Eric Zuesse
On January 30th, the South China Morning Post bannered “How Donald Trump could change the course of Meng Wanzhou’s ‘years-long’ battle against extradition:Canada usually complies with extradition requests but the China-US trade war – and the US president’s apparent willingness to intervene in the case – could make the difference this time.” That “‘years-long’ battle” referred to an expected future “years-long” legal wrangling over Wanzhou, not to anything in the past, because the extradition request was made by U.S. President Donald Trump only on December 1st of last year.
Canada’s press likewise is reporting the intense political nature of Trump’s demand to bring Wanzhou, one of China’s top international corporate executives, to the U.S., on criminal charges. On January 28th, Canada’s Global News TV network headlined “Conservatives slam Liberals for handling of Meng Wanzhou case” and“Liberals say Conservatives making ‘false claims’ on China”.
On January 29th, Toronto’s Globe and Mail headlined “U.S. formally requests extradition of Meng Wanzhou to face financial fraud charges”, and reported that “Canada has received a formal request from the United States for the extradition of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, officially starting the clock on a complex process that could ultimately see her sent stateside to face multiple charges of financial fraud. … Ms. Meng, who is living in her Vancouver home, appeared briefly in B.C. Supreme Court on Tuesday for a bail adjustment hearing.”
China’s Government views “Western egoism and white supremacy” behind Trump’s actions in this case.
On January 9th, China’s Ambassador to Canada reacted to the 1 December 2018 arrest of the the mega-corporate Chinese executive Wanzhou by saying:
Without violating any Canadian law, Meng was arrested last month and put in handcuffs just as she was changing planes at the Vancouver International Airport. … Some people in Canada, without any evidence, have been hyping the idea that Huawei is controlled by the Chinese government and poses security threats to Canada and other Western countries, and that Chinese law requires China’s enterprises to collaborate with the government in espionage activities. However, these same people have conveniently ignored the PRISM Program, Equation Group, and Echelon — global spying networks operated by some countries that have been engaging in large-scale and organized cyber stealing, and spying and surveillance activities on foreign governments, enterprises, and individuals. … Something is considered as “safeguarding national security” when it is done by Western countries. But it is termed “conducting espionage” when done by China. What’s the logic? … The reason why some people are used to arrogantly adopting double standards is due to Western egoism and white supremacy. In such a context, the rule of law is nothing but a tool for their political ends and a fig leaf for their practising hegemony in the international arena.
The U.S. arrest warrant alleged that Wanzhou had violated Trump’s anti-Iran sanctions. However, Trump himself had instituted those sanctions after his having single-handedly, and in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that all treaties must be approved by at least two-thirds of all sitting U.S. Senators, failed to seek such Constitutionally mandated approval (and his predecessor, Barack Obama, had likewise committed the United States to ending those sanctions by Obama’s violating the U.S. Constitution’s requirement of at least a two-thirds vote approving in the Senate any treaty-change). Violating the U.S. Constitution is now perhaps even the norm for the U.S. Government, especially regarding international relations. And the U.S. Supreme Court almost never intervenes or objects, at all, in any way. The U.S. Constitution is dying, if not dead, at least on many of the most important issues.
(Incidentally, at the time, 9 June 2010, when the sanctions were first being imposed against Iran, Susan Rice, Obama’s U.S. U.N. Ambassador, had endorsed them heartily, by saying, “Today, the Security Council has responded decisively to the grave threat to international peace and security posed by Iran’s failure to live up to its obligations under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).” So, these sanctions were instituted by the U.N. Security Council in 2010 with Obama’s support. However, in order for the U.S. to participate in them without violating the U.S. Constitution, a two-thirds vote of the U.S. Senate was necessary, but no such vote was ever held in the U.S. Senate. And such ignoring of the U.S. Constitution is normal. Furthermore, the White House proudly announced on 31 July 2012, during President Obama’s re-election campaign, that “With President Obama’s leadership, the United States gained the support of Russia, China, and other nations to pass United Nations Security Council Resolution 1929 in June 2010, which created the most comprehensive and stinging international sanctions the Iranian regime has ever faced.” It wasn’t until Obama’s coup in Ukraine in February 2014, that Russia’s leader, Putin, knew that Obama had been deceiving him that Obama was intending to reverse, or “reset”, former U.S. President G.H.W. Bush’s secret policy since the time of 24 February 1990 to continue America’s Cold War against Russia even after the Soviet Union and its communism and Warsaw Pact would end, as they all did in the following year, 1991. Obama had used that deceit in 2010 to get Russia and China onboard America’s anti-Iran train. Under Trump, it’s a train that’s crashing through to China. All of this — everything — is in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s two-thirds-of-Senate clause. U.S. foreign policies are established, and set, almost entirely in secret, and without any public debate, even in the U.S. Senate. That’s the reality: a secretly imposed dictatorship. This is America’s reality, today.)
