The country is now averaging over 1,300 deaths per day from the coronavirus.
Donald Trump
Day: November 20, 2020
After four long years of diminished prospects, stagnation and divisive geopolitics, four summits could show the way toward a better future.
Recently, Moscow hosted the 12th BRICS Summit. Malaysia is hosting the APEC Summit. And Riyadh will welcome the world leaders into the highly-anticipated G20 conference.
Importantly, these high-level events followed the signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the world’s largest free-trade pact, which could help build multiple new paths toward a shared future.
The global economy is expected to shrink by 5 percent in 2020. World trade is likely to plummet by 20 percent. After misguided trade wars and the pandemic, global cooperation across all differences is vital to defeat the pandemic and facilitate economic recovery.
World’s largest free-trade pact, to act as inspiration
In the ASEAN Summit last weekend, after nearly a decade of talks, 15 countries signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).
The RCEP includes the 10 ASEAN countries, East Asian leaders (China, Japan, South Korea), and Oceania (Australia, New Zealand). Their combined economic muscle is almost a third of the world gross domestic product (GDP).
The RCEP is expected to eliminate 90 percent of the tariffs on imports between its signatory economies within 20 years of coming into effect, which could be by early as next year. It will also seek to establish common rules for e-commerce, trade and intellectual property.
Until recently, the RCEP critics in the West argued that the pact represents “shallow” integration since its requirements are not as stringent as, say, the now defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which was negotiated in secrecy in the Obama era. Typically, when the remaining 11 TPP countries agreed on the revised Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), it omitted 20 provisions that US had included in the original TPP.
Second, “shallow” integration is better aligned with the integration needs in emerging Asia, where governments play critical role in economic development, the idea of national sovereignty is vital, and legacies of Western colonialism remain prominent.
Third, the RCEP may be more aligned with the new international landscape that’s overshadowed by protectionism and tariff wars.
BRICS expediting global recovery
Hosted by Russia on November 17, the BRICS Summit brought together major economies of the emerging-market bloc: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Together, they account for one quarter of the world economy.
As the second-most affected country by the novel coronavirus pandemic, India’s cumulative Covid-19 cases exceed 9 million, while Brazil has 6 million and Russia 2 million cases, respectively. Unlike the rest, China has managed to keep its cases below 90,000. As a result, Chinese economy is already rebounding.
Due to the tensions in the world economy, the BRICS Summit focused on practical measures to battle the pandemic and support the BRICS’ economic recovery. It also created an early warning system for epidemiological threats to foster BRICS capabilities on medical products. As clinical vaccine tests are moving ahead fast, companies in BRICS countries are getting ready to ramp up large-scale production.
As a result of the pandemic, the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) has been in great demand. It has already reserved $10 billion to combat the pandemic, but its overall portfolio of investment projects exceeds $20 billion.
Most importantly, the Summit further facilitated trade, investments and small-and-medium size enterprises’ (SMEs) role in international trade. While large multinational corporations fuel the recovery of global GDP, it is the SMEs that have the relatively greatest job-creation effect, which is vital for global recovery.
New APEC vision, roadmap needed
In the Malaysia-hosted APEC Summit on November 20, the bloc is expected to set a new vision to guide the forum’s work in the next decades.
With APEC and its 21 member economies, the idea of regional free trade has been around since 1966 when Japanese economist Kiyoshi Kojima advocated a Pacific Free Trade agreement. Three decades later, APEC leaders opted for free and open trade and investment in the Asia Pacific.
In 2006, C. Fred Bergsten, then chief of an influential US think-tank, advocated the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP). If the FTAAP could be achieved, it would represent the largest single liberalization in history.
That’s the FTAAP goal that APEC put forward in 2006, which is supported by many Asian economies, including China. It would be very much in the long-term interest of the United States as well. No single country can any longer have unipolar primacy in world trade; all countries have a critical stake in multilateral world trade.
What APEC needs is a timely roadmap for the effective implementation of its vision.
Cooperation must be focus of G20 summit
Since early spring, the major rich-income economies have been crafting massive stimulus responses against the pandemic. In 2020, fiscal support packages could climb to $15 to $20 trillion worldwide. Meanwhile, many medium- and particularly low-income economies are suffering from excessive debt burden.
On November 21-22, the G20 Summit will focus on addressing the implications of the global pandemic, future health care plans and steps for revising the global economy, including fiscal support, debt reductions and other vital measures.
G20 has the required economic muscle for global change. With 19 largest economies and the European Union, it accounts for 90 percent of the gross world product and 80 percent of world trade.
When the major economies in Western Europe and North America failed to contain the Great Recession in 2007-09, it was G20, led forcefully by its then-chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, that played a vital role in surpassing fatal headwinds.
More recently, such initiatives have been less evident.
