The number of memo readers has grown and I have returned to a one memo format each day but they are somewhat longer. I hope those who read them will at least be persuaded there are several sides to all issues and reflect. How you come out thinking is for you to decide but I simply want to stimulate you to think and reflect.
Because I am back to posting one memo each day sometimes what I post could be stale newswise but the message, in my opinion, remains "meaty."
There is a lot going on these days and I never lack for postings.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Blame "Spock" for the generations we have been raising.
https://twitchy.com/samj/2023/
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More Biden stupidity.
And:
Biden renews a sanctions waiver that helps fund terrorism.
The Editorial Board
The waiver, first issued in July and now renewed for another four months, allows Iran access to revenue from Iran’s electricity shipments to Iraq. The State Department says this is necessary to keep the lights on in Baghdad. That oil-rich Iraq remains dependent on Iran for gas and electricity is its own scandal, but the excuse doesn’t wash.
The July waiver was part of an unwritten nuclear agreement with Iran. Giving Iran access to these billions could never pass Congress, so Mr. Biden bypassed it. The idea was to quiet the region until after the 2024 U.S. election.
How little peace the money has bought is clear. Even on the nuclear front, new United Nations inspector reports show that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium continues to grow, Reuters reported Wednesday. Iran now has enough for three nuclear bombs.
After Oct. 7, the White House was quick to distance Iran from the attack. But Israel has since faced thousands of rocket attacks by Iranian proxies on five fronts. Entire regions of Israel have had to be evacuated, with more than 200,000 civilians internally displaced.
Since Oct. 17 Iranian proxies have also carried out 56 attacks—and counting—on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria, injuring 59. In other words, Iran has been attacking Americans on average twice a day for a month.
In years past, U.S. policy has allowed Iraq to import Iranian electricity only if the payments were kept in escrow in the Trade Bank of Iraq and denominated in Iraqi dinars. The Biden Administration is now allowing far larger payments and has introduced a mechanism for Iran to move the funds through France, Germany and Oman.
This is likely so the money can be changed to euros, which are more readily convertible, says Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Even if the money goes for “humanitarian purposes”—as the U.S. contends—this frees up funds for terrorism. Iran sends some $700 million to Hezbollah and at least $100 million to Palestinian terrorists annually.
The Biden Administration had tried to keep its sanctions waiver classified, but Rep. Bill Huizenga (R., Mich.) was able to enter much of it into the Congressional Record. Mr. Biden has also quietly let the international embargo on Iran’s missile program lapse and relaxed oil-sanctions enforcement, yielding a surge in Iranian oil exports that has brought the regime tens of billions of dollars.
Secrecy has been the Biden pattern on Iran, and for good reason: Its policy is unpopular. A Nov. 10-13 poll finds that 70% of Americans, including 58% of Democrats, think the President has been “too accommodating” to Iran. Obama-era habits have proved hard to break.
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New York Times Opinion Columnist Doesn't Know Hamas Runs Gaza
By DAVID STROM
She writes for the NYT Opinion section as a contributor. She works for Slate. She helped found Gawker and ran the New York Observer. Her bio reads like somebody who is expected to know a thing or two because her job is to explain things:
ELIZABETH SPIERS is a digital media strategist and entrepreneur who was the cofounder of Gawker and later, Breaking Media. She consults to media companies, digital startups, and progressive organizations. She is currently a contributing writer to the opinion section of The New York Times, a co-host of the Slate Money podcast with Felix Salmon and Emily Peck, which covers finance news of the week, a co-author of Slate’s Pay dirt column, and she teaches a class on innovation in media in the Studio 20 program led by Jay Rosen in the Graduate School of Journalism at NYU.
She was formerly the editor in chief of The New York Observer and editorial director of Observer Media Group, where she oversaw the flagship newspaper and its digital analogs, and a variety of print and digital trade and lifestyle publications.
As a journalist, she has been a columnist at Fast Company and Fortune and contributed to a variety of publications, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, The New Republic, and GQ. She is the co-author of Slate’s Pay Dirt column about the ethics of money.
She is a Young Leaders Forum Fellow alumna of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. She previously taught for six years in SVA’s Design Research MFA program.
So imagine my surprise when she revealed that she didn’t know that Hamas runs the Gaza Health Ministry.
