U.S. vs. China: Who Really Stands for Peace?

Cross-posted from GlobalResearch.ca by Jerry Alatalo | May 6, 2024

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By Megan Russell

Thousands of innocent civilians are dying– men, women, children– being bombed to death as they sit in their homes.

Thousands of Ukrainian and Russian men have been unwillingly drafted into the military, torn from their families, forced to kill each other, and forced to die.

Images and videos of cold-blooded genocide plague our news in a constant loop, and our government has the audacity to sit in their comfy little chairs and not only deny what is happening, but to also order more money sent to continue these horrors.

The US has a long history of involvement in overseas conflict; this isn’t the first time we’ve had to fight back against militants in power, and it won’t be the last. Now, the US clearly has its sights set on China. Billions of dollars have already been spent militarizing the Asia-Pacific, surrounding China with military bases and conducting threatening war games– the US military’s version of peacocking.

The first step of war, as US military elites are well aware, is information warfare. Currently, the media is spouting hateful rhetoric towards China, contributing to a giant spike in Asian-American hate crime. Our political leaders accuse China of everything the US is guilty of: preparing for war, spying, stifling business. The government is so paranoid they’ve even banned the Chinese social media app Tiktok– an unprecedented divergence from our first amendment rights.

We’re at a critical junction in history. Either we let the US continue to spout narratives of fear and division and drive us towards war, or we sift through the lies, raise the truth, and fight back against the imperialist elite.

It’s time to re-navigate the situation. Let’s step back and debunk some claims.

Statement: China Wants War

Evidence:

China has, throughout its thousands of years of history, long stood for peace and harmony. Modern political ideology is interwoven with ancient Chinese philosophy and the belief that war is a failure of the state.

But let’s look at something nobody can dispute: what are US politicians saying, and how does this compare to what Chinese politicians are saying?

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently published a report detailing five objectives China had for Secretary Blinken’s visit this week, reflecting the ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence’, a foundational pillar of Chinese foreign policy.

One of those objectives was for “the China-US relationship should be stabilized, improved, and move forward along a path of stability, health, and sustainability.” They also advocated for mutual cooperation, strengthening dialogue, and effectively managing differences.

Meanwhile, numerous US political and military figures have said the opposite, calling for the US to raise arms and surround China with military bases, missiles, and troops. They cite a future war as almost inevitable, declaring that China will “invade” Taiwan by 2027. Just this month, Xi Jinping met with the former president of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, to express their mutual consensus to stand for peace, agreeing that war “would be an unbearable burden for the Chinese nation.”

To summarize, China does not want war. Prominent political figures and spokespersons have repeatedly pronounced their adherence to peace, and have implored the US numerous times to work towards mutually beneficial cooperation rather than current antagonistic practices.

Conclusion: FALSE!

Statement: The US Stands for Peace

Evidence:

You might be thinking: who has ever made that statement? Quite a few, believe it or not.

We’re going to look at the statement in the context of China, and for a moment, leave behind all the other wars the US has been involved in and actively pushed for.

The United States spends more money on defense spending than the ten following countries combined. That’s around $850 billion dollars per year– and every year, the amount goes up. In 2024, the budget request was for $911 billion dollars.

A good amount of this money has been spent building military bases in the Asia-Pacific, surrounding China with threatening long-range missiles and other defense systems. As it stands, the US has over 750 military bases around the world, with 313 bases in East Asia alone. Meanwhile, China has no military bases in the entire Western hemisphere.

 

US military strategy in the Asia-Pacific operates along one dominant strategy: militarize, militarize, militarize. Policy experts continue to recommend “porcupining” nearby nations, including Japan, the Philippines, and Guam. In doing so, they have repeatedly harmed the natural environment, destroying protected reefs and dumping harmful chemicals into the ocean. Many locals denounce US military presence and rising militarism, terrified they may be pulled into a conflict they want no part in.

The truth is, the US has a long history of war and imperialism. Including militaristic and covert operations, the US has invaded over 50 countries since its inception. Since WW2, the US has started wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, all of which were unmitigated disasters. Adversely, China has not fought a war in 45 years.