Trade wars have no winners, shared future will benefit all
In January 2017, China’s President Xi Jinping offered a strong defense of more inclusive free trade at the World Economic Forum. Xi likened protectionism to “locking oneself in a dark room” in the hopes of protecting oneself from danger, but in so doing, cutting off all “light and air.”
Xi predicted, quite rightly in retrospect, that “no one will emerge as a winner in a trade war.”
It is this global sense of a shared future that the summit season should promote for success in the battle against the pandemic and for global economic recovery.
The original article was published by China Daily on Nov. 17, 2020. This is an updated version.
The article From RCEP And BRICS To APEC And G20 Summits – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.
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By Joe Schaeffer*
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation senior advisor Linda Etim is Team Leader for International Development on Democrat Joe Biden’s would-be presidential transition team. In an Oct. 6 position paper for a foreign policy think tank heavily funded by globalist billionaire George Soros, Etim wrote that:
“[W]e must prioritize the fight against global white supremacy and nationalist populism that verges on fascism, both in our own countries and internationally. The rise of xenophobic and ultranationalist populism is not only a domestic threat to our democracies, but it also leads to a dangerously perverted understanding of the world.”
The shockingly incendiary statement takes on an ominous added significance as massive fraud allegations surround Biden’s unverified election victory over populist Republican President Donald Trump.
Gates, Obama, And Bush
Before joining the Gates camp, Etim served in the Obama administration after stretches at the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency during the George W. Bush years. Etim was appointed USAID Assistant Administrator for Africa during the second Obama term and worked on the National Security Council as the Director for African Affairs during the first.
Etim’s war-like phrasings are part of a larger treatise released by the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace, an internationalist think tank that states on its website that it has received “$1 Million and Above” in funding from Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Close Obama ally and former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker is Chair of Carnegie’s Board of Trustees. Business execs from Bank of America and Citigroup serve alongside her on the board.
The Oct. 6 paper Etim contributed to, titled “Reimagining Transatlantic Relations,” includes a chapter authored by former George W. Bush administration Director of Homeland Security and Patriot Act co-author Michael Chertoff. Carnegie Endowment President William J. Burns, who served as former deputy secretary of state under both Bush and Obama, wrote an introduction.
In her submission, Etim emphasizes the need for the “Global North,” meaning North America and Europe, to subsidize the “Global South,” i.e. South America, Africa and Oceania. She conjures the menacing specter of past “colonialism” in an attempt to induce racial guilt as justification for having the U.S. and other Western nations transfer their wealth to the Third World.
Etim writes:
“Starving the Global South of attention and resources will not only lead to humanitarian disasters but will also provoke massive security challenges that dramatically impact the Global North too. The Black Lives Matter movement arose out of the specific context of the persistent race-based caste system of the United States. But the movement’s fundamental claim — of the equal dignity and rights of all persons by virtue of their humanity — is one that needs to be driven through our perspectives and approaches to international development as well.”
“[T]he Global North cannot routinely pretend away the rest of the planet — and perhaps no phenomenon demonstrates this point as clearly as migration,” she proclaims.
Showing that her intelligence ties to the Bush administration are no coincidence, Etim resorted to similar language in a 2017 article for the George W. Bush Institute, again identifying the Trump movement as a threat to democracy itself:
“American democracy is at a crossroads. The barrage of actions against it by hostile powers and the executive branch’s increasingly charged rhetoric against the very institutions charged with safeguarding our democratic system (the media and the judiciary) could result in two distinct outcomes.
The first involves our nation grappling with the original sins of our country’s foundation (slavery, the rights of women, and the treatment of indigenous people) and working to bolster democracy for future generations. The second path is the erosion of public confidence in our institutions, and more sophisticated attacks on our information systems and corporations by Russia and China.”
Does anyone still not understand why Bush has already congratulated Biden on his thoroughly unproven election “victory” even as the overwhelming majority of grassroots Republicans are fully aware that if the ballot shenanigans in key battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania are allowed to stand the GOP can likely never hope to win a presidential election again?
Biden’s Radicals
Etim’s revolutionary prose is hardly out of place on Team Biden. Liberty Nation reported in September that multiple leading names on Biden’s A-List of foreign policy advisers are directly tied to an organization that has officially endorsed a radical “action paper” titled “Toward a Feminist Foreign Policy in the United States.” Members of the heavily Biden-aligned group Foreign Policy For America even played a key role in crafting the paper.
The document was produced with the help of “contributing” individuals from Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Planned Parenthood, and the globalist Council on Foreign Relations.
“Feminist foreign policy… seeks to disrupt colonial, racist, patriarchal and male-dominated power structures; and allocates significant resources, including research, to achieve that vision,” the action paper reads.
Simon Clark is Chairman of the Board of Directors at Foreign Policy For America. On July 1, he wrote an inflammatory article for the Center for American Progress, a leftist group that is also financially backed by George Soros.
