NO BS NEWS

Canada Turning into Chinese Colony

2012-02-14T10:40:00.000-08:00

Skip the first part It gets interesting at 2:00 into the video.

I'm going to have to quit the conservative party and join the Greens.

Also look what's in the news today:

Legislation that would give police and spies easier access to information about Internet users threatens to turn Canada into a surveillance society

This combined with the governments support of torture
and detention without trial. What the hell is going on?

I feel betrayed, my country has been stolen.

Human Rights and Business Ethics: Fashioning a New Social Contract

2012-02-05T15:46:00.000-08:00

February 16, 2000

(Accepted for publication: Journal of Business Ethics)

Journal of Business Ethics

Volume 27, Numbers 1-2, 205-214, DOI: 10.1023/A:1006488202305

“Human Rights and Business Ethics: Fashioning a New Social Contract”i[1]

Dr. Wesley Cragg Gardiner Professor of Business Ethics Schulich School of Business York University 4700 Keele St., Toronto, Canada M3J 1P3 Tel: (416) 736-5809 Fax: (416) 736-5762 E-mail: wcragg@ssb.yorku.ca

Biography
Wesley Cragg is the Gardiner Professor of Business Ethics at the Schulich School of Business, York University (Canada) with a cross appointment to the philosophy department. He is responsible for encouraging and coordinating research and curriculum development on the ethical dimensions of public, para-public, not-for-profit and private sector management in the business school. He has published widely in applied ethics, philosophy of law and punishment, philosophy of education and moral, social, political and legal theory. His current research includes issues in business and occupational ethics, environmental ethics, and the use and effectiveness of voluntary codes to regulate international business transactions.

Abstract
This paper argues that widely accepted understanding of the respective responsibilities of business and government in the post war industrialized world can be traced back to a tacit “social contract” that emerged following the second world war. The effect of this contract was to assign responsibility for generating wealth to business and responsibility for ensuring the equitable sharing of wealth to governments. Without question, this arrangement has resulted in substantial improvements in the quality of life in the industrialized world in the intervening period. I argue that with advance of economic globalization and the growing power and influence of multi national corporations, this division of responsibilities is not longer viable or defensible. What is needed, fifty years after the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, is a new social contract that shares responsibilities for human rights and related ethical responsibilities in a manner more in keeping with the vision captured by the post war Declaration. I conclude by suggesting some reasons for thinking that a new social contract may be emerging.

Key Words : corporate social responsibility, ethics, human rights, globalization, U.N. Declaraton of Human Rights, social contract, government.

In 1948, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations. In the intervening fifty years, it has been formally endorsed by most of the countries of the world. The Declaration itself was a response to human rights abuses that preceded and accompanied the second world war, a global war that created a global moral crisis to which the United Nations Declaration was a collective and global response. The Universal Declaration began:

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, and Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and, the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief, and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people ...

The General Assembly:
Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement of all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society ... shall strive to ... secure their universal and effective recognition and observance ... .

In the years following the proclamation, it came to be widely assumed that the
Declaration of Human Rights was addressed principally to governments. In the liberal democracies of the developed world, governments, urged on by their citizens, did proceed to take up the challenge. Human rights were enshrined in constitutions; the Canadian constitution is an example. Laws designed to protect minorities from discrimination were passed. Provision was made for refugees, tho ugh it was not always as generous as it might be. A social safety net was put in place to protect the poor including health insurance, unemployment insurance, old age security and so on. Constitutional guarantees were put in place to restrain governments in the exercise of their powers thus protecting freedom of expression and of the press, freedom of assembly, the right to a fair trial and so on.

One consequence of the assumption that protecting and enhancing human rights was a government responsibility, however, was a de facto division of responsibilities between governments and the private sector. The private sector assumed primary responsibility for generating wealth while the public sector accepted responsibility for ensuring respect for human rights including freedom from “fear and want”.

