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HorseLord posted:Just like that. Exactly, what's a little first degree murder between comrades.
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Jul 25, 2015 04:08
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 22:36 |
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Nonsense posted:Despite our hegemony, we've allowed the oceans to become really dangerous again though. I'm very firmly in favor of blasting African pirates into dust if it means Euros can sail down the horn, and other formerly proper colonies. Perhaps they should start by blowing up the poachers and polluters that wrecked the economy, thus leading to piracy.
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Jul 26, 2015 13:14
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HorseLord posted:"hey guys! China is capitalist now! They're full free market and everything! Clearly they're not real communists at all" I had never considered that policy but it seems interesting. I had always heard of them arresting union organizers that irritated a local public officials and harvesting organs from union organizers. Do you have any sources?
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Jul 26, 2015 13:18
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Mandy Thompson posted:Perhaps they should start by blowing up the poachers and polluters that wrecked the economy, thus leading to piracy. Well too bad because military repression already did the job. In March there was the 1(one) succesful hijacking since 3 years. Of course the vessel was a illegal fishing trawler, operated by
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Jul 26, 2015 14:01
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A thoughtful excerpt from Peter Navarro's "Death By China". I disagree that there are any substantial communist principles remaining in China's economy, but otherwise it's a solid analysis. One of the most lethal consequences of China’s emergence as the world’s undisputed “factory floor” has been its increasingly voracious appetites for the Earth’s energy and raw materials. To feed its manufacturing machine,1 China must consume half of the world’s cement, nearly half of its steel, one-third of its copper, and a third of its aluminum. Moreover, by the year 2035,2 China’s oil demand alone will exceed that of total oil production today for the entire world. These are indeed lethal appetites. That’s because, to support these appetites, Chinese government officials have climbed into a blood-drenched colonial bed with murderous dictators and rogue regimes around the world. In doing so, Chinese government officials and diplomats are engaging in the most scurrilous abuse of United Nations diplomacy the world has ever seen. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, China can veto any UN sanctions it chooses to. For almost a decade now, top Chinese diplomats have been using China’s UN veto power to broker a wide range of “blood for oil” and “rape for raw materials” deals. Consider these facts: • In exchange for Sudanese oil,3 China’s veto merchants stopped the UN from intervening in the Darfur genocide—even as a relentlessly brutal Janjaweed militia used Chinese weapons to forcibly rape thousands of women and kill 300,000 innocent Sudanese. • China’s veto merchants also blocked UN sanctions against Iran and its anti-Semitic, sham-election president to gain access to the world’s largest natural gas fields. This act has blown open the door to nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. It has also dramatically raised the probability of a nuclear strike on Israel and significantly increased the risk of an atomic weapon falling into the hands of anti-American jihadists. China’s abuses of the peacekeeping mission of the United Nations are hardly isolated incidents. Instead, they are part of a broader “going abroad” strategy that has transformed China from a once isolationist nation into arguably the world’s biggest budding colonial empire. This is no small irony for a country originally founded on anti-colonial, Marxist principles and once heavily victimized by the British Empire and its opium wars on China. Throughout Africa, Asia, and America’s backyard of Latin America, China’s own twenty-first century brand of colonialism always begins with this Mephistophelean bargain: lavish, low-interest loans to build up the country’s infrastructure in exchange for raw materials and access to local markets. Of course, once a country takes this colonial bait, rather than use local labor, China brings in its huge army of engineers and workers to build new highways and railroads and ports and telecommunications systems. This infrastructure then both literally and digitally paves the way for the extraction and transport of raw materials. So it’s back to China’s factory floors in cities like Chongqing, Dongguan, and Shenzhen for Cameroon’s timber, the Congo’s magnesium, Djibouti’s gypsum, Gabon’s manganese, Malawi’s uranium, Mozambique’s titanium, Niger’s molybdenum, Rwanda’s tin, and Zambia’s silver. As the final colonial coup de grâce, China then dumps its finished goods back onto local markets—thereby driving out local industries, driving up the unemployment rate, and driving its new colonies deeper into poverty. Arming Itself to the Teeth Even as China has boomed at the expense of much of the rest of the world, it has used its rapid economic growth to fund one of the most rapid and comprehensive military buildups the world has ever witnessed. In this way, and in the spirit of Vladimir Lenin’s dictum that a capitalist will sell the rope that will be used to hang him, every “Walmart dollar” we Americans now spend on artificially cheap Chinese imports represents both a down payment on our own unemployment as well as additional financing for a rapidly arming China. Here’s what just some of that vaunted war machine is shaping up to look like: • China’s newly modernized Navy and Air Force feature everything from virtually undetectable nuclear submarines and the latest Russian-designed fighter jets to ballistic missiles that can precisely target America’s aircraft carriers on the high seas. • China’s own “Pentagon” is confidently developing advanced weapons systems—many of which have been stolen from us by Chinese hackers and spies!