This gem was dropped in the middle of an argument on Twitter between Noah Blum and Ms “I am so brilliant and wise” Elizabeth Spiers. Blum is Chief Technology Officer of Tablet, an excellent news source focused mainly on Jewish issues. Tablet, however, is alternative media, where you are required to have knowledge before you opine; The New York Times is Mainstream Media, where you don’t.
Spiers, who TEACHES AT A JOURNALISM SCHOOL and writes for THE NEW YORK TIMES didn’t know that Hamas runs the Gaza Health Ministry.
Let that sink in. She literally did not know that. She thought it was a conspiracy theory.
It doesn’t take a lot of research to know this. It is not only widely discussed, but it has been published in just about all the publications for which she does now or has worked. The Washington Post did an entire piece defending their use of the statistics despite it being run by Hamas.
If she bothered to read anything, she would know.
Unfortunately, she has the reading habits of the average teenage TikToker who is currently getting their mind blown by how brilliant Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” is.
Spiers apparently is a special kind of stupid, which I suppose is very on-brand for somebody who writes for the Opinion section of the NYT, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and teaches at a J-school.
Lest you think I am joking about Spiers working for the New York Times, here is a link to her columns.
She doesn’t know that Hamas is the government of Gaza. And she is spewing out opinions about the Israel-Hamas war. As a “journalist.” The New York Times and Washington Post publish her frequently. Her regular gig is writing for Slate and doing a much-listened-to podcast on money.
It blows your mind.
I admit that I regularly show contempt for the MSM, but even I didn’t expect that a “journalist” would be so utterly ignorant as to not have the most basic facts in their head–5 weeks into a story!–before spewing their own opinion onto the internet.
Many journalists are venal, but relatively few are this stupid. I thought. At least I thought that. Maybe I overestimate them. They could be wrong so often and push ridiculous propaganda because they are so stupid that they never even bother to check into a thing before they hit “Publish.”
In order to do propaganda well enough to make it into the Times or the Post you would normally have to have an IQ north of 100, but I guess the standards have dropped. Much of my contempt for these people is driven by a belief that they have the tools to know how wrong they are, but perhaps I have been overestimating them.
Perhaps they are just stupid and have editors who manage to take their mangled prose and make it sound good
You can rest assured that none of the publications that spread her mouth-breathing opinions–she is a huge opponent of Israel and spews her bile online–will take note of just how ignorant she is. Nor will she lose her J-school job. She is a Leftist, after all.
Because in journalism these days, having even a passing knowledge of the facts is less important than having the “right” opinions and parroting them.
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There are no two justice standards, only one. Hang Trump no matter what he does.
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Special Counsel Lets Biden Off Scot-Free In Classified Docs Case While DOJ Tries To Imprison Trump For The Same Thing
BY: JORDAN BOYD
While the Department of Justice works overtime to imprison top political foe and 2024 presidential poll leader, former President Donald Trump, over mishandling classified documents, Special Counsel Robert Hur plans to let President Joe Biden off scot-free.
CNN, which broke the news, claimed that instead of filing charges, Hur planned to “be critical of Biden and his staff for the way they handled sensitive materials.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland hand-picked Hur as special counsel for the documents case in January 2023. Hur’s involvement in the FBI’s communications with Russia collusion hoaxer No. 1 Christopher Steele and his role as a member of the DOJ team that tried to subvert a congressional exposé of the intelligence community’s failures during that same collusion hoax fed fears that he would not divert from the DOJ’s politicized agenda when he evaluated Biden’s information cache.
Hur’s decision not to charge Biden while the DOJ continues to target Trump only confirms those suspicions.
There were plenty of questions and questionable activity, including the comings and goings of several White House officials in the months leading up to the discovery of classified documents, surrounding Biden’s concealment of the papers from his time as vice president.
Yet neither the article nor the accompanying TV segment made any mention of why Biden’s lawyers, who claimed they stumbled across the documents, were snooping around the Penn Biden Center office in Washington, D.C., in the first place.
The White House insisted the National Archives and Records Administration and DOJ were notified “the minute that his lawyers found those documents” in fall 2022. Even though investigators did not get fully involved until 2023, CNN echoed this talking point by claiming that the “key differences” between Biden’s document scandal and Trump’s was that Biden “quickly notified the National Archives of the materials found in his possession.”
CNN did not mention the other key differences between Biden’s and Trump’s case, like the fact that Trump’s documents were discovered on a private, Secret Service-protected property while Biden’s were found in a busy public building and easily accessible garage. Nor did it note that NARA specifically didn’t work with Trump after his departure as it did with former President Barack Obama and Biden.