Let me describe this arrangement as a tacit social contract. It is this “contract” that I want to examine and evaluate in what follows.
Establishing the existence of a “contract” or a general understanding of respective responsibilities in complex societies or tracing causally its impact is not an exact science. However, I do want to suggest that understanding the division of responsibilities between business and government in the post war industrialized world as forming a tacit social contract is illuminating however difficult it might be to prove its existence. It is illuminating, I want to suggest, because it highlights the striking character of that division of responsibilities and its implications for the way in which much of the private sector perceives its role and responsibilities. Specifically, as generators of wealth, many private sector corporations and business people have been persuaded to the view that their sole social responsibility is simply to maximize profits in lawful ways. As a result, many in the corporate world tend to pay little attention to human rights issues as a corporate responsibility.

The evidence supporting the existence of a tacit understanding of the social responsibilities of the private sector is extensive and multi dimensional. There are for example the theories of management that emerged in powerfully articulate forms in the sixties and seventies that argued that a corporation's sole obligation is wealth maximization for the benefit of its owners or shareholders whose property it is. As Milton Friedman put it both simply and elegantly, the social responsibility of the modern corporation is simply to maximize profits. To go beyond this objective is a misuse of power that is doomed to fail and in the process impede the exercise on the part of civil authorities of their own proper responsibilities.ii[2]

One would expect that companies that see profit maximization as their primary obligation to define their social and ethical responsibilities narrowly. They would regard themselves as having a limited number of informal obligations defined by local conventions and culture. These would include obligations owed by the company to employees and the reciprocal obligations of employees to their employer. Other obligations would those be set out in contracts with employees, suppliers, customers, clients and so on. Taken together, these informal and contractual obligations could be anticipated to include: honesty in financial transactions, respect for company property, avoidance of conflict of interest, meeting contractual obligations, respect for the law and respect for basic rules of civility.

One would also expect that when companies with this management orientation went beyond their ethical duties narrowly defined and their legal obligations, it would be for clearly defined public relations purposes governed by enlightened self-interest.
In short, as Milton Friedman suggested, where the primary obligation is wealth maximization, obligations to stakeholders can be expected to be defined by the law, prevailing ethical customs and good public relations.

There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that this view has become the dominant view since the Second World War. The codes of conduct that have become common features of corporate policy and public relations in the last three or four decades are one rich source of supporting documentation. iii[3] What they reveal is a focus on “measures designed to protect the firm from wrongful acts by its employees”.iv[4] That is to say, the primary purpose of codes of conduct historically has been the protection of the corporations. Public relations also emerges as a key factor in this regard. Thus, a 1978 UK study of advertising codes of ethics around the world found that for example “industry will dedicate resources to code administration only if it expects benefits such as consumer goodwill or the removal of government legislation”, a view that studies of Canadian and American codes have echoed.v[5]

Further evidence comes directly from the private sector itself. A good example is a statement by François Vincke Secretary General of PetroFina, who says in a recent discussion of the International Chamber of Commerce’s campaign against bribery that “until recently, ... corporate responsibility was dictated by the law, or to put it in even simpler terms: the ethical code of a company was the criminal code”. vi[6] Perhaps even more persuasive is a report to the OECD by a business sector advisory group which states categorically that: “Most industrialized societies recognize that generating long-term economic profit is the corporations primary objective.”vii[7] The authors of the report acknowledge that ethics and ethics codes have a clear place in corporate governance whose goal is profit maximization. However, those ethical values must connect directly or indirectly to enhancing the bottom line. Furthermore, corporations that go beyond these ethical parameters should disclose their social agenda. The implication is clear. Commitment to respect human rights in international commerce even where it is not mandated by law implies a willingness to diverge from the goal of maximizing long term economic profitabilityviii[8]. There is no parallel suggestion that companies that propose not to respect international human rights and other ethical standards in their operations disclose this fact as well.