Luridly titled “How White Supremacy Returned to Mainstream Politics,” the piece openly paints any support for President Trump’s efforts to enforce the immigration laws of this nation as xenophobic, racist Nazism.
“As many commentators have noted, President Trump’s claim that immigrants will ‘infest our Country’ directly echoes Nazi propaganda and other precursors to genocidal violence,” Clark wrote.
Clark went on to describe any opposition to illegal immigration as white supremacy:
“President Trump’s campaign rhetoric surrounding immigration and invasion is the point at which he appears to most closely align with white supremacist concepts. Stopping immigration is the central aim of white nationalism, as white nationalists see this as the only way of stopping immigrants from taking power away from a white majority.”
Michele Flournoy, widely considered likely to become the first female defense secretary if Biden assumes the presidency, is affiliated with Clark’s FP4A, as are top Biden advisors Anthony Blinken and Avril Haines.
“I promise you this: I will be a president for all Americans — whether you voted for me or not,” Biden has stated as he desperately tries to maneuver into president-elect mode despite the growing waves of red flags signaling election fraud engulfing the 2020 vote.
Rather than trust him, or the dodgy methods that have given him his thoroughly unconvincing “triumph,” Americans are best advised to believe the words of his handpicked associates.
*About the author: Political Columnist at LibertyNation.com Joe Schaeffer is a veteran journalist with 20+ years’ experience. He spent 15 years with The Washington Times, including 8+ years as Managing Editor of the newspaper’s popular National Weekly Edition. Striving to be a natural health nut, he considers staring at the ocean for hours to be an act of political rebellion.
Source: This article was published by the Liberty Nation
The article Biden’s Radicals Reveal His Globalist Agenda – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.
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By Nandini Sarma
President Xi Jinping made a major announcement in his address to the United Nations General Assembly in September of this year. He committed China to a target to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2060. This is a significant announcement, given that China is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide and one of the largest consumers of coal. The communique on the 14th five-year plan (2021-2025) underscored the importance of sustainable and healthy growth. But what does this ambitious goal mean for China in terms of challenges and opportunities?
The challenge is enormous. The aim of carbon neutrality by 2060 would need drastic reduction in the use of fossil fuels in industry, transportation and electricity generation. This would mean that coal consumption would have to be eliminated by 2060, or offset the emissions produced by methods such as planting trees or carbon storage. Coal is a major source of energy generation accounting for 60% of total energy generation. The following graph shows a comparison of the coal consumption by China and by the rest of the world.
An energy transition to cleaner fuels would require huge investments. A study by Tsinghua University’s Institute of Energy, Environment and Economy estimate investments to the tune of US$ 15 trillion would be required in cleaner energy in the coming years. [1] The goal of carbon neutrality also raises questions about the viability of the planned investments in coal projects and the risk of stranded assets. Further, in the wake of the slowdown on account of the pandemic, there has been increased lobbying from producers to increase investments in coal production. Investment in fossil fuels has been three times that of planned investment on low carbon energies.
As per a study, to meet the Paris agreement goals, China would need to reduce thermal power capacity by 2030 rather than add to it. In addition to not building any new coal plants, China would have to implement a range of policies to achieve its target of net zero by 2060. This would include subsidies to accelerate absorption of newer technologies, scale up investments in power grids, energy battery storage and regulation of the market. China would also have to build nuclear power plants to replace coal-fired plants but this is an issue that requires gaining confidence of the public on safety issues. These measures require considerable political will. The US-China trade war and with Washington pulling out of the Paris agreement, there is far lesser international pressure on climate issues. This may explain the transfer of the climate change portfolio from the politically powerful National Development and Reform Commission to the newly established Ministry of Ecology and Environment. But it is also in China’s interest to adopt cleaner fuels and Beijing does want to position itself as a superpower that leads by example. The actual implementation of the net zero carbon target would depend on the finer details of the 14th five year plan that would come out in the coming months.
Besides coal investments domestically, China is the largest investor in coal projects internationally. China has spent billions in coal-fired plants and more are in the pipeline, especially through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Shifting dirty fuel abroad is not a long term solution for climate change. What does the domestic goal of net zero mean for its overseas investments?
Opportunities
China has very early on identified the market opportunities in clean energy technologies. The economies of scale achieved by China has led to drastic fall in prices, for instance for photovoltaic cells and wind turbine systems. China is the largest producer of electric cars and buses. It also dominates lithium-ion battery supply chain and chemical refining. The following chart shows the share of China’s production in the global supply chains, across various levels of the supply chain, as of 2019. As seen in the graph, China’s share in global supply of refining stands at 80% and for lithium-ion battery cells at 73%.
