The U. S. government The U. S. imposed competitive sanctions aimed at “crushing” China’s tech sector and halting the country’s rise, policymakers and analysts in Washington admitted.
Joe Biden’s management took extremely competitive steps this month by preventing China from loading as many semiconductors, chip-making machines and supercomputer parts as possible.
A former Pentagon official said it was a “disproportionate” and “unilateral” attack, which amounts to a “form of economic containment. “
He said this in an article in Foreign Policy, D. C. ‘s political class magazine, titled “Biden Now Willing to Take China Out. “
Jon Bateman, a former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst who has held various political positions at the Pentagon, wrote that U. S. officials have “imposed disproportionate measures” and “forced others to comply. “
“Washington’s mentality promises a steady march toward large-scale generation decoupling,” he concluded.
Bateman said that “the growing audacity of unilateral U. S. moves and Washington’s open acceptance of a near-containment strategy” reflect the U. S. government’s new Cold War goal. “China’s technology will slow down at all costs. “
Currently, Bateman is a senior fellow in the generation and foreign affairs program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank that is helping Washington expand policy, with abundant investments from the U. S. government. The U. S. , its allies, major corporations and banks, and circle of family foundations of billionaire oligarchs.
In April, he published a report for Carnegie titled “U. S. -China Technology Decoupling: A Strategic and Policy Framework. “
In the lengthy article, Bateman “offered a concrete picture of what centrist decoupling looks like and how enterprise-level implementation works. “
Bateman wrote the foreign policy article as part of a debate with stalwart hawks in Washington’s elite political circles. He warned that his “maximalist” strategy could backfire and hurt the United States and its allies, and instead promoted a more cautious step-by-step approach. .
“American restrictionists, zero-sum thinkers who urgently need to push for generational decoupling, have won the strategic debate within the Biden administration,” he warned.
“More cautious voices, technocrats and centrists advocating slow restrictions on some facets of China’s technological ties have lost,” Bateman said.
He claimed that Washington’s new Cold War against China has been absolutely bipartisan, but “Donald Trump’s scattered regulation and erratic public statements have given little clarity to allies, adversaries and businesses around the world,” while “Joe Biden’s moves have been more systematic. “”
“The United States has been waging a low-level economic war against China for at least 4 years, launching barrage after barrage of tariffs, export controls, investment blocks, visa caps and much more,” he wrote.
Bateman said the Biden administration’s new sanctions, however, “more than any previous U. S. action. “”In the U. S. , they reveal a determination to thwart Chinese functions on a broad and basic level. “
“Although presented as a national security measure, the greatest damage to China will be economic, on a scale disproportionate to the military and intelligence considerations cited through Washington,” he wrote.
He added: “The U. S. government is not in the U. S. government. ” The U. S. imposed the new regulations after limited consultation with spouse countries and companies, demonstrating that its quest to obstruct China outweighs considerations of diplomatic or economic repercussions. “
Bateman noted that the U. S. The U. S. seeks to pressure its allies to sign up for its new anti-China Cold War, leading a foreign crusade to economically isolate Beijing through building a “Chip 4” alliance with South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, which makes the vast majority of the global semiconductor industry.
Bateman’s fears that these new competitive Cold War policies could backfire have already been realized. Washington’s swift attempt to decouple the U. S. economy from China weighs heavily on American universities.
According to a report published in October by Harvard, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), at least 1,400 scientists of Chinese origin have left U. S. think tanks. The U. S. Department of State for China is a state of China.
The South China Morning Post reported that “the top number illustrates a ‘deterrent effect’ resulting from U. S. government policies. “The U. S. Department of Health and Human Services stiff suggests that U. S. studies are not being able to study and educational activity through scientists of Chinese descent and suggest that U. S. studies are not being able to study and educational activity. “The U. S. will possibly be affected. “
The tech press has sounded alarm bells about Washington’s bellicose attacks on Beijing.
The EE Times of the electronics industry quoted a business analyst as saying that the “U. S. sanctions are being imposed on the issue. “”The U. S. put a transient failure in China by bringing its casting industry to more complex nodes. “
They also used Cold War rhetoric to refer to competitive U. S. policies. U. S. Department of Health, writing:
The latest U. S. salvo The U. S. chipmaker will roll back its domestic chipmakers for generations, while global suppliers of semiconductors and production equipment will suffer billions of dollars in lost sales due to a massive drop in demand from China, analysts told the U. S. Times. .
