China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Indonesia and Taiwan all claim parts of the South China Sea

Funny how it is only the US backed places are stirring up shit.

A hundred years ago Sigmund Freud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays, discovered you could make people buy things they didn’t need by appealing to their emotions. It had political ramifications too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04

However, it was misrepresented by many major media outlets in their reporting.

No surprises there

I’m sure I read elsewhere recently that the Ukrainian army was killing 17, 000 Russian troops a day. Fifty thousand wont last long

He may not care about the Palestinian issue but he may feel a little different about Israeli expansion

Slavery, human trafficking and child labour: >https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893248/red-cobalt-congo-drc-mining-siddharth-kara

Cobalt Red: a regressive, deeply flawed account of Congo’s mining industry https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/cobalt-red-siddharth-kara-democratic-republic-congo-book-review/

Toxic waste killing animals: >https://www.afrik21.africa/en/niger-chinese-gold-mines-closed-after-the-death-of-around-fifty-animals/

According to local livestock farmers

No further investigation? Certainly not, the US government just passed a bill dishing out $325 million a year of tax payers money for anti-China propaganda stories https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/1157/text

https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20240505-chinese-owned-gold-mines-in-niger-ordered-shut-after-herders-report-animal-deaths

The same story as above but it added the line:

French company Orano (formerly Areva), which has been extracting uranium in northern Niger for more than 40 years, is regularly accused by NGOs of polluting the environment.

The French have been doing it for 40 years and only now it gets a mention, a throwaway sentence at the end of an article criticising China.

Was there a follow-up? Did the mines reopen? Did the government send in the army, or allow private militias to quell restive natives as they would have to if the West were “protecting its interests?”

Labour violations, stealing land: >https://news.mongabay.com/2024/04/locals-slam-zimbabwe-for-turning-a-blind-eye-to-chinese-miners-violations/

Zimbabwe has been cut off from global financiers over failure to service its debts. The country was also hit by sanctions and trade embargos by the European Union, U.K. and U.S. over serious human rights violations.

They conveniently forget to mention how it got into debt and why the country can’t service it. Go look up the country’s history, it might give you a clue as to why they might prefer doing business with China instead of the West.

Of course, mining is a dirty, filthy business. It fucks up the land and is really shitty for anyone who lives nearby. There are bound to be accidents and there are bound to be people who are upset.

That doesn’t alter the fact that China is also building infrastructure, creating jobs and giving them the tools they need to develop thus creating wealth.

I know Americans think Africans still live in mud huts and beat drums at dinner time but they are not so stupid that they keep doing business with people who routinely rip them off.

You will, of course, cry “China bad, China worse.” It seems a lot of African countries are willing to take that risk. After all, the railways that China has built in Southeast Asia, which the West insisted were doomed to fail, are doing extremely well indeed.

They are all over social media and news aggregators pushing nakedly pro-US narratives about everywhere the west doesn’t like, feverishly downvoting anyone who has the temerity to offer a different point of view

Perhaps you could share some details

China’s engagment in Africa is just as neocolonial as Western engagement if not more

How so?

China is building infrastructure, creating jobs and giving African nations the tools they need to develop thus creating wealth. What does China get out of it? Markets - a place to sell the products the make. That is quite a bit different from the western policy of enriching despots, plundering mineral wealth and leaving the countries to fester and rot.

Never mattered to the Democrats either. No matter who has been in power America’s geopolitical ambitions are all that mattered. To Trump, he is the only thing that matters.

Since the 1960s, the United States has systematically punished the Cuban people through a stringent blockade on its economy for having declared and built a political and economic model different from the one advocated and directed by the United States.

The US also has about 750 military bases (not including black sites) scattered across 80 countries around the world

HK$20,000 is nothing when you consider that is not much more than a months rent in Hong Kong.

Isn’t that a bit like asking the fox to guard the hen house?

But how did America and Americans ever allow it to get like this?

Of course not, because they are complicit

Georgian President Won’t Recognize Vote Results, Calls For Protests, Alleges Russian Interference

What a surprise, eh?

no one will lift a finger to stop them.

No one can, America won’t let them. This is their genocide as well because only they can stop it

And when the children are not being targeted online they are being shot at in school

10 developments at the BRICS meeting yesterday some of which western media will probably not report. Make of them what you will.

1. US Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin said they would end the war in Ukraine. Speaking at the BRICS conference which ended yesterday, Putin said he welcomed Donald Trump’s pledge and “believed it was sincere.”

2. China’s leader Xi Jinping and India’s head Narendra Modi committed to ending their countries’ long-term but mostly non-violent border dispute, striking a huge blow against American attempts to divide the two Asian giants.

3. BRICS membership growth continued to accelerate, with Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates declared members this week, Turkey next in line, and others applying. BRICS already has more than 40 per cent of humanity and 35 per cent of global GDP.

4. Despite internet misinformation on currency (it is NOT true that 159 countries signed up for a BRICS currency), it IS true that innovations, including a digital currency project called m-Bridge, will de-dollarise the global cross-border payments system in the long term.

5. The massive turnout of world leaders at BRICS showed that the US plan to isolate Russia had failed—and, with poetic justice, the failure coincided with a year in which the US itself was repeatedly isolated from the world in multiple United Nations votes over the pitiless slaughter in Gaza.

6. Modi’s declaration of the difference between BRICS and other country groupings (think NATO, QUAD, AUKUS) was startling: “We support dialogue and diplomacy, not war,” Modi said.

7. There was obvious delight among participants that United Nations secretary-general António Guterres attended BRICS, doing his job—which was to represent the wider world of humanity, rather than the western world’s 13 per cent. He echoed the call to end fighting in Ukraine.

8. The publication of figures showing that Russia’s economy had been far less damaged than the US intended, reinforced the belief that a significant part of global economic muscle had moved from US control to the wider, multipolar world.

9. Delegates said the developments made the prospects of war in East Asia less likely. If the Ukraine war had failed to isolate and weaken Russia, the US would think twice about repeating the strategy using the island of Taiwan to isolate and weaken China.

10. China’s leader Xi Jinping pointed out that “the common march of the Global South towards modernity is a major event in world history”. He also said that BRICS, as a huge bloc of anti-war nations working together could only be a force for stability in the world— much needed.