RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15305/china-trade-agreement-hole

Moreover, China’s officials, once they have encryption keys and access to the China network of a foreign firm, will be in a good position to penetrate the networks of that firm outside China. Therefore, Beijing will soon steal data stored on foreign networks and put companies, like Nortel Networks, out of business or ruin them to the point where Chinese entities can buy them up at reduced prices. Do we really want the Fortune 500 to be owned by China?

There is, of course, no point in including in the trade deal forced taking and intellectual property protections if they do not cover the cybersecurity rules.

Washington will have to do something fast to protect American businesses in China — and the American economy — because the Phase One deal is clearly inadequate. There is, after all, a big hole in the center of it.

There’s something missing from the “Phase One” trade agreement with China, announced Friday. And it’s something critically important. Yet, Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, appeared not to know about it afterwards.

“We will see,” said Kudlow in response to Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures,” her Fox News Channel show, as she asked him about Beijing’s new “cybersecurity” rules. “There’s a large IP chapter in this deal and there’s also a large forced technology transfer chapter in this deal. I don’t think we know enough about these new Chinese rules and we’ll have to look at that and by the way if they do violate them of course we will take action.”

Bartiromo was referring to two sets of Chinese rules. On December 1, Beijing implemented the Multi-Level Protection Scheme 2.0, issued pursuant to the 2016 Cybersecurity Law. On January 1, China’s Cryptography Law becomes effective.

These measures prohibit foreign companies from encrypting data so that it cannot be read by the Chinese central government and the Communist Party of China. Businesses will be required to turn over encryption keys. Companies will not be able to employ virtual private networks to keep data secret, and some believe they will no longer be allowed to use private servers.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15304/china-business-security-threat

“What I really want to know about is the intellectual property [IP] part of this…. isn’t it true that they’ve [China] just instituted their own new cyber security rules that are in place that say that no foreign company may encrypt data so it can’t be read by the Chinese central government and the communist party of China? In other words, businesses are required to turn over the encryption keys. Are these new rules that China just put in place basically negating any opportunity for the U.S. to protect its IP?” — Maria Bartiromo, Sunday Morning Futures, Fox News Channel, Real Clear Politics, December 15, 2019.

China’s 2015 National Security Law… says that all citizens, firms and organizations have “the responsibility and obligation to maintain state security.” Its 2017 National Intelligence Law obligates such individuals and entities to “support, provide assistance, and cooperate in national intelligence work…” It is not hard to see how China could apply rules even beyond the Encryption Law to justify violations of a deal with the U.S. under the guise of “national security concerns,” and the “rule of law.”

“[T]heir own track record, as well as the practices of the Chinese government, demonstrate that Huawei and ZTE cannot be trusted.” — US Attorney General William Barr; letter to the Federal Communications Commission, November 13, 2019.

How can the U.S. transact with China in any strategically significant area given the communist regime’s aims, and its power over every Chinese entity? Is the US ultimately trading away its freedom?

As the world awaits the details of the Trump Administration’s reported “phase one” trade deal with China — U.S. officials expect it to be executed in January 2020 — a more fundamental question arises: Should America be doing business with China in strategically significant areas, or even beyond?

In a December 15th interview with Director of the United States National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo indirectly touched on this question. Bartiromo asked Kudlow if the proposed deal accounted for new Chinese regulations that would seemingly threaten the intellectual property (IP) of American firms transacting with Chinese ones. She was likely alluding to China’s new Encryption Law, set to take effect on January 1, 2020. Some have suggested that the law would enable the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to collect all information that traffics on Chinese networks. To the extent the trade deal does not account for this law, the implication is that its provisions relating to IP protections could be rendered moot. Here is the relevant portion of the exchange:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/brexit-won-now-its-trump-win-2020-bruce-thornton/

In 2016 two political earthquakes struck the establishment consensus that has dominated the West since World War II. On June 23 the Britons voted to take England out of the EU. Nearly five months later political neophyte Donald Trump won a stunning upset over Hillary Clinton and become President. These two votes were portents of a major shift away from technocratic rule by elites, and a restoration of national sovereignty and citizen political autonomy.

Both elections, however, over the last three-and-a-half years have been met with concentrated and passionate resistance by each country’s ruling elite, including political quislings from supposedly conservative parties. Tory Remainers, including PM Theresa May, used every delaying tactic to undo the June vote, and along the way showed their disdain for the grubby masses who dared to challenge the ruling class. And they also energized the Labour Party and its anti-Semitic, jihadist-hobnobbing leader, socialist Jeremy Corbyn.

In this country, NeverTrumpers Republican fifth-columnists continue to undermine the President and give comfort to a Democrat party now dominated by its most left-wing elements. And they too have exposed their elitist disdain for the “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” who comprise ordinary Americans living outside the Acela Corridor cocoon. In the latest attempt to poison the well of the 2020 election, the House voted to impeach President Trump just a few days after the British election. In both countries, elites refused to honor the results of legal elections, then turned to media, academic, and celebrity calumny of voters, along with judicial and political skullduggery, to undo the outcome and hamstring their political enemies, the Brexiteers and Trump.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-from-the-tory-landslide-11576540523?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Last week’s U.K. general election revealed two political dynamics that the rest of the world should study closely.