The administration of US President Joe Biden has reinforced the measures of the Cold War of more than 40 years ago. In their new rivalry, the U. S. The U. S. aims to freeze China’s advance on a new front: chip generation that is for economic progress and military superiority.
Wired magazine came to the same conclusion, reporting that U. S. sanctions were not the same. The U. S. aimed to “crush” China’s tech industry.
Wired said Washington’s “radical new controls are designed to keep the [Chinese] AI industry trapped in the dark ages as the United States and other Western countries move forward. “
The tech magazine quoted Gregory Allen, director of the AI Governance Project at the Center for Strategic
Allen summed it up: “The United States tells China, ‘The AI generation is the future; We and our allies pass there, and you cannot come. ‘»
Benjamin Norton is the founder and editor-in-chief of Multipolarista.
Mobilizations took to the streets of Colombia on April 28 a national strike in protest of social injustice and competitive tax reforms proposed by the government of Iván Duque. Student movements, industrial unions, youth organizations, feminist groups, and indigenous peoples’ and other movements. Afro-descendants marched, blocked roads and organized cultural activities in urban centers and rural territories throughout the country, exercising their right to nonviolent protest. But the state responded quickly with violent repression, especially in primary cities such as Cali, Bogotá, Palmira and Popayán.
– Victor (@victor4nj) May 8, 2021
Although the vast majority of protests were peaceful, remote incidents of looting and violence were used as an excuse to use superior force opposed to demonstrators. The media’s discourse about “good protesters” and “bad protesters” legitimizes this response. Many reports of infiltrators are used to galvanize violence and looting, as has been the case in previous movements in the country. The armed forces reportedly stood idly by and allowed looting to take place, only to respond to such incidents with violent repression.
Instead of responding to the demands of citizens who oppose tax reform and social injustice, the state responded with militarization, turning nonviolent protests into war theaters.
– Truee K✯ (@Truee_K) May 5, 2021
Several villages are occupied through 4 armed state actors:
Instead of seeking to pacify the scenario and shield citizens, these forces have threatened security, peace and human rights.
Serious human rights abuses
Countless videos recorded by protesters and bystanders circulate on social networks, in which cases of police brutality, indiscriminate shooting and use of tear gas in internal neighborhoods involving young people and older adults appear. In recent days, violence has taken a new face in Cali, with the presence of plainclothes police and reports of unmarked cars shooting at protesters.
The Bogotá-based non-governmental organization Indepaz reports that between April 28 and May 8, the following occasions occurred:
Armed police threatened lawyers and human rights defenders while investigating missing users in police stations. The foreign network became aware of the gravity of the scenario when, on May 3, members of a humanitarian project composed of representatives of the United Nations and the State were attacked by armed police. while waiting to enter a police station in search of missing users. On April 7, while a humanitarian project took position north of Cali with the presence of Senator Alejandro López, a car took position, injuring one user and killing three.
The racialization of state repression
Violence and repression have a disproportionate effect on black communities, reflecting only the internal armed conflict that Colombia is experiencing. For example, 35 of the 47 murders reported by Indepaz took place in Cali, home to South America’s largest Afro-descendant population. . No wonder structural and systemic racism is deeply rooted in Cali. Many of the highest competitive instances of state violence have been perpetrated in neighborhoods with a majority or giant population of Afro-descendants, treating communities as enemies of war. Historically, those neighborhoods have suffered socioeconomic exclusion, most reinforced by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, and state violence. spaces in the north of the department of Cauca, in which Calí is located, and the Pacific coast.
While official statistics do not reveal the proportion of black victims in this existing wave of police brutality due to the lack of disaggregated data, images of victims clearly show the disproportionate effect on black youth.
— NCP (@renacientes) 28 April 2021
Racial profiling not only underpins state violence, but is at the center of state denial and impunity. Debates about gang violence and existing urban conflicts are already being used to ask whether some of those young people participated in the protests or whether criminals were killed in the context. of daily violence in their communities. This narrative no doubt seeks to decrease the number of protest-like deaths, justifying the deaths of young black men. The first recorded death in Cali occurred in the predominantly black neighborhood, Marroquín II, where a 22-year-old boy was killed. But the army later denied that his death was similar to the protests.
Militarization, imperialism and protests
The existing scenario in Colombia cannot be understood in isolation from the broader armed clash and deepening of the neoliberal timetable supported and supported through the United States and the multinationals that feed on Colombia’s herbal resources. U. S. imperialist interests in the region have been transparent ever since. the last nineteenth century, with the attempted invasion of Colombia’s neighbor, Panama, in 1885 and the beginning of the assignment of the Panama Canal in 1904. In 1948, the Organization of American States was created in an assembly in Colombia.