Thus implicit among the assumptions of the report is the tacit understanding that the primary ethical obligation of a modern corporation is to maximize profitability within the constraints of law. This implication is reinforced by the report’s suggestion that where important social objectives are at stake, governments will have to assume the leadership position. ix[9]
This view has come to dominate the thinking not only of business but also of
governments and international economic institutions established to deal with the growth of international trade. Its effect has been to separate economics, which in the minds of many means “the science of profit maximization”, from any ethical values beyond those required to ensure the achievement of the corporations primary objective, namely profit maximization.

The post war social contract evaluated

The post war period has seen rema rkable growth in respect for human rights and economic wealth for industrialized countries. While not everyone has shared equally in the wealth generated, it is unarguable that the economic wealth available to the citizens of the industrialized world today is many times greater than the wealth available to citizens of the same countries either before or after the war. Respect for human rights has also become an entrenched feature of the industrialized world’s political and social systems. One again, not everyone has benefitted equally. But it is surely evident that human rights and related moral principles are more widely respected and constitutionally entrenched than was the case fifty years ago. The benefits have been enormous.

We might therefore describe the outcome of the tacit social contract that has guided post war economic development in the developed world as follows: profit maximization + a free market + the law = economic wealth (development).

This formula, though apparently widely endorsed, has none the less come under considerable scrutiny in recently years. Two factors have been particularly influential. First is a series of “moral crises” involving illegal or unethical conduct on the part of employees and senior management acting in what they thought was the best interests of their employers that resulted in significant damage to a number of large and apparently successful corporations. What these crises have revealed is that the mantra of profit maximization can work both for and against corporations and their shareholders by rationalizing unethical and illegal actions. Cutting ethical corners, which many have come to believe is at least sometimes the price that tough minded business people have to pay to compete successfully, can backfire resulting in serious public relations costs and financial penalties.

The Lockheed bribery scandal in the late 1970’s was for many the first clear warning sign. Both the actions of Lockheed senior management and subsequent investigations on the part of the U.S. Senate made it painfully clear that respected business leaders were prepared to condone bribery in foreign business transactions if that is what it took to beat the competition. Particularly important for our purposes, however, was the fact that those condoning corruption
saw it as justifiable in the international market if it did not involve breaking the laws of the corporation’s own country or what were seen as the moral conventions of the country in which it took place. Even more insidious was what appeared to be an implied suggestion that similar conduct might also be justified in the home market if competing successfully demanded it. This conclusion was relatively easily rationalized if law was equated with law enforcement and risks associated with skirting the law were carefully and rationally calculated.

The Bophal disaster further illustrated ambiguities about how the social contract was to be interpreted in international commence. Against what laws and environmental regulations should management be judged, India’s or those of the country in which a company was headquartered, in this case the United States? What moral conventions, for example with regard to health and safety standards, should prevail, those of the host country or those of the parent?
Increasingly, companies also have also begun to realize that the mantra of profit maximization can be turned against a corporation when it becomes the frame of reference for individual employees. This knowledge in turn has made it more and more difficult for senior management to accept the idea that “business is business and ethics is ethics” particularly when confronted with employee fraud and other forms of unethical activity, x[10] a lesson driven home for many by the collapse of Barrings Bank.

For many, what these developments have stimulated over the past two decades is the growing realization that ethics and business are much more closely connected than the tacit social contract, forged in the post war period, would suggest. The remedy offered has been to develop better articulated and more robust understandings of the role of ethics in leadership and corporate culture. The result has been the growth of interest in corporate codes of conduct that set out acceptable standards of conduct for both corporations and their employees.
What is more, decisions to create codes and build more ethical corporate cultures have had some surprising results. Many corporations have discovered that substantial positive benefits can flow from building a reputation as an ethical company. Employees prefer to work for ethical companies. A reputation for ethical business practices attracts better qualified, better motivated job applicants. Employee morale and public relations benefit. Long term profitability can be enhanced and so on. These discoveries have added additional weight to the view that ethics and business are related and that indeed there is a place for ethics in free market economies.

