education. Contrary to how it’s often portrayed in the news cycle, civics education is not merely a concern on the right.

Still, there were some partisan differences. Democrats demonstrated more confidence in the public school system to deliver what kids need to know about the American founding, while Republicans were more likely to see private schooling or homeschooling as the best way to do the job. Republicans were also more likely to say that they believe schools are promoting a biased political agenda, and that their children were not free to express their ideas at school.

But the most striking differences weren’t partisan. Instead, they emerged when comparing the responses of young parents to those of older parents.

To the question, “What emotion do you believe your children feel when they see the American flag?” most parents responded positively. “Pride” and “gratitude” together made up more than 63% of the responses, compared to 5.8% who said their children felt “shame” or “disgust” when they see the flag.

About 30% overall said their children felt “indifference” when they saw the flag. But when you consider younger parents as a group that number was much higher. 52.6% of parents aged 18-24 said their children felt indifference to the flag. For parents aged 25-34, that number is 41.6%.

Let’s call it the civics education age gap. And while the survey asks parents specifically what their kids think about the flag, data from additional questions on the survey suggest that younger parents may share some of that indifference about America in general.

On the question of how to portray the flawed figures of America’s founding, overall, 92.5% of respondents said public schools should “portray historical figures honestly with the understanding that we can teach a person’s achievements even if their views do not alight with values of today.” Only 7.5% of all respondents believe that “if the views of historical figures do not align with the values of today, we should minimize or avoid teaching about their historical achievements.” On this question, the responses of young parents aged 18-24 differed only slightly from the average parent—9.8% of them believe we should minimize the achievements of problematic historical figures, or even avoid teaching about them altogether. For parents aged 35-34, that number was 8%.

The context for this survey is, of course, our culture’s ongoing debate over how to teach kids about the impact of racism and slavery on our country, and what those things mean about our national identity. The disagreement could be boiled down to the question, “Is America Good?” Thomas Jefferson is a prime example. He was a racist slave owner who nevertheless expressed ideas that gave birth to a new kind of political freedom, and whose words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal” would one day be uttered by Martin Luther King in defense of civil rights for those slaves’ descendants.

At a recent event in Washington, D.C. where the results of the survey were discussed, education and civil rights activist Bob Woodsen spoke of the importance of allowing for “redemption” when we consider our flawed founding fathers and our national identity. Hans Zeiger, president of the Jack Miller Center, put it this way, “We can be honest about our history without being romantic about it.”

 When asked which aspects of civics education should have priority, over 70% of parents said the focus should be “teaching students the principles underlying American politics, such as the history and ideas behind the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution.” On the other hand, nearly 23% said the priority should be “teaching students how to actively promote change in government.” Among parents aged 18-24, that number was nearly 55%.

The vast majority of Americans today agree that civics education is important, and that civics education should include an honest assessment of our nation’s flaws and our flawed founding fathers. But younger parents seem to embrace a more pessimistic view of our nation and a more activist vision of the civics classroom. If these differences were to endure as younger parents age, one wonders what the civics age gap portends. One wonders what it will mean for our nation if younger parents, and their children, allow no place for redemption.

How long will Tesla hold onto its dominant electric vehicle (EV) market share?

This is one of the biggest questions facing the U.S. automotive industry. On one hand, Tesla has a very strong brand and loyal customer base (similar to Apple). The company also has a headstart in EV production and spends more on R&D per car than its competitors.

On the other hand, legacy automakers such as Volkswagen are eager to overtake Tesla. As the incumbents, they have decades more experience in building cars and are investing billions of dollars to catch up.

To keep you up to date on this evolving story, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu uses data from the EPA’s 2022 Automotive Trends Report. in the following infographic:

Data for the 2021 Model Year

Although it comes from a 2022 report, the comprehensive production data used in this infographic is for the 2021 model year.

The table below breaks out total production by EV and PHEV (plug-in hybrid electric vehicle).

*Rounded to nearest 1,000. Numbers may not add up due to rounding. Includes top 14 manufacturers with U.S. footprint

Toyota and Stellantis are the two biggest legacy automakers in this dataset, though it’s worth pointing out that they only produced PHEVs. Toyota’s first EV, the bZ4X, isn’t slated for release until 2023.

Stellantis appears to be even further behind, though the company has plenty of untapped potential with brands like Jeep and Ram. In a recent interview, Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares revealed that the company has set aside $36 billion for electrification and software.

Legacy Brands with the Most Momentum

When it comes to building EVs, some legacy brands have moved quicker than others.

Among these legacy brands is Volkswagen, which has made a major commitment to EVs in the fallout of its Dieselgate scandal. The group aims to produce 22 million EVs by 2028, and is rolling out various models including the ID.3 hatchback, the ID.4 SUV, and the ID. Buzz (an electric revival of the classic Microbus).