Colombia has been the strategic point of Washington’s political, economic and military operations in recent decades. Thanks to the technical and logistical support of the United States, Colombia is one of the largest military powers in the region. With the signing of Plan Colombia in 1999 and Plan Patriota in 2002, the presence and influence of the U. S. military was seen in the future. The U. S. economy only deepened.
Moreover, U. S. military aid has depended on state policies that derive advantages from U. S. imperial interests. For example, in 2009, the United States signed an agreement with the Uribe government to operate from seven Colombian military bases. Although this agreement was blocked by the Constitutional Court, the Santos government subsequently reached select bilateral agreements. These have allowed access to and use of the bases in practice, and have further facilitated the failed and harmful strategy of spraying the herbicide glyphosate on illicit crops. All this helps the ‘enemy within. ‘” ideology and terrorist risk that underpinned the initial emergence and expansion of paramilitarism in the 1980s.
It is exactly this style of paramilitarism that the Colombian state is employing in the context of existing protests, specifically in Cali, where state agents, without proper identification, collaborate with civilians to shoot and kill demonstrators from high-end cars. The Indigenous Guard, which accompanied the protests in Cali, has suffered several such attacks, the most recently on May 9, when another 8 people were injured.
This violent state repression is another result of imperialist intervention and the neoliberal extractivist allocation that militarism uses for a traditionally racialized population that it sees as residual and as a risk to the white supremacist capitalist order.
As reported by the International Committee of Solidarity #FreeAlexSaab on June 6, a delegation is in Cape Verde to meet with Venezuelan envoy Alex Saab, who is imprisoned on orders from the United States. They intend to document the status of his imprisonment and call for his release.
The humanitarian delegation is led by Cape Verdean leader Bishop Felipe Teixeira, Cape Verdean politician Pericles Tavares and human rights activists Sara Flounders of the International Action Center and Roger Harris of the Working Group on the Americas.
On their first full day in Cape Verde on June 4, the emergency human rights delegation met with Saab’s lawyer and Venezuela’s ambassador, attempted to meet with the local police commander, and saw firsthand where Saab is located. Heavily armed guards prevented a visit.
The solidarity committee is circulating a petition calling for Saab and offering updates on Twitter.
– FreedomForAlexSaab (@FreedomAlexSaab) June 6, 2021
Alex Saab’s case raises damaging precedents in terms of extraterritorial judicial abuses, violations of diplomatic prestige and even the use of torture to extract false confessions. That’s according to John Philpot, a Montreal-based foreign human rights lawyer. He spoke May 19 at a webinar sponsored by the Alliance for Global Justice and other teams about this example of the long success of the American empire applying its fatal sanctions to about a third of humanity.
U. S. sanctions Venezuela for sovereignty
Chicago ALBA Solidarity activist Stansfield Smith said Saab’s case is one component of a broader U. S. effort. The U. S. government is using legal warfare to impose its illegal sanctions, which the United Nations condemns as “unilateral coercive measures. “regardless of U. S. dominance.
The United States will enhance its imperial success through its dominance of the foreign economic system, which is denominated in U. S. dollars and mediated through economic exchange known as SWIFT. By controlling the foreign economic system, Smith explained, Washington can ask for that. banks in foreign countries accept U. S. restrictions. U. S. citizens expose themselves to sanctions.
Venezuela’s resistance to U. S. meddling, beginning with Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution two decades ago, has been punished across the U. S. with increasingly excessive sanctions that now amount to a suffocating blockade, causing severe shortages of food and medicine. Bolivarian Circle activist William Camacaro Alberto Lovera testified about the impact on the Venezuelan people. This U. S. effort is not a major in the U. S The U. S. government to replace the regime is, in fact, collective punishment to force Venezuelans to reject their elected government.
Even a U. S. government report. The U. S. Department of Justice admits that “sanctions, i. e. against the state-owned oil company in 2019, most likely contributed to the steeper decline of the Venezuelan economy. “This devastating blow to its oil industry has affected Venezuela’s ability to generate electricity, conduct agricultural activities, and generate profits from the sale of oil to fund social systems and import basic necessities, all of which have negatively impacted the lives of Venezuelans.
Once a major oil exporter, Venezuela’s ability to import machinery parts for its oil refineries and soft oil to blend with its heavy crude has been disrupted in the United States, devastating its production capacity. oil for food.
