The Roosevelt administration was significantly infiltrated with Soviet spies. Harry Dexter White was assistant Secretary of the Treasury and played an important role in the Bretton Woods Conference.
After the war, White was closely involved with setting up what were called the Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. These institutions were intended to prevent some of the economic problems that had occurred after World War I. As late as November 1945, White continued to argue for improved relations with the Soviet Union.[21] White later became a director and U.S. representative of the IMF. On June 19, 1947, White abruptly resigned from the International Monetary Fund, vacating his office the same day.
The Wikipedia article is quite defensive about White’s role vis a vis the Soviet Union.
This codename was confirmed by the notes of KGB archivist Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin, in which six key Soviet agents are named. Harry Dexter White is listed as being first “KASSIR” and later “JURIST”.[65]
Another example of White acting as an agent of influence for the Soviet Union was his obstruction of a proposed $200 million loan to Nationalist China in 1943, which he had been officially instructed to execute,[66] at a time when inflation was spiraling out of control.[67]
Other Venona decrypts revealed further damaging evidence against White, including White’s suggestions on how to meet and pass information on to his Soviet handler. Venona Document #71 contains decryptions of White’s discussions on being paid for his work for the Soviet Union
The Venona transcripts make it clear that White was a Soviet asset.
What of Biden? We have the Hunter Biden laptop revelations, which have been largely suppressed. Hunter was paid millions by China, even though he is an addict and weak link to his father. Other Biden family members are deeply corrupt in other areas.
Biden appointees are pro China if anything. and a significant matter.
Biden’s appointees won’t be weak on China, they will be pro-China. The geopolitical implications of Biden coming to office are going to have long-term repercussions. Even before the election China was threatening the US military, crossing the sea boundary into Taiwan’s territory with invasion forces 2-3 times each week, threatening other neighbors, attacking diplomats of other countries, and attempting to destroy Australia’s economy. Given Pres. Trump’s opposition to Chinese communist bullying of other countries vs. Biden’s pro-China stance, it was understandable that China has supported Biden from the beginning. Having worked in several countries neighbors to China, I can say that many people overseas are not happy with the idea of Biden as president.
China is not shy about asserting its opinion
February 2021 reprises a red-line drama, not yet as tragedy and not as farce but definitely as a threat to world peace. The repetition tests the will of President Joe Biden’s administration to defend American security and a common-sense understanding of human freedom.
On Feb. 1, communist China’s top foreign policy guru, Yang Jiechi, gave a speech to a virtual audience hosted by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.
Yang reportedly told his audience, “The United States should stop interfering in Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang” — western China where Uighurs live — “and other issues.” Yang said these three regions are Chinese “internal affairs.”
Then Yang added the most nuanced phrase: “They” — the so-called internal affairs — “constitute a red line that must not be crossed. Any trespassing would end up undermining China-U.S. relations, and the United States’ own interests.”
“Red line” meaning China’s rules.
What is behind this ?
Machiavellians worldwide will credit Yang for constructing a shrewd and early “red line” test of Joe Biden using “cocktail power warfare.”
Yang’s threat comes less than a week after Chinese aircraft intruded on Taiwanese air space. That was a military show of force to test the Biden administration. Yang escalated the diplomatic challenge.
Military power, diplomatic challenge? Mix them and you’ve a cocktail of the military and diplomatic elements of power.
But information power is also in play. In the immediate background lurks Hunter Biden and his potentially billion-dollar deal with Chinese communist entities. Scrutiny and analysis and totally relevant pre-election examination of the Biden family’s financial arrangements with China were suppressed by social media tech titans and anti-Trump mainstream media.
Which leads us to the real Machiavellian stroke: Yang exploits America’s greatest strategic weakness — a corrupt press.
Biden’s Secretary of State is a Clinton loyalist and internationalist. He does not seem to be interested in China.
No one in his inner circle seems interested in China
Although Biden admitted in a Foreign Affairs essay this spring that he must get tougher on China, his inner circle now features former Secretary of State John Kerry, who infamously remarked that the United States does not seek to contain China. It also includes new national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who has gone further than Kerry by stating that America should play an active role in encouraging China’s growth.
The Biden blob is firmly against decoupling from China and is instead focused on building an international coalition to take on rising power.
There are also rumors that Bob Iger, Executive Chairman of the Walt Disney Company, may become ambassador to China. Under his stewardship, Disney has developed close ties to the communist government. For example, Iger earned a hefty amount of criticism after Disney thanked the security forces in charge of the Uyghur concentration camps in the credits of Mulan. This is hardly someone we can count on to uphold America’s national security interests.