The US pushing for a war with China is not new or surprising, but we have to do everything we can to stop the push before it escalates. Tell Biden administration that China is Not Our Enemy and sign the petition telling Congress to vote NO on militarizing the Philippines. 

Conclusion: FALSE!

Statement: The US Needs to Protect Itself by Surrounding China with Weapons

Evidence:

Policy experts and military professionals adhere to the concept of deterrence with a disconcerting level of zeal. Logically, and according to their favorite Game Theory 101 class, it makes sense. One is less likely to attack if they are aware how strong their opponent is– aware they would face severe repercussions that outweigh any potential gain.

However, the logic goes sour when you recognize a few basic facts: 

• One, China is not an opponent and does not wish to be an opponent.
• Two, hyper-militarizing the Asia-Pacific makes war more likely, not less. It’s not deterrence– it’s provocation.
• Three, the US is trampling on the desires of local populations and harming the environment while at it.

China does not want war, as we’ve covered, and has expressed its concern that US militarization of the region can lead to increased risk for misunderstanding and misjudgment– which could easily escalate into conflict. The US needs to focus on prevention rather than deterrence, by strengthening dialogue, reaffirming commitments to peace, and fostering a partnership with China on other potentially catastrophic issues, such as environmental protection and nuclear disarmament.

Ultimately, there are no gains to be had by throwing billions of tax dollars into militarizing the Asia-Pacific. What the US fails to realize is that there are people living on the land they are abusing. The environment is protected– and sacred– and the military-industrial complex has no place rearing its ugly head where it does not belong.

Conclusion: FALSE!

Statement: The US Needs to “Beat” China to Maintain Power and Position

Evidence:

First, it’s important to acknowledge the origins of such a claim. Why, exactly, does the US need to maintain its hegemonic status over China, and why are our politicians and policy experts so obsessed with the idea?

There are three terrible, powerful factors at play here: colonialism, imperialism, and racism.

Colonialism: The US has a steep history of adhering to colonialist doctrines. Even its inception was a story of colonialism, running Native Americans off their indigenous lands to take over. Over the course of its comparatively short lifetime, the US has seized Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, the Philippines, Hawaii, and more. The US government feels it has the right to continue abusing these ties, building military bases against the desire of local indigenous populations.

Imperialism: US imperialism is essentially the belief in the expansion of American political, economic, military, and cultural influences. It ties into colonialism in many ways, reflecting the belief in racial and cultural superiority.

Racism: Racism is one of the driving factors of US imperialism and colonialism– the glamorization of “the white savior” to lead “others” out of barbarity and into salvation. Sinophobia has run rampant in the US for many years, leaking into American politics and media. Since the 2020 global pandemic, Asian American hate crimes have been on the rise.

All three tie together into a twisted undercurrent of thought running below the surface of US foreign policy. While US politicians push us towards confrontation for the sake of preserving a US hegemony, China reports that, “We firmly believe that great power competition should not be the dominant theme of this era, nor can it solve the problems faced by China, the US, and the world.”

Yikes. That’s a stiff departure from Biden’s “we want competition with China” State of the Union speech, and an even worse departure from former Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger and Congressman Mike Gallagher who say, “The United States shouldn’t manage competition with China; it should win it.” In doing so, they also claim that “the US needs to accept that achieving it will require greater friction in US-China relations.” This is nothing short of an admittance: US political leaders are so concerned with winning some power competition that they’ll risk going to war– push for it, even.

RAND policy experts punched the numbers. Even a minor conflict could lead to a 20-35% economic shrinkage of China’s economy. This would devastate the lives of millions of Chinese citizens. Recovery would take years. It’s no wonder the US imperial agenda is pushing for war.

Conclusion: FALSE!

