Fed Reserve Chairman not happy with Republican Party fake news propaganda that China penetrated Federal Reserve 美聯儲主席對共和黨關於中國滲透美聯儲的假新聞宣傳不滿意

Limitless wars as well as domestic gun violence good business for US military industrial complex / NYT: Assault Weapons Makers Pulled In Over $1 Billion as Violence Surged, Report Says 無休止的戰爭和家庭槍支暴力對美國軍事工業綜合體是好事財源滾滾來/紐約時報:帶來十億美元收入

A House panel found that the companies have thrived in the past decade by selling and marketing military-grade weapons to civilians, specifically young men. By Annie Karni July 27, 2022

WASHINGTON — The leading manufacturers of assault rifles used to perpetrate the deadliest mass shootings in the United States have collected more than $1 billion in revenue over the past decade as gun violence across the country has surged, according to a House investigation set to be presented on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

The findings, released before a congressional hearing on Wednesday on the marketing of assault rifles, indicate that the gun industry has thrived by selling and marketing military-grade weapons to civilians, specifically targeting and playing to the insecurities of young men, while some have made thinly veiled references to white supremacist groups.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform opened an investigation into the gun manufacturing industry in May after the gun massacre in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 elementary school students and two teachers and a racially motivated mass shooting in a Buffalo supermarket that killed 10 people.

The panel requested that the country’s top five gun manufacturers share information on their sales and marketing strategies, as well as any efforts they make to track safety data related to their products.
“The business practices of these gun manufacturers are deeply disturbing, exploitative and reckless,” Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and the chairwoman of the committee, said in a statement. “These companies use aggressive marketing tactics to target young people — especially young men — and some even evoke symbols of white supremacy.”

She added, “We found that none of these companies bothers to keep track of the death and destruction caused by their products.”

The House is expected to vote on Friday on an assault weapons ban for the first time since 1994, a measure that will have no chance of passage in the evenly divided Senate.

On Wednesday, the committee will hear testimony from Christopher Killoy, the president and chief executive of Sturm, Ruger & Company, and Marty Daniel, the chief executive of Daniel Defense.
The manufacturers that were investigated — Bushmaster, Daniel Defense, Sig Sauer, Smith & Wesson, and Sturm, Ruger & Company — all marketed their weapons to young men as a way to “prove their manliness,” according to the report, and sold “guns to mass shooters on credit” while failing to take basic steps to monitor deaths associated with their products.
The report showed that, as the country has struggled to cope with an epidemic of gun violence that has plagued schools, churches, supermarkets, concerts and shopping malls, firearms manufacturers have been enjoying ballooning proceeds from the sale of the weapons used to carry out mass shootings.

Daniel Defense’s revenue from AR-15-style rifles tripled from 2019 to 2021, to over $120 million from $40 million, the report said. Daniel Defense manufactured the AR-15-style rifle that was used by the 18-year-old gunman in Uvalde.

Ruger, the country’s largest maker of rifles, reported that its gross earnings from AR-15-style rifles also nearly tripled from 2019 to 2021, increasing to over $103 million from $39 million. The company’s AR-15-style rifle and pistols were used by mass shooters in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in 2017 and Boulder, Colo., in 2021.

Smith & Wesson’s revenue from all long guns, which include AR-15-style rifles, more than doubled between 2019 and 2021, to $253 million from $108 million. The company sold the weapon used in the July 4 massacre in Highland Park, Ill., as well as the Parkland school shooting in Florida in 2018.

Sig Sauer, the company that sold the AR-15-style rifle used in a mass shooting in 2016 at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., and three of the weapons used by the gunman in Las Vegas in 2017, refused to disclose its revenue.

And Bushmaster, which made the weapon used in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, said it had no financial data from previous years because it was recently purchased by a new company.

As their business has expanded, the gun manufacturers have also made covert references to white supremacist groups like the Boogaloo Bois, according to the report.

