The following is a small collections of excerpts, from Jeff J. Brown’s book at Punto Press: China Rising- Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations- The True Face of Asia’s Enigmatic Colossus After the Prologue, one chapter from each of the four main sections of the book is included.

Prologue

On a personal level, this book is a virtuous circle. My first book, 44 Days, really gave me a deep understanding of China and its peoples. This book, China Rising- Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations- The True Face of Asia’s Enigmatic Colossus, has enabled me to discover my own countries (the United States and France), past and present, as well as digging much deeper and wider into all things China, past, present and future.

This whole process has been a voyage to learn the truth and I slowly realized this means questioning a lifetime of conventional wisdom, the popular consensus and their accepted myths. Looking back, I was not really prepared to do this, until coming back to China in 2010. The alternating bookends of growing up in America and then living and working in Africa and the Middle East, 1980-1990; living in China, 1990-1997, France and the United States, 1997-2010 and then back to China, 2010-2016, were and are the doors of my newfound perception.

I now understand that getting de-brainwashed takes a lot of effort, humility and personal courage. I get inspired reading about others people’s journeys to discover the truth. Please allow me to share mine.

I grew up in Oklahoma, USA, in the 1950s-1960s, a very unique period in modern American history. Every school day started with the Pledge of Allegiance, class prayer and singing the Broadway musical, state song, Oklahoma. Patriotism, God, country, the goodness of America’s government and the nobility of its institutions. Beacon on the hill. America’s selfless sacrifice to bring freedom, democracy and Adam Smith’s invisible hand of righteous capitalism to the world’s oppressed masses. Domino theory. Red scare. Commies. Nuclear bomb shelters. Teachers practicing with us, “When you see the flash of light, duck and cover”. Sputnik. The space race. John F. Kennedy. RFK and MLK murdered. Vietnam. Nixon. Sex ‘n drugs ‘n rock ‘n roll. Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane. Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Motown, Stax. Dr. Strangelove, Zorba the Greek, The Graduate, Manchurian Candidate, Fahrenheit 451, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Westerns and WWII movies on the big screen. Bertrand Russell, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill and Fyodor Dostoyevsky by the bedside. The Honeymooners, Father Knows Best, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, Ed Sullivan, Twilight Zone, I Love Lucy, Leave It to Beaver, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Andy Griffin and Saturday morning cartoons on black and white, and then finally, color TV. Norman Rockwell. Life Magazine. Reader’s Digest.

My first indoctrination to government propaganda. Every week at elementary school, we had this drill, to “protect” ourselves from a Russian atomic blast. This massive disinformation campaign served two purposes: to make America’s citizens think that atomic annihilation was feasible and the Cold War nuclear arms race was a patriotic necessity. (Image by Wikipedia)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gD_TL1BqFg

This video of archival footage shows just how much duck and cover would have protected us. Yeah, sure.

Spent half my time in the city and half on a family farm. Driving a tractor, harvesting crops, cleaning manure out of animal pens, helping ewes give birth to newborn lambs at 3am in the freezing cold, riding a horse, hunting and fishing – all this left an indelible mark on my psyche. Getting your hands dirty and living the science and art of agriculture will do that to you.

Got a BS (Oklahoma State, 1976) and MS (Purdue, 1978) in Animal Sciences, thinking I was going to go back home and farm. But the Brazilian community at Purdue adopted me and I quickly learned Portuguese, discovering that I had a knack for languages (along with all the hard work to succeed). Went to Brazil to seek my fortune as a soybean farmer. Couldn’t get anybody to lend me the startup money. In retrospect, I am not disappointed. Had I done so, I would probably be impoverishing local natives, clearcutting rain forest and destroying the environment, while getting very rich, at the expense of the aforementioned. Looking back, it’s not who I want to be during my time on Planet Earth.

Brazil whet my appetite to see the world. I became a volunteer for the Peace Corps, in Tunisia, as an agriculture extension agent (1980-1982), learning fluent Arabic, speaking, reading and writing. This background got me into international agricultural marketing in Africa and Middle East (1982-1990). During this time, I learned French, met my Parisian wife in Algeria in 1988, whereupon, we left for China in 1990.

China Rising was recently published in eBook and print formats. Buy it today by clicking on the image above, or use our special offer through Ganxy at bottom of this page.

We lived in China 1990-1997, during what I call the Wild East Buckaroo Deng Days. I learned Mandarin fluently and became a naturalized French citizen. I continued to work in agricultural marketing (which gave me the opportunity to travel over much of rural China) and then built and managed the first McDonald’s bakery in the Mainland. Our two daughters were born while we were in China at this time. Needless to say, these seven years are a huge part of our lives.