Imagining a Better World…

The US has spent billions and billions of dollars preparing for war with China. Imagine what the world would look like if those billions had been spent elsewhere– on infrastructure, poverty alleviation, cultivating a peace economy, environmental sustainability initiatives, pushing for love and mutual respect rather than division, fear, and hate…

There is a world where the US and China are capable of a respectful, cooperative relationship, where differences are set aside in accordance with a bigger picture: how can we make the world better for each and every person? How can we cultivate peace? How can we preserve the natural environment and ward off climate change?

Humans have been on this earth for a long time, and yet, we still don’t know what it would be like to live a life of peace. War infects every community, influencing the ways we live and interact with the world. It’s up to us, as citizens of the most militaristic country in the world, to put an end to our government’s rampage of imperialism and fear.

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Megan Russell is CODEPINK’s China is Not Our Enemy Campaign Coordinator. She graduated from the London School of Economics with a Master’s Degree in Conflict Studies. Prior to that, she attended NYU where she studied Conflict, Culture, and International Law. Megan spent one year studying in Shanghai, and over eight years studying Chinese Mandarin. Her research focuses on the intersection between US-China affairs, peacebuilding, and international development.  

Featured image is from InfoBrics

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Megan Russell, Global Research, 2024

Hempcrete Manufacturing Offers Massive Business Potential for Native American Tribes.

[Editor’s note: Article cross-posted from PopularResistance.org on December 26, 2023 | My comment at the post: “Hempcrete manufacturing represents a very rare business opportunity for Native American tribes to ‘turn the tables’, so to speak, on the white man, and get in on the ground floor of a just-born massive potential business market, unchained to the starting blocks (this time around), and free to succeed wildly in what could very well become the dominant form of house/building construction globally in the near future…”]

THE LOWER SIOUX NEED HOMES, SO THEY’RE BUILDING THEM FROM HEMP

• By Judith Matloff, Next City. December 24, 2023

Above photo: The Lower Sioux tribe is investing in hemp as a source of housing and revenue to hopefully sustain the tribe in the future. Aaron Nesheim / Grist.

The Indigenous Nation, One Of The Smallest In The Country, Will Soon Have The America’s First And Only Facility To Create Hempcrete.

For now, it’s only a gaping hole in the ground, 100-by-100 feet, surrounded by farm machinery and bales of hemp on a sandy patch of earth on the Lower Sioux Indian Reservation in southwestern Minnesota.

But when construction is complete next April, the Lower Sioux — also known as part of the Mdewakanton Band of Dakota — will have a 20,000-square-foot manufacturing campus that will allow them to pioneer a green experiment, the first of its kind in the United States.

They will have an integrated vertical operation to grow hemp, process it into insulation called hempcrete, and then build healthy homes with it. Right now, no one in the U.S. does all three.

Once the tribe makes this low-carbon material, they can begin to address a severe shortage of housing and jobs. Recapturing a slice of sovereignty would be a win for the Lower Sioux, once a largely woodland people who were subjected to some of the worst brutality against the Indigenous nations in North America.

They lost most of their lands in the 19th century, and the territory finally allotted to them two hours south of Minneapolis consists of just 1,743 acres of poor soil. That stands in contrast to the fertile black earth of the surrounding white-owned farmlands.

Nearly half of the 1,124 enrolled members of the tribe need homes. Some of the unhoused camp on the hard ground outside the reservation, with nowhere else to turn. Those who do have shelter live in often moldy, modular homes with flimsy walls that can’t keep out the minus-15 Fahrenheit winter cold.

Now, they have two prototypes that are nearly done and know how to build or retrofit more. While learning how to make the houses, the construction team developed a niche eco-skill they can market off the reservation as well.

“The idea of making homes that would last and be healthy was a no-brainer,” said Robert “Deuce” Larsen, the tribal council president.

“We need to build capacity in the community and show that it can be an income stream.”

That one of the smallest tribes in the country, in terms of population and land in trust, is leading the national charge on an integrated hempcrete operation is no mean feat, seeing that virtually no one in the community had experience with either farming or construction before the five-person team was assembled earlier this year.

“It’s fantastic,” said Jody McGuinness, executive director of the Hemp Industries Association. “I haven’t heard of any other fully integrated project like this domestically.”

