One more reason the world can no longer afford the luxury that is war

"In this increasingly interdependent world, we have few pure “enemies” anymore: Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Al Qaeda, the Taliban. But we have many “frenemies,” or half friends/half foes. While the Pentagon worries about a war with China, the Commerce Department is trying to get China to buy more Boeing planes and every American university worth its salt is opening a campus in Beijing; meanwhile, the Chinese are investing in American companies left and right. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is the biggest thorn in America’s side in Latin America and a vital source of our imported oil. The U.S. and Russia are on opposing sides in Syria, but the U.S. supported Russia joining the World Trade Organization and American businesses are lobbying Congress to lift cold war trade restrictions on Russia so they can take advantage of its more open market."

--Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/opinion/its-mitts-world.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120905

China: This is why we spend so much on defense?

China is famous--notorious, infamous, really--for polluting their air, water and soil across most of the entire country. Then, they suppress their people's speech and movements and who knows what all. Poverty is still rampant across the huge nation, etc. Now? What's in the news? There's this article: Top of Chinese wealthy's wish list? To leave China BEIJING (AP) — Chinese millionaire Su builds skyscrapers in Beijing and is one of the people powering China's economy on its path to becoming the world's biggest. He sits at the top of a country — economy booming, influence spreading, military swelling — widely expected to dominate the 21st century. Yet the property developer shares something surprising with many newly rich in China: he's looking forward to the day he can leave. Su's reasons: He wants to protect his assets, he has to watch what he says in China and wants a second child, something against the law for many Chinese. Despite more economic freedom, the communist government has kept its tight grip on many other aspects of daily life. China's leaders punish, sometimes harshly, public dissent and any perceived challenges to their power, and censor what can be read online and in print. Authoritarian rule, meanwhile, has proved ineffective in addressing long standing problems of pollution, contaminated food and a creaking health care system. "In China, nothing belongs to you. Like buying a house. You buy it but it will belong to the country 70 years later," said Su, lamenting the government's land leasing system. "But abroad, if you buy a house, it belongs to you forever," he said. "Both businessmen and government officials are like this. They worry about the security of their assets." So why do I bring this up? This is the country we're supposed to be afraid of so we keep spending 700 billion dollars per year on "defense"--read: the "military-industrial complex"--but we don't otherwise have enough to pay our bills, educate our citizens and give them good health care and roads and sewer systems and other important infrastructure. It's insane. We have to stop spending so much on defense. It's unnecessary and it's ignorant. There's a lot more in the article, too, you may want to see, spelling out their many problems. Find it here: http://news.yahoo.com/top-chinese-wealthys-wish-list-leave-china-065826880.html

Uh-oh--this isn't going anywhere good

It seems leaders in China just keep pushing and pushing for change when it comes to the monetary system of the world, specifically as the US' dollar is the basis for the rest of the world:

China economist blasts dollar dominance on eve of G20

BEIJING (Reuters) – Dollar dominance is sowing the seeds of financial turmoil, and the solution is to promote new reserve currencies, a Chinese government economist said in a paper published on the eve of a G20 meeting about how to reform the global monetary system.

Let there be no doubt, if this goes their way, the Chinese' way, it won't be pretty for us, ladies and gentlemen.


And after that last financial/economic debacle we caused that went global, what with the creation and then selling of what were supposed to be AAA grade securities that ended up being junk and then, on top of that, not punishing anyone for it or fundamentally changing virtually anything in our system so we're sure it never happens again, you can't too much blame 'em, can you?


I hope this party doesn't end while I'm at it.

Link to original story:  http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_china_g20_dollar

China on the US dollar

Talk about a "back-handed compliment."

Chinese President Hu Jintao said, basically, two things over the weekend as he's about to visit us and meet with President Obama this week.

First, he said there needs to be "cooperation" between our two countries.

Well, yeah, since they make stuff (cheap) and we buy so much of it.  That and the fact that they are so heavily invested in us and have been for some time ($2.85 trillion at the end of 2010), I'd say cooperation is pretty much an important "given" for the foreseeable future.

Second, he called the present U.S. dollar-dominated currency system a "product of the past" and highlighted moves to turn the yuan into a global currency.