Special counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump in June with 37 counts of mishandling classified documents following his first term in the White House. A couple of months later, Smith tacked on three more charges related to the discovery of documents at Trump’s sprawling Florida mansion.
Biden’s information cache warranted the same level of investigation and transparency that Trump suffered. Instead, he won’t even get a slap on the wrist. While Trump is tied up in a court that refuses to delay his May trial date, Biden faces zero red tape, legal hurdles, or consequences.
Biden harbored classified documents from his time as vice president in a box by his 1967 Corvette Stingray and his “think tank” office for years, yet it was Trump who became the subject of the corporate media and the FBI’s public scorn and could soon face jail time.
The DOJ’s treatment of Biden compared to its treatment of Trump only furthers a majority of Americans’ belief that the U.S. has a two-tiered system of justice.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
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I hope you do not believe these various riots are spontaneous. They are funded by those who hate capitalism, America, Israel and threatens anything that undercuts their desire to control according to their sick and dangerous views.
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Meet the American millionaire Marxists funding anti-Israel rallies
By Francesca Block
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Tax dollars spent for hate. This is what representative government has come to mean. No wonder we distrust our government.
OPENTHEBOOKS; shut the minds.
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Our taxpayer dollars at work
Vote for anyone who promises to cut off any government funding to universities with a large (greater than $500,000) endowment fund and anyone who promises to eliminate the
"tax free charity" status for these universities and anyone who promises to tax the universities on their income.
Harvard, top private universities pocket $7 billion a year in taxpayer cash
By Stephen Dinan
Students walk through a gate at Harvard University, Thursday, June 29, 2023, in Cambridge, Mass. In the wake of a Supreme Court decision that removes race from the admissions process, colleges are coming under renewed pressure to put an end to legacy preferences, the practice of favoring applicants with family ties to alumni. At Harvard, which released years of records as part of the lawsuit that ended up before the Supreme Court, legacy students were eight times more likely to be admitted, and nearly 70% were White, researchers found. (AP Photo/Michael Casey) **FILE**
In the wake of a Supreme Court decision that removes race from the admissions process, colleges are coming under renewed pressure to put an end to legacy preferences, the practice of favoring applicants with family ties to alumni. At Harvard, which released years of records as part of the lawsuit that ended up before the Supreme Court, legacy students were eight times more likely to be admitted, and nearly 70% were White, researchers found. (AP Photo/Michael Casey) **FILE**
Stanford, Northwestern and the Ivy League universities have collected a combined $33 billion in taxpayer-funded grants and contracts and another $12 billion in tax breaks on their endowments over the last five years, according to new data from OpenTheBooks.com.
That $45 billion is now being called into question as lawmakers fume over the schools’ handling of pro-Palestinian sentiments on campus in the wake of Hamas‘ attack on Israel last month.
Adam Andrzejewski, founder of the government spending watchdog OpenTheBooks, said Americans should be surprised by the significant amount of support they are giving to the schools. “With the U.S. taxpayer subsidies, tax breaks and federal payments into these 10 elite universities pushing $7 billion per year, it’s time to revisit the definition of a public charity,” he said. “Collectively, these schools have gamed the tax code for vast institutional enrichment.”
Stanford University led the way with $7 billion in grants and contracts. Columbia University was second with $5.9 billion. Harvard University was fifth with $3.3 billion over the 2018-2022 period. Dartmouth College was the only Ivy not to get at least $1 billion.
OpenTheBooks said the massive amount of money makes the schools “more federal contractor than they are educator.”
The largesse spanned administrations, with both the Trump and Biden teams pouring taxpayer cash into the Ivies and other elite universities. Over the five years studied, the schools got between $6 billion and $7 billion in grants and contracts each year.
Schools have defended the money, saying it funds cutting-edge medical science and other research.
OpenTheBooks, though, said the universities seem to do fine raising money on their own without Uncle Sam’s help.
Endowments for the 10 schools studied grew from $172.2 billion in 2018 to $237 billion at the end of last year and OpenTheBooks projected the total will reach $1 trillion over the next 25 years.
Some of that is from new donations, but much of it is from investment growth. According to the study, if the schools were ordinary Americans, they would pay a capital-gains tax of 20% on the growth.
But because the schools operate as nonprofits, they only pay a 1.4% “excessive endowment tax,” which was imposed by then-President Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul and applies to schools with endowments of at least $500,000 per student.