Then, my wife and I owned and managed a retail business in Normandy, France (1997-2001). Since I had left the US in 1980, we moved back to Oklahoma, so we could spend time with my parents. I actually returned on the first flight (United from Paris to JFK) that was allowed back into US airspace, a few days after 9/11. After 21 years, what a symbolic way to return home, for what was to transpire.

The America I left and the one I came back to, were two different countries. I was shocked by how rundown everything was, all the poverty below the surface, how superficial and self-centered everyone was, and how reactionary and insular the people were. It was buy-buy-buy-me-me-me. Given our eclectic experiences, my wife and I were like exotic, Dr. Seuss creatures from an alien planet. We never fit in, but the time with all my extended family was wonderful. We built up a big real estate business and lost everything we owned in the 2008, thanks to the “Save the Big Banks” middle class implosion. Our plans of becoming teachers for our retirement years got moved up in a hurry. We started working in Oklahoma City urban, minority schools that same year.

In 2010, we moved back to Beijing to teach in international schools, bringing our younger daughter with us. As depressing as it was returning to America in 2001, it was just as amazing and jaw dropping seeing China, after being absent for 14 years. Wow! This is the first time I began to sense that China was moving up and on, while the US was going down and out. The contrasts were that remarkable. I so much wanted to share what was happening, thus, I started a blog and doing extensive research in the process. Then I took a solo trip across China in the summer of 2012, to journal about it. This morphed into my first book, 44 Days, whose travels are really a metaphor about discovering China in history and current events, how it all relates to the West and what humanity can expect in the future. I then began writing my online column, Reflections in Sinoland. This book is an anthology of these articles and it is continuing to be added to at www.chinarising.puntopress.com Over the years, my classroom experiences inspired me to develop a method to teach English, which is published, Doctor WriteRead’s Treasure Trove to Great English.

After Xi Jinping was elected president of China, I was and am still so impressed with him, that I am now writing an historical fiction, Red Letters – The Diaries of Xi Jinping, which will be out in print and ebook, late 2016. In the meantime, Badak Merah Press has commissioned me to write, China Is Communist, Dammit! It will be out in print and ebook mid-2016. These two books involve a massive amount of research, learning and discovery. I’m having the literary time of my life.

My arc of personal enlightenment about how the world really works has been a long, slow hyperbolic curve that has skyrocketed upwards in the very recent past. In 1972, if my draft lottery number had been drawn, I would have patriotically gone to Vietnam. That year, I voted for Richard Nixon, not George McGovern. Working and living with peasant farmers for two years in the Peace Corps opened my eyes to how the other 85% of the world lives, as well as eight years traveling all over Africa and the Middle East. Since I was involved in agriculture, my work got me out of the big cities and into the hinterlands of each country where I traveled, so I got the see “the real” Africa and Middle East. It was very educational and humbling.

While sensing the inequities and injustices, I was still firmly rooted in the myths of America’s moral superiority and divine righteousness. It was not until we returned to the US in 2001 and living in Bush World for nine years, that I began to see the rot of empire. Still though, I clung to the nobility of the “democratic” process and the mainstream media’s mind numbing consensus. I still believed at the time that the New York Times and the Economist were cutting edge journalism.

It was when we came back to China in 2010 that all the scales really started cascading off my eyes, traveling, researching and writing. Since then, I have spent thousands of hours studying genocide, empires, societal collapse, war, capitalism, colonialism, socialism, communism, fascism, false flags, the deep state, etc. I innately understood that I could never understand China and the Chinese, until I really knew the truth about the West. I was ready to question my 1950s-1960s upbringing, its conventional wisdom and official narrative. Like in the eponymous movie and its protagonist Neo, I was finally prepared to step out of the Matrix. There was no turning back.

After researching and writing 44 Days, I had now given up on the US, but being a dual national French-American, I still clung to the illusion that Europe, with its socialism, UN Charter on Human Rights and the lessons learned from two world wars, was the world’s last great hope for moral recovery. And then, like an amped up Hurricane Katrina, came the Western junta’s genocide in the Ukraine. For months, I followed with morbid horror (and continue to do so), the ugly face of not only American, but European fascism. My utter disgust and disillusionment with my ancestral home, Europe, boiled over and I clearly saw that American empire is nothing more than a continuation of European empire. I could now truthfully and coherently talk and write about a seamless historical spectrum: The West. And thanks to this epiphany, I could honestly and meaningfully write about China and its people, from their point of view.