Have we ever had an administration so friendly to an enemy ? The Copperheads were a significant 5th column during the Civil War but were never part of Lincoln’s administration. In World War I the Wilson Administration was aggressively anti-German. Russian was an ally in WWII so the level of sympathy was understandable, even if aided by some Soviet agents.
Many of America’s businesses, from farmers to manufacturers, are deeply invested in China, but they also understand that China steals their work and forces them to accept it to access the market.
It’s how you get into a situation like Elon Musk’s Tesla: the Chinese government provided a billion-dollar loan to the carmaker to come in and establish an electric vehicle market in China. Meanwhile, the country steals Tesla’s innovations (including sensitive NASA coding developed by SpaceX) and has begun creating state-sponsored competitors.
That’s why members of Congress have proposed amendments to decouple key defense industry sectors, like the U.S. space industry, from China — to protect sensitive U.S. data from state-sponsored thievery. Yet Biden’s recently unveiled national security team continues to downplay the need for decoupling from the communist regime.
This may be the opportunity to see what has happened to the relationship since GHW Bush sent Brent Scowcroft to reassure the CCP that Tiananmen Square was not a big issue.
Mean while, some of us wonder why China is now permitted to install part of the US electrical grid
Trump’s Executive Order 13920 declared a national emergency with respect to the nation’s electric grid and prohibited the acquisition or installation of “any bulk-power electric equipment … designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied, by persons owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of a foreign adversary.” In sum, Trump forbade the use of grid equipment that is made in China, Russia, or other hostile nations.
Trump’s order was a common-sense response to real, proven threats. Just last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States seized a Chinese-built transformer because officials believe “its electronics had been secretly given malicious capabilities, possibly allowing a distant adversary to monitor or even disable it on command.”
Why was this important ? Why reverse the order by Trump?
New examples of Biden policy are coming every day.
Joe Biden keeps appointing “czars.” One of them, the Asian policy czar, is Kurt Campbell.
Campbell was a former Obama administration official and, more recently, board vice chairman of the U.S.-China Strong Foundation. What’s that? According to Alana Goodman, who cites State and Justice Department records, it’s “ostensibly a nonprofit group that promotes student language exchanges with Beijing but whose leaders included prominent members of the Chinese government’s overseas propaganda fronts.”
It’s just amazing.
The Soviets seem to have missed a bet when they just didn’t buy Roosevelt. So much easier and more direct than all this sneaking around and working through lackeys. I wonder if the media would have hidden that the way they hid that he couldn’t walk. Remember 10% goes to the “Big Guy”.
The USSR was never nearly rich enough to be able to just buy off top politicians the way China can and has, and the establishment wasn’t nearly as venal and corrupt as it has become in the past few decades.
A difference being that the Communist sympathizers in the FDR administration were mainly motivated by ideology. The current China-supporters are motivated mainly by money.
An analogy might be with the American businesses which were happy to continue doing business with Nazi Germany.
The West is still stuck with the idea that wars are fought with bombs & bullets. We should pay attentiont to Sun Tzu’s dictum that the real Art of War is to win without fighting — clearly, the Chinese Communist Party has not forgotten. This war has been fought for at least a quarter of a century in the economic realm.
Most of the damage to the West has already been done. So much of the productive industrial infrastructure has already been moved (voluntarily!) to China. And what remains largely depends on essential parts imported from China. Western media has been brought under CCP influence, western academia depends on the CCP for graduate students and financial support. Establishment Democrats and Republicrats are mostly now on the CCP team. But Russia! Russia! Russia!
Face it! We the People have been betrayed to the CCP by those who claim to be our leaders. And the CCP will reap a rich reward from whatever it cost them to put the Senile Sniffer in the White House.
The point that the Soviets were never rich enough is a good one. Deng Xiaoping said it was important to get rich first. I wonder if he planned this or it just happened? What we are dealing with is Deng’s China, not Mao’s. The trouble is that Xi Jinping may have very different ambitions than Deng.
More concerns with Biden appointments Will the Democrats share these concerns?
Mike K: “The point that the Soviets were never rich enough is a good one.”
We need to dig a little deeper on that one. The USSR never attempted to become the Workshop of the World, which is a large part of why the USSR never became rich enough.