The difficulty is that the resulting codes are largely self serving. Their primary function, as Craig Forcese points out in his two volume study for the International Centre for Human
Rights and Democratic Development (Montreal, Canada), has been to ensure that the corporation and its employees meet their reciprocal obligations to each other and to the law and act in ways that enhance the corporation’s public image. Hence corporate codes have not been extended, for the most part, to cover issues like respect for human rights.

Of course, human rights are covered in the country in which corporations are headquartered since they are embedded in the legal structures of the industrialized world. Hence, in those contexts explicit reference to human rights values is redundant. However, the laws of industrialized states do not as a rule extend beyond their borders. Hence they do not govern corporate operations abroad, specifically in the developing world. As a result, current interest in ethics codes has not altered in any fundamental way the post war social contract.
The second factor relevant to an evaluation of the post war conception of the social responsibilities of corporations is globalization. Globalization is a complex phenomenon and not easily characterized accurately. What can be said, however, is that it has had dramatic impacts on the legal environment in which corporations, particularly multinational corporations, conduct business. These changes in turn have significant implications for corporations and the post war social contract.

First is the fact of corporate power. The largest transnational corporations have budgets that dwarf those of most of the world’s nations. This power has been enhanced by corporate mobility. In today’s world, corporations have a great deal of freedom in deciding where to do business. They can choose the countries in which they invest. They can choose their suppliers. And their suppliers can choose with remarkable freedom where in turn they will produce the goods and services they offer. An equally important parallel development has been advances in communications technology that allow the movement of capital virtually instantaneously from one country to another.

The effect of these developments has been to give multinational corporations remarkable freedom to choose the legal systems that will govern their operations. Corporations are now free to seek out those environments in which the laws in place provide the most favourable conditions for maximizing profits. This fact in turn has given corporations a powerful tool for persuading the countries in which they do business to create a favourable legal environment, namely one that puts the fewest possible regulatory constraints on the conduct of business. Thus, various states have made themselves into havens for firms seeking to avoid tax and banking restrictions, corporate disclosure and other regulatory regimes in their home country.
Globalization has also provided nation states with an incentive to engage in “regulatory
competition”. The temptation to attract investment by promising a legal environment that minimizes labour or environmental standards, for example, is obvious. The result has been what some have described as a “race to the bottom.”xi[11]

In contrast, while globalization has strengthened the capacity of multinational corporations to choose and shape the regulatory environment in which they operate, it has weakened the capacity of nation states to regulate business activity. Law as we know it is the creation of nation states. The jurisdiction of national legal systems is bounded by the principle of extraterritoriality limiting the capacity of states to project their domestic law abroad. The ability of states to control the legal environment regulating international commerce has been further weakened by free trade agreements such as NAFTA and the WTO.xii[12] The effect of these factors both apart and in combination has been to put much of the activity of multinationals beyond the effective reach of any one country’s legal system.

Paralleling these developments has been the emergence and increasing importance of transnational agencies and institutions, for example the OECD. However, to date, few if any of these agencies and institutions -- the European Union is the single obvious, but still limited, exception -- have been willing or able to stand proxy for the state, to make regulatory standards effective across national boundaries. Even when they are able to “legislate” (e.g. the ILO) many countries refuse to treat such regulatory standards as legally binding until and unless they are expressly incorporated into domestic law. When they are able to “adjudicate” (e.g. the United Nations or the World Court) they seldom have at their disposal effective regimes of enforcement, and sanctions must still be applied by states.