Ford is also showing good pace, announcing $22 billion in EV investment between 2021 and 2025. The brand produced its 150,000th Mustang Mach-E in Nov. 2022, and is aiming to build 270,000 of them in 2023 alone.

Ford’s highly anticipated F-150 Lightning has also received over 200,000 reservations. Production of the Lightning is expected to be 15,000 in 2022, 55,000 in 2023, and 80,000 in 2024. Rivian, Ford’s primary rival in the electric pickup truck segment, is on track to reach 25,000 vehicles in 2022.

Authored by Joe Lauria via ConsortiumNews.com,

It is a hard thing to combat because it’s not a physical enemy but rather messages that lodge themselves in millions of people’s minds. And it has come to rule over us. 

Cathy Vogan, the executive producer of Consortium News‘ webcast CN Live!, recently coined a new term to describe rule by psyops, or psychological operations: psyopcracy.   According to Wikipedia: 

“Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.

The purpose of United States psychological operations is to induce or reinforce behavior perceived to be favorable to U.S. objectives.”  

William Casey, C.I.A. director under Ronald Reagan, said: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

Thus the American people are continuously subject to a number of psychological operations otherwise known as “the news.”  

U.S. intelligence officials feed journalists disinformation to create a false narrative that is intended to mislead the public and cover-up what is actually taking place. The constant reinforcement of these lies becomes entrenched in the public mind and after time comes to be accepted as unquestionable truth.  

Here’s an explanation of how the C.I.A. did it in Vietnam:

Through such operations, the American people were led to believe for years that the United States was winning in Vietnam, when it was actually losing, as the Pentagon Papers proved. 

Since then, many examples have followed of completely false stories being planted into people’s minds to start and keep a war going, the fake WMD narrative in Iraq perhaps the most infamous.

Blind Faith (Eden Gallanter/Creative Commons)

Today the war people are being fooled about is in Ukraine. Sometimes a psyop doesn’t involve inserting false information, so much as leaving out what’s true. 

The American people, and by extension people around the world, have been led to believe that an unprovoked Russian madman started the war last February.

That’s because they are purposely not told that the war actually began in 2014 after a U.S.-backed coup in Kiev led Russian speakers in Donbass to declare independence, after which the coup government militarily attacked them. 

Other facts are removed from the story, such as Russia’s proposed treaties with the U.S. and NATO last December that would have prevented Russia’s intervention in the Ukrainian civil war. 

Robert Parry, the founder of this website, in March 2017 wrote the article, “How US Flooded the World with Psyops,” in which he reported for the first time:

“Newly declassified documents from the Reagan presidential library help explain how the U.S. government developed its sophisticated psychological operations capabilities that – over the past three decades – have created an alternative reality both for people in targeted countries and for American citizens, a structure that expanded U.S. influence abroad and quieted dissent at home.

The documents reveal the formation of a psyops bureaucracy under the direction of Walter Raymond Jr., a senior CIA covert operations specialist who was assigned to President Reagan’s National Security Council staff to enhance the importance of propaganda and psyops in undermining U.S. adversaries around the world and ensuring sufficient public support for foreign policies inside the United States.”

A psyopcracy?

— Cathy Vogan (@CathyVoganSPK) December 24, 2022

So many people are subject to psyops that telling the truth becomes a formidable task. You become the one that is out of step. You are the one that seems to be mad.

*  *  *

Consortium News‘s mission since 1995 has been to fight against psychological operations that have come to rule over Americans, convincing them of all manner of falsehoods, such as that their nation is motivated by humanitarian and democratic principles in the world. And that the Ukraine war was unprovoked.

Help us fight the psyopcracy…

Authored by Hannah Ng and Steve Lance via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

China had made clear its biological weapons ambitions long before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

Wenstrup together with Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) released a report (pdf) on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic on Dec. 14.

“Our State Department has put things out over the past, even going back to 2005, that China is interested in offensive bioweapons,” Wenstrup told the “Capitol Report” program on NTD, the sister media outlet of the Epoch Times, on Dec. 16.

The lawmaker singled out the work of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)’s Fifth Institute of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), the military’s top medical research body. 

“In 2005, the U.S. State Department publicly stated the U.S. assessment that China also operates an offensive biological weapons program, specifically identifying two Chinese entities as likely involved, one of which is the Fifth Institute. In a 2006 declaration of compliance with the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention, China acknowledged that the Fifth Institute specifically conducts research on SARS coronaviruses,” the report reads. 

Wenstrup also took note of the book titled “The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Artificial Humanized Viruses as Genetic Weapons,” released by AMMS in 2015.

“The book described how to create weaponized chimeric SARS coronaviruses, the potentially broader scope for their use compared to traditional bioweapons, and the benefits of being able to plausibly deny that such chimeric coronaviruses were artificially created rather than naturally occurring,” the report states.

The congressman, who is also a medical doctor, said that the military research institute had also collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the body at the center of the lab leak theory of the pandemic origins. 

