Corporate influence of Beijing, Saudis, etc.

[MonDie]

Watching Al Jazeera will introduce you to plenty of third-world problems: vaccination and antiboiotic resistance, contaminated water and landfill landslides, collapsed buildings and dams, tsunamis and earthquakes, sand mining and The Great Green Wall, air quality in Bangkok and New Delhi, and smuggled firearms and the direct sale of firearms, armoured vehicles, and fighter jets.  Yet some of them still find time to invent, like Sounthirajan Kumarasamy and his team did, and I want to see more of it.  Our planet is accelerating toward a mass extinction, and India by itself has three times more heads than the United States.

Although foreign leaders favoring the status quo will blame protests on foreign influences, they benefit from globalized scientific advances and in fact some of the wealthier countries will exert economic pressure on our corporate media.  The members of this forum are not corporate subordinates who cannot freely discuss these foreign influences.  Beijing (mainland China) seems to have effectively eliminated coverage of Hong Kong's huge, on-going protests in a globalized city as wealthy as any american city.  Saudi Arabia has been buying american fighter jets, has bribed Trump via his hotels, and has bought information from Twitter employees.  When they trade with us to fund their pro-government media, we are already an influence.  The foreign influence seems to be in our direction, and not theirs, when they purchase or replicate our weapons or surveillance technology and when they actively suppress our coverage of their civil rights violations.  At the very least, we are obliged to print a blank page in the Chinese section or the Arabic section, otherwise we are complicit.  Moreover, when american companies buy, hire, or "move" overseas to avoid taxes and minimum wages, we lose out and our rich are advantaged by the privilege of overseas activity.

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The Hong Kong Free Press ... ...

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Jamal Khashoggi reported that MBS ... ...

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looks really friendly ... ...

12:06 PM CST November 10th

1:00 PM:  The documentary reminded me of the report on the Falun Gong influence behind the pro-Trump Epoch Times that you were seeing advertised on YouTube.  That's a wacky story.

 

 

1:15 PM:  Actually, information on how Badger Sportwear's shoe materials were traced to the Uighur detention centers is surprisingly difficult to find, but it's more up to date.

 

I forgot lobbying, an issue which is more prominent but also more complicated.  Here is a Fortune 1997 archive on its Power 25 lobbying groups.  I have long remembered that the NRA, the Christian Coalition and the National Right to Life Committee fall within the top ten, but what I didn't notice before is that AIPAC was actually no. 2.  Although the Israeli issue is tied up with conservative Evangelical Christians, what might be more notable is that The Israel American Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) actually represents a foreign country.  Of course, AIPAC had a very, very minor role in Trump's anti-Palestinian decision to recognize Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv, as the capitol of Israel... eek.

To be honest, I don't fully understand how lobbying influences D.C.  I do know that business firms and "the business lobby" are very powerful, and that being a lobbyist is profitable.  AOC documented DC's ironic lines of homeless people who were paid placeholders for rich lobbyists.  Moreover, it seems that Saudi lobbyists were exploiting loopholes to pay off our politicians over the war in Yemen.

Another peripheral -- or not so peripheral -- issue was accidentally omitted.  Chinese investors have hidden their money overseas by "parking" that money in american and Australian housing markets, artificially inflating the price of housing.  This has exacerbated the homelessness problem in certain cities.  I think the Australian government was doing something about it... It might be difficult to estimate the actual impact of this hidden Chinese money.  In any case, we don't want our rich to avoid our taxes, and we don't want their rich to artificially inflate our housing markets.  However, I would like to know the positions of lobbying groups like AIPAC on tax avoidance schemes and money laundering schemes.  These issues might not be so peripheral after all.  Cyprus and Switzerland are notorious money laundering locations, and Trump's (German) Deutsche Bank controversy momentarily made headlines.  In years past, HSBC-US and Wachovia were convicted of laundering money to the drug cartels, but the punishment wasn't close to proportional.  On this October 26th, Mexico's AMLO surrendered El Chapo's son to an unexpectedly forceful display from the drug cartels.  Some important question ensue.  Where is the Mexico lobby?  Why couldn't central american lobbyists push for stronger fines against those banks?  Why do the activities of foreign lobbying groups seem to undercut international law rather than uphold it?

12:24 PM CST, November 13th, 2019

12:30:  I forget the specifics, but I think international corporations had a stake in the burning of the Amazon, an area which Brazil's Bolsonaro wants to economically develop.  Lula Livre!