Category: international affairs

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free trade & free markets international affairs

Embargo Socialism?

Cuba, communism, socialism, freedom, slavery

As the people of Cuba have revolted, this month, taking to the streets in huge marches, complete with waving of American flags, leftists in America — who love socialism and hate the Stars and Stripes — have been put in an awkward position. 

The Biden administration, in its continual prostration before progressives, initially attributed Cuban unrest to lack of COVID vaccine access. But then leftists began blaming the United States’ embargo for that and for Cuba’s sorry economic mess, blaming the U.S. as the cause of Cuban misery. 

Not Cuba’s Castro communist government! 

The problem is U.S. foreign policy, or so the memes assert. Some claim that the embargo amounts to a blockade of all international trade with Cuba.

Is this true?

“Embargo is the official term used by the U.S. government to describe the sanctions on Cuba,” Politifact explains. “While the nuances in the U.S. embargo can make it difficult for foreign companies to trade with the country, there is no evidence that they can’t,” concluding with “We rate this claim False.”

Indeed, other popular memes show that the U.S. is the only country on the planet not trading with the communist-​run tyranny due south of Florida.

More interesting is the clarification of the embargo by Senator Marco Rubio. “There’s only two embargoes, here: the embargo against government-​owned companies and the embargo that the Cuban regime imposes on its own people.”

It is entirely legal for Cubans and Americans to trade, says Florida’s senior U.S. senator. But the Cuban tyranny won’t let them.

All my life the U.S. has been engaged in an embargo against Cuban socialism. Against slavery. Against a government at war with its people. 

It has not yet “worked,” but I know why Cubans wave American flags.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs national politics & policies

Optimized for Attack

Whence came this pandemic? 

Now that we can investigate the lab leak theory without being smeared as conspiracy nuts or buried in an avalanche of disinformation from China, the World Health Organization, and the U.S. scientific community — all protected in their deceit by Big Tech and our mainstream media — we might make progress in our inquiries.

On June 29, in a little-​covered hearing before Republican-​only members of the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Select Coronavirus Crisis, several renowned scientists testified, most notably Dr. Richard Muller, emeritus professor of physics at Cal-Berkeley.

“I would like to emphasize five points,” Muller stated, “each of which is capable of separating or distinguishing between a natural origin — a zoonotic origin — and the lab origin” of SARS-​CoV‑2: 

  1. “The absence of pre-​pandemic infections,” which he called “unprecedented”;
  2. “The absence of a host animal” (which was lied about early on); 
  3. “The unprecedented genetic purity.… Again, MIRS, SARS, previous viruses don’t have this, but it is exactly what you would expect if you’ve gone through gain-of-function”; 
  4. “The spike mutation … there is no known way for that spike mutation to get there except by gene mutation in a laboratory”; 
  5. “This virus was optimized to attack humans. Again, something that has never happened in natural releases — but it does happen if you run it through the gain-of-function.”

“All the scientific evidence argues in favor of the laboratory origin,” he concluded. “The evidence in favor of the natural, zoonotic origin? There isn’t any.”

But here comes the even bigger story, one that Dr. Muller called “horrifying” and “chilling.”

Muller had asked colleagues to assist in his lab-​leak investigation. But they declined to help because that would anger China, which would then blacklist those labs. 

“The idea that China has managed to interfere, to break United States’ freedom of expression, freedom of investigation, freedom of thought, through this collaboration effort,” the doctor explained, “is really scary.” 

If you think the Chinazis are merely a threat to “their own people” and neighboring Taiwan and countries bordering the South China Sea … think again.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Here and here are links to additional testimony at that June 29th hearing. Coverage of Dr. Muller’s testimony first appeared in these pages as a “Thought.”

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international affairs social media

Good-​bye, Google

China, Google, censorship

Is Google working for the Chinese government?

The group Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights believes that pro-​Chinazi partisans have been targeting its YouTube videos, triggering sanctions against Atajurt’s channel. Many of its thousands of videos provide testimony about how family members have been hauled off to internment camps in China’s Xinjiang region.

Alphabet/Google’s YouTube has penalized the Atajurt YouTube channel for alleged “harassment” because some of the videos provide proof of identity. Channel owner Serikzhan Bilash, an Atajurt cofounder, says this is important to establishing the credibility of the testimony.

On June 15, after a dozen of the channel’s videos were flagged for harassment, YouTube terminated the channel. After Reuters asked why, the channel was restored.

On June 22, YouTube locked another dozen videos and accused the channel of praising “criminal groups or terrorist organizations.” YouTube blames automated messages for such accusations. But it hasn’t stopped threatening the channel.

“There is another excuse every day. I never trusted YouTube,” Bilash says. “But we’re not afraid anymore, because we are backing ourselves up with LBRY. The most important thing is our material’s safety.”