The first is very old: Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.  Jeremy Corbyn and the tightly knit clique of pro-Hezbollah, pro-Maduro doctrinaire Marxists and viscerally anti-Semitic conspiracy fans clustered around him mistakenly thought the British working class was hungry for revolutionary social change. They have received their just reward.

The second dynamic, which helped propel Boris Johnson to the greatest Tory majority since Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 landslide, will haunt his premiership and determine its outcome. More than a personal triumph for a man whose political career last year appeared over, more than a historic recasting of the British electoral map, more than the ignominious collapse of the Liberal Democrats, more than the triumph of Scottish nationalism, the election result demonstrates the power of the most disruptive force in global politics today.

Mr. Corbyn misdiagnosed that force as a rejection of capitalism. It’s more subtle. Voters around the world want the prosperity and opportunity that global capitalism provides, but many fear and reject the social consequences of the free market. Large-scale immigration, job losses to automation and foreign competition, the unequal distribution of capitalism’s rewards, and the financial instability and risk associated with innovation are all massively disruptive and inspire backlash—a global surge of populism and identity politics. From Hungary and Turkey to India and beyond, voters are embracing politicians who attack classic liberal political and economic values and vow to defend the cultures and communities this avalanche of change seems to threaten.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/12/15/ninety-peers-call-baroness-tonge-issue-unqualified-apology-blaming/

Nearly 90 peers from the main political parties are calling for Baroness Tonge to apologise for claiming that the Tories won the general election due to Israeli attacks on Jeremy Corbyn. 

The letter, from an “unprecedented” number of former cabinet ministers, senior lawyers and leaders of industry and commerce, calls on Lady Tonge to apologise for bringing the House of Lords into disrepute over the remarks.

Lady Tonge, a former Liberal Democrat MP, wrote on social media after the result last week: “The Chief Rabbi must be dancing in the street. The pro-Israel lobby won our General Election by lying about Jeremy Corbyn.”

But in a letter to Monday’s Daily Telegraph, 88 peers from across the House of Lords said: “We the undersigned believe that members of the House of Lords are required to conform to the highest standards of Public Life. 

“The use of language by Baroness Tonge in a published statement that the General Election outcome was a result of ‘the pro-Israeli lobby’ [and] ‘lying about Jeremy Corbyn’ falls well short of that high standard.”They added: “Her language is both shameful and in clear contravention of the United Kingdom’s adoption of IHRA’s definition of Antisemitism.”Baroness Tonge has brought Parliament into disrepute and we demand that she withdraws her remarks and issues a full and unqualified apology without delay.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-america-first-trade-vision-comes-into-focus-on-three-fronts-11576436055

President Trump claimed a multi-front victory last week in his bid to reshape U.S. trade policy, extracting fresh commercial concessions from Mexico and China while stripping the World Trade Organization of its powers to restrain the tactics he used to secure them.

Combined, the efforts show an approach toward U.S. trading partners and multinationals that is focused more on pressuring companies to produce domestically and sell American-made goods abroad than on helping them expand their global manufacturing footprint.

On Tuesday, the White House announced the rewrite of the country’s largest trade deal, the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, winning approval not only from the compact’s Mexican and Canadian partners but from longtime Nafta opponents among congressional Democrats and organized labor. On Friday, the administration brokered a truce with Beijing in its year-and-a-half-long trade war, putting further tariffs on hold and securing an unusual Chinese pledge to boost imports of U.S. goods by a specified dollar amount while trade talks between the two sides continue.

In between those two announcements, the U.S. on Wednesday effectively crippled the Geneva-based WTO trade court that was launched in 1995 to prevent the kinds of trade tactics Mr. Trump has deployed to coerce America’s trading partners to the bargaining table. Over the past two years, the administration has blocked the appointment of judges to the court and, after two remaining members’ terms expired, the panel as of last week no longer had enough members to issue decisions and enforce WTO rules. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15289/austria-bds-antisemitism

The initiative is being spearheaded by Sebastian Kurz, a former (and most likely the next) chancellor of Austria who also leads the center-right Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei, ÖVP).

“For Austria, Israel’s right to exist is non-negotiable, and any form of anti-Semitism, including Israel-related anti-Semitism, is unacceptable and must be severely condemned. Of course, factual criticism of individual measures by the government of Israel must be allowed.” — Austrian Parliamentary Resolution condemning the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as anti-Semitic.

“This [BDS] movement calls for a boycott of… Israeli artists, scientists and athletes. It demonizes and measures Israel by double standards, makes Austrian Jews jointly responsible for Israeli politics, and by calling for the right of return for Palestinian refugees and all their descendants, it questions the right of existence of the Jewish state.” — Austrian Parliamentary Resolution condemning the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as anti-Semitic.

The BDS campaign “undermines the possibility for a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by demanding concessions of one party alone and encouraging the Palestinians to reject negotiations in favor of international pressure.” — U.S. House of Representatives Resolution 246.