The Boogaloo movement is a group of anti-government extremists who believe a race war, or a second Civil War, is on the horizon. Members of the group often dress in Hawaiian-style floral print shirts and military fatigues. The Palmetto State Armory, a firearms company, markets a “Big Igloo Aloha” AK-47-style assault rifle adorned with such a floral print, which the report said was a clear reference to the Boogaloo Movement.

Daniel Defense has also posted photos of an assault rifle with a floral pattern similar to the one worn by its members.

One Daniel Defense inventory catalogue from 2017 also featured an image of a shooter with a tattoo of a Valknot, a Norse symbol closely associated with transnational white supremacists. The Valknot has been identified as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League.

The gun manufacturers have also made appeals that played on male insecurities, claiming that owning weapons would put users “at the top of the testosterone food chain.”

One Bushmaster ad used the slogan “consider your man card reissued” in an advertisement for an AR-15.

The committee’s investigation also found that the five gun manufacturers under review do not have any systems in place to monitor and analyze deaths and injuries associated with their products.

The companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Republicans on the panel have invited Antonia Okafor Cover, the national director of women’s outreach for Gun Owners of America, a gun rights group, to testify.

What Does Nancy Pelosi Think She’s Doing in Taiwan? A risky trip seems more about dramatic gestures than actual help. 南希佩洛西認為她在台灣做什麼？ 一次冒險的旅行似乎更多的是戲劇性的姿態，而不是實際的幫助.

By Mike Chinoy, a Taipei-based nonresident senior fellow at the University of Southern California’s U.S.-China Institute.

What Does Nancy Pelosi Think She’s Doing in Taiwan?

Instead, the planned August trip appears to be very much symbolism over substance, a photo-op to enable Pelosi to poke Beijing in the eye as she has done in the past. Unlike her appearance in Tiananmen Square in 1991, however, which left a few reporters roughed up and detained, if the situation escalates now, it will be the people of Taiwan—and potentially any American service members flying her there—who will be left to face the consequences.

Sign up to watch the China conference in HK for free, I just did. https://www.chinaconference.hk/agenda 👈

Video: Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian reminds Reuters reporter: Taiwan does not have a “President” 中國外交部趙立堅提醒發問路透社記者：台灣沒有“總統”

https://rumble.com/v1drbop-taiwan-does-not-have-a-president.html
https://www.facebook.com/100036400039778/posts/757881128768548/?d=n

7月26日，在中國外交部的例行記者會上，路透社記者就中國台灣近日相關涉軍事活動相關問題提問，言辭中提到了“台灣總統”的字眼。趙立堅回應問題前提醒該名記者，台灣沒有什麼“總統”，請他以後提問注意措辭

Demonize Chinese & China the only way to win an election – US & UK use the same playbook, how sad that their voters got fooled so easily / Britain’s Got Talent: 2022’s anti-China bias version by Liu Rui Jul 26 2022

The economics of warmonger US by Global Times Jul 26 2022

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How professional lobbyists have worked to generate enthusiasm in Washington for a long proxy military conflict in Ukraine 專業遊說者如何努力激發華盛頓對烏克蘭長期代理軍事衝突的熱情

Kiev’s influence blitz in Washington is exposed as revealing Foreign Agent registration figures emerge By Slobodan Kolomoets

If you’ve wondered why so much Western media coverage of the Ukraine conflict seems to be based on “Kiev says,” the answer is largely down to the power of lobbying. The Ukraine is always good and Russia is always bad narrative didn’t create itself.

On July 11, Washington DC-based public affairs consultancy Ridgely Walsh registered as a Foreign Agent on behalf of Ukrainian interests with the US Justice Department.

The company – which typically advises Silicon Valley big hitters such as eBay, Google, Snapchat, SpaceX, and Uber – is just the latest Beltway operator to enlist under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). This is archaic and abstruse legislation thrust to the forefront of the mainstream news agenda during the ‘Russiagate’ hoax of the Donald Trump presidency.

Last July, just 11 US-based firms were registered as lobbyists for Ukrainian clients under FARA. Over the course of 2021, these influencers attempted to pressure Washington to kill the Nord Stream 2 project, increase lethal aid shipments to Kiev, and post ever-more US and NATO forces along Russia’s border.

