In the West Junk Information And Junk Judgment Prevail© Global Research
The Western world and that part of the world that partakes of Western explanations live in a fictional world.
We see this everywhere we lookโin the alleged machinations of Russia to elect Donald Trump president of the US, in claims that Saddam Hussein and his (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction were a threat to the United States (a mushroom cloud over American cities), that Assad of Syria used chemical weapons against his own people, that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, that a few Saudi Arabians outwitted the entirety of the US, EU, and Israeli intelligence services and delivered the greatest humiliation to the "world's only superpower" in the history of mankind, that Russia invaded Ukraine and could at any moment invade the Baltics and Poland, that the US rate of unemployment is 4.6%, that China's trade surplus with the US is due to Chinese currency manipulation, and so on and on.
Allegedly we live in a scientific era of information, but what good can come from faulty orchestrated information? As long as fake news delivered by presstitutes serves powerful private and governmental interests,
how can we know the truth about anything?For example, consider the claim found everywhere in US government and US media statements that the massive US trade deficit with China is the result of Chinese currency manipulation, keeping the yuan underpriced relative to the US dollar.
This false claim, which is widely accepted as truth even by Russian writers on Russian
websites, is nonsense. China's currency is pegged to the US dollar. It moves with the dollar. China pegged its currency to the US dollar in order to create confidence in the Chinese currency. Over the past decade China has adjusted the peg of its currency to the dollar and permitted a rise in the value of the Chinese currency from 8.1 yuan to 6.9 yuan to the US dollar. (The yuan reached a strength of 6 to the dollar, but a rising dollar was pulling up the yuan, causing China to widen the float in order to avoid undue appreciation because of the US dollar's rise to other Asian and European currencies.) How is a rising yuan "currency manipulation"? Don't expect an answer from the presstitute financial media or the junk economists who comprise the neoliberal economics profession.
Comment: It's great to see someone seeking to mend relations with Russia. As Congressman Rohrabacher has said in past delegations to Russia, But if the US thinks they can lure Russia away from China, after sabotaging them in Ukraine, Syria, sanctions, and waves of propaganda, they're in for yet another embarrassing defeat.