myth that asians have no empathy

The Most Empathetic Countries in The World Have Just Been Ranked

BEC CREW

17 OCT 2016

For the first time, scientists have ranked nations by the empathy of their people, and according to data collected from 104,365 adults across 63 different countries, Ecuador is the most empathetic country in the world, followed by Saudi Arabia and Peru.
The study, which placed the US at no. 7 on the list, measured the locals’ compassion for others and their tendency to imagine another person’s point of view. Lithuania was ranked as the least empathetic country of the bunch.
Conducted by researchers from Michigan State University, the study has been described as the most comprehensive and descriptive understanding of empathy around the world to date.
Based on online surveys completed by more than 100,000 representatives, it looks at the links between empathetic feelings and various personality traits and 'prosocial' behaviours, such as volunteering and charitable donations.
"To our knowledge, this study is by far the largest examination of cultural differences in empathy, with respect to both the number of individuals and the number of countries represented," the researchers conclude.
Here’s the top 10:

Ecuador
Saudi Arabia
Peru
Denmark
United Arab Emirates
Korea
United States
Taiwan
Costa Rica
Kuwait

The countries with the lowest Total Empathy scores were Lithuania, Venezuela, Estonia, Poland, and Bulgaria, with the team finding that seven of the 10 least empathetic countries were in Eastern Europe.

You can see the rankings of other countries in the map at the top of the page. (Larger version here.)
The researchers defined empathy as the tendency to be psychologically in tune with others’ feelings and perspectives. To measure this in the participants, they asked them to complete a comprehensive list of questions drawn from several standardised tests.
These tests assessed each person’s empathy, basic personality traits, prosociality, and individualism/collectivism - meaning if they prefer loosely knit social networks and individuality, or tightly knit social networks and interdependence with others.
They also measured each individual’s self-esteem and feelings of wellbeing.
The volunteers were asked to rank a series of statements ranging from, "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me," to "On the whole, I am satisfied with myself."
They were asked how happy they felt with their lives, and how often they donated money to an organisation, volunteered time to an organisation, or helped a stranger. Personality traits such as agreeableness and conscientiousness were also assessed.
The results showed that 'collectivistic' countries - meaning those with participants that preferred tightly knit social groups and interdependence - were higher in empathy, and empathy across each country’s volunteers was linked with agreeableness, conscientiousness, self-esteem, subjective well-being, and prosocial behaviours.
Being the first such study attempting to assess empathy on such an enormous scale, there are a number of limitations that should be taken into account.
There's the fact that the surveys were all conducted in English, and that the results relied on self-reporting by the volunteers. The study also did not distinguish between feelings of empathy toward people in the participants' own country versus those in other countries.
The researchers also emphasised that this is just "a snapshot of what empathy looks like at this very moment", and say they expect the values for each country to shift in the coming years.
But despite the limitations, the researchers say the results give us a crucial insight into how empathy is expressed in different cultures - and gives future researchers are far more diverse sample to work with when examining empathy.
"Despite the strong influence that culture has on how we relate to others around us, researchers have generally relied on samples of North American college students when studying empathy," they explain.
"Given the important role of empathy in everyday social life, we hope that the current study will stimulate research examining how empathy is expressed in different cultures and social settings, and help inform future research on the relationship between empathy and culture from a broader and a more representative perspective."
The results have been published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology.

U.S. biggest sponsor of terrorism and war xinjiang uyghurs cold war

Excerpt from the book Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia by Paul L. Williams : "Throughout the 1990s, hundreds of Uyghurs were transported to Afghanistan by the CIA for training in guerrilla warfare by the mujahideen. When they returned to Xinjiang, they formed the East Turkistan Islamic Movement and came under Çatlı's expert direction. Graham Fuller, CIA superspy, offered this explanation for radicalizing the Chinese Muslims: The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them [Muslims] against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia. This policy of destabilization was devised by Bernard Lewis, an Oxford University specialist on Islamic studies, who called for the creation of an “Arc of Crisis” around the southern borders of the Soviet Union by empowering Muslim radicals to rebel against their Communist overlords."

trade bullying u.s. patents japan

If history is a mirror to the future, the similarities between the spiralling technology stand-off between China and the US and the economic wars waged by the US with Japan – which peaked in the 1980s and 1990s – may be instructive. But there are differences between the two which may predict a different outcome.

