The very fact that we all spy on each other is why this story is nonsense.
There’s no value to a weather balloon given the satellites, corporate/IT espionage, and straight up spies.
This whole thing is to continue the drum up to war because China is going to surpass US economic dominance on the planet and we can’t deal with not being the global hegemon.
I’ve been watching my country drum up wars my entire life. It’s easy to call a spade a spade when you realize that the merger of Capital and unaccountable intelligence agencies are what geopolitics actually centers around.
Again, while the American public are being spoon fed this utter nonsense scare of a balloon, the US has finalized deals to finish its complete encirclement of China with military hardware this week. This balloon thing is the lowest effort distraction to the actual threat, which is a waning empire that won’t give up its death grip on the world peacefully.
The Coming War on China
johnpilger.com
For my money we were doing better before either Xi or Trump landed in the top slot and figured they were emperors and that their respective empires were threatened by mere existence of a swaggering counterpart.
China and the US have been and should be economic partners and competitors. Now both "sides" are bristling about how they each have the power to lay waste to the other but the other is the aggressor.
Yes there are problems. Respect for intellectual property, human rights, cultural suppression... and the USA has a disconcerting tendency to ignore any of its own faults on those scores and only to point the finger at China, especially when it must be time to ramp up USA defense spending again instead of investment in the very wellbeing of Americans at the most basic levels: nutrition, shelter, healthcare, education... and yeah, catching up on infrastructure and job generation. All that stuff we've been allowing successive administrations since Reagan to be ripped off in favor of deregulation and profit maximizing by private industry.
To my mind there's nothing wrong with criticizing both China and the USA for their behavior vis a vis each other. I'm happy to be an American with the right to make those criticisms.
I'm not so happy at some apparently growing (and lemming-like) anti-China US attitudes since the advent of Trump's isolationism and Xi's attempts to establish a prez-for-life gig atop the CCP. I get why Xi is uneasy about where China was going... the rise in China of modified capitalism and a consumerist middle class and trade agreements that put more Western goods in their hands and more Western ideas was bound to cause problems in China's erstwhile methods of social control.
I loathe that Xi's first thought after making examples of some annoying oligarchs as unacceptably corrupt, was to start cracking down harder on "splittists" and "separatists" and throwing culturally genocidal weight around in Xinjiang and Tibet.. harassing dissidents in Hong Kong... and making noises anew about how Taiwan is just part of the map of greater China. And increasing pressure to comply on all Chinese citizens, via more intrusive inspection of their internet usage and ubiquitous domestic surveillance.
I also loathe the American notion to suddenly tear up the Chinese-American "partnership" idea in the wake of proposals that China is always a copycat and always cheating and maybe China sic'd covid on us and how anyway China is overbearing and "coming out of its place" on the global stage.
That latter assertion makes me laugh (despite the truth that China is now overextended abroad) because for decade after decade the USA exerted imperialist ideas in Central and Latin America, then dropped those like hot rocks when caught out meddling --just for instance-- with the likes of the 1972 Chilean election and the affairs of Nicaragua in the 1980s. We hardly noticed when China began expanding its investment in Latin America, never mind Africa. We only noticed when they stepped into openly courting Pakistan when the USA tired of Pakistan's constant attempts to steer a sustainable course between domestic pressures of Islamic militants in their border provinces and keeping enough grace with the Americans to warrant $$$ in foreign aid. And sad to say, some of the "noticing" then was just a partisan thing thrown onto the wall by Rs meaning to get a leg up on criticizing Biden for departing Afghanistan when Trump at one point had to be dissuaded from leaving that venue "today, I mean it."
Much of the USA also didn't give a damn when China and the USA long ago had begun swapping parts of the supply chain around in food production and preparation, including Chinese acquisition of land in the USA for hog production and the intricacies of how many times the same damn chicken can end up flying across the ocean as a slaughtered bird, a cut-up bird, a nuggeted and breaded bird and finally a package in a USA supermarket's frozen entrees aisle. We maybe noticed when some papers reported that China had elected to leave the mess of actual hog raising over here while exporting the hog breeding technological expertise that it had purchased at the same time...
Then suddenly the US popular media swings to reporting that China is meddling with sovereign nations by bribing them with infrastructure development and yada yada. Yeah. Because they could. Like we were doing until we decided to invest money in corporate and individual tax cuts instead, and so land in the airy country of publicly traded share buybacks and all those theatre of the absurd M&A asset stripping antics of hedge funds in the private sector.
Be that as it may, there's not so much American reporting of the fact that there are now our Chinese counterparts saying stuff like "fine, do rip up this so called competitive partnership with us, go ahead, because you've been ripping off our workers for decades to prop up the American economy while trashing our landscape with effluents from your production here and your consumption over there."
We counter with lists of how much we've done to improve Chinese human rights by insisting on certain factory conditions. They counter by pointing to the turquoise and magenta waste pools of toxic compounds we're happy not to be creating shoreside from certain plastics-oriented manufacturing processes.
Both countries need to clean up their own acts. We'd do better sitting down again to see how we can cooperate to benefit more of the people of both countries. Together we are a big chunk of the people of planet Earth. But we may both have arrived at a state where only the top tier figures in the calculations, and "cooperation" becomes a passé buzzword while leaders respectively amp up for escalated hostility, not least to impress --and DISTRACT-- both domestic audiences from ongoing consolidation of wealth and power.
On the balloon(s). They're not just ordinary weather balloons, that's for sure. Plain weather balloons don't carry gear the size of buses in them. What I find most interesting is that no matter how they are publicly viewed or what they're really all about, we're living through an era in the USA where there's no such thing as "politics stops at the shoreline."
Even when we ordinary citizens and plenty in government do not know what's up with those balloons, our pols and their partisan media outlet boosters and social media influencers are willing to try to make political hay off the suggestions that anyone from either side of the aisle may have made about those balloons or China in the past few days.
