Category: Aggregated

In a cover story on Steve Bannon in Bloomberg Businessweek on Sept. 28, Bannon has escalated his stated intention of driving President Trump into an economic war with China, assuring that the U.S. does not save itself by joining the New Silk Road.

The article is titled “Bannon’s Back and Targeting China,” with the kicker: “From Birmingham to Beijing, the former Trump strategist is leading a movement of his own, now warning of the forced technology transfer of American innovation to China—and working with Henry Kissinger.” They report that Bannon has been consulting with Henry Kissinger and others, “preparing a project to sound an alarm about what he views as the primary economic threat to America: China.” They quote Bannon: “If we don’t get our situation sorted with China, we’ll be destroyed economically. The forced technology transfer of American innovation to China is the single biggest economic and business issue of our time. Until we sort that out, they will continue to appropriate our innovation to their own system and leave us as a colony — your Jamestown to their Great Britain, a tributary state.”

Bannon told Businessweek that he made up his mind to quit the Trump Administration after a pair of September meetings at Kissinger’s country home in Connecticut. Kissinger, Bannon told them, said that during the Vietnam War, analysts outside the administration revived the Committee on the Present Danger because they were afraid that the U.S. was losing the Cold War with Russia. “They understood that you couldn’t do it from inside,” Bannon said. “You had to go outside and, like a fire bell in the night, wake up the American people.”

Bannon also pointed to his work with Andrew Marshall, director of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment for 42 years (who did his best to start a war with China in each of those years).

“There have been 4,000 years of Chinese diplomatic history, all centered on barbarian management, minus the last 150 years,” Bannon said. “China’s historical disposition toward trading partners is exploitative and potentially ruinous. It’s always about making the barbarians a tributary state. Our tribute to China is our technology — that’s what it takes to enter their market, and [they’ve taken] $3.5 trillion worth over the last 10 years.”

Businessweek writes that Bannon is planning to start a global conference series. “We are in advance discussions about having Breitbart sponsor a major security conference in sub-Saharan Africa, the Persian Gulf, Central Europe, and East Asia, in early to mid-2018,” he said.

The article also notes that Bannon’s meetings with Kissinger and with Politburo member Wang Qishan last week in Beijing don’t apparently cohere with his hardline posture.

The City of London’s The Economist this week escalated their campaign to get both Europe and the U.S. to launch full-scale economic warfare against China. The cover of the Sept. 23-29 issue pictures a mean-faced panda bear playing cards, with a card up his sleeve, under the title: “Does China Play Fair?” The editorial, in classic British style, writes: “Depictions of corporate China as just an undemocratic, state-run monster, thieving and cheating to get ahead, are crude and out of date.” We must be far more sophisticated in our war on China, they go on to explain.

China, they say, is fully guilty of “blatant theft of intellectual property” having gotten where they are by stealing our industrial and nuclear secrets. But the bigger problem, they say, and the “hardest to deal with,” is “unfair competition, sharp practice that breaks no global rules”! The obvious British solution: Change the rules. China has demanded that companies investing in China share their technology, and be subject to Chinese criminal law, while they have the gall to “restrict access to lucrative sectors.” This is “dangerous precisely because today’s rules offer no redress.”

This is followed by the subhead: “Don’t Get Angry. Get Even,” which calls on “America, Europe and big Asian countries” to come together to stop China, to “review their policies for screening investments” on so-called national security grounds.

Meanwhile, Fox News ran scurrilous attack on China under the title “Next Move in America’s ‘Maximum Pressure’ Campaign: Stress North Korean Atrocities and China’s Shameful Role.” The author, Anne Pierce, is a proud member of the Churchill Society and author of a book praising Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman as among our greatest presidents, writes: “China has worked long and hard to upend America’s post-World War II role as the guarantor of stability in Asia and has made tremendous strides in recent years in enhancing its geopolitical and military positions…. China’s aspirations are not just regional, but global. Its One Belt, One Road initiative — which entails building roads, railways and pipelines in Africa, the Middle East and beyond, and includes loans and poverty projects — is designed to gain access to raw materials, and gain economic and political leverage.”

Even the Confucian Institutes are devious, Pierce writes, “designed to disseminate Chinese history and culture in ways flattering to the Chinese government…. Massive information operations downplay its political system and territorial ambitions, and portray China as benevolent…. President Xi Jinping is positioning China as the only great power that can maintain world peace and stability and foster global cooperation and prosperity.”