Nor is globalization the only obstacle to state regulation. The popularity of neo- conservative policies has led many governments in the developed world to reduce state regulation of the economy, taxation and state expenditure thus liberating market forces and, hopefully, stimulating investment, jobs and general prosperity. While the state has by no means disappeared and has even deployed its coercive powers more vigorously in certain fields of social control, for example the bribery of foreign public officials, in many areas, business is being freed from many of the constraints which had been imposed over half a century of interventionist state policies.xiii[13]

The result of these domestic and global shifts is the apparent emergence of what might be called a regulatory vacuum with regard to many aspects of international commerce. It is a vacuum furthermore which many corporations have shown considerable willingness to exploit. Thus, it is now painfully obvious that many business leaders are prepared to ignore some of the
most basic norms of human behaviour in the name of profit maximization. It is equally obvious that many of their competitors feel compelled to follow their lead or lose an important competitive advantage.

What are the implications of these developments for an evaluation of what I have described as the economic assumptions underlying the post war social contract, namely that “free markets + profit maximization + the law = economic wealth (development)”? It would appear to be this. Where corporations are able to control the legal environment that governs their activities then “law” drops from the equation. When law is removed from the equation, the formula equates unconstrained profit maximization with the generation of economic wealth and development.
The most appropriate moral characterization of unconstrained profit maximization is greed.

It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, given the account just offered, that we have seen serious efforts over the past two decades, particularly on the part of a few private sector commentators and “cutting edge” business tycoons, to rehabilitate greed. The 1980’s, for example, are now widely known in North America as the greed decade. It was a decade in which a few enormously “successful” entrepreneurs toured business schools extolling the virtues of greed. It was also a decade in which an undisciplined pursuit of profits caused a spectrum of disasters from the wide spread collapse of financial institutions (in the United States, for example) to the destruction of fishing stocks that had been the source of livelihood and subsistence for communities for centuries (in Canada’s Maritime provinces, for example). And it was a decade that ended in a damaging recession from which many communities in the industrial world began to recover only after almost another decade steady economic growth.

In 1990's, the collapse of the “tiger” economies and the spread of “the Asian flu” is widely agreed to have involved two factors. The first was the lack of accountability and the apparently irresponsible use of power on the part of Asian financial institutions and conglomerates. But equally important has been the pursuit of profits at any cost on the part of investment mangers and financial institutions in the industrialized democracies.xiv[14]

Hedge funds provide an excellent example of management for profit maximization in a global economy in which legal constraints are minimal. These funds are managed with a view to making as much money as possible in as short a period of time as possible for wealthy investors. Global financial markets are largely unregulated. Hedge funds exploit that fact for the benefit of their managers and shareholders. In the process, they have been known to seriously destabilize financial systems around the world.

The story of Long-Term Capital Management illustrates the phenomenon. This hedge fund was managed by some of the world’s most gifted and knowledgeable money managers who used the financial resources of some of the world’s largest and most powerful financial institutions and their own talents to gamble on the movement of money markets. The result was the near collapse of the financial systems of the industrialized world, an outcome that was avoided only by the intervention of the American Federal Reserve Board.xv[15] In reviewing these events, surely the name, Long-term Capital Management, is not without significance. Neither is the fact that two of the managers of the fund at the time of its collapse were Nobel laureates. But perhaps most important is the obvious implication that greed under the guise of profit maximization can have very destructive impacts on a global market economy.

In this environment, ethics that goes beyond the bounds of corporate self interest is seen as not simply irrelevant to economic development but also an impediment forcing corporations to choose between ethics, including respect for human rights, and profits. Equally import, there is no evidence that an economy built simply on unconstrained profit maximization will result in economic development let alone minimally equitable development of the sort that has characterized the post war economies of the industrialized world.

How then are these post war deveopments to be characterized, ethically speaking? As already noted, the unrestrained pursuit of profit maximization is simply another word for greed. And greed has been condemned as personally and socially destructive by all of the world’s great religions and by moral leaders at virtually every stage of the development of human civilization. Furthermore, there is today no shortage of evidence confirming that view. What that evidence suggests is that unrestrained profit maximization or greed is the enemy not the driving force of a free market economy.