Wenstrup said there were “published articles with scientists from the Fifth Institute, as well as the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) … combining their military with their other areas of research.”

He further pointed to a scientist with the PLA’s Fifth Institute, General Zhou Yusen, who had reportedly worked with the WIV for years prior to the pandemic.

According to Wenstrup, Zhou was “heavy into the gain of function type research or chimeric research.”

“Notably, in the spring of 2020, as global COVID-19 cases surpassed 7 million and COVID-19 deaths surpassed 400,000, General Zhou reportedly died under mysterious circumstances,” according to the GOP report.

Challenging the Intelligence Community

The lawmaker noted that an update to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)’s declassified assessment (pdf) of the origins of COVID-19 released in October 2021 did not address important information that indicates the Chinese regime’s interest in offensive bioweapons. 

“The declassified updated assessment also failed to address the AMMS’ publicly stated interest in the development of engineered coronaviruses for biological weapons purposes,” the GOP report states.

“The IC [intelligence community] should be transparent regarding what it does or does not know regarding the relationship between the PLA’s Fifth Institute of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), which China has publicly admitted conducts bioweapons research and coronavirus experiments, and the WI,” the report continues. 

Wenstrup specifically pointed to Zhou’s death under questionable circumstances, saying “We want to know what the intelligence community knows about his work, and also about his untimely death and the circumstances around that.”

Lack of Cooperation

The lawmaker highlighted that China has consistently failed to cooperate with investigations into the origins of COVID-19.

“When they finally did let people come to China, they really didn’t let them into the lab and to see everything. As a matter of fact, they [investigation group] had to be held in quarantine for one or two weeks before they even got to have a conversation,” he said, referring to a team of World Health Organization-recruited scientists who visited China in early 2021 to probe the pandemic origins.

“And interestingly, the only person they would allow from America was a gentleman named Peter Daszak, who was with EcoHealth Alliance, who was getting NIH [National Institutes of Health] funding, and then working with the Chinese on coronavirus type of research,” he added.

Daszak is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit that has drawn considerable scrutiny over funneling federal funding to the WIV for research on coronaviruses, which some experts say amounted to gain-of-function research.

Given the history of collaboration between Daszak and WIV, Wenstrup said there was potential for bias.

Further Investigation

Wenstrup said that the committee would continue to probe the pandemic origins, especially after the Republicans take the gavel in the new year.

Read more here…

In the last few weeks there’s been increasing public talk of achieving peace through direct negotiations coming out of both Ukrainian and Russian officials. But for now, each side is sticking to their respective strict demands, making the possibility of serious talks coming to fruition anytime soon highly unlikely. Yet it’s at least a positive that the word “negotiations” is even in the air at this point.

The latest back-and-forth began with a Monday statement by Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba, who called for a peace summit to be held by the end of February with the mediation of UN Secretary-General António Guterres. However, his key sticking point, which proved to be a non-starter for Moscow, was that Russian officials first face a “war crimes court” for the invasion of Ukraine.

“Every war ends in a diplomatic way,” Kuleba said. “Every war ends as a result of the actions taken on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.” He added while talking about a UN venue, “This is really about bringing everyone on board.”

And as Politico reported of the top Ukrainian diplomat’s Monday remarks, “Asked about whether they would invite Russia to the summit, he said that Moscow would first need to face prosecution for war crimes at an international court.” Kuleba then stipulated, “They can only be invited to this step in this way.”

Kuleba then went on the attack, speaking of the Russians: “They regularly say that they are ready for negotiations, which is not true, because everything they do on the battlefield proves the opposite.”

In part, this was all a reaction to weekend comments by President Vladimir Putin saying he’s ready to negotiate “with everyone involved” in the Ukraine conflict.

The Kremlin’s official response to Kuleba’s latest comments came via head of the Russian State Duma Committee on international affairs Leonid Slutsky – who it should be noted would likely head any future Russian delegation in talks with Ukraine. Slutsky dismissed the Ukrainian calls for a war crimes tribunal as a “smoke screen.” 

“Ukraine is still not ready to hold peace negotiations; all the statements made by [Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry] Kuleba are a smoke screen,” Slutsky said, and further according to state media:

Slutsky underscored that it was the Ukrainian side that withdrew from the Istanbul peace process, instead choosing a path of escalation. “It wasn’t us who were evading peace talks, it wasn’t us who staged the provocation in Bucha,” he added.

Slutsky noted that “the ball is still in Kiev’s court,” adding that the goals of the special military operation remain the same, those being the denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine.

He emphasized Moscow’s key stipulation that talks are possible if the West halts its ongoing weapons pipeline to Ukraine’s armed forces.

“Russia has repeatedly called on the international community, including at the parliamentary level, asking to stop arming the Kiev regime; however, Western states continue sponsoring and supplying heavy weapons. This is what the UN should pay greater attention to,” the lawmaker said, after UN leadership appeared to back Kuleba’s call for peace talks.