OpenTheBooks said the schools avoided $13 billion in taxes, thanks to their status.
“Who knew that you were subsidizing the wealthy, elite universities? They don’t need taxpayer help,” Mr. Andrzejewski said.
Some of the schools also collected COVID-era bailout money from the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund. Other schools, including Harvard and Stanford, turned the money down.
The Israel-Hamas war has put a new focus on the federal cash, with several Republicans calling on the schools to be stripped of federal support.
Among them are several presidential hopefuls and top congressional leaders.
Some donors to the schools have also balked at their handling of the matter. Billionaire Cliff Asness said denying the universities money “appears to be one of the only paths” to getting the schools’ attention.
The schools’ defenders fretted about the lack of academic freedom if schools kowtowed to donor threats. But the schools have not been shy about condemning the views of conservatives, leading critics to wonder about a double standard at play in their reluctance to condemn pro-Hamas students.
OpenTheBooks pointed to Stanford‘s designation last year of the word “America” as “harmful language” as one example of what schools have allowed in the past.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
Copyright © 2023 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
And:
Colleges Screening anti-Semitic film "Israelism"
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Israel’s strategic imperative
We need to think about what the Oct. 7 attack represents within the Iranian blueprint for the annihilation of the Jewish state. Op-ed.
By Caroline Glick
Caroline B. Glick is the senior contributing editor of Jewish News Syndicate and host of the “Caroline Glick Show” on JNS. She is also the diplomatic commentator for Israel’s Channel 14, as well as a columnist for Newsweek. Glick is the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington and a lecturer at Israel’s College of Statesmanship.
(JNS) As of now, it appears that owing either to U.S. insistence or the Israel Defense Forces’ operational preferences, Israel is leaning towards keeping the issue of Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon on the back burner in the hopes of not having to engage Iran’s most powerful proxy force directly. The argument presented on behalf of this approach is that by defeating Hamas completely and reducing Gaza to rubble, Israel will deter Hezbollah from attacking it for the foreseeable future.
While reasonable in theory, this view appears to ignore two key aspects of the strategic equation.
1. First, we need to understand what it means that Hamas and its partners/trainers/suppliers/bosses in Iran and Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon planned this war for two years.
With two years to prepare, we should assume they gamed all possible scenarios and planned for them, including Israel’s current operation in the Gaza Strip. Israeli commentators like to insist that Hamas was doubtlessly taken by surprise by the ferocity of Israel’s response to their one-day Holocaust. But given their meticulous planning, this assertion is highly unlikely.
2. The second thing we need to consider is the nature of our enemy. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime do not care about the societies they control. They are jihadists. In their religious war, all Muslims are obligated to participate. Some are destined to be fighters and martyrs. Some are tasked with serving as human shields. Hamas doesn’t care if Gaza is reduced to rubble if its cause of reducing Israel to rubble is advanced.
This brings us to Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s war machine is embedded into Lebanon’s civilian life. Nearly every apartment in Southern Lebanon has a room where missiles are stored and launched against Israel. The same is true of schools, mosques and other civilian structures.
Hezbollah showed its wanton indifference for Lebanon’s well-being on Aug. 4, 2020. That day, a nuclear-level explosion occurred at the Port of Beirut, when 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate stored in a Hezbollah-controlled port hangar detonated. The port was destroyed, 218 people were killed, 300,000 Lebanese were rendered homeless, and most of Lebanon’s grain reserves were vaporized along with what little was left of the Lebanese economy. Hezbollah didn’t rebuild anything or pay damages. As usual, it threatened investigators who predictably found nothing.
One of the central questions related to Oct. 7 is: Why didn’t Hezbollah participate? Why did Hamas invade Israel by itself?
One explanation, presented by Islamic expert Professor Mordechai Kedar and military affairs expert Yair Ansbacher, argues that Hamas jumped the gun. The Nova music festival just over the border where thousands of young, beautiful, unarmed Jewish women and unarmed Jewish men were set to party together was too tempting a target for Hamas’s jihadists to pass over.
According to media reports, several of the terrorists killed and captured in Israel on Oct. 7 had military-grade maps detailing a strategic military base far from the border that they were supposed to seize. Had the base fallen, the reporters said, Israel would have faced a strategic calamity of untold proportions.