In the process, they amassed over 10,000 contacts with lawmakers, think tanks, and journalists. This is a staggering figure when one considers the Saudi lobby – one of the largest and most influential in the US – had just 2,834 interactions with these elements in the same timeframe.

Lobbying activity on behalf of Kiev over 2022 will inevitably dwarf even that vast total. Now, the number of registered pro-Ukrainian agents in Washington stands at an unprecedented 24, with six being compelled to register in June alone. Strikingly too, many of these companies are providing their services free of charge – to the extent pro bono lobbying for Zelensky’s government has been dubbed the ‘hottest trend’ in Washington DC political circles.

This phenomenon cannot be attributed to generosity of spirit, or altruism. Some lobbyists work for the Ukrainian government without remuneration for a positive PR boost, others to rehabilitate their reputations and remain in favor with US clients after enthusiastically representing Russian corporations prior to the February 24 invasion. As we shall see, there are potentially other, more spectral factors at work in some cases, too.

It is likely many more firms are effectively representing Ukrainian interests than are officially recognized under FARA. Ridgely Walsh only registered in July, after Vox documented its work chaperoning two Ukrainian pilots around Washington, meeting with journalists, senators and representatives, and Defense and State Department representatives. It had been working for the Ukrainian government for over five months by that point.

The FARA filing indicates that Ridgely Walsh engages directly with Yury Sak, adviser to Ukrainian Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov, and Lieutenant Colonel Denis Smazhny, and an appendix in the document sets out the terms of Ridgely Walsh’s work for Kiev.

It states that the company “provides public relations and media relations support to Ukraine, including by engaging with US media representatives, government officials, NGOs, educational institutions, think tanks, investors, and foreign policy experts; arranging media interviews; developing and pitching op-eds; [and] organizing events.” The firm also creates “opportunities for Ukrainians to interact” with journalists, politicians, pundits, and “other sections of the US public.”

These activities are provided “on a volunteer basis and without compensation,” and are “motivated by [the company’s] compassion for the Ukrainian people.” It adds that Ridgely Walsh’s team includes a Ukrainian national, a reference to its senior director, Veronika Velch.

Velch’s background is colorful, to say the least. In 2013, she spent five months interning at the state-run Voice of America, an asset of US Agency for Global Media, which is funded and controlled by the US government, and openly avows that its output is directly influenced by Washington’s “national security interests.”

After an unexplained seven-month gap in her CV, in May 2014, Velch joined the Center for United Actions, a Washington DC-based NGO “working for the benefit of Ukrainian citizens,” founded by Ukrainian politician and former KGB asset Oleg Ribachuk in 2009.

It was one of many subversive efforts he bankrolled in the years leading up to the 2014 Maidan coup, which played a pivotal role in stirring up that insurrectionary upheaval. Two years prior, Ribachuk declared the 2004 Orange Revolution “was a miracle” – “we want to do that again, and think we will.”

The constellation of troublemaking initiatives funded by Ribachuk also received significant financing from American oligarch Pierre Omidyar, and US intelligence agency fronts USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which were fundamental to supporting the 2014 Maidan in Kiev.

Writing in February 2014, veteran journalist Bob Parry noted that the NED had over the previous year funded 65 projects in Ukraine totaling over $20 million, amounting to “a shadow political structure of media and activist groups that could be deployed to stir up unrest when the Ukrainian government didn’t act as desired.”

The National Democratic Institute, a division of the NED central to the Orange Revolution, also sponsored a campaign cofounded by Velch, ‘Follow the Money’, which battled for political campaign finance transparency in 2015-16.

Tantalizingly, Ridgley Walsh’s FARA filing states that Velch “engaged with foreign policy and national security reporters in the US” regarding Ukrainians who traveled back to Kiev after February 24, while she was “outside the US” – in other words Ukraine – and coordinated directly with “US government officials and media” journeying to the country or covering the conflict.