Now it is all very clear to me. Western colonialism, false flags and color revolutions have never stopped since 1492, when Columbus “discovered” the “New World”, as if it were devoid of humanity. The methods and instruments of destabilization, divide and conquer, exploitation and resource extraction have simply adapted. Western empire, with its racism, capitalism, war and fascism, is a four-headed Hydra, and it is insatiable. China has been struggling to rise up against this onslaught, since the first Europeans landed on China’s shores in 1514. The Chinese, with the world’s longest continuous civilization, were and are more than qualified to fight back. It is an irony of history that the West used four of China’s great inventions, gunpowder, moveable type, the compass and paper, to bring the Heavenly Mandate’s long history to its lowest nadir, the century of humiliation, from the 1840s to 1949.

There is a titanic struggle for the soul of humanity, our survival as a species into the 21st century, and it is China, Russia, BRICS, ALBA CELAC and NAM. It is Xi, Putin, Maduro, Castro, Correa, Kirchner, Zuma, Afwerki and all the hundreds of world leaders the West has assassinated or deposed, versus Western empire, Obama, Cameron, Hollande, Merkel, Abe and their thousands of satraps in the hallowed hall of imperial power.

The world needs a million more voices like The Greanville Post, The Saker, Pepe Escobar, Andre Vltchek, Kevin Barrett, Rory Hall, Dave Kranzler, Moti Nissani, Gail Evans, Dan Yaseen, Mo Dawoud, Jason Bainbridge, Dean Henderson (all of with whom I’ve worked), and the many other journalists/authors involved in this worldwide struggle for humanity’s very survival.

From the mouth of the Dragon and the belly of the New Century Beast, it is an honor to lend my voice from the viewpoint of China’s people and their leaders, past, present and future.

Part I: Deep State West (Wing)

This section of the book is put first for a very valid reason. It has taken me years and years, upon thousands of hours of reading and research to understand that our Western governments have a long history of being and continue to be very evil and corrupt. Yes, the West invented penicillin and gave us Mozart, but since the 1400s, Eurmerica has been and continues to colonize the rest of the world’s people’s and resources, via war, overt and covert regime change, with their international financial institutions – and false flags. This global Western empire of exploitation and extraction continues unabated and it is a very hard and bitter pill to come to this realization. Like the vast majority of people, simply to avoid mental discomfort and to go along to get along, I was in complete denial until recently. It’s just so much easier, to look the other way and survive the day.

What I have learned in writing this book, is that you cannot wrap your head around the popular notion of China’s rise, without also recognizing Western colonialism’s imperial past and ongoing decline, including the rampant use of false flags. They go together like soy sauce and steamed dumplings.

It takes great courage and overcoming an insurmountable mental hurdle to accepting the documented proof of just how common our Western governments commit false flags, in order to manipulate their citizens, get them to accept laws and norms against their own freedoms and safety and like all false flags throughout history, enabling our governments to victimize and attack perceived enemies at home and abroad.

No surprise then, that, Western false flags figure prominently in China’s modern history.

Don’t despair or be shocked. I know exactly how you feel. It took extensive research, while writing this and two other books, to have the scales of brainwashing and propaganda ripped from my eyes. The power of denial and conformity are oppressive. Ultimately, it is a very difficult and emotionally taxing journey to get there, but so liberating and cleansing when you finally reach the summit. While not a religious person, I think that when the clarity of the truth fulfills you, it is like an intellectual and spiritual baptism of sorts.

This section has many hyperlinks, which you can study at your leisure. In any case, Deep State West (Wing) is intended to be a solid primer to help you understand much of what I’ve discovered and presented here. You may not be ready to take the journey just yet, but you will understand my life’s trajectory and this book’s rationale much clearer.

MH370, Chinese Cyberwar Geniuses and the Long Arm of Western Empire

I asked this same question in the previous chapter: why isn’t anybody looking towards the North? Now we know why. (Image by en.wikipedia.org)

Why are the Princes of Power keeping the 99%’s attention riveted on the middle of bumfug nowhere, in the Southeast Indian Ocean, looking for MH370, and why is nobody asking about the second possible escape route – to the North, in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

Everybody I talked to, including journalists based in Beijing and other bright lights of the illuminati, just guffawed at the thought. Chortle no more. I do not have the means nor the tools to confirm all of this. And one thing for sure: if true, the mainstream media won’t touch it with a ten-meter pole, as it would implicate their masters and handlers. But as a rational thinker, the following scenario is looking more than credible, especially given the goose egg laid in the Indian Ocean, finding not even one shred of debris, in spite of a massive, extended, multinational search, other than a supposed flaperon, dubiously discovered a year and half later, all the way over on Reunion island, and which was never confirmed by an independent source.

