On Thursday, Beijing responded to President Biden’s first address to Congress where he said the US was in competition with China to “win the 21st century.”
When asked about the speech, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said that competition between the two countries was natural. “But this kind of competition should be a track and field race, not a duel to the death,” he said.
“The US always demands that others follow the rules while violating the rules themselves,” Wang added. “It is in nature out of Cold War thinking and ideological bias, and is a sign of lack of self-confidence. We hope the US can discard the mentality of sour grapes towards China.”
President Biden has framed the competition between the US and China as an ideological battle between “autocracy” and “democracy.” Wang warned the US that trying to force other countries to accept Washington’s version of democracy “will only create divisions, intensify tension and undermine stability.”
Biden also addressed Washington’s military plans for Asia to counter Beijing in his address. He said he told Chinese President Xi Xinping that the US will militarize the Indo-pacific region “just as we do with NATO in Europe.”
Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Wu Qian said on Thursday that the US has significantly increased its military activity near China’s coast since Biden came into office. Wu said operations had increased by more than 20 percent for US warships and 40 percent for military aircraft in waters claimed by Beijing.
The Chinese are being polite. It’s more like, “hot war thinking.”
Humanity stands at the brink of extinction. It matter naught whether one is Republican or Democrat, American or Chinese. Survival requires more input from more people. We need to hear and discuss as many good ideas as possible, to open the door for wisdom gained from ordinary people’s wide ranging experience.
Examine briefly how Americans came to be in this precarious insecure social and national condition. Start with democracy as a concept. What is it? This subject needs to be discussed.
Representative democracy is different from plain democracy. Democracy itself needs no descriptive adjective and grows with human advances. Representative democracy is a form of government that quite obviously tends to concentrate wealthy people at the top simply because a major function of representative democracy is to represent capital. Periodic election campaigns compete with plans to grow the economy and make good jobs, from which capitalists get their percentage as profit. It all seems normal and straight-forward but there’s a major hitch; Capitalism is designed to grow faster and faster forever. Earth does not grow and capitalism must grow.
Believe it or not; Earth has already reached its limit of pollution recycling capacity. The result is human life is facing extinction. Representative democracy alone cannot solve the very problem it is designed to make by supporting capitalist growth. A new form of democracy is needed to be standing in the wings and ready to begin work on survival. The people’s referendum is one part of the model from which future government forms will develop. Representative democracy is not something to discard, it is a functional companion in a dynamic nuanced relationship with popular referenda decided upon by we the people acting on our own initiative.
America’s founding fathers had no models to follow other than royalty, a hint of democracy for rich english business owners, and the ancient slave powered democracies of Rome and Greece. Women were considered second class citizens, at best; many men considered women as personal property. Although the yoke of slavery was removed from white males, it was placed knowingly upon women and people with brown skin. Economic wage slavery was a different story; it continues to this day for everyone but the rich. Benefits to wealth from wage slavery remain the underlying reason for efforts to limit democracy as well as opposition to improving it.
The continuing struggle by wealthy people to limit democracy is not taught to us in school when we are young. If we continue formal education as we grow older, one of our required courses is introduction to economics. There we are indoctrinated into believing unregulated free markets tend toward equilibrium by balancing supply and demand. Scratch the surface and see economics is not based on facts or science; It posits people as consuming units possessing all the facts about every product and choosing what to buy rationally based on a price tending toward equilibrium set by supply and demand. This entire economic picture taught to millions of students is management propaganda.
In reality, privatized resources are extracted from our planet, which is a small bubble of life zooming through space nestled inside our galaxy. Commercial and public waste is dumped into oceans and air and onto lands of spaceship Earth. We are taught that somehow an unregulated free market will magically settle into equilibrium that grants maximum health and happiness to our species. Really? All we need to do is think of Hans Christian Anderson’s naked king seen through the untrained eyes of a child to see equilibrium is not even possible. Imagine driving on an unregulated freeway and one is fairly close to understanding unregulated free market economics.
We approach the abyss of extinction and need to honestly examine representative democracy as that which has governed to this point. None of us but the truly weird want to continue on the path of war with Russia, China and a long list of other fictional enemies. Eternal war, chemical pollution, plastic molecules mixed in with our protein molecules and global climate collapse are happening now during governance by representative democracies that represent capital.
Explore constituentassembly.org to learn and think about modern ideas of democracy. The people’s initiative is one option for avoiding disaster but it cannot govern without representative deliberations. We need both. A real patriot will help invent a modern democracy wise enough to avoid war.
Biden has always been a Class A warmonger.
“The US always demands that others follow the rules while violating the rules themselves,”
Hammer. Hitting. Nail. (on)Head.