The Chinese Communist Party recognized back in Deng’s day that their poverty plus their generally educated productive population created a big potential opportunity. Once they had secured access to the World Trade Organization, they offered Western businesses cheap labor and freedom from over-regulation — an offer that short-term focused Western executives could not refuse. Then as China consequently grew economically, the CCP offered Western businesses access to their growing market with over a billion people — but at a price, “Build It In China”. Naturally, Intellectual Property leaked from the West to China, and (probably more importantly) China’s workforce gained the human knowledge necessary for technology while those same skills drained from the West.
At the end of all of that, China had become rich enough to buy off the Western Political Class. But more importantly, China had become the indispensable Workshop of the World while the West was well on the way to becoming a Cargo Cult economy dependent on Chinese imports. The Western Political Class and their Big Business allies are now trapped. Unfortunately, the rest of us are trapped along with them.
There is a way out of this — but it will take decades to recover the industrial capacity & human skills which have been lost. The situation will have to get worse (and it will !) before we get our act together and start the long slow process of turning things around.
there were certainly officials like say forrestal whose firm dillon read had strong ties to corresponding firms, like general aniline and film, william draper who I referred to earlier re japan, was another such figure, sullivan and cromwell, represented the bulk of german industry,
in addition to dexter white, there was laughlin currie, lawrence duggan, in the oss you had duncan lee, not to mention herbert marcuse and maurice halperin in their analytical section, those where just some of the stalinophiles, the ones who followed the yalta vs riga axioms,
In many ways China has a more honest approach to government. They manage their economy directly. In America you have a range of forces competing for dominance, to do just the same thing. You call it democracy but its just another way to spin power.
If you want access to China’s market, the largest in the world, you have to play by their rules. You hate that.
The Hong Kong fiasco, the poor Uighurs, the issues with Taiwan are all parts of your propaganda effort, to paint China as a bad country. A country with far less people in jail, and one that raised a billion people from poverty in an astonishingly short time. At this point its a freer country than the US for its population. They will fight for Taiwan. Will you?
Estimates made by economists, show China in 2030, with about the economic power of the US and EU combined. As they are up almost 4% in 2020 and you are down about the same amount, this may easily come true.
I used to think this theory was far fetched,
https://thehundredyearmarathon.com/
but having seen the events of last year as part of a hybrid warfare campaign, like the retired general chi haotian, would have recommended, the release of the virus, augmented by the information warfare that apelbaum has noted, which is not unique to chinese state actors, like the houston consulate, it seems more plausible,
So far, Biden has probably cost China less than a tank, not nearly as much as a fighter. Even the Soviets could have afforded a gross. Politicians are cheap. Money is a much more reliable motivator than some sort of nebulous philosophy. The Soviets were happy enough to buy enlisted men, like I said, they aimed too low.
The Soviets were happy enough to buy enlisted men, like I said, they aimed too low.
Oswald worked out pretty well for them.
The bribes aren’t direct, except in the most brazen cases like Biden’s filthy family. The ChiComs have spent 99% of their money luring businesses there, which can then launder money to the Democrat party and politicians. The Soviets couldn’t do that.
The Soviets, like the Chinese, did pretty well on university campuses. The Soviets did not have money for “Confucius Institutes” but they got the nuclear secrets from a few fellow travelers. I think the Soviets got more from ideology and the Chinese just buy people like the Bidens and the professors in fields they want.
}}} So much of the productive industrial infrastructure has already been moved (voluntarily!) to China. And what remains largely depends on essential parts imported from China.
This is largely irrelevant. When/as we need such, we can readily build new factories — with extensive automation to reduce the number of employees, as we would need to do anyway if China doesn’t make stuff we want/need.
And as long as we have sense to stockpile strategic items, this is not an issue, either, as it can’t stop us from making the things to make the things.
Building capacity we don’t need right now will be a waste of time, time-value-of-money, and could easily result in pre-outdated manufacturing capability as new mechanisms come into development. For example, some machining we would do with Computerized lathes may be possible in 5y with metal 3-d printers — so designing a plant now instead of 5y from now, when we need it, would be a mistake.
The state of 3d printing is still in its infancy, and will have a truly massive effect on manufacturing in the next 5-10 years, both in-plant and “what gets made in the home”. We don’t have Star Trek replicators YET, but you can already see how the first generation of them might work.
Q.E.D. building mfr plants NOW is of dubious value.
P.S., the net affect on China’s ability to sell the stuff it makes, if they suddenly tried to stop making/selling stuff to the USA would not be pretty. The economic results for China’s sake would be ugly as hell.
China is developing a middle class, and the effect of THAT on china’s longer-term societal development is still under way, and its end-result will be interesting, to say the least.
