The Final Countdown – 7/25/23 – Barbenheimer Opens Big as Hollywood Strikes Rage

On this episode of The Final Countdown, host Ted Rall and Manila Chan discuss hot topics, including the Hollywood strike.
 
Steve Gill: Attorney and CEO of Gill Media
Mitch Roschelle: Media Commentator, Thought Leader, Podcaster 
Angie Wong: Journalist 
 

The show kicks off with Steve Gill, attorney and CEO of Gill Media to discuss a possible Trump indictment. 
 
In the second half of the first hour, Mitch Roschelle, Media Commentator, Thought Leader, and Podcaster discusses the imminent strikes in the U.S. economy. 
 
The second hour begins with journalist Angie Wong to talk about Hunter Biden’s Delaware dealings. 
 
The show closes with hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan discussing the latest out of China. 
 

The Final Countdown – 6/22/23 – Indian President Visits U.S. Amid Row With China

On this episode of The Final Countdown, the hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan discuss hot topics, including Modi visiting Biden in Washington. 
 
Sourabh Gupta: Senior Asia-Pacific International Relations Policy Specialist 
Nebojsa Malic: Serbian-American journalist, blogger, and translator 
Steve Gill: Attorney and CEO of Gill Media 
Jamarl Thomas: Cohost of Fault Lines
 
The show starts with Senior Asia-Pacific International Relations Policy Specialist Sourabh Gupta who joins to discuss Modi visiting Biden in Washington. 
In the second half of the first hour, the hosts spoke to Serbian American journalist Nebojsa Malic to talk about the latest round of sanctions against Russia from the EU. 
 
The second hour begins with the attorney and CEO of Gill Media Steve Gill, to discuss the Durham testimony. 
 
The show wraps up with Co-host of Fault Lines Jarmal Thomas to talk about the third-party presidential candidates. 

The Final Countdown – 6/21/23 – U.S. Doubles Down on Claim China is Building Base in Cuba

On this episode of The Final Countdown, the hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan discuss a wide range of topics, including U.S. claims of China opening a base in Cuba.  

Ted Harvey: Former Colorado State Senator, Chairman of StopJoe.com
KJ Noh: Journalist, Political Analyst, Writer, & Teacher
Luis Garate: Journalist, Expert in International Relations, and Director of Comunicambio 

The show starts with Former Colorado State Senator and Chairman of StopJoe.com Ted Harvey joins to discuss Hunter Biden’s plan to plead guilty. 
In the second half of the first hour, the hosts spoke to journalist KJ Noh to talk about U.S. claims of China opening a base in Cuba. 
 
The show wraps up with Luis Garate talking about the ex-Prime Minister of Peru being detained on conspiracy charges. 

The Final Countdown – 6/19/23 – Can a Top Level Meeting Cool U.S.-Chinese Tensions?

On this episode of The Final Countdown, the hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan discuss top news, including Blinken and Xi’s meeting in China. 

Melik Abdul: Cohost of Fault Lines 
Andy Mok: Senior Research Fellow at the Center for China and Globalization 
KJ Noh: Journalist, Political Analyst, Writer & Teacher 
Clinton Nzala: Political Commentator based in Nairobi, Writer for Africa Stream   
 
The show kicks off with Cohost of Fault Lines Melik Abdul to discuss Republicans’ lessons from the elections of 2020. 
In the second half of the first hour, the hosts spoke to Andy Mok, a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for China and Globalization to talk about A.I. and deep fakes in the upcoming 2024 elections. 
 
In the first half of the final hour, KJ Noh, Journalist and Political Analyst, discusses Blinken’s visit to China. 
 
The show wraps up with Clinton Nzala Political Commentator and writer for Africa Stream to talk about the South African president’s treatment in Poland. 

The Final Countdown – 5/24/23 – Ron DeSantis 2024? Florida Governor to Announce Candidacy

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Manila Chan and Ted Rall discuss hot topics, such as Ron DeSantis planning to announce his candidacy. 
 
Mitch Roschelle: Media Commentator, Podcaster, Macro Strategist 
Rev. Gregory Seal Livingston: Ordained minister, pastor, Civil Rights leader 
Nebojsa Malic: Journalist, blogger, and translator
Kiji Noh: Journalist, political analyst, writer and teacher 
 
In the first half hour, the hosts were joined by Media Commentator, Mitch Roschelle to discuss Ron DeSantis’ 2024 candidacy. 
 