All of the major parties represented in the Austrian Parliament have agreed to support a resolution condemning the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as anti-Semitic.

The measure calls on Austria’s federal government to fight anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and to withhold any form of financial and other state support from anti-Semitic organizations and advocates of BDS principles.

The resolution will be submitted to the lower house of Parliament, the National Council, in January 2020. It is expected to be passed with an overwhelming majority. While anti-BDS laws have been passed in Vienna and Graz, the largest and second-largest cities in Austria, this would be the first time that such a measure is enacted at the federal level.

On December 11, legislators from all five major parties — including the left-leaning Greens and the right-leaning Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ) — formally agreed to co-sponsor the resolution, which is being spearheaded by Sebastian Kurz, a former (and most likely the next) chancellor of Austria who also leads the center-right Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei, ÖVP). The resolution states:

“Anti-Semitism has existed since antiquity, although the term itself was not used until the 19th century. The core, however, was always the same: it was — and is — the fomenting of prejudices and hatred in word and deed against Jews. Throughout history they have been victims of violence and exclusion, which reached a devastating climax in the murderous cruelty of National Socialism and the declared goal of the systematic destruction of Jewry by the Nazi regime.

“In total, more than six million Jews, many of them children, fell victim to the Shoah. They were murdered in the extermination camps by poison gas or otherwise. But even this unimaginably cruel genocide and the memory of it has not caused many people to rethink, and so Jews, even in the present, are exposed, once again, to hate and prejudices, which in the worst cases culminate in violence.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/hopkins-boris-win-seismic-moment-our-history-katie-hopkins/

There are still times this little island I live on manages to surprise me. Right now, I could kiss it’s rolling hills and green and pleasant lands.

Boris Johnson’s stunning win in the British General Election 2019 is simply electrifying. It gives him a clear majority in the House of Commons and an equally clear mandate to Get Brexit Done by 31 January.

The reaction of decent Brits and law-abiding patriots could not be more thrilling. Boris re-imagined a clip from Love, Actually in his campaign and right now it really does feel as if there is ‘joy all around’.

It is not just that Boris won. Nor the size of his majority at 78. Nor the fact that his power is nearing Thatcher’s.

It is the affirmation that the heart and soul of this country is still intact. That the British spirit is alive and kicking and that some kind of fight-back for our Judeo-Christian culture is on.

Despite the fact our supporters are silenced in the media, unrepresented by broadcasters and unheard in life, we are still here, ready to shout and to act when we are called upon – or, indeed, finally allowed to.

This is a very British revolution. No battles waged in the street, as in France with the Gilets Jaunes still out there week on week. No stones thrown, or windows broken, as on the streets of Hong Kong. No streak of flames across the night sky as a Molotov cocktail is tossed in anger.

Just the dignified silence of the ballot box on a cold December day in the wind and rain, reminding those who should know better that when we voted on 23 June 2016 we meant what we said. And we still mean it today.

The British people voted for Brexit. They have waited stoically for it to be delivered. And now it will be done.

All this coming from a place where things do feel truly broken. London is just picking itself back up from another terror attack on London Bridge, only recently washed down from the last blood that was spilled there.

A Muslim mayor presides over the highest murder rates in modern history, with Chicago-level numbers of black-on-black stabbings, the slaughter of children as young as 14, and feuding drug gangs settling scores with knives.

https://www.steynonline.com/9913/boffo-boris

Whatever one feels about Boris Johnson (and almost any one who’s had any truck with the man has, if he’s honest, highly mixed views) today’s election is a spectacular triumph for him. On the day Andrew Scheer, the Canadian Tory leader, announced he would be stepping down, the UK Tory leader led his party to their biggest share of the vote in half-a-century and swiped seats held by Labour since 1935 – from Blythe Valley to Bishop Auckland. Both Scheer and Johnson are unprincipled opportunists, but the latter is a fighter who knows how to return the ball and swat it down the opposition’s gullet.

He was fortunate, of course, in finding himself up against Jeremy Corbyn rather than Justin Trudeau. Whether this was a referendum on Corbynism or on Brexit I leave for the exit pollsters, but either way Labour looks set to be reduced to fewer than 200 seats for the first time in eighty-four years. As I write, there appears to have been, in pure psephological terms, a swing away from Labour of about ten per cent. Six per cent of that went to the Brexit Party, not that it was enough to win them any seats, with the rest being split between Tories and the Liberal Democrats. So, put crudely, historically Labour working-class constituencies in northern England that voted Leave and were then screwed over by the subversives of a Remainer Parliament abandoned century-old tribal loyalties to Labour and shifted to pro-Brexit parties.

On the other hand, in leafier southern territory middle-class Remainers weary of Corbyn’s equivocation on the subject shifted in smaller numbers to the LibDems, as the party most upfront about its willingness to subvert the result of the referendum (“Bollocks to Brexit”). As a result, Labour has been reduced to a pantomime horse of urban redoubts – immigrant enclaves in the North and Midlands and upscale champagne-socialist quartiers of London, either indifferent or rather partial to Jeremy Corbyn’s particular baggage.