On December 11th of 2018, the economist Jeffrey Sachs bannered, at Asia Times, “Meng arrest a huge provocation to China”, and he said:
The context of the arrest matters enormously. The US requested that Canada arrest Meng in the Vancouver airport en route to Mexico from Hong Kong, and then extradite her to the US. Such a move is almost a US declaration of war on China’s business community. …
The US rarely arrests senior businesspeople, US or foreign, for alleged crimes committed by their companies. Corporate managers are usually arrested for their alleged personal crimes (such as embezzlement, bribery or violence) rather than their company’s alleged malfeasance.
Yes, corporate managers should be held to account for their company’s malfeasance, up to and including criminal charges; but to start this practice with a leading Chinese businessperson, rather than the dozens of culpable US CEOs and CFOs, is a stunning provocation to the Chinese government, business community, and public.
Meng is charged with violating US sanctions on Iran. Yet consider her arrest in the context of the large number of companies, US and non-US, that have violated US sanctions against Iran and other countries. In 2011, for example, JPMorgan Chase paid US$88.3 million in fines for violating US sanctions against Cuba, Iran and Sudan. Yet chief executive officer Jamie Dimon wasn’t grabbed off a plane and whisked into custody.
And JPMorgan Chase was hardly alone in violating US sanctions. Since 2010, the following major financial institutions paid fines for violating US sanctions: Banco do Brasil, Bank of America, Bank of Guam, Bank of Moscow, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Clearstream Banking, Commerzbank, Compass, Crédit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, ING, Intesa Sanpaolo, JP Morgan Chase, National Bank of Abu Dhabi, National Bank of Pakistan, PayPal, RBS (ABN Amro), Société Générale, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Trans-Pacific National Bank (now known as Beacon Business Bank), Standard Chartered, and Wells Fargo.
None of the CEOs or CFOs of these sanction-busting banks was arrested and taken into custody for these violations. …
Quite transparently, the US action against Meng is really part of the Trump administration’s broader attempt to undermine China’s economy by imposing tariffs, closing Western markets to Chinese high-technology exports, and blocking Chinese purchases of US and European technology companies. One can say, without exaggeration, that this is part of an economic war on China. … They certainly have nothing to do with upholding the international rule of law.
The US is targeting Huawei especially because of the company’s success in marketing cutting-edge fifth-generation (5G) wireless technologies globally. …
Sanctions regarding non-national parties (such as US sanctions on a Chinese business) should not be enforced by one country alone, but according to agreements reached within the United Nations Security Council. In that regard, UN Security Council Resolution 2231 calls on all countries to drop sanctions on Iran as part of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. Yet the US – and only the US – now rejects the Security Council’s role in such matters.
Michael Moore’s latest documentary film, Fahrenheit 11/9 (not to be confused with his 2004 Fahrenheit 9/11) documents that throughout the career of Donald Trump, he has been racist in his actions, even where he wasn’t also racist in his explanations of his actions. Moore also documented there the full participation of Trump’s predecessor, President Obama, in the Republican Michigan Governor Richard Snyder’s having caused and then covered up the lead-poisoning of Flint Michigan’s children, who are overwhelmingly Blacks. However, with Obama, the contempt appears to have been against the poor, whereas with Trump, there is, in addition to that classism, clearly a hatred of racial and ethnic minorities. That’s perhaps the major difference between the two men.
