BANGKOK, Thailand -- China's joint, three-week, anti-terrorism exercise in Pakistan on November 20-December 11 was to help defend Beijing's $70 billion Belt and Road Initiative projects against deadly anti-Chinese insurgents in Baluchistan province.

Under threat is the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) which includes upgrading Pakistan's north-south roads and Karakoram Highway, to link Kashgar in China's landlocked Xinjiang province directly to Pakistan's hammerhead-shaped peninsula and port of Gwadar in Baluchistan on the Arabian Sea, close to the Persian Gulf.

The CPEC is also expanding Gwadar's deep-water port, so large Chinese vessels will have a much shorter route for shipping petroleum from the Persian Gulf to oil-hungry China.

Currently, oil-laden ships bound for China depart the Middle East through the Persian Gulf into the Arabian Sea and then route south around India toward Singapore.

To reach China's east coast ports, those ships must pass through the congested Malacca Strait, where U.S.-backed Singapore monitors its narrow waters.

American cities are in crisis. From an ever-widening income gap to the absence of affordable housing to crumbling schools, many metropolitan areas are on an unsustainable trajectory. However, these problems are not caused by immigration and “woke policies” as the right would have you believe. Instead, the root of the problem is the insatiable greed of the capitalist class and the corruption that inevitably follows in its wake.

Columbus, Ohio is a classic example of the mutually beneficial relationship between city officials and developers that all too often leaves working people behind. In an ongoing effort to lure wealthy developers to the area, the city provides tax abatements. In return for building in certain areas and for including “affordable” housing in their developments, these developers are given significant tax breaks. From the point of view of finance capital and elected officials in the city it is a classic win-win situation. Corporations get their money, and the city gets new and more profitable  housing units for its expanding population.

People’s willingness to get upset about evidence-free allegations of rapes by Hamas is not purely because people rightly condemn rape but also because the topic distracts from condemning open shameless public mass-murder which happens to be even worse than rape.

All the attention going to which idiots are supposedly protesting Jewish restaurants or murdering Palestinian college students is not due purely to wanting to place blame correctly but also to valuing any topic that’s not the open shameless public mass murder underway right before our eyes.

People’s obsession with who knew what before the Hamas attack is not due purely to wanting to expose Israel’s lies or Hamas’s nefariousness but also to how hard it is to look at open shameless public mass murder underway before our eyes.