The US-Japan economic tensions started in the 1950s over textiles, extended to synthetic fibres and steel in the 1960s, and escalated – from the 1970s to 1990s – to colour televisions, cars and semiconductors, as Japan’s adjusted industrial policy and technology development moved it up the industrial chain.

Boosted by government support, Japan’s semiconductor industry surpassed the US as the world’s largest chip supplier in the early 1980s, causing wariness and discontent in the US over national security risks and its loss of competitiveness in core technologies.

The Reagan administration regarded Japan as the biggest economic threat to the US. Washington accused Tokyo of state-sponsored industrial policies, intellectual property theft from US companies, and of dumping products on the American market.

The US punished Japanese companies for allegedly stealing US technology and illegally selling military sensitive products to the Soviet Union. It also forced Japan to sign deals to share its semiconductor technologies and increase its purchases of US semiconductor products.

“The Trump administration is using similar tactics against China that were used against Japan in the 1980s and 1990s,” said an adviser to the Chinese government, on condition of anonymity, adding that the US was continuing its hegemony to curtail China’s tech development and was trying to mobilise its allies to follow suit.

After talks to end the US-China trade faltered last month, Huawei – a global leader in the 5G market – is now standing at centre stage of a protracted technology stand-off between Beijing and Washington, which has grown increasingly wary of the rising competitiveness of Chinese tech companies.

Zhang Monan, a researcher with the Beijing-based China Centre for International Economic Exchanges, does not foresee an easing of the rivalry between the US and China.

“The current US-China conflicts are more complicated than those between the US and Japan,” she said.

“The US will only get more intense in its containment of China and the tech rivalry won’t ease, even if China and the US could reach a deal to de-escalate the trade tensions.”

Huawei is at the centre of a technology stand-off between Beijing and Washington. Photo: AP

Back in 1982, the US justice department charged senior officials at Hitachi with conspiracy to steal confidential computer information from IBM and take it back to Japan. IBM also sued Hitachi. The two companies settled the case out of court and Hitachi paid 10 billion yen (US$92.3 million) to IBM in royalties in 1983, while accepting IBM inspections of its new software products for the next five years.

Toshiba, a major electronics producer in Japan, and Norway’s Kongsberg Vaapenfabrikk secretly sold sophisticated milling machines to the Soviet Union from 1982 to 1984, helping to make its submarines quieter and harder to detect. This transfer of sensitive military technology in the middle of an arms race between the US and the Soviet Union was not revealed until 1986.

The US issued a three-year ban on Toshiba products in 1987 and the company ran full-page advertisements in more than 90 American newspapers apologising for its actions.

In 1985, the US imposed 100 per cent tariffs on Japanese semiconductors. A year later, in its five-year semiconductor deal with the US, Japan agreed to monitor its export prices, increase imports from the US, and submit to inspections by the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

A display of chips designed by Huawei for 5G base stations on show at the China International Big Data Industry Expo. Photo: AP

This was followed by a second five-year semiconductor deal in 1991, in which Japan agreed to double the US market share in Japan to 20 per cent. In yet another bilateral semiconductor deal in 1989 Japan was required to open its semiconductor patents to the US.

Meanwhile, the US government boosted its efforts to help American businesses cement their industrial leverage in the chip sector and unveiled rules to protect its domestic chip industry.

The two countries were irreconcilable in 1996 on how to measure their respective market share. Overall market circumstances had also changed by then, with the US becoming competitive in microprocessing, and South Korea and Taiwan emerging as strong rivals to Japan.

Its dominance in semiconductors lost, Japan reached out to Europe for a range of cooperative technology deals.

Cooperate, don’t confront: academic advises Beijing on trade war tactics

“History can tell that high technology matters greatly to national security strategies. It is not a process of mere market competition. It follows the law of the jungle,” Zhang said.

The US has intensified its investment scrutiny by rolling out the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernisation Act last year, which extends the regulation to key industrial technology sectors.

Zhang predicted the US would continue to contain China’s technological development in key sectors such as AI, aerospace, robots and nanotechnology – all of which are of great importance to Beijing.

The US has said Chinese tech giants Huawei and ZTE present a national security risk. Last April it cut US supplies to ZTE, citing violations of sanctions against Iran and North Korea. The ban was removed three months later after ZTE paid US$1.4 billion in fines.

It was a wake-up call for China to develop its own core technologies. The subsequent US ban on Huawei added to the urgency to do so, observers said.

Wang Yiwei, a professor in international relations with Renmin University, said China had to develop its own hi-tech know-how while continuing the opening up process.