Building a new social contract

What then are the lessons to be learned from the post war experience? The first, surely, is the need to reexamine the ethical foundations of market economies and the relative responsibilities of the private and public sectors in ensuring that business activity leads to equitable economic development. A second and equally important lesson is that events provoking global crises and changes can provoke the kind of serious rethinking of responsibilities that seems now to be required. The 1948 Declaration of Human Rights stands as a powerful example, coming as it did as a response to the moral crisis provoked by the horrors of the second world war. A second example is the rethinking that many corporations have
undergone in the past three decades faced with moral crises caused by ethically questionable state and corporate conduct.xvi[16]

Most recently, events in Seattle in response to World Trade Organization meetings designed to facilitate further economic globalization have provoked calls for serious reevaluation of the values driving the new economy. A third lesson, however, must be added to the previous two. As was the case in 1948, events over the past half century have given rise to resources, insights and experience that are now available to guide the process of reexamination and development of new standards if we choose to use them.

Let me conclude by highlighting some of those resources, insights and experience. Note first that in response to the damaging effects of corruption on economic development, some of the world’s most influential international economic institutions (e.g. the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank) are now beginning to slowly to accept that ethics and economics are integrally related. One consequence of this reexamination is the recently concluded Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development convention calling on member countries to criminalize the bribery of foreign public officia ls. This convention has emerged from the realization on the part of a number of powerful multinational corporations that corruption is inconsistent with the operation of a market economy and a serious impediment to economic development. Equally important has been the realization that the problem of corruption cannot be solved by individual corporations or the public or private sectors acting alone. Finally, events leading up to the creation of the convention have illustrated the impact that NGOs, Transparency International in this case, can have in bringing about coordinated actions by national governments and international institutions in dealing with this kind of global problem.

The OECD and it nation state members have also developed Corporate Governance Guidelines and Guidelines for Multi National Enterprises. In both cases, there is evidence that the industrialized nations and their international institutions are moving beyond understandings of corporate social responsibilities that have dominated corporate and government thinking since the second world war.

Second, faced with the need to provide principles and codes to guide corporations in the global market place, coalitions of business leaders, religious leaders and members of civil society are fo rming with a view to articulating model international codes of conduct. Two examples are the CAUX Round Table Principles for Business and An Interfaith Declaration by Christians, Muslims and Jews. The Interfaith Declaration builds on the values of justice, mutual respect, stewardship and honesty. The Caux Principles are grounded on two moral concepts, the
Japanese concept of “kyosei” which means living and working together for the common good, and the concept of human dignity. Both these statements give a central place to respect for human rights in business activity.

Third, a number of governments have begun to develop codes for the conduct of international business. A good example is the “Standard of Principles for Canadian Business”. This code highlights respect for human rights and social justice. The American government has also published a statement on Model Business Principles and has become heavily involved in negotiations with American multinational companies in the apparel industry. And while these efforts cannot be said to have been particularly influential to date, they do indicate a growing awareness that ethics has a serious role to play in the private sector.

Fourth, increasingly, multinational corporations too are recognizing that the old social contract is no longer valid. The best indication of this is the development of corporate codes that explicitly recognize that one of the central ethical obligations of business is to ensure respect for human rights in their own operations. An example is the Code of Conduct for Alcan Aluminum Ltd., a Canadian multinational company in the aluminum business. This code states that “Alcan is guided by principles of non-discrimination and respect for human rights and freedoms”. Placer Dome, a Canadian mining company, is a second example of a multinational corporation that has recently made a public commitment to operating world wide in accordance with principles of sustainable development which include respect for the human rights.
What these developments indicate is that segments of the business community are increasingly aware that ethics and economics are closely related. Thus, the Pacific Basin Economic Council Charter on Standards for Transactions Between Business and Government links good governance and economic growth and calls for honesty, integrity, transparency and accountability in business transactions as a key to building public confidence in business and government.