The blueprint for the 14th five year plan also emphasises China’s goal to make major breakthroughs in key technologies and become a global leader. The current dominance of China in new clean technologies is on account of its long term policies and investments in critical sectors that will gain more prominence in the future. Even the US and Europe are having to play catch-up and are trying to create their own industries that will rival the Chinese giants.
Implication for India
As a developing country, China has long argued for differentiated responsibilities that precludes sharing the same burden as developed countries. But, Beijing has recognised the economic and political benefits of pursuing climate-friendly goals and has set more ambitious climate goals. This will definitely put pressure on India to review its own commitments. With similar goals of being a super power and increasing its influence in the global arena, can India afford to stay behind on its climate ambitions?
China already dominates critical technology supply chains. India is heavily dependent on China for imports of battery systems, solar cells and other critical technologies. Reducing dependence on Chinese imports will not be easy and it will require identifying key sectors in the supply chain where India can invest and reduce its dependence on imports. Collaborations with other countries would also be beneficial. India would require careful planning to indigenise the manufacturing and attain the PM’s goal of “atmanirbharta”.
[1] https://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/significance-of-china-s-net-zero-target-120102700013_1.html
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By Hadi Azmi and John Bechtel
After a fractious summit in 2018 amid a U.S.-China trade war, Asia-Pacific leaders came together Friday to say that a free, open and non-discriminatory trade environment was key to reviving a global economy battered by the coronavirus pandemic.
United States President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping were among the 21 leaders who attended this year’s virtual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, hosted by Malaysia. And unlike in 2018, all the group’s nations were able to agree on a joint communique at the meeting’s end.
“We recognize the importance of a free, open, fair, non-discriminatory, transparent and predictable trade and investment environment to drive economic recovery at such a challenging time,” the 21 nations said in their joint statement, called the 2020 Kuala Lumpur Declaration.
The last APEC meeting, in 2018, failed to produce a communique that all leaders agreed on. A meeting last year, scheduled to be held in Chile, was canceled because of the domestic situation there at the time.
Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin of host-nation Malaysia indicated that there were no sticking points this year despite the Sino-U.S. trade war.
“The impact of this trade war has been eclipsed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The health risks and its impact on the global economic ecosystem has been the major priority agenda for all APEC economies this year,” Muhyiddin said at a post-meeting press conference.
“APEC’s work this year has been focusing on the importance on economic recovery post-COVID-19 pandemic. Equally important is to accelerate work towards developing the COVID-19 vaccine and making it a global public good that is available and affordable to all.”
The APEC nations also pledged to “refrain from backtracking and resorting to protectionist measures to keep markets and borders open,” the Malaysian PM said.
Both the U.S. and China made sure to note their commitment to the Asia-Pacific and Indo-Pacific regions.
Trump was making his first APEC appearance since 2017 and perhaps his last one as president before leaders on the Asia-Pacific stage. In his remarks, Trump reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to “promoting peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region through strong economic growth,” according to a statement from the White House.
For his part, China’s Xi touted a Beijing-led regional trade agreement signed last Sunday. He announced that the Asian superpower and world’s most populous nation was also considering joining a trans-Pacific partnership, a version of which the U.S., under the Trump administration, pulled out of in 2017.
The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Xi referred to, went into effect in 2018.
Fifteen Asia-Pacific nations, including China and not including the U.S., signed what has been called the world’s biggest trade deal, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) on Nov. 15.
COVID-19 and APEC
APEC 2020’s joint statement stressed that recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic is this year’s overarching goal. The commitment to free and open trade was also in the service of stemming the human toll of the pandemic.
“We highlight the importance of facilitating equitable access to safe, quality, effective and affordable vaccines and other medical countermeasures that are vital to safeguard people’s health and well-being, while incentivizing innovation,” the APEC leaders’ joint statement said.
“We will cooperate to facilitate the movement of essential goods and services, as well as the essential movement of people in a safe manner, identifying and resolving unnecessary barriers to trade and strengthening the resilience of our supply chains.”
As of Friday the pandemic, whose ripple effects have devastated economies worldwide, had reached more than 57.3 million cases across the globe with an overall death toll of 1.36 million people, according to the latest data from disease experts at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S.
In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s Muhyiddin told reporters after the forum that the pandemic had created new and emerging avenues of business and investment.
“Perhaps the most interesting opportunity arising from the pandemic crisis is the rise of the digital economy. We have seen how innovation from digitalization has served where households and businesses around the region have turned to technology to help function efficiently daily,” he said.
With this in mind, APEC nations included equitable digital access and digital security in another statement they issued called APEC Putrajaya Vision 2040.
“We will strengthen digital infrastructure, accelerate digital transformation, narrow the digital divide, as well as cooperate on facilitating the flow of data and strengthening consumer and business trust in digital transactions,” their joint statement said.
The article Asia-Pacific Nations, Including China, US, Commit To Free And Open Trade appeared first on Eurasia Review.
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