EE. UU. se proposes a fuel and food import mission
Alex Saab, Venezuela’s special envoy and ambassador to the African Union, was on a project from Caracas to Iran to procure food and fuel for Venezuela’s CLAP food aid program. Saab was arrested while refueling in the African country of Cape Verde and has been detained. from June 12, 2020.
Saab’s “crime,” according to the U. S. government. The U. S. administration, which ordered the jail, is cash laundering. In other words, Washington sees Saab’s foreign industry as circumventing fatal U. S. sanctions. U. S. money laundering is a matter of the U. S. as cash laundering.
After a 2-year investigation into Saab’s dealings with Swiss banks, the Swiss government concluded on March 25 that there was no money laundering involved. . Saab was born in Colombia, but now has Venezuelan nationality.
Saab’s arrest and extradition order by the United States would be like Saudi Arabia: it is not easy to arrest and extradite a British citizen visiting Italy for wearing shorts. In essence, the United States has no legal jurisdiction over a Venezuelan in Cape Verde bound for Iran.
The legal fig leaf for what amounts to a kidnapping, an INTERPOL “red notice,” which was only issued a day after Saab’s arrest and then withdrawn. my government. “
Saab’s Distinguished African Defence Team
Saab’s lawyer in Cape Verde, Geraldo da Cruz Almeida, explained in the webinar the absurdity of the politically motivated court case opposing his client. Saab violated neither Cape Verdean nor Venezuelan law. In addition, Saab’s diplomatic prestige has granted him immunity from arrest. .
The United States does recognize Saab’s diplomatic status. But again, US President Joe Biden maintains the fiction that Juan Guaidó, self-proclaimed and anointed through Trump, is president of Venezuela.
Femi Falana, former president of the West African Bar Association, spoke at the webinar from Nigeria. Attorney Falana represented Saab before the Regional Court of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). On March 15, the court ordered Saab’s cancellation. Extradition.
Under U. S. pressure, Cape Verde continues to detain Saab. Attorney Falana called on Biden to respect the rule of law and human rights in Africa. Activist Sara Flos of the Center for International Action noted that 15 of the 39 countries the United States illegally sanctions are African.
Ranked 175th and 185th among the world’s countries respectively in terms of geography and economic size, the Republic of Cape Verde is vulnerable to heavy-handedness across the United States. It has few resources and depends on tourism and remittances from abroad. Shortly after Saab’s arrest, U. S. gave $1. 5 million to private sector entities in Cape Verde, in addition to a total of about $284 million in U. S. aid over the past 20 years.
The U. S. Department of State The U. S. Department of Commerce describes Cape Verde as “a partner” where “the existing administration has prioritized relations with the United States and Europe. “with the Cape Verde police.
Cape Verde, it should be noted, is vital in the history of African liberation. Marxist Amílcar Cabral led the movement for the liberation of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde islands and was assassinated in 1973, a few months before signaling independence from Portugal.
Setting a precedent
Meng Wanzhou, a Chinese citizen doing business in Canada, is under arrest for “bank fraud” and is fighting extradition to the United States. North Korean Mun Chol Myong has already been extradited to the US. to Saab, for doing business under foreign laws than for complying with illegal U. S. measures.
That the U. S. The U. S. government being able to prepare for the arrest of a diplomat — who enjoys immunity under foreign law even in wartime — is a grim precedent. That the arrest is extraterritorial is worse. This is reminiscent of the blatant, illegal and inhumane US practice of ordinary renditions, which was used to populate torture chambers at Guantánamo.
The award-winning film The Mauritanian tells the true story of crusader lawyer Nancy Hollander, who managed to free a tortured and innocent man from the hell of Guantánamo manufactured in the United States. Hollander, played in the film via Jodie Foster, says, “I’m just protecting him, I’m protecting the rule of law. “
The genuine Nancy Hollander attended the webinar. A delegation of lawyers to Cape Verde is being planned in solidarity with Saab and a petition crusade is being carried out on his behalf. These efforts that Alex Saab’s defense is a defense of the primacy of foreign law over illegal U. S. sanctions. U. S.
With the imaginable extradition of a Venezuelan diplomat to the United States on trumped-up charges, an emergency human rights delegation organized through the Intercountry Campaign to Free Alex Saab was temporarily sent to Cape Verde, where he is imprisoned. This western island country off the coast of Africa is one of the smallest, poorest and most geographically remote countries in the world.