Early on, a journalist friend was pleasantly surprised when I brought up Occam’s razor, in looking for a solution to the MH370 mystery. Occam’s razor is the law that usually the simplest explanation is the best or correct one. Thus the pilots, for whatever reason, just flew the plane into the deep blue sea. End of story. But this Occam’s razor is just not cutting it anymore. Time to look elsewhere to unwind 2014’s Gordian knot of the year. The passengers’ families obviously smell a rat. They are getting together a $5 million reward, in hopes of enticing someone on the inside to spill the beans – if they live long enough to meet with the grieving. The half-life of informed people like this tends to be measured in days and hours, if there is a whiff of suspicion from on high.

And then as if by divine providence, we learn that in Europe of all places, dozens of commercial airliners went missing off the Old Continent’s sophisticated air traffic control screens, due to high tech NATO electronic war games. Well, blow me down, Captain Ahab, I can see far, far away from this here Beijing crow’s nest. If they can make fifty Boeing and Airbus jet planes full of thousands of people vanish off radar terminals in one of the busiest skies in the world, then it must be a piece of cake to disappear a solo plane like MH370, right?

In an Anonymous news release on YouTube, we learn that there were 20 (Chinese) employees of Freescale Semiconductor on board MH370, bound for where else – Communist China. Four of these employees shared a revolutionary patent on the new “KL Zero” computer chip, which will be used in missile defense (read Star Wars) radar systems. The patent was approved just four days after the disappearance of MH370. Therefore, the four Chinese patent holders could not legally pass the wealth and control of this patent on to their heirs. This leaves the fifth shareholder of the patent as 100% owner: Freescale Semiconductor itself. Who owns Freescale Semiconductor? Jacob Rothschild and the Bush Dynasty’s Carlyle Group. Either you are a conspiracy theorist or a coincidence theorist, but it’s funny how things work out that way.

So, the plot thickens. Why were they in Kuala Lumpur? Why were they all together? Why were they going back to China? Were they defecting back to the Motherland? Were they single or double agents?

Who wouldn’t want to get their hands on these Chinese scientist patent holders and their vast knowledge of warfare cybertechnology? Or better yet, who would want to make sure these geniuses did not help the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) use the very same “Western” stealth technology, to defend the Chinese Homeland? This is not primarily about Jacob Rothschild’s greed and the Carlyle Group’s Bush Dynasty-Bin Laden bedmates, although filthy lucre is often seen lurking around the stage set. This is more than likely about the United States and NATO making sure these Chinese scientists didn’t land in the Middle Kingdom and work for Baba Beijing. How big is a computer chip? The size of your fingernail? It would have been very easy for one of these Chinese brainiacs to hide this new KL Zero war-chip in their suitcase. One or some of these guys could have been PLA (double) agents all along, which if true, would be a John Le Carré-esque-spy-thriller infiltration of the century, into the dark heart of America’s most sensitive military technology.

Since the 1970s, Freescale, a military cybertech supplier, has been helping the Western Empire keep its Wehrmacht jackboot on the face of the Dreaded Other (communists starting in 1917, in 2001 add Muslims). Of course it would have its share of CIA/NSA minders working on the inside, keeping tabs on its highly sensitive advancements. These 20 Chinese scientists were way too close to something obviously very coveted and extremely compromising to the US/NATO war machine. US/NATO would do anything to keep them and “it” from ending up in Baba Beijing’s hands.

All of this is bolstered further by the divulgations of a recent Oped News article by Scott Baker. In it, an anonymous Russian (maybe a KGB stringer) reports on the whereabouts of MH370 being on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and that “there were 20 Asian specialists on board”, who have been taken to a bunker in Pakistan. According to this report, these facts have been collectively corroborated by several intelligence agencies. Given that the United States rules Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s skies as much as it does Washington DC’s, any denials by these NATO puppet governments can be taken with a grain of salt. Whether these 20 Chinese scientists are being used for blackmail or as bargaining chips to “sell” is debatable. More than likely, US/NATO would prefer to have them offed, now that the West has the coveted technology to themselves. Or do they? If these Chinese scientists were agents of the PLA, then they may have already sent Baba Beijing the blueprints. However, it would have been nice for Baba to hold the Real McWang in the palm its hand, and plug it into the ol’ Victrola for some space age East Is Red Karaoke.

The only positive outcome of all these high level espionage and warfare power plays is that the 227 passengers and 12 crew members might still be alive. The Russian report says they are alive, divided into seven groups and living in mud huts, southeast of Kandahar. However, if it is true that US/NATO is pulling these nefarious puppet strings, from Empire’s standpoint, these hostages would be more of a liability than an asset, and better off dead.