Both Kedar and Ansbacher argue that it was the terrorists’ bloodlust that held them up. Hamas jihadists were so excited by the killing, raping, burning, abducting and torturing that they gave Israel’s defenders time to organize and fight them back, blocking them from advancing forward. By blocking Hamas’s advance, Israel’s heroic first responders convinced Hezbollah not to invade from the north.
‘Catastrophic damage’
There is a lot to recommend this interpretation of events. All the same, the fact that the invasion was planned for two years speaks against it or, at least, offers another explanation.
In an analysis of Israel’s strategic threat environment and imperatives published at the Claremont Review of Books, author and military analyst Mark Helprin distinguished the threat Hamas poses to Israel from the threat Israel faces from Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon and Iran.
Hamas, Helprin explained, is not and has never been an existential threat to Israel. Hezbollah and Iran are existential threats to Israel. Hezbollah’s arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles of all ranges and payloads can decimate Israel’s strategic and military infrastructure, as well as its economy. Its short-range missiles are sufficient to enable its battle-hardened, genocidal, well-armed and trained Radwan Brigade to invade the Western Galilee.
As Helprin noted, “Iran has built the threat of Hezbollah not merely in view of its hoped-for final solution [i.e., the annihilation of the Jewish state], but to dissuade Israel from dealing with an incipient Iranian nuclear breakout.”
As to that breakout, on Wednesday, the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency issued a scathing report on Iran’s nuclear program. Over the past two-and-a-half months, Iran added 6.7 kilograms to its illicit stockpile of 60% enriched uranium. Iran now has at least 128.3 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium that can be quickly enriched to bomb-grade levels sufficient to build three nuclear bombs.
Moreover, the IAEA is convinced Iran has undeclared nuclear material at four sites. Iran, the IAEA report said, isn’t cooperating with inspectors or investigations of its nuclear operations and does not intend to cooperate in the future. The Iranian regime is barring European nuclear inspectors from its nuclear installations for political reasons.
With or without nuclear weapons, Helprin summarized Iran’s missile capabilities thusly: “Iran’s minimum of 3,000 ballistic missiles and land-attack cruise missiles of at least 26 types include 15 varieties capable of reaching Israel, with warheads from 1,650 to 2,200 pounds. Hardly bashful about utilizing parts of this arsenal to strike, as it has Saudi Arabia and American military bases in the Middle East, Iran will be presumably even less reluctant in regard to Israel, which it views with the same dehumanizing bile as Hitler did the Jews of Europe. Though Israel’s missile defenses can degrade a missile barrage, they cannot prevent catastrophic damage.”
Since Hezbollah is Iran’s shield against Israeli action against Iran’s missile and nuclear installations, Helprin argues reasonably that Israel must attack Hezbollah first.
This brings us back to the rationale for limiting the war to Gaza: If Israel decimates Gaza and annihilates Hamas, then it will deter Hezbollah and other potential foes, including Iran, from attacking.
The weakest front
In recent days, both Hezbollah and Iranian leaders have made statements indicating that they are prepared to hang Hamas out to dry and will not come to its defense. Israeli analysts are interpreting these statements as proof that Israel’s operation in Gaza is indeed deterring them from getting involved.
But we need to think about what the Oct. 7 attack represents within the Iranian blueprint for Israel’s annihilation now two years in the making.
On Oct. 7, Israel was brought to its knees by savages. It took the IDF up to 12 hours to respond in a coherent fashion after being caught unawares by thousands of invaders despite weeks of escalating assaults by Hamas on the border fence. One of the operational goals of the Gaza operation is to wipe out the humiliation of that day and rebuild Israel’s standing as a powerful and competent power in the region. The Abraham Accords, Israel’s peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, and prospects of Saudi-Israeli peace all hang in the balance.
Since Oct. 7, Israel has shown its operational competence and national determination. But it has also shown its utter subservience to the United States, a power widely perceived by the nations of the region as both waning and treacherous to its allies.
For its part, the Biden administration is openly subverting Israel’s campaign by demanding it resupply Hamas through so-called “humanitarian aid,” including fuel that Hamas openly diverts to its forces. The administration is also demanding that Israel end the war in a manner that will exact no price on the Palestinian Arabs for their bloodlust.
The administration’s demand that Israel abandon Gaza after the war; permit Hamas’s junior partner the Palestinian Authority to take over on the backs of IDF soldiers; and commit to the establishment of a Palestinian Araab state in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, and Jerusalem is a demand that Israel hand Hamas’s supporters and partners a strategic victory for their mass slaughter.
