Anti China Fake News

 

The details (from  a tweet):

Nury Vittachi

@NuryVittachi

·

12h

I SUPPORTED THE so-called pro-democracy politicians in Hong Kong for many years. I knew the main members personally and happily stuffed my hard-earned cash into their collection boxes. But I increasingly felt something wasn’t right. Then I did some digging. And then I backed off as fast as I could. Here’s the story. . A NEW ASSISTANT As a South China Morning Post reporter in 1991, I noted the rise of a new political group called the United Democrats. They had an “executive assistant” who was always seen at the right hand of the leaders. His name was Tom Boasberg. So, not Chinese, but American. He was hyper-political, and his previous employer was the United States government. Many businesses in Hong Kong employed Americans, sure. We all liked Americans. But this wasn’t a business – it was supposedly a "grassroots" political party—and I thought it odd to have a foreigner at the top end of the noisiest political organization in the city. And when Boasberg moved on in 1992, I noticed that he was replaced by another executive assistant, a woman named Minky Worden. She too was American, she too was hyper-political, and she too was previously employed by the United States government: a coincidence. When Ms Worden left that role in 1998, the group took an another person in her place: a woman named Emily Bork. She too was American, she too was hyper-political, and she too previously worked for the United States government. A series of coincidences? (Ms Worden went on to become an enthusiastic player in the Uyghur genocide hoax. Her journalist husband Gordon Crovitz, with whom I worked directly, later went on to sign a contract to work on media monitoring with the Pentagon.) . FACTIONS For some of this period, I was a Legislative Council columnist for the South China Morning Post. I lived next door to Yeung Sam, a leading member of the so-called “pro-democracy” party, and soon learned there were factions within it. Everyone’s favorite (including mine) was a rough diamond called Szeto Wah who was noisily patriotic about China while believing that western democracy would be good for Hong Kong. (Yeung himself was unpopular within the organization.) But many of the other “pro-democracy” politicians, unfortunately, became closely tied in with anti-China groups funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy, which had taken over the CIA's “soft power” covert regime change duties. The NED had quietly started funding political parties in Hong Kong in 1990, but kept under the radar, using multiple other identities. Cash arrived in Hong Kong listed as “donations” from a non-existent body called the American Institute for Free Labor Development (set up by the CIA for money transfers). . EXTREMELY DANGEROUS The NED were and are extremely bad people. Working worldwide, they used the “pro-democracy” label as a cover to poison the public against local candidates who failed to be pro-Washington in any country. The NED successfully manipulated elections in Nicaragua in 1990 and Mongolia in 1996 and helped to overthrow democratically elected governments in Bulgaria in 1990 and Albania in 1991 and 1992, as intelligence historians noted. And they would eventually cause chaos in my peaceful, gentle Hong Kong. The NED did this by using their bottomless funds to blend Hong Kong’s “pro-democracy” politicians with two groups they funded to poison Hong Kong people against mainland China. One was called the Human Rights Monitor and the other was the Confederation of Trade Unions (not to be confused with the HK Federation of Trade Unions, which was a genuine trade union organizing group). . DESTRUCTION OF LEGCO The "pan-democrats" quickly lost the goodwill of the Hong Kong people by automatically vetoing every act the government did, causing massive delays in a city used to efficiency. Legco became dysfunctional, sometimes grinding to a halt. The physical violence seen in the Taiwan parliament was transferred to Hong Kong, with people such as Ted Hui throwing fists and foul matter into the parliamentary chamber (and becoming hated by the building's cleaners). . PROTESTS PREPARED OVERSEAS By 2012, this pro-US movement in Hong Kong was working with the Oslo Freedom Foundation (which, despite the name, is based in the US), in a multi-year operation to organize massive demonstrations in Hong Kong with the aim of destabilizing the city. The US plan was to present this foreign-organised anti-China insurrection as home-grown “pro-democracy” protests, trusting in the western mainstream media to excuse the horrific violence and hide the US funding. (Which they did.) A major aim was fearmongering. By forcing Beijing to send the tanks into Hong Kong, Taiwan would abandon its growing friendship with the mainland, and became once again a dependable part of the Pentagon's First Island Chain. . A FAILED OPERATION The rest is history. The Chinese refused to send in the tanks. The PLA stayed at home. The Hong Kong police managed to quell the riots without killing a single person (unlike in the six other uprisings in the world that same year, all of which led to multiple deaths). The operation failed. . DISGUSTED By 2021, many people in Hong Kong knew about the foreign forces' involvement and were disgusted with the pan-democrats. My friends and I, almost all of whom had been big fans for many years, became totally disillusioned with them, and with western-style democracy as a whole. The western mainstream press rigidly turned their faces away and refused to see any of this. And today, the China-hostile media, from Reuters’ James Pomfret to the BBC’s Danny Vincent, continue to fail to report the real story. Whether they are hiding it or are genuinely unaware of what is going -- that's not for me to say. But I will say that the catastrophic loss of trust in the western mainstream media is well deserved.