“China has paid a price to learn whose globalisation it is,” he said.

“We may see some extent of disengagement with the US in technology and dual-use sectors, but China can speed up cooperation with European countries, and other countries such as Israel, to offset the risks from the US.”

In December, the US filed criminal charges against Huawei and its chief financial officer Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, alleging bank fraud, obstruction of justice and technology theft.

The squeeze continued last month with the US blacklisting Huawei, restricting its access to American hi-tech supplies and putting pressure on its allies to freeze the company out of the 5G market. So far, those allies, including Germany and Japan, have remained hesitant about meeting the US request and refrained from siding with either country.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said on Monday that Huawei had obtained 46 commercial contracts in 30 countries as of June 6, “including some US allies and some European countries that the US has been working hard to persuade out of the contracts”.

For Zhang, the differences between Japan’s experience of US concerns of technological advancement and China’s may offer some hope for Chinese ambitions.

“Dependent on US for security protection, Japan was limited in [its ability to] push back and was already a developed country,” she said.

“But China has huge domestic market potential to address the imbalance [between] economic and technology development. This remains a big attraction to multinational companies, which would enable China to integrate into global innovation and technology cooperation, but China has to figure out how to dispel the doubts on its growth model.”

u.s. hegemony

Investment Not Democracy
It’s nothing new. From the start, the “American Century” had nothing to do with advancing democracy. As numerous key U.S. planning documents reveal over and over, the goal of that policy was to maintain and, if necessary, install governments that “favor[ed] private investment of domestic and foreign capital, production for export, and the right to bring profits out of the country,” according to Noam Chomsky. Given the United States’ remarkable possession of half the world’s capital after World War II, Washington elites had no doubt that U.S. investors and corporations would profit the most. Internally, the basic selfish national and imperial objectives were openly and candidly discussed. As the “liberal” and “dovish” imperialist, top State Department planner, and key Cold War architect George F. Kennan explained in “Policy Planning Study 23,” a critical 1948 document:

We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. … In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. … To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. … We should cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

Kennan: Stop talking about human rights and democracy.

The harsh necessity of abandoning “human rights” and other “sentimental” and “unreal objectives” was especially pressing in the global South, what used to be known as the Third World. Washington assigned the vast “undeveloped” periphery of the world capitalist system—Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and the energy-rich and thus strategically hyper-significant Middle East—a less than flattering role. It was to “fulfill its major function as a source of raw materials and a market” (actual State Department language) for the great industrial (capitalist) nations (excluding socialist Russia and its satellites, and notwithstanding the recent epic racist-fascist rampages of industrial Germany and Japan). It was to be exploited both for the benefit of U.S. corporations/investors and for the reconstruction of Europe and Japan as prosperous U.S. trading and investment partners organized on capitalist principles and hostile to the Soviet bloc.
“Democracy” was fine as a slogan and benevolent, idealistic-sounding mission statement when it came to marketing this imperialist U.S. policy at home and abroad. Since most people in the “third” or “developing” world had no interest in neocolonial subordination to the rich nations and subscribed to what U.S. intelligence officials considered the heretical “idea that government has direct responsibility for the welfare of its people” (what U.S. planners called “communism”), Washington’s real-life commitment to popular governance abroad was strictly qualified, to say the least.
“Democracy” was suitable to the U.S. as long as its outcomes comported with the interests of U.S. investors/corporations and related U.S. geopolitical objectives. Democracy had to be abandoned, undermined and/or crushed when it threatened those investors/corporations and the broader imperatives of business rule to any significant degree. As President Richard Nixon’s coldblooded national security adviser Henry Kissinger explained in June 1970, three years before the U.S. sponsored a bloody fascist coup that overthrew Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”
The U.S.-sponsored coup government that murdered Allende would kill tens of thousands of real and alleged leftists with Washington’s approval. The Yankee superpower sent some of its leading neoliberal economists and policy advisers to help the blood-soaked Pinochet regime turn Chile into a “free market” model and to help Chile write capitalist oligarchy into its national constitution.
“Since 1945, by deed and by example,” the great Australian author, commentator and filmmaker John Pilger wrote nearly nine years ago, “the U.S. has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see William Blum’s histories). Bombing is apple pie.” Along the way, Washington has crassly interfered in elections in dozens of “sovereign” nations, something curious to note in light of current liberal U.S. outrage over real or alleged Russian interference in “our” supposedly democratic electoral process in 2016. Uncle Sam also has bombed civilians in 30 countries, attempted to assassinate foreign leaders and deployed chemical and biological weapons.
If we “consider only Latin America since the 1950s,” writes the sociologist Howard Waitzkin:

