Better than the Russians at Information War

There was an article today about Finland and its training of its young people to recognize fake news and propaganda.  The CNN article describes the details of a program to educate to reduce the number of times the population falls for made up stories and slanted news.  While it is a good article to read, Denmark has shown an similar capability over several years in getting to the root of false stories, the most famous being the debunking of Russian stories pertaining to the shooting down of commercial flight Malaysia Air 17 in July of 2014.  They also exposed an Iranian story of how a mobster killed a person who had a clash with a local customer.  The Danes began removing Iranian diplomats two years before they announced what was really behind the killing of an Iranian dissident.  He was not the victim of organized crime. 

We certainly have something to learn from both of these countries.  Our news media is no longer an independent profession looking for truth.  It has political agendas that slant facts towards one party or another, and no longer sees the need to apologize for mistakes of fact.  Funny that CNN, one of the worst of them for its slanted news stories, would be the one to produce this article.  It would be nice to hope that it bodes well for the future of CNN, but don't hold your breath. 

Russia Upsets Ukraine's Neighbors

The Russians are just nasty.  They are pulling stunts to disrupt relations between Ukraine's neighbors by such things as painting swastikas on the Hungarian cultural center in Uzhgorod and similar instances that give the impression that the Ukrainians don't like Hungarians very much.  They put a grenade into a consulate in the Ukrainian city of Lutsk.  You might think the Russians would have a better way to spend their time, but not so.  They enjoy this kind of thing, even if it is not really all that successful at moving people away from the Ukraine.  It still has plenty of support.  The thought of Crimea does not go away that easily. 

Still, we get a good idea of what Russia's philosophy is with respect to Information War.  Disrupt, damage, slowly influence.  We need to be giving some of their own back for that.  We should be disrupting their own operations and running more of our own.  The EU too. 

For the full story see the Wall Street Journal today

Tools to Report Censorship by Social Media

If, like me, you are censored by your social media you can report it to Congress and the results will be tabulated and presented to the various companies involved. 

https://whitehouse.typeform.com/to/Jti9QH

China Exposed in Venezuela

Reuters has an exclusive on a report of China's investments in Venezuela, most of which benefited a few individuals, but did nothing for the people they were supposed to serve.  In the documented case of China CAMC Engineering Co Ltd, the goal was to provide jobs to many residents who would build new bridges and roads, a food laboratory, and the largest rice-processing plant in Latin America (something one has to wonder about).  It fell quite a bit short of that, but made some politically connected people more rich than they would have been otherwise. 

Part of the lack of success came from the necessity of paying bribes to local officials (indictments showed $100 million just for the rice project).  The Chinese don't seem to have reservations about paying bribes if it gets them what they want.  Only it didn't get them a rice processing plant. 

China has a string of these programs that are outright bribery to meet political objectives.  We saw examples in the Philippines, North Africa, Vietnam, and Cambodia, to name a few.  They are designed to sound like something that will benefit the country in some vague way, but they rarely do accomplish any of the promised results.  What they do is build up debt which cannot be paid, and result in China getting payment of its debt in other types of currency, like ports, infrastructure contracts, or utilities.  Ultimately, it looks just like the Mafia moving in on productive investments and corrupting them. 

This is where our policies that try to change trade behavior in China are so difficult to solidify.  They don't play by the rules of international trade or the norms of commercial business.  We can identify what kinds of activities we would like to see from China but those behaviors are significantly different than what the business and political practice of the country.  Imagine trying to get a mob boss in Boston to stop running prostitution, loan sharking, or illegal gambling operations.  We usually arrest them rather than trying to move them into legal businesses.  That won't work in international trade. 

The White House thinks taxing them, in the form of tariffs, is the right answer, but that is like trying to tax illegal operations.  That would require legalizing the behavior we are trying to stop. 

How China Steals Tech

The US China Economic and Security Review Commission has published a good summary of how the Chinese are stealing technology from the United States.   How Chinese Companies Facilitate Technology Transfer from the United States

I know this sounds like something that is commonly known, the report is worth reading because of the examples that don't tell the same stories you read in the press every day.