 

America's corruption

 

Jesus Christ man it's just graft.

It's not inefficiency. It's not waste. It's not a mistake. People took the money and built nothing, on purpose, because they like money. https://t.co/r5tRHClKBC pic.twitter.com/L4yKei5bUW

— Ben Landau-Taylor (@benlandautaylor) December 14, 2025

Physician Burnout

Think about this the next time you complain to your doctor. From a real doctor in the comments in Naked Capitalism:

About PCP burnout – I am not meaning this as a rant. But I think it is important for people to understand the time pressure and world their general internists are facing.

This week – Monday the 8th of Dec through Friday the 12th of Dec – in my office hours of 9:30-5:30 PM every day, I saw a total of 108 patients myself. The MAs and PAs and RNs who work under me saw an additional 57. In the AM before the office, I have had an average of 3 people in the hospital whom I try to see every day at lunchtime. Because life since COVID has become so overwhelming, I now have hospitalists doing all the work, but I do all I can to see the patients. I have 11 people in nursing home care. So all 11 are seen once a week at various times where they can be fit. My office staff typically fields about 200-250 phone calls a day. I have very good staff but they are also involved with other MDs in my office. Of those calls, I have about 30-50 that I must deal with every day mostly by telling the staff what to do. There are all kinds of patients who demand to speak with me only about test results, etc…….and there are several who because of the severe nature of their results, I need to speak to. I typically try to do this 1 patient at a time in between visits. Despite how obviously crazy medicine has become, so many patients think when I call them it is time to have a visit – and these calls can often become very involved. I am looking at my leftover calls that I need to make from the week on this Sat AM – and the number totals 34. There is simply not enough time in the day to do this. When people do not get immediate feedback some of them can become explosively anger and yell at the staff – causing very high turnover at times. The staffing in modern internist offices has been cut to a third or so of what it was when I started – at the same time the admin bloat in the hospitals and the insurance companies I would guess is 5 times as high. I am plagued with an EMR that is simply tedious in every aspect. Bring back the paper charts and I would save an hour or two of clicks every day. My staff and I have to field every day about 10-12 insurance denials, almost all of which are very involved and are regarding critical meds and tests, etc. In all of this chaos throughout the day, 3-4 times daily I have to take 10-15 minutes to do peer-to-peer discussions with insurance companies about meds or tests. About 90% of the time they just prima facie approve stuff – demonstrating what a waste of time the entire process is – the other 10% are often heated battles that leave me absolutely drained and angry. At any given time, I have about a dozen fully-insured patients who have been denied care and testing with whom I have to spitball all kinds of ideas to keep them going. All the while, almost every day there is a curveball or two that no one sees coming that are often very time-intense. For example, a patient was sent to the NH for terminal hospice care on Friday. The hospital doctors forgot to turn off their ICD – defibrillator – so even though the patient was passed, their heat was not allowed to pass until I left my busy practice, ran to the NH, and turned it off myself. Critical mistakes like this in modern hospitals are just every day now. It is hard not to make them when there is a different physician every day on the case.

So, this AM on Saturday, I will do my best to work through as many phone calls as I can – knowing I will not get them all – and knowing that people will be screaming next week. I understand how expensive the insurance premiums are and I understand exactly how people feel they are due Cadillac service. But there is nowhere in the USA that is staffing their MD offices for this service. The 24 million dollar/year CEOs though and all the million dollar year C suite people in Big Hospital and Big Insurance have all the help they can dream up – coffee-pourers, armies of Ad people, Marketing, etc.

The students that come through this mess tell me that actually my office is one of the best run that they have seen- again – read the paragraph above and really think about that – but these students all see what a complete disaster this is and don’t just walk away – they run. Dermatology is becoming quite the draw. The best minds in medicine are literally wasted on Dermatology and there are so many of them.

People really do wonder why MDs are so burned out. And even a little psycho. I do not wonder at all. My goal every day is no longer to do the best I can do – it is literally not to let anyone die. And to do everything I can to minimize the anger and vitriol knowing there is nothing I can do to eliminate these bad feelings. The entire leadership of the profession knows all about these problems – I cannot think of a thing they have done about it in decades.