The deep state of US/NATO, along with Russian intelligence, which together have well over 100 military reconnaissance satellites suffocating every square meter of the Earth’s surface, know exactly where MH370 ended up. If they know, Baba Beijing surely knows too, and is just holding its cards close to see how events shake out. In any case, without so much as a single solitary scrap of maritime evidence to show for the massive and exhaustive searches in the Indian Ocean, an Afghanistan-Pakistan change of flight plans is looking more and more believable. You are either a conspiracy or coincidence theorist. Pick you poison.

Part II: How the West Was Lost and Other Hair Raising Tales of Empire

Many of you readers will either find this section inspiring and hopeful, cheering me on, or angry and polemical about topics you would prefer not to deal with. I fully empathize with both groups, since I have been in both places during my life. Speaking truth to power and calling a lie a lie takes courage and inevitably upsets a lot of people in the process.

I respect whichever side you may currently be on, during your life’s journey. For the purposes of this book, my understanding of China, its people and leaders would never have been laid bare, unless I accepted as truth everything that is thoroughly researched and written about herewith.

It took me years to figure it out, but I finally realized that to know China’s past, present and future, I had to get to the bare bones of my ancestors’ and culture’s timeline, past present and future. I’m talking about the dark underbelly of truth that a lifetime of brainwashing and propaganda has kept hidden. It has been one incredible, personal and intellectual journey, to discover it all. Finally, finally, I am at peace with myself.

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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are. ― H.L. Mencken

The West’s Russell Brand vs. Sinoland’s Rushe Wang: A Conversation in Commonalities and Key Contrasts

The Princes of Power and Lords of the Loot

The Princes of Power are a prickly lot, be they Western or Eastern, Northern or Southern. They know they are one spark of popular outrage away from economic re-equilibrium, or if the 99% get really radical and revolutionarily randy, they can pay with their hubristic heads. Just ask the ghost of Robespierre. It says a lot about how rigged the roulette table of civilization actually is, when there is only one significant example of the former in recent times: Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and its very ephemeral 50 years of a chance of a better life for the common people. That sure didn’t last long. From the perspective of deep history, which consumes Baba Beijing (China’s leadership), a half a century is a fleeting moment along the Arrow of Time’s trajectory. The world’s shadow fascists, who have been calling humanity’s shots on Mother Earth since the glory days of Babylonian Big Boss Hammurabi 4,000 years ago, and surely long before that, don’t take too kindly to sharing our Pale Blue Dot’s natural resources – not even a teensy-weensy bit – 101% will do just fine, thank you. And while we 99% are at it, busy beavers all, we can work for free and be grateful for the time spent maintaining the glories of the official narrative, which for the last 500 years has been and continues to be Caucasian conquest, colonialism and cupidity. Post World War II, it’s now fawningly called the Washington-London-Paris consensus, since these three countries, more than any others, set the tone and message in the Western mainstream media. The US Marines’ finest have the Few and the Proud. The 99% have their Meek and their Many. Sitting here in Buddha World Beijing, and with all due respect for Jesus Christ, I don’t see us inheriting the Earth anytime soon. About the only time America came close to living up to Christ’s prophesy, was during the 50 years of Roosevelt’s New Deal and in reality, it was a pretty tepid affair for the common man and woman.

The Lords of Legal Loot also get very tetchy when someone is clever enough to gin up a simple message of outrage, a sound bite that resonates in the rapidly emptying pockets, stomachs and under the disappearing roofs over the heads of the masses. Short and sweet, pungent and powerful. Such was the case with the pithily named Occupy Wall Street (OWS). Too clever by half, so it just had to go. Those kinds of quickly coined phrases are so easily remembered, can circulate like wildfire and thus must either be sucked into the upward vortex of Newspeak and bastardized, or with great and extended effort, sent in the opposite direction deep down Orwell’s Memory Hole, just like the Palestinians’ Al-Nakba, never to be acknowledged, mentioned, reported on or referenced again.1 The one percent’s infanticide of OWS has been remarkably and ruthlessly efficient, like the gas chambers of Auschwitz or Stalin’s generation of grinding gulags.

Would the 99% please just shut up?

But these silly and feckless nuisances just keep coming. Will they ever learn? The 1% have again been forced to budge just a little bit in their Pininfarina Aresline Xten designer chairs, 2 because of a smarty pants by the name of Russell Brand. And smart he is: well spoken, a man of letters and possessing a rapier wit with words. Just ask BBC’s hapless errand boy for the official narrative, Jeremy Paxman, who interviewed this wily whippersnapper during Newsnight 2013 on the 23rd of October. Paxman surely thought that our curly coiffed, nouveau rich British comic should know better than to turn on his new high class fan base, the uber-wealthy. In fact, Russell could make many more millions as a neocon comedian, like Dennis Miller, the right wing’s poster pundit in laugh land. Miller confirms with a condescending smirk what his financial brethren already smugly know: they own the world. And you know what the Russians say – tough shitsky.