Clearly then, Velch and Ridgely Walsh have been crucial to shaping coverage of the war since it began. In this context, her professional history is important to consider – for one of the NED’s core objectives, and key successes, in the Maidan coup was presenting domestic and foreign audiences with a highly romantic narrative of the demonstrations in Ukraine, and their participants, which bore little relation to reality.

Based on the output of NED-funded media outlets such as Hromadske, viewers would have been forgiven for concluding the protests were energized by concerns over human rights and democracy, and were representative of the entire Ukrainian population.

In reality, as a February 2014 Washington Post op-ed exposed in forensic detail, polling data showed less than 20% of protesters were motivated by “violations of democracy or the threat of dictatorship,” only 40-45% of Ukrainians were in favor of European Union integration, soon-to-be deposed President Viktor Yanukovich remained “the most popular political figure in the country,” and no survey conducted by that time had ever indicated majority support for the uprising.

Much of the public opposition to the government overthrow stemmed from the “anti-Russian rhetoric and the iconography of western Ukrainian nationalism,” which was widespread among demonstrators, “not [playing] well among the Ukrainian majority.” In all, 50% of Ukraine’s population resided in regions that “strongly identified with Russia” and had done so for over two centuries – “nearly all” of them were “alienated by anti-Russian rhetoric and symbols.”

These crucial facts were otherwise hidden from view in the West at the time, and became ever-more suppressed in the months and years following Maidan, as the Ukrainian government waged all-out war on the residents of Donbass – the blood-spattered dimensions of which were barely mentioned in the media.

A one-sided and utterly distorted view of events in Ukraine persists to this day, courtesy of Ridgely Walsh and its peers. With vanishingly rare exceptions, established news outlets have presented the conflict as a David and Goliath battle between unalloyed good and evil, and have unquestioningly reported extremely dubious official claims emanating from Washington and London about Ukraine’s endless heroism and triumphs on the battlefield.

In fact, the vast majority of Western media coverage of the conflict has amounted to simply regurgitating Ukrainian statements, without any attempt at fact checking.

Returning to the FARA filing, its last 20 pages consist of a table outlining almost 400 introductions to journalists and interviews and articles placed in media outlets, arranged by Ridgely Walsh between the start of February and mid-July.

Dozens of these entries are related to the aforementioned pilots, including multiple invitations for journalists to a private dinner with them in Washington. At that summit, one of the aviators is reported by Vox to have openly said: “Our main goal is self-explanatory. We’re meeting media and lawmakers in order to push the weapon flow to Ukraine.”

The meal represented just one of many steps in a whirlwind tour of the US, which led to the pair being quoted widely in US media, including an appearance on CNN alongside rabidly pro-war actor Sean Penn.

The aforementioned Lieutenant Colonel Denis Smazhny, an “aerial defense specialist,” also gave several interviews to various US news networks in late June, pleading for Kiev to be given fighter jets instead of drones, which the US had previously vetoed, due to major concerns about sensitive technology falling into Russian hands, and their use triggering a hostile counter-response from Moscow.

In support of his entreaty, Smazhny alleged Kiev had destroyed 500 air-borne targets to date, and 150 Russian helicopters – a somewhat unbelievable claim, although it appears to have had quite an impact on US lawmakers. On July 15, Congress approved $100 million in funding to tutor Ukrainian pilots in manning American-made F-15 and F-16 fighter jets, despite it taking at least three months for pilots to be trained to an even a ‘basic’ level.

Evidently, Washington and Kiev are preparing for a very long war indeed. And a vast army of lobbying firms are ready, willing, and able to make that happen, by deluging the media and legislative chambers the world over with eminently suspect narratives to maintain inexorable and ever-increasingly vast Western arms shipments to Kiev, despite prolongation of the crisis ensuring more death and destruction, mass starvation in the poorest reaches of the world, and possibly a global financial collapse.

What is this ‘rules-based international order’ that Western elites keep talking about? America, and its allies, love to invoke the code words for ‘you are free to do as we tell you’ ‘our way is the only way’