Besides, hempcrete as a construction material is normally the domain of rich people with means to contract a green home, not marginalized communities. That’s because the sustainable material is normally imported from Europe rather than made locally.

“It’s accessible to people with wealth, who can afford to build a bespoke house. It’s not accessible to the general public,” McGuinness said.

The project is the brainchild of Earl Pendleton, 52, a rail-thin man of quiet intensity, who until recently was the tribal council’s vice president. He grew obsessed with industrial hemp when reading about it 13 years ago.

Pendleton was intrigued to learn that the bamboo-like plant has 25,000 uses, including wood substitutes, biofuel, bioplastics, animal feed, and textiles.

Hemp can grow in a variety of climates and, depending on the location, can yield more than one harvest a year. What’s more, hemp regenerates soil, sequesters carbon, and doesn’t require fertilizers.

“It blew my mind,” he recalled.

People often confuse hemp with its cannabis cousin, marijuana. But hemp has negligible THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive component that creates a weed high. And this stalky variant is more versatile than the flowery CBD (cannabidiol) type.

Hempcrete is made by mixing mashed stalks with lime and water. The resulting oatmeal-like substance is stuffed or sprayed into the cavities of framed walls. Once it hardens, it resembles cement to the touch (thus the name) but has different properties.

The petrified substance has airtight qualities that can dramatically cut down on heating and air-conditioning needs. Unlike many commonly used building materials, it is nontoxic and resists mold, fire, and pests.

While it’s used in Europe, commercial hemp was banned in the U.S. until the 2018 Farm Bill. Since then, hempcrete has been slow to catch on, due to a chicken-and-egg conundrum. Farmers don’t want to plant without facilities nearby to process the stalks. Potential processors don’t want to buy expensive machinery without guarantees of raw material. And most American contractors don’t know anything about hempcrete.

Aside from the green value, Pendleton saw a chance to pivot from the reservation’s Jackpot Junction Casino, the tribe’s main source of income for the past 35 years. A bronze statue of a warrior spearing a buffalo stands in front.

For many years, as Pendleton managed the floor and worked blackjack, he saw gamblers lose their paychecks, and more. The Lower Sioux weren’t getting richer. The population on the reservation has expanded rapidly since 2000, which means the per capita cut that each family gets from the $30 million yearly profits has shrunk. For most families, it is the only income they receive.

“We sell misery. It’s nothing to be proud of, the money to be made here,” Pendleton said.

He added that the guaranteed money from the casinos killed many people’s ambitions to get education or training for jobs, or to seek work off the reservation.

It took a while for him to convince the tribal leadership to endorse his hemp vision. “When I would bring it up eight years ago, they’d say, ‘What? You’re going to smoke the wall?’ They associated it with weed.”

He had some learning to do, too. Pendleton knew nothing about the industry, so he binged on YouTube videos about techniques and drove around the country to meet experts.

“It was daunting,” he said.

Once the tribal council got on board three years ago, they cobbled together loans, government grants, and their own funds to earmark more than $6 million to build the first two prototype homes and the processing campus.

They have the potential to plant hemp on 300 acres and, at a given time, grow on between 100 and 200 acres. Test seeds came from New Genetics in Colorado and the Dun Agro Hemp Group, a Dutch company with a new processing facility in Indiana that is seeking partnerships with tribal communities.

Pendleton recruited Joey Goodthunder, a cheerful 33-year-old who had picked up farming cattle and corn from his grandfather, as agricultural processing manager. Goodthunder set to planting in a field called Cansa’yap, or “the place where they paint the trees red,” which is what the tribe used to do to mark territory.

Pendleton lured as project manager Danny Desjarlais, 38, a tattooed carpenter who had been thinking about becoming a long-haul truck driver for lack of other work.

“Earl found out and took me and my kids’ mom out to eat and told her, ‘If he drives a truck, he’s not going to be home every night. I’ll have him home for dinner every night,’” Desjarlais said.

Desjarlais entertained doubts about this bizarre product he had never heard of. Pendleton sealed the deal by taking him to a hemp building conference in Austin, Texas. “That was eye-opening,” Desjarlais said.