Russell Brand: fracking vs twerking. (Image by kateausburn)

But no, this ungrateful former poor boy parvenu, Brand, who has cleaned up his drug addicted soul, gave a very simple political manifesto, as the guest editor of the venerable Fabian Society liberal magazine, The New Statesman. Paxman couldn’t resist the bait and had Mr. Brand on British national TV. It has now gone viral on planetary TV cum YouTube and the rest is history. The leaders of the Unfree West cringed – no not Obama, Cameron and Hollande, they are the chattel property of the Gods of FIRE (Finance-Insurance-Real Estate). It is these latter who squirmed, as this very passionate and articulate man stated what is obvious to all of the 7,133,000,000 members of the human race, except the few thousand families who own them, that:

You yahoos at the top of the money mountain shouldn’t destroy the planet,

You shouldn’t create massive economic disparity,

You shouldn’t ignore the needs of the people,

And since your servants in the whoredom halls of statecraft only serve the interests of your legalized world resources chop shops, namely corporations,

It’s time for a revolution.

Talking revolution can get you killed. Just ask John Lennon, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Hopefully, Mr. Brand has well paid, loyal bodyguards.

Memories of Ol’ Kingfish and the Great Depression

Hmm. Brand sounds pert near a 21st century meme of Depression-era US Senator Huey “Kingfish” Long, who was running for president against the venerable incumbent, FDR in 1936, on his Share Our Wealth program, and gaining a serious groundswell of popular support. The disgusted 99% were ready to seriously realign the country’s human and natural resources – the New Deal in hyper drive. We’re talking about radical, socialist redistribution of wealth from the 1% to the 99%, a platform that Father Oscar Romero Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesus Christ and Pope Francis would all heartily endorse. Here it is,

1. No person would be allowed to accumulate a personal net worth of more than 300 times the average family fortune, which would limit personal assets to between $5 million and $8 million. A graduated capital levy tax would be assessed on all persons with a net worth exceeding $1 million.
2. Annual incomes would be limited to $1 million and inheritances would be capped at $5.1 million.
3. Every family was to be furnished with a homestead allowance of not less than one-third the average family wealth of the country. Every family was to be guaranteed an annual family income of at least $2,000 to $2,500, or not less than one-third of the average annual family income in the United States. Yearly income, however, cannot exceed more than 300 times the size of the average family income.
4. An old-age pension would be made available for all persons over 60.
5. To balance agricultural production, the government would preserve/store surplus goods, abolishing the practice of destroying surplus food and other necessities due to lack of purchasing power.
6. Veterans would be paid what they were owed (a pension and healthcare benefits).
7. Free education and training for all students to have equal opportunities in all schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions for training in the professions and vocations of life.
8. The raising of revenue and taxes for the support of this program was to come from the reduction of swollen fortunes from the top, as well as for the support of public works to give employment whenever there may be any slackening necessary in private enterprise.

Go, Kingfish, go!

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, Kingfish got shot in the guts on the capitol steps in Baton Rouge in 1935. Minor detail that. Serves him right too, depending on your point of view, but I know one class of people, America’s shadow fascists, who were mighty relieved that their dirty deed was done cheap, for the price of a .38 caliber lead bullet. That was an investment in metals commodities that makes rigged IPOs look like passbook savings returns.

Huey Long Statue & Burial Site (Image by Paul Lowry)

The gold plated glutei maxima lounging in those million dollar XTen’s are clinching up in quiet queasiness, as Russell’s video interview is going around the world, and we know their modus operandi like a well-worn playbook. The Princes of Power, are and will at first ignore Brand in stony silence, or with well-coordinated, manufactured media mewing, mocking him for his childish naiveté. Denigrating chuckles of belittlement are de rigueur, in hopes that the Lords’ contempt is imprinted on the minds of the masses, and let’s face it, it almost always works. Otherwise, reality would be radically and positively different than what it is and I could find something else to do besides write about it.

And now over to you Beijing.

It’s not much better over here in Sinoland. Baba Beijing would rehearse the first act of this playbook to perfection. If an oriental doppelganger called Rushe Wang did the same thing here and crossed the Obaman red line of blaming the Communist Party of China (CPC) for what ails the 99%, the truth of the matter is he would likely be harassed and/or arrested on trumped up charges of tax evasion or some such, by the Chinese authorities. But unfortunately, this also happens all too routinely in the United Stasi of America. A case in point: just ask the ex-governor of Alabama, Don Siegelman, ex-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, or Karen Silkwood, Marin Luther King, Jr. and the Kennedy Brothers for that matter.6 Try to suggest taking even a teensy weensy bit of the Princes of Power’s 101% and you can end up paying a very heavy price indeed.