Rock Star Feeds the Hungry

 

The bill read $0.
She stared at it, certain it was a mistake. Then the words beneath the total sank in:
“Minimum: $0. Suggested donation: $12. Pay what you can, or volunteer 30 minutes.”

Four days without a real meal. Four days of gas-station crackers and shame. Now she… pic.twitter.com/IS4qCLAoWZ

— Mr Commonsense (@fopminui) December 12, 2025

 

...worth reading the whole thing. A welcome contrast to the rock star self indulgence so widely publicized. Also: the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation builds affordable housing units.

Sanders on Elections and Socialism : How We Win

Thanks to Duane Campbell for posting this:

Sanders on Elections and Socialism : How We Win




Over the weekend, Bernie Sanders spoke to the How We Win conference, a gathering of democratic socialist elected officials and their staff in New Orleans sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, Jacobin, the Nation, and other partners. Below is a transcript of his remarks.

Thank you for inviting me to say a few words. Let me begin by thanking all of you for having the guts to run for public office. It’s a lot harder to go out and knock on doors to represent constituents with the problems they face seven days a week. So I want to thank you very much for that. Despite the horror in the White House right now, they’re out there all across this country. We’re seeing strong progressive growth. It is not just Zohran Mamdani in New York or Katie Wilson in Seattle. From coast to coast, you are seeing progressive democratic socialists standing up, taking on the establishment and winning elections.

And one of the great secrets of the corporate media is that right now in the House of Representatives, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has about one hundred members, including dozens and dozens of very strong progressives. That is the result of the hard work all us have done over the last number of years.

I’ve been asked to give you some advice. What I’m gonna tell you is probably what you already know. Number one, here is a radical idea — do your job that you were elected to do. Now, I’ll tell you a story. Here is the story. I was elected to be mayor of Burlington, Vermont; won it by ten votes way back in 1981. We had a strong foreign policy. We had exchange programs. We dealt with national issues. But I’ll never forget there was an article in the local newspaper and the report asked some guy, “But what does it mean? What do you think about having a socialist as your mayor?” And the guy said, “Well, I don’t know much about socialism, but I do know they’re getting the snow off of the streets a lot faster than they used to.”

You gotta do your job. If you’re on the city council, the school board, the state legislature, you gotta do it. And if you do your job well, people will give you the latitude to talk about many, many other issues. But don’t lose focus regarding the job that you are elected to do.

Second of all, establishment Democrats have the brilliant idea that the only people they can talk to are establishment Democrats. They literally have lists of people: “Don’t knock on this door; don’t knock on that door. Only on these.” I strongly disagree with that suggestion. Knock on every door in your district. And what you’ll find when you do that is you’ll have the right-wing people slam the door in your face. You’ll have some unpleasantness. But by and large, what you’ll find is that there is a lot more commonality of interest than you might have appreciated. In my view, the reason Donald Trump is president of the United States today is not because people voted for a trillion dollars in tax breaks for the 1 percent or massive cuts in health care. He is the president of the United States because of Democratic establishment candidates’ failure to provide a real analysis and agenda that meets the crises that we face today.

Establishment Democrats believe that you can tinker around the edges, you can tell the world how terrible Donald Trump is, and that’s fine. But right now, what the American people understand is that übercapitalism — an oligarchic form of society, which is what we have today — is a disaster for the working class of this country. We don’t have to tinker around the edges. We have to create a very new form of society.

So for just your average person out there, you are in many cases going nowhere in a hurry. You understand that with real inflation accounted for, wages are basically the same as they were fifty years ago, despite a huge increase in worker productivity as a result of all of the expansion of technology. And almost all of the gains of that new technology have gone to the 1 percent. And ordinary workers know that there’s something wrong with 60 percent of our people living paycheck to paycheck while Elon Musk owns more wealth himself than about the bottom 52 percent of American society. They know that.

Here is a radical idea — do your job that you were elected to do.

They know that there’s something wrong when we have a campaign finance system that is totally corrupt and allows billionaires in both political parties to buy elections. That’s a broken system. I say these things because you’re gonna have Republicans who understand this as well. They understand if you look at the basic necessities of life — just think for a moment: you’re living in the richest country in the history of the world, and it cannot even provide the basic necessities of life for working people.

Just take a look at the health care in your community. Talk about health care. Everybody will tell you that despite spending twice as much per capita on health care as any other nation, the health care system is totally broken. Everybody knows that. The educational system is largely broken, and the childcare system is a disaster. Kids can’t afford to go to college, or they’re leaving school deeply in debt. Public schools are under enormous pressure. Teachers are underpaid. They’re dealing with all kinds of disciplinary issues, kids who come from troubled families or are acting out in school. We are dealing with a situation where our food system, just nutrition . . . we are the most obese and unhealthy nation on Earth because you have a food industry that makes huge profit by selling our kids crap, and the price of groceries is soaring.