Pendleton signed up three other Lower Sioux, only one of whom had experience putting up walls. And he invited two luminaries in hemp building — Jennifer Martin, a partner in HempStone, and Cameron McIntosh of Americhanvre — to teach the different application techniques. They are based, respectively, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.

Intrigued by what this project could achieve in terms of Native sovereignty, Martin traveled to Minnesota again and again to usher the crew through the project.

“What the Lower Sioux is doing is the most compelling and forward-thinking thing that’s happening in hempcrete today,” she said. “No one else is doing anything like this. And Danny is one of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with; he’s like a sponge.”

The venture has, unsurprisingly, experienced bumps. Equipment housed at another company’s warehouse nearby broke down. Replacement parts were backlogged due to pandemic supply chain issues. Since they couldn’t process hemp in the time allotted to build, the crew had to import some.

Goodthunder, meanwhile, struggled with harvesting techniques alien to conventional agriculture, such as leaving cut stalks to rot in the field for weeks so that unwanted seeds can separate from the woody inner fiber, called hurd.

Yet they’ve made progress.

They began with a demo shed in September, 2022, placed on a field where the tribe holds powwows, an annual celebration of music and dance. The kids used it as a concession stand to sell sodas and candies. The remaining skeptics all wanted their pictures taken next to it.

“Once they saw it, they changed their minds,” Desjarlais said. “They said, ‘Let’s build a house.’”

Build they did. In a 14-day blitz in July, the team threw together a 1,500-square-foot lime-green ranch, without any blueprints. It’ll be used as two units of temporary housing for people coming from substance abuse treatment or jail.

“Everyone said, ‘It‘s impossible.’ Even people in the hemp world thought it was impossible,” Desjarlais said proudly. His muscled arm, tattooed with the words “Love Life,” pointed at the hempcrete blocks wedged securely into the 12-inch-thick walls. A pleasant, haylike smell wafted through the house.

Another four-room prototype is already framed and being filled with hempcrete. It will be rented out to community members when done.

The processing campus where they hope to manufacture blocks or panels of hempcrete has a solar greenhouse to store bags of lime and hemp, as well as equipment such as a combine harvester and a decorticator that separates the hurd from the softer fibers that can be used for textiles.

The project could serve as an example for the 573 other federally recognized tribes, many of which face similar critical shortages of jobs and housing. Native Americans retain 25 percent of U.S. land tenure in federal trust, and self-governing communities don’t have to wait for permits from other authorities.

Larsen, the tribal president, thinks hemp could provide a lucrative income stream for tribes that have the land to grow it and a trained crew that can offer its skills off the reservation.

“Native American tribes have an advantage, because they can build with materials that are new, without having to get them certified by a national agency,” said McGuinness. “They don’t have the bureaucracy holding them down.”

What’s more, he’s hearing about non-tribal companies, Dun Agro among them, that are viewing tribal communities as development partners.

Architect Bob Escher, who has four residential designs in the works involving hemp, sees demand for skilled hemp professionals increasing as green building takes off. So far, there are only a handful of these experts in the U.S.

“Who knew five years ago that a hempcrete consultant would be sitting at the same table with structural engineers, electrical contractors, HVAC installers, and interior designers to help me and the client develop the design program,” he said. “This is the pure definition of job creation.”

For now, the Lower Sioux undertaking has caught the eye of four other reservations in Minnesota, as well as Dallas Goldtooth, who plays the Spirit in the hit show Reservation Dogs on Hulu. Desjarlais said the actor was interested in a hempcrete build for his mother, who lives in the community.

Farther north, the Gitxsan First Nation in Canada invited Desjarlais to show them in August how to build. They’ve grown enough hemp for three prototype homes on their Sik-E-Dakh reserve 16 hours north of Vancouver and are seeking $5.5 million (Canadian) to get a similar integrated project off the ground.

Desjarlais left them inspired, said Velma Sutherland, a band administrator. “This could be the start of something big.”