In the second half of the hour Rev. Gregory Seal Livingston, ordained minister, pastor, and Civil Rights leader joins to discuss the Illinois clergy abuse cases. 
 
In the last hour, Nebojsa Malic, journalist, blogger, and translator, to talk about the Target controversy. 
 
The Final Countdown wrapped up with Kiji Noh, to talk about the U.S. defense pledge with Papua New Guinea. 

What If, What If, What If

Political attacks against the social media company TikTok are based on a lot of what-ifs with a heavy dose of racial bigotry. No evidence has been presented about the supposed “threats” other than theoretical speculation. Yet we are supposed to react to these paranoid delusions? This is the same thinking that got us into Iraq.

DMZ America Podcast #94 (Audio or Video): Is TikTok a Threat? France is Burning! The Non-Arrest of Donald J. Trump

Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right) debate breaking news across the nation on a busy week.

Congress grilled the CEO of the Chinese-owned social-media app TikTok, reminding Ted of the PMRC hearings of the 1980s, another moment when Congress worked hard to appear anti-fun and out of touch. Scott calls China a “threat”; Ted prefers to see them as a “challenge.” What do we have to fear from TikTok, other than becoming even stupider?

France is burning in the wake of President Emmanuel Macron’s sop to the neo-liberal class: raising the national retirement age from 62 to 64. Scott asks Ted, a French citizen, why younger Frenchmen are demonstrating in solidarity with older people they have to support in old age? Ted addresses the fact that pension reform might have been greeted differently from a different, more populist president.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg didn’t file charges against Donald Trump last week, but next week might be different. Scott and Ted agree that an arrest will empower the former president. Ted takes a victory lap on calling for Trump wanting a perp walk last week. Scott deplores liberal gloating because it feeds into Trump’s narrative.
 

 

Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast:

DMZ America Podcast Ep 94 Sec 1: Is TikTok a Threat?

DMZ America Podcast Ep 94 Sec 2: France is Burning!

DMZ America Podcast Ep 94 Sec 3: The Non-Arrest of Donald J. Trump

War for Taiwan? It Would Be Our Craziest War Ever

            America and the West have begun promoting the idea of a war against China over Taiwan. If China invades Taiwan, President Biden has said, the U.S. would go further than it has in Ukraine, sending American ground troops as well as weapons. 37% of American voters agree with Biden. But how do you go to war to defend a country from invading itself?

            According to the U.S., the U.N. and most of the world—including Taiwan itself—Taiwan is part of China.

Can the U.S. invade Ohio?

            Like many other nations places, Taiwan is in a tough spot caused by decisions made by U.S. policymakers many years ago.

            Until 1945 Taiwan was a Japanese colony. The birth certificate of my former father-in-law, an ethnic Taiwanese, read “Taipei, Japan.” The end of World War II brought a breather. Occupation forces withdrew. The Taiwanese expected independence as part of postwar decolonization. But America had other plans.

Across the Taiwan Strait, the Chinese civil war was drawing to a close. Mao Tse-Tung’s Communists were beating the far-right Nationalists (KMT) led by Chiang Kai-shek. The Nationalists, looting everything they could carry including China’s gold reserves, jumped aboard U.S. ships helpfully provided by President Harry Truman and fled to Taiwan. The exiled KMT took over, purged and murdered Taiwanese intellectuals and independence advocates and established a vicious authoritarian dictatorship of the type propped up by the U.S. around the globe during the Cold War. There was a remarkably calm transition to democracy following Chiang’s death.

            “When,” my father-in-law would ask me during one of our long political discussions, “will the United States give independence to Taiwan?”

            “Whether it’s the U.S. splitting from Britain, or East Timor,” I replied, “independence is taken, not given. You declare independence.” 1,400 Timorese died after declaring independence from Indonesia.

“We can’t do that,” he’d say. “China will invade. Many people will be killed.”

“Maybe they’d invade,” I’d replied. “Maybe not. But there’s no other way.”

