Update on my predictions

You may recall that I made three predictions to be fufilled by the end of next year or so. UKIP has already lost its leader, so that's one achieved already. I'm quietly confident about Korea, what with Trump making the breakthrough that has eluded his predecessors (if you read Scott Adams, the man who best predicted and explained Trump's rise and success, then you'll find Trump much more comprehensible than if you read the outraged commentary of most writers - people who can't understand how Trump got to be President are unlikely to be able to explain what he is doing now).

However, I am becoming a little worried about my third prediction. I was hopeful when The Economist, a thought leader in these things, dedicated its front cover and a long article to explaining how the West got China wrong. But then there was that awful poisoning in Salisbury and the media tried to attribute the Italian election outcome to Russia and I became pessimistic again.

So, in my own essentially ineffectual way, I am going to try to push the prediction towards fulfilment. Here's an article that deserves more publicity about how China tried to swing the election for Bill Clinton.

As the article states: "This is not a theory, it is historical fact". 

It continues: "In the end, several prominent Democratic fundraisers, including close Clinton associates, were found to be complicit in the Chinese meddling efforts and pled guilty to various charges of violating campaign finance and disclosure laws (most notably James T. Riady, Johnny Chung, John Huang, and Charlie Trie). Several others fled the country to escape U.S. jurisdiction as the probe got underway. The Democratic National Committee was forced to return millions of dollars in ill-gotten funds (although by that point, of course, their candidate had already won).

It was a scandal that persisted after the election in no small part because many of Clinton’s own policies in his second term seemed to lend credence to insinuations of collusion.

Rather than attempting to punish the meddling country for undermining the bedrock of our democracy, Bill Clinton worked to ease sanctions and normalize relations with Beijing—even as the U.S. ratcheted up sanctions against Cuba, Iran, and Iraq. By the end of his term, he signed a series of sweeping trade deals that radically expanded China’s economic and geopolitical clout—even though some in his administration forecast that this would come at the expense of key American industries and U.S. manufacturing workers.

Clinton authorized a series of controversial defense contracts with China as well—despite Department of Justice objections. Federal investigators were concerned that the contractors seemed to be passing highly sensitive and classified information to the Chinese. And indeed, the companies in question were eventually found to have violated the law by giving cutting-edge missile technology to China, and paid unprecedented fines related to the Arms Export Control Act during the administration of George W. Bush. But they were inexplicably approved in the Bill Clinton years.

For a while, polls showed that the public found the president’s posture on China to be so disconcerting that most supported appointing an independent counsel (a la Mueller) to investigate whether the Clinton Administration had essentially been “bought.”

Law enforcement officials shared these concerns: FBI director Louis Freeh (whom Clinton could not get rid of, having just fired his predecessor) publically called for the appointment of an independent counsel. So did the chief prosecutor charged with investigating Chinese meddling, Charles La Bella. However, they were blocked at every turn by Clinton’s Attorney General, Janet Reno—eventually leading La Bella to resign in protest of the AG’s apparent obstruction."