Could it then be that Trump’s now-indubitable racism is part of his sense of “Make America Great Again” (the alleged basis of his trade-policies)? The Republican Party says that it’s not, but they also deny that Trump is a racist, which now clearly is a false allegation about him — he certainly is a racist.
How much more about America’s foreign policies might Trump’s deep-seated white-supremacist racism be affecting those policies — especially trade-policies (and this includes, of course, economic sanctions)?
Given the evidence that’s presented in Moore’s documentary, his racism has been expressed — in his actions — against Blacks, and it has also been widely expressed, even also verbally, against Hispanics, and, perhaps even more blatantly, against Muslims (except not against U.S.-allied aristocracies, such as the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia).
In keeping with the majority of America’s Christians, Trump is not racist against Jews. He even is largely financed by Jewish billionaires, such as the Israeli Sheldon Adelson. But whether he is racist against Chinese is, as of yet, an open question. But now, China’s Government has raised the issue.
The Chinese Government is certainly not going beyond the bounds of the evidence and of logic, to raise this question.
Furthermore, Sachs’s own statement against Trump on this matter is actually a damnation against not only Trump but also against all recent U.S. Presidents and their Administrations, when Sachs said, “Yes, corporate managers should be held to account for their company’s malfeasance, up to and including criminal charges; but to start this practice with a leading Chinese businessperson, rather than the dozens of culpable US CEOs and CFOs, is a stunning provocation to the Chinese government, business community, and public.” Sachs was saying there that, up till the present time, it has never been the case that “corporate managers” are “held to account for their company’s malfeasance, up to and including criminal charges.” He is there alleging that the only, or virtually only, people who are in prison in the United States, are people who are not “corporate managers” who themselves carried out, or rewarded or incentivized their employees to carry out, “their company’s malfeasance.” Only lower-level people are subjected to any significant imprisonment in the United States, no matter how corrupt the mega-corporations are. He is saying that America, which has the world’s highest percentage of people in prison, allows “corporate managers” to perpetrate, and to reward their employees for perpetrating, “criminal” acts. So, although America is an incredible police-state regarding its poor (and the Moore film also copiously displays that fact) Sachs, there, is saying that “corporate managers” in the United States are actually above the Law. That’s a remarkable admission from him — and it’s true. For the aristocracy, America is no police-state at all, except one that protects them and their privileges — privileges both legal and otherwise, both in prison and on the outside.
Another meticulously researched nonfiction movie, this a top-quality “docu-drama,” is the 2014 Kill the Messenger, about how the CIA was caught organizing and protecting narcotics kingpins and using kickbacks from this multibillion-dollar-per-year illegal business to finance off-the-books foreign regime-change operations, which are too costly to be funded merely in the official ways. The same U.S. Presidents who were famously waging “The War Against Drugs” were secretly having their CIA use the illegal narcotics trade in order to pump up up their regime-changes abroad, to serve America’s billionaires’ interests. And then the mainly Blacks who became victimized by, and who participated in, this trade got slammed into prison for it, while their CIA-cooperating bosses did not. This movie is a cult classic amongst investigative journalists, because it shows how the CIA destroyed and perhaps murdered the great investigative reporter, Gary Webb, who revealed the scandal. America’s major ‘news’-media fired him and never allowed him ever again to work for them. Then, once Webb’s career was destroyed by that blacklisting of him on the part of the ‘news’-organizations, and he was in obscurity, he died mysteriously with two bullets in his head, and few among the public even heard about the murder, at the time. It seems that Webb never got to know that the CIA’s narcotics trafficking kickbacks had begun with the CIA’s first-ever coup, which was in 1948 Thailand and installed there a general who was the lynchpin for the southeast Asian narcotics network and who helped establish, with Nugan Hand, the CIA’s future dependence upon drug-trafficking. So, both regime-change and narcotics-trafficking were joined together right at the CIA’s very start. But Gary Webb reported only about the Reagan-era part of this longstanding (if not permanent) CIA system. And this was the first time that any part of this seedy history became publicly known (to the extent it did, at all).
It’s not merely Trump, and Moore’s documentary made clear that Obama was just as psychopathic against the poor as Trump is, though slick enough to hide it, even from the people who despise Trump for his racism.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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