The parallels between Baba Beijing and the FIREmen only go so far though. Yes, Baba Beijing considers the CPC to be above criticism, just as the West’s owners consider deregulated, rigged for the superrich, libertarian jungle capitalism to be beyond reproach. To speak out against capitalism is heretical and public protests against the West’s rapidly declining day-in-the-life are now criminalized. If Mr. Brand’s message takes off and lights that spark the Prince of Power have nightmares about, they will crush him and his followers, just as they did Occupy Wall Street and as Baba Beijing did to the Falun Gong movement. But if our oriental Rushe Wang was clever, kept his criticisms void of name calling, to save Baba’s face, and stuck to targeted vitriol against the 1% Chinese, here is where today’s vacuous excuse for Western leadership and the savvy, ears-to-the-streets Baba Beijing would likely diverge: Baba would not hesitate to take a pound of flesh and more out of the gold plated backsides of the Sino-superrich and probably seize their Pininfarina Aresline Xten designer chairs to boot, in order to maintain credibility with its restive citizens. All this, to honor China’s 2,200 year old Heavenly Mandate, which weighs so onerously on their collective, historical shoulders.

The West’s political class just helps itself

In the West? They couldn’t be bothered with such face saving niceties, not to mention the finer points of running a country. As Russell Brand so eloquently declared, our bought and paid for political class serves only one interest: its owners. I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to hum over and over in my head that Beatles’ riff,

You say you want a revolution…

Rock on.

__________

1- As an example, try to find Al-Nakba in Encyclopedia Britannica, complimentary electron microscope and zigapixel CCD camera included. Its non-existence in Western thought is one of the modern era’s greatest triumphal Memory Holes, an Orwellian pièce de résistance that George would duly appreciate.
http://aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2013/05/20135612348774619.html

2- Cost per pampered poof is a trifling $1,500,000, http://most-expensive.com/office-chair.

3- https://youtube.com/watch?v=xGxFJ5nL9gg. Eight point five minutes of principled mirth.
4- Great stuff this. No wonder they killed him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_Our_Wealth. America’s shadow fascists were already retching over the New Deal.

5- Paxman was so desperate, he was even reduced to calling Brand, “A trivial little man”.

6- Don Siegelman’s sad tale is the tip of America’s injustice iceberg: http://donsiegelman.org

Part IV: China vs. the West: Planet Earth’s Titanic, 21st Century Wrestling Match for Humanity’s Future

Who would have thought that in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping and the Communist Party of China launched their first series of economic and social reforms, that it would come down to this: either China and its allies, BRICS, SCO, CSTO and NAM, are going to lead Planet Earth’s peoples into the 22nd century, or the United States and its allies, Eurangloland (EU-NATO, Australia, New Zealand and Japan?

Never could two overarching visions be so diametrically opposed. This titanic duel between two broadly different systems of governance, social criteria, economic and financial policy will determine the fate of our species. May the best side win.

Thoughts on Xi Jinping

Xi Jinping is giving a lot of thought to his people’s future – and the future of Planet Earth, well into the 21st century. (Image by Tavis Coburn The New Yorker)

If you are a member of the Western elites, their military and/or the deep state, you should be very, very worried, now that Xi Jinping is in power (ditto Putin in Russia). To better understand Xi, it helps to know about his father, Xi Zhongxun, as Xi is a proverbial chip off the old block.

Xi Zhongxun was a committed revolutionary from an early age. He was sent to prison at the age of 14 for trying to poison a teacher, whom he and his schoolmates considered to be a lackey for the foreign colonialists. He joined the Communist Party of China behind bars, in 1928, at only 15 years of age. Quite an auspicious adolescence.

Xi Zhongxun was also a very successful military leader in the Red Army and had fabulous organizational and managerial skills. Without him setting up operations in Shaanxi Province, where Mao & Co. arrived after the Long March ended in 1935, the Red Army may not have been able to push on to defeat the fascist Japanese and KMT, and kick out the Western colonialists, towards eventual national liberation in 1949.

Tel père tel fils (like father like son). Father Xi Zhongxun on the left with his son, Xi Jinping on the right. Photo taken circa late 70s, when Xi Jinping was going to university. (Image by Baidu)

Xi père and Xi’s mother, Qi Xin, were unfailingly committed to the Party and the Chinese communist revolution. Herculean and bitter personal sacrifices were made by Xi’s parents for their country and Party. All their lives, they never gave up on the cause of socialism for the Chinese masses, even though they were purged, imprisoned (father) and sent to hard labor on farms (mother), 1962-1976.

