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In this mailing:
* Peter Schweizer: Elite Capture
* Amir Taheri: France and its Specter


** Elite Capture ([link removed])
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by Peter Schweizer • February 20, 2022 at 5:00 am
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* [Elite capture] is a crucial tool of [China's] success. The idea is simple enough: by tempting another country's elite with money, access and favors, you move them to see their interests and China's interests as intertwined or even the same.
* [Each] of the individuals we discuss would deny their role in helping China gain access to American capital markets, American military and surveillance technology, or American policy making. Each will say they are merely pursuing business opportunities that the Chinese market has offered them, as any goods capitalist should. They may argue the companies they run are truly international...
* Ray Dalio, who wrote in his 2017 book, which bears the title Principles, of his "personal hero," Wang Qishan. "Every time I speak with Wang," Dalio swooned, "I feel like I get closer to cracking the unifying code that unlocks the laws of the universe." Wang is the second most powerful man in the Chinese Communist Party and known as Xi's enforcer. The Economist called him "the most feared man in China." But not to Dalio. Readers learn, on the very next page of that book that at the same time Dalio was trying to start a new hedge fund in China.
* Nor are they all as obsequious about it as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.
* Almost everything [Apple] sells is manufactured in China, and the iPhone has more than 23 percent of the market for phones in China. Apple has repeatedly been accused of benefiting from the forced labor of Chinese Uyghurs, which the company denies.
* As the muckraker and novelist Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Elite capture is a crucial tool of China's success. The idea is simple enough: by tempting another country's elite with money, access and favors, you move them to see their interests and China's interests as intertwined or even the same. (Image source: iStock)

While researching how Americans having been getting rich by helping the Chinese Communist Party achieve its outspoken aim of replacing the US as the "world's No.1 power," I came across the phrase "elite capture" -- their term to describe the actions of influential people in the US towards China.

"Elite capture" can refer to different things, but to the Chinese Communist Party, China's intelligence apparatus, or those involved in quasi-private business ventures, it is a crucial tool of their success. The idea is simple enough: by tempting another country's elite with money, access and favors, you move them to see their interests and China's interests as intertwined or even the same.

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** France and its Specter ([link removed])
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by Amir Taheri • February 20, 2022 at 4:00 am
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titute.org/18246/france-specter-islam#print
* In any case, Islam, though it has contributed to numerous civilizations, isn't itself a civilization but a religion. It is the French who, in their universities and such places as the Louvre Museum, bring dozens of different civilizations, cultures and arts under the "Islamic" label. That, in turn, legitimizes those, like the Muslim Brotherhood, the Khomeinists, Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda and ISIS among others, who reduce Islam to a political ideology or even a slogan under which they pursue their quest for power.
* Over the past three decades, the French state has granted official recognition to over 3,000 mosques and Islamic associations, enabling them to benefit from tax exemptions and other pecuniary advantages worth billions of euros.
* France does have an "Islamic problem". But it is of its own making....

(Image source: iStock)

"A specter is haunting France, the specter of Islam!"

This is the message that, with variations of intonation and nuance, comes from almost all of the dozen or so declared candidates in France's forthcoming presidential election.

This reminds those of us who witnessed the 20-year-long Brexit saga of the ordeal that Britain went through to end up more divided than ever and less able to deal with the problems that the anti-immigration discourse occulted under a fog of pseudo-nationalism.

In Britain, the anti-immigration slogan targeted citizens of European Union states but, in fact, was aimed at all immigrants and those with foreign descent especially from Africa and South Asia.

More importantly, it tried to hide Britain's deeper problems such as growing inequality, industrial decline, an education system in crisis, a fragile demography, de-sacralization of political and moral authority, and fissiparous tendencies in parts of the kingdom.

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