—to shoot down our satellite and GPS systems and send nuclear warheads deep into the American heartland. • Unlike a fatigued U.S. army now thinly stretched by the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the People’s Liberation Army—the largest in the world—has both the overwhelming force and troop readiness to roll over the forces of India, South Korea, Taiwan, or Vietnam and still have more than enough foot soldiers to crush the Taliban and keep the peace in Baghdad if it cared to. • The “war hawk” wing of China’s military is even readying the ability to drop virtually untrackable nuclear bombs from space. These cosmic nukes simply arrive on target in a few short minutes and far too quickly and quietly for countermeasures. Of course, America isn’t the only country that should fear the emergence of a new and powerful Asian aggressor. China’s increasingly nervous neighbors now face a rapidly increasing risk from a rising Asian hegemon amidst China’s brinkmanship and bullying over everything from access to shipping lanes to long-simmering territorial disputes. It’s Big Brother Meets Silent Spring Also in danger are the hundreds of millions of innocent Chinese citizens, who face extreme “Death by China on China” risks from China’s pollution-rife economic growth model, its rigid, class-based Communist Party theocracy, and an “Orwell on steroids” totalitarianism. On the pollution front, an overreliance on an export-driven, heavy manufacturing economy has turned the atmosphere over China’s industrial heartland into the world’s biggest toxic cloud and shroud. More than 70% of China’s major lakes, rivers, and streams are severely polluted. Even a popular tourist cruise down the Yangtze River, above the Three Gorges Dam, reveals that this once-pristine Chinese national treasure where Mao once swam is now virtually devoid of birds and visible signs of aquatic life. Meanwhile, “What happens in China doesn’t stay in China.” As Chinese factories churn out a flood of products destined for the shelves of Target and Walmart, China’s particularly virulent brand of air pollution rides more than 6,000 miles along the jet stream to California, dropping toxic waste all along the way. Today, most of the acid rain in Japan and South Korea is “Made in China,” while an increasing share of the fine particulate found in the air in West Coast cities like Los Angeles likewise started out in a Chinese factory. As for the risks posed by China’s rigid, class-based society, the bitter, ironic truth here is that the ruling Communist Party oversees not a true “People’s Republic” but rather its own secular theocracy. While Marx turns over in his grave and a pickled Mao stares glassy-eyed from his crystal coffin in Tiananmen Square, a relatively small fraction of the Chinese population grows fabulously rich even as one billion Chinese citizens continue to live in a Hobbesian world of grinding poverty without access to adequate health care and where even a minor sickness can become a death sentence. China’s totalitarian politics are equally appalling. To quell dissent, the Communist Party relies on a police and paramilitary force numbering more than one million. Its Orwellian web also features some 50,000 cyber cops. Together, these real and virtual jackboots are unrelenting in their repression and suppression. • Try to organize your workplace, and you are beaten and then fired. • Stand up for human rights or women’s rights, and you are mercilessly hounded, placed under house arrest, or simply “disappeared.” • Be revealed as a Falun Gong practitioner or “closet Catholic,” and get ready to have your “deviant thoughts” washed right out of your brain. The linchpin of such Chinese repression is a grim archipelago of forced labor camps to which millions of Chinese citizens have been exiled—often without trial. For those imprisoned in China’s Laogai gulag, it could be worse; according to Amnesty International, the People’s Republic annually executes4 several times more of its own people than the rest of the world combined. At least lethal injection is now preferred to the traditional bullet to the brain. It is not compassion, however, driving this capital punishment “reform.” It is simply that injections are cheaper to clean up, provide less risk of HIV infection to the executioners, and make it much easier to harvest the victim’s organs for sale on the black market. The Big Sellout, the Bigger Copout Even as these countless Deaths by China play out both within the People’s Republic and on killing floors around the globe, America’s business executives, journalists, and politicians have had far too little to say about the single greatest threat facing the United States and the world. In the executive