            The Taiwanese people are unwilling to die. So Taiwan has never declared independence. Since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, the island of Taiwan­—whose legal name is the Republic of China—and mainland China have agreed on the legal fiction that Taiwan and China are part of the same country. Beijing calls Taiwan “a renegade province” it wants back in its fold; Taipei’s government, heir to the defeated Nationalist troops who fled to exile across the Taiwan Strait when the Communists seized power in 1949, officially maintains the ridiculous position that someday it will reconquer the mainland.

Mouse eats cat.

Like Kurdistan, Palestine and Pakistani Kashmir, Taiwan lingers in diplomatic purgatory, its people semi-stateless. It enjoys robust economic growth and de facto independence. But it’s not really a country. It has no seat at the U.N. Only 13 nations, most of the tiny—Belize, Haiti, Vatican City, Honduras, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Paraguay, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Tuvalu and Guatemala—recognize Taiwan as a country. Even its primary benefactor, the U.S., does not recognize it.

Yet Taiwan is different. Always on the periphery, the Chinese empire’s control of the island waxed and waned in proportion to its political stability and military strength, allowing the Taiwanese as well as the ethnic Han Chinese who migrated there from the mainland, to develop their own arts, food, and political and economic cultures. Seventy years of diplomatic limbo and de facto independence—their own coins, stamps, military—have accelerated those trends and made them feel permanent. They don’t want to be absorbed into the Borg, like Hong Kong.

            It isn’t hard to see why Taiwan’s people embrace the strategic ambiguity of diplomatic limbo. Life is good and getting better, money is rolling in, and—bluster aside—China seems unwilling to risk the chaos and economic cost of reclaiming an island it hasn’t had under direct control since the 19th century. Why fix the unbroken?

            Except—it is a broken situation. You can’t have national pride until you’re a nation. You can’t demand respect unless your people demonstrate courage. Most of all, there’s the question of what the future holds: President Xi Jinping seems smart enough not to try to put the band back together again, at least not via hard (military) power. What about his successor or his successor’s successor?

            Every now and then some Taiwanese political theorist gins up a farfetched workaround that promises to deliver independence without the risk of Chinese tanks rolling through Taipei. The 51 Club, founded in 1994 with 51 members, is a Taiwanese organization dedicated to the goal of turning the island into the 51st state of the United States. Presto! War with Taiwan is war against the United States—something the Chinese would never want.

The idea hasn’t exactly caught fire. “All the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] has to do is lob a few missiles over, and people will be swarming to us,” founder David Choi predicted in 1994. No missiles yet.

            Annette Lu, former vice president of Taiwan under the KMT, promotes One Zhonghua, a scheme under which Taiwan and China would form an economic commonwealth like the European Union, with economic integration and political independence. Neither the Chinese nor the Taiwanese are on board.

            There’s also a theory that the U.S. is, under international law, has been—and still is—the administrator of Taiwan since World War II. In 1945, the U.S. appointed Chiang’s Republic of China (KMT) to administer Taiwan—think of it like a sublet. The San Francisco Peace Treaty didn’t go into effect until seven years later, in 1952. “The treaty never mentioned who would receive Taiwan. Japan surrendered its former colony, but it never said to whom,” writes The Taipei Times. So who gets it? “Regarding Taiwan, the official U.S. position was, is and continues to be that it is ‘undecided.’” Biden may be hanging his hat on this bit of unfinished business.

            From a domestic U.S. political perspective, however, whatever enthusiasm Americans have for defending Taiwan would vanish as soon as they learn that we would be risking World War III over a “country” that isn’t even a country—and doesn’t claim to be. The United States has gotten itself into a lot of stupid wars, but this would be the craziest one ever.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

DMZ America Podcast 89: Jimmy Carter Death Watch, Over/Underrated Presidents, China Backs Russia in Ukraine

Political cartoonists Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right) join an about-to-grieve nation considering the presidency and legacy of Jimmy Carter, 98, who recently entered hospice. Not discussed elsewhere yet important is Carter’s policies, which began the current trend of the conservative Democrat. Yesterday was Presidents’ Day so it’s time to take a walk down historical-memory lane and consider which of our leaders enjoy an undeservedly positive reputation, and which presidents have been unfairly overlooked for their accomplishments. It’s the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine: what happens next? Quagmire and escalation. Most notably, the president of China is meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin this spring in Moscow in order to discuss material ways China can help the Russian war effort in Ukraine.

 

 

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