[T]he United States has used direct military invasion or has supported military coups to overthrow elected governments in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Haiti, Grenada, and Panama. In addition, the United States has intervened with military action to suppress revolutionary movements in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. More recently … the United States has spent tax dollars to finance and help organize opposition groups and media in Honduras, Paraguay, and Brazil, leading to congressional impeachments of democratically elected presidents. Hillary Clinton presided over these efforts as Secretary of State in the Obama administration, which pursued the same pattern of destabilization in Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia.

Death Count: In the Millions

The death count resulting from “American Era” U.S. foreign policy runs well into the many millions, including possibly as many as 5 million Indochinese killed by Uncle Sam and his agents and allies between 1962 and 1975. The flat-out barbarism of the American war on Vietnam is widely documented on record. The infamous My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, when U.S. Army soldiers slaughtered more than 350 unarmed civilians—including terrified women holding babies in their arms—in South Vietnam was no isolated incident in the U.S. “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Noam Chomsky’s phrase at the time). U.S. Army Col. Oran Henderson, who was charged with covering up the massacre, candidly told reporters that “every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden somewhere.”

My Lai (Photo: U. S. Army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle)

It is difficult, sometimes, to wrap one’s mind around the extent of the savagery the U.S. has unleashed on the world to advance and maintain its global supremacy. In the early 1950s, the Harry Truman administration responded to an early challenge to U.S. power in Northern Korea with a practically genocidal three-year bombing campaign that was described in soul-numbing terms by the Washington Post years ago:

The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. ‘Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—20 percent of the population,’ Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later Secretary of State, said the United States bombed ‘everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.’ After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops … [T]he U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of explosives on North Korea, including 32,557 tons of napalm, an incendiary liquid that can clear forested areas and cause devastating burns to human skin.

Gee, why does North Korea fear and hate us?
This ferocious bombardment, which killed 2 million or more civilians, began five years after Truman arch-criminally and unnecessarily ordered the atom bombing of hundreds of thousands pf civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to warn the Soviet Union to stay out of Japan and Western Europe.
Some benevolent “world policeman.”
The ferocity of U.S. foreign policy in the “America Era” did not always require direct U.S. military intervention. Take Indonesia and Chile, for two examples from the “Golden Age” height of the “American Century.” In Indonesia, the U.S.-backed dictator Suharto killed millions of his subjects, targeting communist sympathizers, ethnic Chinese and alleged leftists. A senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s later described Suharto’s 1965-66 U.S.-assisted coup as s “the model operation” for the U.S.-backed coup that eliminated the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, seven years later. “The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders,” the officer wrote, “[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965.”
As Pilger noted 10 years ago, “the U.S. embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a ‘zap list’ of Indonesian Communist party members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. … The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called ‘the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia.’ ”
“No single American action in the period after 1945,” wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, “was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate [Suharto’s] massacre.”
Two years and three months after the Chilean coup, Suharto received a green light from Kissinger and the Gerald Ford White House to invade the small island nation of East Timor. With Washington’s approval and backing, Indonesia carried out genocidal massacres and mass rapes and killed at least 100,000 of the island’s residents.
Mideast Savagery
Among the countless episodes of mass-murderous U.S. savagery in the oil-rich Middle East over the last generation, few can match for the barbarous ferocity of the “Highway of Death,” where the “global policeman’s” forces massacred tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on Feb. 26 and 27, 1991. Journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:

U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. ‘It was like shooting fish in a barrel,’ said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun … for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. … ‘Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,’ said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. … U.S. pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the flight deck, from cluster bombs to 500-pound bombs. … U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions. … The victims were not offering resistance. … [I]t was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or defend.