LBRY is a blockchain protocol used by YouTube competitor Odysee, to which Atajurt has so far ported almost a thousand of its videos.

The large audiences of Google’s YouTube and other Big Tech social-​media forums make them appealing as a means of getting out a message. But as Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights and many others are discovering lately, you better have backup.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs

The 400 Million

“More than 50 million total deaths,” writes Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle, summing up the cost of Communist Mao Zedong’s decades of re-​making Chinese society from the “Great Leap Forward” to the “Cultural Revolution.” 

“… entirely self-​inflicted,” Von Drehle adds.

“A free market of ideas would never have settled on such terrible policies,” he declares, “and a limited government could not have enforced them.”

Exactly! Is it finally morning in Washington?

The columnist articulates two principles: (1) “a free society is a great solver of problems and finder of answers because more brainpower is better than less,” and (2) “while a big government can certainly give a great boost to a good idea, it can also put enormous force behind a bad idea — and when it does, the effects can be catastrophic.”*

He highlights China’s brutally enforced One Child policy, instituted in 1979, whereby the government, according to One Child Nation documentarian Nanfu Wang, bragged it had “successfully prevented 400 million babies from being born.” Through forced abortions and infanticide! 

“This draconian, ill-​considered measure,” Von Drehle charges, “has brought China to the brink of population decline at a time when the rising nation is still too poor, on a per capita basis, to support swelling ranks of elderly pensioners on the backs of a dwindling number of young workers.”

So, in 2016, “the all-​powerful government permitted couples to have two children,” he explains. “Birthrates have continued to drop, moving the Central Committee to raise the cap last month to three children.” 

Regardless of the number, what could be more totalitarian than the government deciding how many children you may have?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Like covering up a virus outbreak that turns into a pandemic killing almost 4 million people worldwide — and over 600,000 Americans?

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international affairs

How About That?

Joe Biden

The G7 summit provided much-​needed comic relief. 

Biden’s mumbling and stumbling elicited titters and gasps. (His slip in constantly referring to Libya when he meant Syria was, if not funny, at least revealing.) But maybe the greatest moment of pandering silliness came from Britain’s Boris Johnson.

“We’re building back better together,” Johnson said. “And building back greener and building back fairer and building back more equal and how shall I — and in a more gender-​neutral and perhaps I — a more feminine way! How about that?”

A naked appeal to feminists. Which the “conservative” politician does not seem to understand isn’t the same thing as appealing to women in general.

His answer got play mainly because he mouthed a slogan with aesthetic stickiness: “build back better.”

But the opportunity to “build back” at all is the result of governments first destroying so much of commercial and civil life. Maybe politicians are the last people we should trust to do that.

The big news out of the summit was the idea of a “universal 15 percent corporate tax,” to establish a “level playing field.”* And prevent what Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen calls “a race to the bottom” — by which she means the escape of international corporations to lower-​tax areas overseas.

MSNBC puts this notion in context: “the average corporate tax rate across 177 different jurisdictions in 2020 was just under 24%.”

Instead of trying to maximize revenue by raising taxes, high-​tax governments could simply reduce taxes. That would keep corporations within territory, and over time keep revenue flowing.

That would be a “race to a level playing field” without all the political hoopla.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* And somehow this new this new “universal” tax is said to exclude China!

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First Amendment rights international affairs

The Biden-​Boris Censorship Alliance

The Group of Seven (G7) is an annual meeting at which leaders of seven major countries hobnob about international matters and how they might coordinate policies.

This year, the pandemic was high on the agenda. Also on the agenda, if lower and less conspicuous, was muzzling dissidents.

Dissidents being defined, in current style, as people who spread “disinformation.”

At the meeting, Joe Biden and Boris Johnson endorsed a revised version of the 1941 Atlantic Charter that includes a seemingly minor provision: “We oppose interference through disinformation or other malign influences, including in elections . . . .”

That’s it — just an ominous hint. 

But the Biden administration has been more open in other contexts. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki says that according to Biden, more should be done by “major platforms” to prevent “misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life-​threatening information” from going out to the public.

Throughout history, people have disagreed about facts and their interpretation. It’s nothing new. And pretending it is new provides no justification for preventing the exercise of freedoms that are the only means of reaching and communicating truths — and of correcting the honest or dishonest errors that government officials are as capable of committing as the rest of us.

The UK is considering an Online Safety Bill to block social media sites that fail to remove “legal but harmful content” — which opens up wide vistas of … illegal legal content? 

Even if our government doesn’t follow Her Majesty’s (yet), our current administration is pressuring social media firms to impose censorship on its behalf.

That’s violation-​by-​proxy of the First Amendment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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