Xi’s father was also very empathetic, being a successful conciliator and negotiator in Western China, before and after liberation in 1949, with local Tibetans and Muslim Ouighers. Xi’s father avoided as much bloodshed as possible and the more violent aspects of revolution. It was Xi’s father, who Deng Xiaoping sent to Guangdong Province, across the border from Hong Kong, in 1978, to defuse the volatile discontent among the locals, who were clamoring over the border, into the British colony, seeking work and a better lifestyle. It was Xi’s father, not Deng, who came up with the brilliant idea to create little Hong Kongs inside Guangdong, where the masses could work and realize their dreams. Thus, Shenzhen and the other Special Economic Zones (SEZs) were signed off on by the National People’s Congress, Central Committee, Politburo and Deng. Deng & Co. didn’t have any money, but they had the power of the pen to make Xi’s SEZs legal. The rest is history.

Xi’s father was also incredibly well read and erudite. Their house was full of dog eared books. Xi Jinping was sent to the countryside in 1969, to work as a peasant for seven years, during the Cultural Revolution. Xi did backbreaking, barefoot labor and learned to live with fleas and lice, while developing his nascent leadership and managerial skills. He arrived with boxes of his father’s books to keep him company. He read every one of them, many in the evenings, reading out loud under a kerosene lamp, to his less educated rural neighbors.

To this day, Xi Jinping is probably one of the best read world leaders in office, having and continuing to read hundreds of Russian, Greek, French, German, English, Spanish and American classics (fiction and nonfiction), all the huge canon of Chinese works, as well being extremely well versed in Marxist-Leninist-Maoist writings. Xi even got an additional college degree in Marxist Theory and Law, 1998-2002, while he was governor of Fujian. He never stops reading and learning, claiming that it is his greatest personal passion.

It also needs to be pointed out that Xi Jinping, like his father, is a military man. He has been in the PLA since 1980 and held high level, military command posts everywhere he went throughout his 35-year career, at the local, provincial and finally, national level. His wife, famous revolutionary songster Peng Liyuan (she sings Russian folk songs like a native), is also a lifelong member of China’s military. Like Xi’s mother and father, he and Peng are proud Chinese soldiers and communists, through and through.

Finally, like his father, who also saw the highs and lows of the human condition, Xi Jinping’s broad life experiences and empathy make him an excellent judge of character, which is invaluable as a leadership trait. As president and top military leader of China, he is involved in choosing hundreds of team members, and he has a knack for picking the right people, as well as removing the ones who don’t perform.

So, all of this was imbued in Xi Jinping from birth. While a child of privilege, due to his father’s legendary standing in China’s modern history, his parents emulated and taught Xi Jinping empathy, frugality, simplicity, humility, hard work, sacrifice, fairness, reasonableness, tolerance for other people’s differences, a thirst for knowledge and loyalty to country, revolution and Party. If much of this sounds like Buddhism-Daoism-Confucism, well it is. When Xi was in Fujian Province, 1985-2001, he was in contact with many Taiwanese visitors. While an avowed atheist, Xi became very interested in this ancient foundation of Chinese society, which richly flavors Taiwan’s people. Today, Xi is reaching back to this tripartite cornerstone of Chinese civilization, to invoke his “moderately prosperous” Chinese Dream (much as Putin has with Russian Orthodoxy), and to hone his decidedly anti-Western Empire sentiments.

Lastly, unlike his father, who always preferred to work in the background, Xi Jinping is showing himself to be a master of media and public relations. He deftly uses TV and print media to the Party’s advantage. His books are being translated into several languages and, The Governance of China, has already sold four million copies overseas. The Chinese Dream of the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation, is also available internationally.

All of his books and speeches are now available for free via a phone app in China. Over the Chinese New Year, the Party produced three short animated cartoons that went viral, depicting Xi cleaning up corruption and working for the masses to achieve the Chinese Dream and Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation. His wife, Peng Liyuan, and Premier Li Keqiang, add savvy media support for Baba Beijing at home and around the world too. No other modern Chinese leader, apart Mao, has used the media as masterfully as Xi.

As I have said in a number of radio shows and columns, the West has no answer for Xi Jinping (nor Putin, for that matter). The world is officially in the Xi Era (and you could just as well add, Putin Era). All of this will be fleshed out in fascinating detail, from his birth to the present, in my late 2016 book, Red Letters – The Diaries of Xi Jinping (including all those meetings and phone calls between Putin and Xi).