The Highway of Death

The victims’ crime was having been conscripted into an army controlled by a dictator perceived as a threat to U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil. President George H.W. Bush welcomed the so-called Persian Gulf War as an opportunity to demonstrate America’s unrivaled power and new freedom of action in the post-Cold War world, where the Soviet Union could no longer deter Washington. Bush also heralded the “war” (really a one-sided imperial assault) as marking the end of the “Vietnam Syndrome,” the reigning political culture’s curious term for U.S. citizens’ reluctance to commit U.S. troops to murderous imperial mayhem.
As Chomsky observed in 1992, reflecting on U.S. efforts to maximize suffering in Vietnam by blocking economic and humanitarian assistance to the nation it had devastated: “No degree of cruelty is too great for Washington sadists.”
But Uncle Sam was only getting warmed up building his Iraqi body count in early 1991. Five years later, Bill Clinton’s U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright told CBS News’ Leslie Stahl that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S.-led economic sanctions imposed after the first “Persian Gulf War” (a curious term for a one-sided U.S. assault) was a “price … worth paying” for the advancement of inherently noble U.S. goals.
“The United States,” Secretary Albright explained three years later, “is good. We try to do our best everywhere.”
In the years following the collapse of the counter-hegemonic Soviet empire, however, American neoliberal intellectuals like Thomas Friedman—an advocate of the criminal U.S. bombing of Serbia—felt free to openly state that the real purpose of U.S. foreign policy was to underwrite the profits of U.S.-centered global capitalism. “The hidden hand of the market,” Friedman famously wrote in The New York Times Magazine in March 1999, as U.S. bombs and missiles exploded in Serbia, “will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
In a foreign policy speech Sen. Barack Obama gave to the Chicago Council of Global Affairs on the eve of announcing his candidacy for the U.S. presidency in the fall of 2006, Obama had the audacity to say the following in support of his claim that U.S. citizens supported “victory” in Iraq: “The American people have been extraordinarily resolved. They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah.”
It was a spine-chilling selection of locales. In 2004, the ill-fated city was the site of colossal U.S. war atrocities, crimes including the indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals, and the practical leveling of an entire city by the U.S. military in April and November. By one account, “Incoherent Empire,” Michael Mann wrote:

The U.S. launched two bursts of ferocious assault on the city, in April and November of 2004 … [using] devastating firepower from a distance which minimizes U.S. casualties. In April … military commanders claimed to have precisely targeted … insurgent forces, yet the local hospitals reported that many or most of the casualties were civilians, often women, children, and the elderly… [reflecting an] intention to kill civilians generally. … In November … [U.S.] aerial assault destroyed the only hospital in insurgent territory to ensure that this time no one would be able to document civilian casualties. U.S. forces then went through the city, virtually destroying it. Afterwards, Fallujah looked like the city of Grozny in Chechnya after Putin’s Russian troops had razed it to the ground.

The “global policeman’s” deployment of radioactive ordnance (depleted uranium) in Fallujah created an epidemic of infant mortality, birth defects, leukemia and cancer there.
‘Bug-Splat’
Fallujah was just one especially graphic episode in a broader arch-criminal invasion that led to the premature deaths of at least 1 million Iraqi civilians and left Iraq as what Tom Engelhardt called “a disaster zone on a catastrophic scale hard to match in recent memory.” It reflected the same callous mindset behind the Pentagon’s early computer program name for ordinary Iraqis certain to be killed in the 2003 invasion: “bug-splat.” America’s petro-imperial occupation led to the death of as many as one million Iraqi “bugs” (human beings). According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in December 2007, “Iraq has been killed. … [T]he American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century.”

The US Marine Corps bombarding Fallujah with a M-198 155mm Howitzer. (Photo: Wikipedia)

As the Senate is poised to confirm an alleged torturer as CIA director it is important to remember that along with death in Iraq came ruthless and racist torture. In an essay titled “I Helped Create ISIS,” Vincent Emanuele, a former U.S. Marine, recalled his enlistment in an operation that gave him nightmares more than a decade later:

I think about the hundreds of prisoners we took captive and tortured in makeshift detention facilities. … I vividly remember the marines telling me about punching, slapping, kicking, elbowing, kneeing and head-butting Iraqis. I remember the tales of sexual torture: forcing Iraqi men to perform sexual acts on each other while marines held knives against their testicles, sometimes sodomizing them with batons. … [T]hose of us in infantry units … round[ed] up Iraqis during night raids, zip-tying their hands, black-bagging their heads and throwing them in the back of HUMVEEs and trucks while their wives and kids collapsed to their knees and wailed. … Some of them would hold hands while marines would butt-stroke the prisoners in the face. … [W]hen they were released, we would drive them from the FOB (Forward Operating Base) to the middle of the desert and release them several miles from their homes. … After we cut their zip-ties and took the black bags off their heads, several of our more deranged marines would fire rounds from their AR-15s into their air or ground, scaring the recently released captives. Always for laughs. Most Iraqis would run, still crying from their long ordeal.