Ow.  That one hurt.


Talk about kicking a guy when he's down.  And the "guy", being us, is his "friend" and close trading partner.


What's kind of amusing about this, too, is that the US wants China to appreciate its currency, the juan, so it isn't so cheap and therefore, its products so cheap, while China criticizes us for efforts by the U.S. Federal Reserve to stimulate growth through huge bond purchases to keep down long-term interest rates, a strategy that China has loudly complained about in the past as fueling inflation in emerging economies, including its own. He said that U.S. monetary policy "has a major impact on global liquidity and capital flows and therefore, the liquidity of the U.S. dollar should be kept at a reasonable and stable level."


So, basically, we each want to tell the other one how, exactly, to run their economies, their currency and so, their country.  That's good.


Unfortunately for us--but great for China--is that they were relatively unscathed by the global financial crisis (we started).  


Here's the scary part, though:  Mr. Hu's comments add to the sense that China intends to challenge the post-World War II financial order largely created by the U.S. and dominated by the dollar.


It's fascinating to see this relationship develop.  For  now, it's "yes, we want to and will cooperate" but it seems they also want to be sure we know they're coming up on us, economically and competitively.  


Fortunately, for now and the foreseeable future, we both need each other.   And badly.


"Can't we all just get along?"


Link to original post:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703551604576085803801776090.html

China---wth??

News out this morning:

5 preschoolers hit with hammer in new China attack

BEIJING – A farmer attacked kindergarten students with a hammer, injuring five, before burning himself to death Friday in China's third such assault in as many days and prompting the government to demand stricter school security nationwide.


More:

The hammer attack follows a rampage Thursday by a 47-year-old unemployed man armed with an eight-inch (20-centimeter) knife at a kindergarten. Some 29 students, aged 4 or 5 years old, were wounded, five of them seriously at the school in Taixing city in neighboring Jiangsu province.

And on Wednesday, a 33-year-old former teacher broke into a primary school in the city of Leizhou in southern Guangdong province and wounded 15 students and a teacher with a knife. The attacker had been on sick leave from another school since 2006 for mental health problems.

Really. What the heck?

What would cause anyone, especially any adult, to attack children like this?

What is it about the Chinese culture, it would seem, that would cause grown adult men to attack virtually totally defenseless children with knives, as in the first two attacks, and now, here, with a hammer?

I would love to have some psychologist and/or sociologist who knows the Chinese either explain this or study it and get back to us as to why these people acted out like this.

There is this from the article:

Most of the recent school attacks have been blamed on people with personal grudges or mental illness — seen as a growing problem because of feelings of social injustice and alienation in the fast-changing country.

But children? Attacking children?

To save my life I can't figure it out. Mental illness would have to be the closest I could come to 'splainin' this one.

Link to original story here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100430/ap_on_re_as/as_china_students_attacked

Thoughts on our world

Seeing the opening of the Olympic Games last evening, from Beijing, made me think how clever mankind can be, both collectively and individually. We all get together and create and see these wonderful spectacles of sight and sound and cooperation. And then we go back to our own homes and countries and all the intelligence and possibility seems to go out the door, so to speak.

We get back on our own home turfs and start thinking that "those people" out there, whoever we fear, are "out to get us" and that we must protect ourselves from them, whether they're Russians and Soviets or Vietnamese or Koreans or Blacks or Chinese or Communists or gays or whoever just isn't like us.

We let our fears and even ignorance of our fellow man and the world take over.

Instead of working together for all of our betterment, we feel and think we have to work to keep "what is ours" and/or to make sure that, "in the future" we have enough.

And it's true for the stereotypical "hillbilly" from Appalachia from a century ago, right down to some people who are supposed to be leading us in and from Washington, today.

I think it's this kind of thinking that Vice President Dick Cheney, his ilk and those of this administration seem so concerned about. It's why we attacked Iraq, it seems. After all, we must have all that oil, mustn't we?

You'd think that, after all the centuries of struggle, we would all, collectively, come together and work together to solve the issues of disease, hunger, pollution, even war--all our problems.

We could do it.