Chinese Censorship Shows Trade Position

There is an article today in the Wall Street Journal (Beijing Media Urge Calm on Trade)
that shows what the Communist country really thinks about the trade negotiations it is having with the US. 

While the politicians and press on both sides of the issues speculate about how the trade talks might go, the Chinese censorship engine is telling their people to remain calm.  This article says they are reducing stories that might inflame the rhetoric, prompting stories that might lead to criticism of the central government or result in banning or restricting sales of US products in China.  We can still remember the iPhone incidents which were incredible displays of bashing or burning iPhones because Apple wouldn't cooperate with Chinese rules for data.  These were totally manufactured scenes, unless we believe that a person would destroy a $700 phone he had just purchased based solely on a principle that would not affect the average user.  Those kinds of displays cause people to change their purchasing choices and have longer term affects than the Chinese really want. 

What can we infer from this kind of restraint?  This is not going to be a long negotiation with serious consequences for both sides of the industrialized countries.  China caused the US to seek other manufacturing venues for some products (Cambodia for tennis shoes is a simple example) and that is something the Chinese would like to avoid.   

Hong Kong's New Extradition Bill

When I first heard that Hong Kong was about to pass a new extradition bill, I didn't even bother to look it up because the Chinese had been operating as if they already had one.  Now, I can appreciate the significance of it because of a brief published by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.  The briefing points out that is not just Hong Kong citizens who can be extradited the Chinese mainland, but anyone who lives there.  So bankers, and financial institutions will find themselves being hauled off to a Chinese court for doing something the Chinese don't like. 
Any company currently doing business in China should read this brief.  It is only a beginning of the use of law to meet their political objectives.  They do it internally but they are reaching out to other lands they control and applying the same laws to anyone who disagrees with them.  It is one thing to be censored, like my blog is in China, but it is entirely something else to do what they did with the booksellers in Hong Kong - Hauling them off to be intimidated in holding cells and threatening their futures if they didn't stop selling books that were banned on the mainland. 

Calling Each Other Liars

When I worked on the Hill it was not permitted to call another Member a liar.  If a staff person did it it would be hard to retain your job.  Congressmen were supposed to be ladies and gentlemen who did not do such things in public. There were some ways around it, but most Members didn't bother.  It was easier to just avoid it altogether.  It was possible to run ads saying a person voted for "starving children", to "reduce wages" when that was not the case at all, but that was not a lie, per se.  It was a matter of political interpretation.  They used to describe conflicts between each other beginning with the words, "My good friend and esteemed Member from South Carolina said..." 

There is a new element to this now that I really don't like.  Nancy Pelosi called Bill Barr a liar for expressing an opinion that was different than hers.  She could have said his interpretation was not correct, or that he did not follow the law as written, or that he was mistaken, but she didn't.  She called him a liar. 

Now, in point of fact, Barr is not a Member and she did not violate the rule of calling another Member a liar.  But, when did it become important for any administration's representative to agree with the positions of the majority leader, or be branded a liar?  Knowingly and willingly making a false statement is a lie.  The person who does it is a liar.  That definition does not fit the circumstances where two individuals disagree on a conclusion. 

The Chinese in Jamaica

I ran into a woman this past week who lived in Jamaica and travelled to the U.S. for business.  She was interested in my first book, and knew my name because of it.  She said I should have done more inquiries into the Caribbean because the Chinese were using the same techniques in the Belt and Road initiative in Jamaica than they were using in North Africa. 

She said the Chinese got deep into domestic politics by buying local political officials who were corrupt enough to sell their souls to Chinese businessmen who bought buildings and brought in Chinese labor that wiped out most of the competition and created monopolies in local business.  I told her this sounds like what they did with economic zones in Vietnam.  She said it was to her too. 

They bred themselves into the local population and it is not hard to find a generation of mixed race individuals in key positions throughout the country.  Businesses now have Chinese owners, that once had Jamaicans in those jobs.  They own the utilities and the telecommunications ( she was attending a telecommunications conference) and very few of her friends believe the Chinese are doing this out of the graciousness of their collective hearts.  She pointed me to a few sources that might help clarify both the situation in Jamaica and a few of the other island nations in that region.  That can be a chapter in my next book.