Estimates made by economists, show China in 2030, with about the economic power of the US and EU combined. As they are up almost 4% in 2020 and you are down about the same amount, this may easily come true.
China is in a worse bubble than Japan was in the 90s. They are rapidly aging and need a sphere of protection. Hence the fake islands and the Yuan diplomacy in Africa and Asia. The latter is already starting to blow up in their face. The couf was a desperate act and may have paid off for a while as they got a toadie in the White House for a while. Will the bubble pop or the make a pfffft sound as the air slowly escapes? Time will tell.
This is going to be a distressing four years.
The problem seems to be that the CorruptocratandJoe Demento just see China as one more source of graft. Nothing to be concerned about. The Dems have sold out everyone else, why would this be any different?
At least this time the GOPe bit players came out in the open for even the idiots to see. Liz Cheney is apparently more visually impared than most. I suspect that she doesn’t care at all about PresidentTrump except for sucking up to her paymasters.
I could walk out and build a factory today with virtually all the machines made in America with the delay being mostly competing demand for the same machines. All I need is a product and a market, the same as it’s ever been. Finding people to run the machines is a whole other problem.
Just finding a cadre of experienced people to train willing students would be a problem since they would have to start, literally, at 2+2=4. The quality of schools is so poor. But the time to ramp up production would be the killer. Until recently, I would have a choice of modern plants in China, willing to take it and run with it. All I’d need was some place to unload the containers from China.
Now the choice is often in how I’d be ripped off. I’d have to decide between simply paying for goods that never arrived, containers that turned out to be full of bricks, finding my product stolen and having to compete with my contractors cousin, finding the delivered product unusable because of poor quality or some combination of the above.
Starting a factory is not a problem. In some ways starting from scratch is an advantage. All it takes is money and time.
MCS…”Just finding a cadre of experienced people to train willing students would be a problem since they would have to start, literally, at 2+2=4.”
I talked with a machinist, who teaches machining, who observed that it’s difficult to teach someone how to use a micrometer if they don’t understand decimals. Also a carpenter who noted that it’s hard to learn to use a ruler or a yardstick if one never learned fractions.
Several years ago, I talked with a woman who was an electrical engineer and a serial enterpreneur. She was starting new businesss, involving a consumer medical electronics product. She is Native American, and mentioned that she’d like to put customer service on her tribe’s reservation…I asked her if she might consider putting the manufacturing there, too. She said she’d love to, but there were just too many services required to support a business like this that are much more available in China than in the US.
Yes, the public schools are in general garbage, because they’re really just day-cares in most places. But I find it very hard to believe that businesses couldn’t train people on the job, no matter their background–as long as the person is motivated enough to show up and apply themselves, which in my understanding can actually be the most serious problem.
Remember in the 90s there was actually pretty strong backlash against Japan, and a strong push to support American business? Now there’s basically nothing at all like that re: China. It’s sad that “we” have just given up. The elites have sold us out, but the rest of us have mostly thrown in the towel.
they are very obvious aren’t they,
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/01/29/gizmodo-us-should-demilitarise-and-withdraw-to-reduce-co2-emissions/
miguel: We think of the military as a means to accomplish foreign policy goals. The left has figured out it’s great to accomplish their domestic goals–social engineering, money laundering to their friends in the contractor world, green energy companies, etc. It’s along the lines of the common enemy within vs without dichotomy of left vs right…
Foreign policy analyst Lee Smith exposes specific American business, governmental and academic, relationships with Communist China in this informative essay. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-thirty-tyrants
Pengun said: “A country with far less people in jail…”
That’s because they simply execute a lot of their criminals. Cheaper in the long run. Also see: organ harvesting.
When political power is contested by each faction inviting in aliens and foreigners to help it win, a nation and a people are doomed.
And Democrats have been inviting in Communists since the 1920s.
Democrats, the party of race laws, race hatred, and brutality since… its founding.
China rules:
China wins always.
It seems that the Chinese government holds Canadians in particular contempt.
China rules:
China wins always.
It seems that the Chinese government holds Canadians in particular contempt.
Tried to link a particularly ugly link, hope this works better.
Here’s the damn link.
https://www-theglobeandmail-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/politics/article-canadian-gold-mining-junior-accuses-china-of-stealing-the-firm/?amp_js_v=a6&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQFKAGwASA%3D#aoh=16121493859646&csi=0&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theglobeandmail.com%2Fpolitics%2Farticle-canadian-gold-mining-junior-accuses-china-of-stealing-the-firm%2F