People understand that. I flew in from the National Airport in Washington; there was a four-hour delay because they couldn’t figure out how to de-ice the plane. All over the country you are looking at basic problems people are struggling with. The system is failing. Our job is not to run away from that reality but to offer a real alternative. Because in my view, what the future is gonna be about isn’t establishment Democrats. All over Europe, for example, the establishment parties are fading away. The struggle is going to be between the Trumpists of the world — right-wing extremism — and a democratic socialist alternative, which recognizes the problems that we face and provides concrete and real and bold solutions for working families.

So what Donald Trump does is go, “Yeah, we got a lot of problems. And the problem is undocumented people, the problem is the trans community, the problem is that we have Somalians who are ‘garbage.’” That’s what demagogues do. They take the problems that we face — often that they cause — and then you blame a powerless minority. Our job is to recognize the problems are real and to put the finger on the real cause of the problem, which is the greed of the oligarchs in this country. So that’s where we’re at now. And it ain’t gonna be easy. Especially with Trump in the White House.

To summarize, the American people know the system is broken. They are hurting. They can’t afford groceries. They can’t afford health care. They can’t afford education. They can’t afford a lot of things. And at the same time, the billionaire class has never had it so good. The establishment Democrats cannot talk about these things because, very often, they’re getting funded by the billionaire class. So what we have gotta do right now is get out into the streets. We gotta talk to our people — allpeople, not just people within our zone of comfort. And we’re gonna be providing real solutions to the crises that we face. So once again, what you have done is extraordinary. I thank you so much and congratulate you for getting out on the streets, for winning elections, and for standing up for working people.

An incredible (Chinese) love poem

 

This strange square 👇 is undoubtedly the most extraordinary work of literature in human history. Yet, unfortunately, barely anyone in the West has ever heard of it.

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered… pic.twitter.com/xVjzmkIWRj

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) December 12, 2025

The Obama Myth

From Naked Capitalism (here)

To get a better sense of what Obama was always about, please read the 2012 post, Exclusive: How Obama’s Early Career Success Was Built on Fronting for Chicago Real Estate and Finance. Its opening:

Barack Obama remains an icon to many on what passes for the left in America despite incontrovertible evidence that he does not represent their interests. There are many contributing factors, including his considerable skills as a speaker and his programmatic effort to neuter liberal critics by getting their funding cut.

A central component of the seemingly impenetrable Obama mythology is his personal history: a black man, son of a broken home, who nevertheless got on the fast track to financial success by becoming editor of the Harvard Law Review, but turned instead to working with and later representing a particularly disadvantaged community, the South Side of Chicago.

Even so, this story does not quite add up. Why did Obama not follow the usual, well greased path of becoming a Supreme Court clerk, and seeking to exert influence through the Washington doors that would have opened up to him after that stint?

A remarkable speech by Robert Fitch puts Obama’s early career in a new perspective that explains the man we see now in the Oval Office: one who pretends to befriend ordinary people but sells them out again and again to wealthy, powerful interests – the banks, big Pharma and health insurers, and lately, the fracking-industrial complex.

Fitch, who died last year, was an academic and journalist, well regarded for his forensic and archival work, as described by Doug Henwood in an obituary in the Nation. He is best known for his book Solidarity for Sale, which chronicled corruption in American unions, but his work that is germane to his analysis of Obama is Assassination of New York. In that, he documented the concerted efforts by powerful real estate and financial interests to drive manufacturing and low-income renters out of Manhattan so they could turn it over to office and residential space for high income professionals.

Fitch gave his eye-opening speech before an unlikely audience at an unlikely time: the Harlem Tenants Association in November 2008, hard on the heels of Obama’s electrifying presidential win. The first part contains his prescient prediction: that Obama’s Third Way stance, that we all need to put our differences aside and get along, was tantamount to advocating the interests of the wealthy, since they seldom give anything to the have-nots without a fight.

That discussion alone is reason to read the piece. But the important part is his description of the role that Obama played in the redevelopment of the near South Side of Chicago, and how he and other middle class blacks, including Valerie Jarrett and his wife Michelle, advanced at the expense of poor blacks by aligning themselves with what Fitch calls “friendly FIRE”: powerful real estate players like the Pritzkers and the Crown family, major banks, the University of Chicago, as well as non-profit community developers and real estate reverends.

Don’t take my word for it. Download the speech and read it. And then circulate it widely. And thank Michael Hudson, Fitch’s friend for over 30 years, for making this document available.

You can find the speech as an embedded document here.