Last Saturday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected this U.S. demand. In response, U.S. officials and former officials began briefing reporters that they seek the replacement of the government with “more moderate” actors. In other words, to secure a Palestinian Arab strategic victory, the United States seeks to overthrow the Israeli government in the midst of war.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid’s sudden announcement on Wednesday that he seeks to oust Netanyahu from power immediately indicated that the U.S. statements are part of a bid coordinated with Israel’s political left and disgruntled Likud MKs.
As to Lebanon, Netanyahu and the War Cabinet are reportedly abstaining from ordering a preemptive attack on Hezbollah’s strategic assets due to operational constraints, with the bulk of Israel’s forces concentrated in Gaza, and due to U.S. pressure. President Joe Biden and his top advisers have openly expressed their opposition to any significant IDF effort to degrade the existential threat Hezbollah poses.
The current state of affairs was easily anticipated by anyone watching the Biden administration’s open collusion with opposition forces that have sought to oust Netanyahu from power since the results of the November 2022 elections became known. And they were doubtlessly considered by Israel’s enemies as they gamed the current war in the months before Oct. 7.
Many, including Netanyahu, have argued that the strategic goal of Hamas’s invasion was to undermine the burgeoning peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and the full economic and strategic integration of Israel into the region. He and others have argued that the success of that integration is contingent on Israel’s victory in the war. This is true.
But it is also true that Gaza is but one front—and the weakest front—in Iran’s war against Israel. If Israel lays waste to Hamas and Gaza but leaves the principal fronts intact, it will not gain deterrence because it will not have won.
To win the war, Israel cannot end the war until it decimates Hezbollah’s strategic capacity to lay waste to the Jewish state through a combined missile assault and a ground invasion. And that, too, must be seen as a stepping stone to defeating Iran, either by enabling the Iranian people to overthrow the regime or by massively degrading Iran’s missile and nuclear capabilities or both
Helprin’s claim that Gaza is not an existential threat is wrong in one sense: The assault Israel suffered on Oct. 7 was so massive that it placed Israel’s ability to defend itself and survive in question. As a consequence, it is of existential importance for Israel to utterly wipe out Hamas. But to prove beyond any doubt that Israel will survive, it needs to deny Hezbollah and Iran the continued means to annihilate it. Any military outcome short of this will not be considered a victory where it matters—in the minds of Israel’s partners and enemies.
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I know The Biden White House is split.
There are those who support everything Biden wants his staff to do and then there are those, mostly Obama sympathizers and some holdovers, that go against everything Biden would like to do.
I believe it is reasonable to wonder just what does Biden know about that is happening.
What took so long for his administration to react to what many universities failed to do and thus, are in violation of section 6 of our CIVIL Right's Legislation?
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THE DAILY SYNDICATE
FEATURED COLUMN
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
THE DAILY SYNDICATE
FEATURED COLUMN
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
Biden’s dangerous Palestinian state fantasy
Under pressure from his party’s left wing, the president is justifying support for Israel’s war on Hamas by reviving the two-state myth. It’s a prescription for another Oct. 7.
Under pressure from his party’s left wing, the president is justifying support for Israel’s war on Hamas by reviving the two-state myth. It’s a prescription for another Oct. 7.
Three in four Palestinians support Hamas’s massacre
Ninety-eight percent of respondents said the Oct. 7 slaughter made them feel "prouder of their identity as Palestinians."
By AKIVA VAN KONINGSVELt
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IF BIDEN BELIEVES HE HAS A FRIEND IN XI AND CHINA HE IS A BIGGER DAMN FOOL THAN I THOUGHT. IF HE BELIEVES THE MILIONS OF DOLLARS CHINA PAID HIS SON GIVES HIM LEVERAGE HE IS A BIGGER FOOL THAN I THOUGHT. THAT ADDS UP TO CHUMP CHANGE IN THE LONG TERM SCHEME OF THINGS.
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THE OP ED IN THE MONDAY (11/12/2023) WSJ ENTITLED."
THE OP ED IN THE MONDAY (11/12/2023) WSJ ENTITLED."
Placating Xi Won’t Change China’s BehavIour."
By Thomas Duesterberg (It is a worthy read.)
By Thomas Duesterberg (It is a worthy read.)