The foreign human rights delegation did not secure Alex Saab’s freedom. Officials denied them a stopover with him. But progress has been made to increase the visibility of the case, which faces massive political, legal and ethical issues with long-term political consequences.
The case considers the kidnapping of a diplomat through the world’s only superpower engaged in an unequal struggle to destroy the once-prosperous and oil-rich country of Venezuela. The attack on Venezuela is not motivated through the US. through successes beyond Venezuela in fighting poverty, selling regional integration and acting as a sovereign nation. Otherwise, the U. S. will not be able to do so. The U. S. would be offering aid to Venezuela, the apartheid state of Israel, the nacrosanct state of Colombia and the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia.
The kidnapping of Alex Saab is a dramatic and far-reaching effort to America’s illegal policy of economic sanctions. The United States tries to impose its will on a country by intentionally attacking the civilian population. Illegal sanctions are a conscious policy of imposing economic havoc to “make the economy scream. “
Saab, a Venezuelan diplomat kidnapped through the US government a year ago, held in conditions of torture. The denial of diplomatic immunity through the United States violates foreign law.
Internacional to lose Alex Saab
The harsh corporate media, by omission, can make a news story invisible. The Saab case is unknown in the United States, even among progressive political journalists, left-wing organizations and solidarity activists. Washington’s request for Alex Saab’s extradition is more widely covered. in African and Latin American publications. In Venezuela, unsurprisingly, the case is well known.
Among those familiar with the subject, an exaggerated focus on the Saab, the individual, obscures the broader problems of national sovereignty and human rights.
Collecting data on what was at stake was no easy task. The U. S. accusation of “money laundering” through a private entrepreneur in a country plagued by excessive shortages has generated little sympathy for Saab’s case. It was only when the facts became clear. that a plan for the external solidarity campaign was drawn up.
The fact that Saab has endured a year of arrest, torture and months of solitary confinement to comply with US requests for cooperation indicates that he is not just a businessman willing to sell to the highest bidder.
The four-person human rights delegation in Cape Verde knocked on government doors, conducted interviews and spoke to the media. The motion of local activists and a strong legal team supported them. The delegation headed by a Cape Verdean citizen, Bishop Filipe Teixeira, OFSCJ, a devoted leader who lives in the Boston domain and leads a congregation of Cape Verdeans. Teixeira is used to participating in social justice campaigns. Tweets, Facebook links and news stories helped break through the wall of silence.
After collecting thousands of signatures, a foreign petition is sent to the president and prime minister of Cape Verde as well as the president of the United States. U. S. Secretary of State Joe Biden. Se held several awareness webinars, and one was added with Saab’s lawyers speaking from Cape Verde and Nigeria.
– FreedomForAlexSaab (@FreedomAlexSaab) June 7, 2021
Role of activists
Solidarity and popular movements that are executed in combination can be a hard curtain force, breaking silence, concern and repression. hitting unrealistic expectations or creating unrealistic photographs of the quality of the internal scenario in the destination country. Solidarity is not a pass for interference, questioning, denunciation or euphoric idealism.
It is imperative to address the source of the problem: the United States. Imperialism – and not getting lost in the weeds of the victim’s complaint. American sabotage, imposed shortages, mercenary attacks, and the fomenting of national antagonism are aimed at creating and intensifying internal divisions. The scarcity is aimed at spreading corruption, looks and treats, privileges and resentment. The target country can be wrongly blamed for the crisis created by US actions. U. S.
Simply put, many progressive goals are thwarted in situations of illegal sanctions, because that is the goal of sanctions. The victim country is obliged to protect itself against constant destabilization and sabotage.
At each and every step, keeping the concentration of American movements crime provides a basis for progressive solidarity. This is not only true in the defense of attempts at revolutionary change, as in Cuba or Venezuela. We also discussed the role of the United States in Cape Verde, a country that obviously does not have to remove Saab from his flight or order his detention. Cape Verde’s isolation and strategic position have just made this country an ideal location for the long arm of U. S. extraterritorial judicial reach. U. S.
This case should be used in the global challenge to the arrogant anarchy of the United States.
This article was originally published by the International Center for Action and edited by Toward Freedom. An earlier article by Roger Harris looked at the effect of sanctions.
Sara Flounders of the International Action Center and Roger D. Harris of the Americas Working Group was in Cape Verde June 3-10 as part of the emergency human rights delegation organized through Alex Saab’s International Campaign for Freedom. The case can be followed on Twitter.