arena, some of America’s biggest companies—from Caterpillar and Cisco to General Motors and Microsoft—have been fully complicit in the Chinese politics of “first divide America and then conquer it.” The tragedy here is that when China’s mercantilist onslaught against American industry began in the late 1990s—and industries like furniture, textiles, and apparel began falling one by one—the business community and organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce were staunchly united. Over the past decade, however, as each additional American job and each new American factory has been offshored to China, the narrow profit-maximizing interests of many of America’s corporate executives have been realigned with their Chinese partners. Indeed, with their bread now being buttered offshore, so-called “American” organizations like the Business Roundtable and National Association of Manufacturers have been transformed from staunch critics of Chinese mercantilism into open, and often very aggressive, soldiers in the pro-China Lobby. While many American corporate executives have become lobbying warriors for China, American journalists are mostly missing in action. The downsizing of newspapers and network television news in an age of the Internet has led to the closing or shrinking of many foreign news bureaus. As a result, the American media has had to increasingly rely on the flow of news from the government-owned Chinese press—one of the most effective and relentless propaganda machines the world has ever witnessed. Meanwhile, the cream of America’s financial press—most notably the Wall Street Journal—clings zealously to a free market and free trade ideology, seemingly oblivious to the fact that China’s “one-way free trade” is simply America’s unilateral surrender in an age of Chinese state capitalism. The absurdity here is that instead of seeing trade reform as a legitimate form of self-defense against a relentless Chinese onslaught of “beggar thy neighbor” practices, publications like the Wall Street Journal continually rail against the threat of American “protectionism.” It’s all so much nonsense, but the ideological drum beat goes on. As for America’s politicians, no single group of individuals deserves more blame for standing meekly, passively, and ignorantly by as China has had its way with the U.S. manufacturing base and engaged in its massive military buildup. It’s not that the American Congress hasn’t been fully warned about the dangers of a rising China. Each year, the Congressionally funded U.S.–China Commission publishes both an annual report and ample testimony about this emerging threat. For example, the U.S.–China Commission has warned that “Chinese espionage activities in the United States5 are so extensive that they comprise the single greatest risk to the security of American technologies.” In fact, to date, China’s far-reaching spy network has stolen critical secrets related to the Aegis guided missile destroyer, B1-B bomber, Delta IV rocket, ICBM-capable guidance systems, Stealth Bomber, and Space Shuttle. Chinese hackers and spies6 have been equally effective at delivering details on aircraft carrier launch systems, drones, naval reactor designs, submarine propulsion systems, the inner workings of neutron bombs, and even highly specific U.S. Navy warship operations procedures. Similarly, on the economic threat, the Commission has pleaded with Congress to recognize that small and medium-sized American businesses “face the full brunt of China’s unfair trade practices, currency manipulation, and illegal subsidies for Chinese exports.” Despite these warnings, Congress continues to ignore the advice of its own independent commission and wake up to the rising economic and military threat from China. Of course, the White House must share equal blame. Both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have talked softly and carried very little sticks when it has come to China. President Bush’s excuse was a preoccupation with the war in Iraq and homeland security coupled with a blind faith in what has been anything but free trade. On Bush’s watch alone, the United States surrendered millions of jobs to China. For his part, Candidate Barack Obama on the 2008 campaign trail repeatedly promised to crack down on unfair Chinese trade practices, particularly in key industrial swing states like Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. However, since taking office, President Obama has repeatedly bowed to China on key trade issues, primarily because he wants China to keep financing America’s massive budget deficits. While Obama mortgages our future to his Chinese banker, he fails to understand that the best jobs program for America is comprehensive trade reform with China.
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Jul 26, 2015 21:00
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Aug 2, 2015 02:41
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But on the other hand someone was inconvenienced at an airport in the US... *throws hands up* I guess there's no point trying to judge either
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Aug 2, 2015 02:42
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 22:36 |
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Fojar38 posted:But on the other hand someone was inconvenienced at an airport in the US... You might hurt someone's feelings. Please stop.
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Aug 2, 2015 14:31
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