The award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told the ACLU about the existence of classified Pentagon evidence files containing films of U.S-“global policeman” soldiers sodomizing Iraqi boys in front of their mothers behind the walls of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. “You haven’t begun to see [all the] … evil, horrible things done [by U.S. soldiers] to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run,” Hersh told an audience in Chicago in the summer of 2014.
It isn’t just Iraq where Washington has wreaked sheer mass murderous havoc in the Middle East, always a region of prime strategic significance to the U.S. thanks to its massive petroleum resources. In a recent Truthdig reflection on Syria, historian Dan Lazare reminds us that:

[Syrian President Assad’s] Baathist crimes pale in comparison to those of the U.S., which since the 1970s has invested trillions in militarizing the Persian Gulf and arming the ultra-reactionary petro-monarchies that are now tearing the region apart. The U.S. has provided Saudi Arabia with crucial assistance in its war on Yemen, it has cheered on the Saudi blockade of Qatar, and it has stood by while the Saudis and United Arab Emirates send in troops to crush democratic protests in neighboring Bahrain. In Syria, Washington has worked hand in glove with Riyadh to organize and finance a Wahhabist holy war that has reduced a once thriving country to ruin.

Chomsky has called Barack Obama’s targeted drone assassination program “the most extensive global terrorism campaign the world has yet seen.” The program “officially is aimed at killing people who the administration believes might someday intend to harm the U.S. and killing anyone else who happens to be nearby.” As Chomsky adds, “It is also a terrorism generating campaign—that is well understood by people in high places. When you murder somebody in a Yemen village, and maybe a couple of other people who are standing there, the chances are pretty high that others will want to take revenge.”

the reason why the U.S. cannot win a case in the WTO for forced technology transfer

In any case, no one can claim that foreign companies were forced to operate in the Chinese market. The argument that US firms have been forced to transfer their technology to China thus lacks significance.

In fact, that argument was never backed by persuasive evidence. While the US trade representative, which compiled the Section 301 report, claims to have conducted many surveys, all respondents are anonymous and their assertions are little more than hearsay – nothing that would be admissible in a court of law.

911 video conspiracy theory

Christopher Bollyn: Solving 9-11, The Deception That Changed The World

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Published on Mar 4, 2017

Christopher Bollyn solves the deception of 9-11 at the Neptune Beach Library in Florida. Contact Christopher at www.bollyn.com

FOX NEWS FAKE NEWS WTO TRIPS AGREEMENT

One area of unwanted attention, from the Chinese perspective, concerns intellectual property rights ("IPRs") protection. Internationally, China has entered into various intellectual property("IP") agreements and treaties, thus demonstrating its commitment to greater protection for intellectual property rights.4 These efforts have resulted in China adopting and implementing strong substantive intellectual property laws. But, despite the changes in legislation, China has failed miserably to enforce these laws.5
China's failure to protect intellectual property rights has prompted the United States, after many failed negotiations, to file a WTO complaint against China. Among other things, the complaint targets China's criminal intellectual property laws, alleging that these criminal laws do not provide a sufficient deterrent to trademark and copyright infringement, and fails to provide adequate remedies for willful trademark infringement and copyright piracy occurring "on a commercial scale," thus violating obligations under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement ("TRIPS"). 6 The deficiencies in China's laws stem from the high thresholds that must be reached before criminal liability attaches. By way of example, China's criminal copyright provision does not impose liability unless theinfringer makes, sells, or distributes more than 500 infringing copies.7 The United States contends that these high thresholds are inconsistent with TRIPS' required criminal penalties, which were seen as a necessary component of international intellectual property reform as a means to punish and deter the more egregious acts of infringement.8
While the United States' complaint raises important legal and social issues, the difficulty of proving the allegations in the complaint cannot be understated. The United States must prove that China's laws are insufficient to deter infringement or capture large-scale piracy. In other words, the United States will have to demonstrate that "but for" the allegedly high thresholds, China's laws would criminally penalize a substantial portion of currently unreachable infringers. This will be a fact-intensive inquiry and it is not clear that the United States can marshal satisfactory factual data to support the claim. Moreover, in light of the vague language used in TRIPS' enforcement provisions, it is unclear how a panel will interpret key phrases in the relevant TRIPS provisions. A WTO panel is likely to grant China wide discretion in implementing its TRIPS obligations.