In an article previewing President Biden’s meeting with China’s Xi Jinping this week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the U.S. has “a pragmatic economic strategy: one that protects our vital national security interests while seeking a stable and healthy economic relationship” with Beijing. But in the perilous and fast-changing world of late 2023, Beijing doesn’t seem interested in that sort of balance. From supporting other authoritarians’ military efforts to trying to displace the U.S.-led global financial system, Mr. Xi is undermining the security of America and its allies. But China’s weakening economy offers an opportunity to win meaningful changes in Beijing’s policies. It will take a hard-line approach to get China’s attention.
Mr. Xi certainly won’t be soft in negotiations. He knows two major wars have sapped America’s diplomatic and military resources—in part because of China’s efforts.
Mr. Xi has tried to create an alternative to the Western financial and economic system created by the Bretton Woods Agreement. A major component of Beijing’s program is undermining the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and principal medium of global payments. That system—in combination with Western dominance of high-tech industries—allows the U.S. and allies to enforce sanctions.
To become more economically self-sufficient and immune from Western financial pressure, Beijing has worked on its own financial and economic system. The Brics grouping—which also includes Brazil, Russia, India and, as of recently, Iran—intends to displace the dollar by settling inter-Brics trade in local currencies. China also has agreements with various Middle Eastern nations to settle trade in local currencies. Beijing tries to do so through its Cross-Border Interbank Payment System.
China has also become the world’s largest provider of development finance, thanks to its Belt and Road Initiative and, to a lesser degree, to the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. In conjunction with this, China has focused its trade expansion on Brics nations and the Shanghai Cooperation Council, a group of eight full members and 10 observers and partners. Total Chinese exports to countries involved in Belt and Road now exceed those to the U.S., European Union, and Japan.
These efforts have yielded international political clout, which China has used to undermine U.S. interests. The Financial Times reported that between 2013 and 2020 Belt and Road nations voted with the Chinese position at the United Nations 75% of the time.
More ominous, China’s economic and financial reach have already allowed it to bypass Western sanctions and materially support authoritarian regimes. The U.S. organization United Against Nuclear Iran in 2022 accused six Chinese banks—including the world’s largest bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China—of complicity in illicit trade with Iran. Though that matter was seemingly never investigated by U.S. authorities, ICBC has been fined for money-laundering-related offenses by the U.S., U.K., Spain and Canada.
The headline program for China’s anti-Western financial system is the purchase and processing of oil and gas from Russia and Iran. China is estimated to be buying more than a million barrels of oil a day each from Iran and Russia, much of it in violation of various Western sanctions. China purchases this fuel at below market price, which aids its growing manufacturing dominance and economic power.
China is also aiding weapons production in Russia and Iran. In March, the U.S. imposed sanctions on five Chinese suppliers for selling drone components, while Politico in April reported that China was in talks with Russia and Iran to replenish Tehran’s supply of chemicals for rocket fuel. China and Hong Kong are major sources for Western semiconductors flowing to Russia in violation of sanctions.
In light of all this, it’s vital that Mr. Biden discuss new U.S. programs to counter China’s mercantilism, its drive to displace American leadership in the world, and, most important, to impose sanctions on China for its support of Russian and Iranian aggression. Straight talk from Washington will get Mr. Xi’s attention.
Mr. Xi desperately needs relief from Western sanctions, tariffs and investment restrictions to prop up China’s faltering economy. China is suffering from demographic decline, rural poverty, ecological stress, underdeveloped social services and youth unemployment. Yet Beijing can’t rely on government stimulus or consumer-led recovery as it has in past economic crises. Local governments provide 86% of public expenditures in China but their financing vehicles are horribly overleveraged. Banks are too, and that combined with falling returns on capital investment and the collapse of the real-estate sector leave few options for an investment- or demand-led rebound.
When Messrs. Biden and Xi meet, the latter will undoubtedly offer rhetorical support for cooperation on climate change and better access to Chinese markets in return for substantial reductions in U.S. tariffs, export controls and investment restrictions. Those will be empty promises, as in the past. In September 2020, China promised to begin reducing carbon emissions by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. In January 2020, Beijing said it would increase U.S. imports under the Phase I trade agreement with the Trump administration. Neither happened. In fact, for all the Biden White House’s attempts to slow carbon output internationally, China’s chief climate negotiator in September said that phasing out fossil fuels is “unrealistic.”
Carrots have never worked with Beijing. Fortunately, at least four sticks are available to Mr. Biden.
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Beijing is undermining U.S. interests worldwide, but there are ways of forcing concessions.
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