Fifth, civil society is beginning to play a central role in the growing awareness that respect for human rights is a private sector as well as a public sector responsibility. International coalitions are beginning to create new benchmarks and tools for assessing corporate social performance. AA1000, developed by the Institute for Social and Ethical Accountability, xvii[17] is a first attempt to generate an internationally recognized auditing standard. SA 8000 is a performance oriented labour rights standard linking directly to the work of the International Labour Organization. SA8000 and is intended to play a role in social accountability similar to the ISO environmental management standards that are now widely used to encourage
environmentally responsible business practices. These initiatives are slowly becoming influential factors reshaping public and corporate understandings of the responsibilities of transnational corporations.

Finally, perhaps of most significance is the leadership being offered by a small number of transnational corporations that have committed themselves to competitive business practices consistent with respect for human rights in all aspects of their operations. What is unique about these corporate leaders is their commitment to allowing and encouraging independent evaluation and monitoring of the impact of their codes on the way they do business. An excellent recent example is a decision on the part of Levi Strauss, a large multinational corporation in the apparel industry whose code sets out “Terms of Engagement” for its suppliers that require respect for employee human and labour rights, to obtain an independent evaluation of the effectiveness of its “Terms of Engagement” in its business operations in the Dominican Republic. In pursuit of this objective, Levi Strauss engaged a group of four NGOs including Oxfam (England) to undertake an independent study. That study has now been concluded and its results are publicly available. This private sector/civil society “partnership” model as a way of building ethics back into the global market is now being explored by corporations in manufacturing, resource extraction and retailing around the world.

What then is to be learned from these developments?

1. We need a new social contract to frame business activities in the emerging global market place. The wide spread view in the private sector that the protection of human rights is a government, not a corporate responsibility is not tenable in a global economy. As the Pacific Basin Economic Council points out in its Charter, the purpose of trade liberalization is to promote development that increases living standards. Both traditional wisdom and recent experience demonstrate that free domestic or global markets that ignore internationally recognized ethical norms do not promote economic development and improve living standards. What they do promote is the reallocation of existing wealth from those who are already poor to those who are already rich.

2. The new social contract must include recognition on the part of the business community that they have an obligation to operate in all aspects of their operations within the framework of policies and codes that encompass respect for human rights and other values of fundamental human importance, for example environmental protection.

3. The new social contract must acknowledge that building respect for fundamental human values in the private sector requires business and government partnerships. It is clear that
national government and international regulation is essential to creating a level economic playing field for the conduct of international commerce. It should be equally clear that gvoernment and international regulation is require to protect the market and those it is designed to benefit from the worst vices of an outdated business culture which is prepared to tolerate and even encourage crony, casino and rogue capitalism and where greed is extolled as the driving force of business activity.

4. The new social contract needs to ensure a significant role for civil society in monitoring the adherence of corporations to the codes they adopt. This cooperation should be based on private sector/civil society partnerships whose goal is to work together for benefit of all stakeholders. 5. Finally and perhaps most important, we need to remind ourselves, as Gandhi and others have pointed out, that commerce without conscience is a formula for human exploitation, not human development.

Notes
References
Arthurs, H.W.: 1997, “‘Mechanical Arts and Merchandise’: Canadian Public Administration in the New Economy”, McGill Law Journal 42:1, 29-61. Culpeper, Roy and Gail Whitmen: 1998, “The Corporate Stake in Social Responsibility”, Canadian Corporations and Social Responsibility, Canadian Development Report 1998, (Reneuf Publishing, Ottawa, Canada), pp. 13-35. Forcese, Craig: 1997, (No. 1) Commerce with Conscience: Human Rights and Corporate
Codes of Ethics (International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic
Development, Montreal, Canada). Forcese, Craig: 1997 (No. 2), Putting Conscience into Commerce: Strategies for Making
Human Rights Business as Usual (International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, Montreal, Canada).Jomo, K.S.: 1998, Tigers in Trouble (Zed Books, London and New York).
Millstein, Ira M. (Chairman): 1998, Corporate Governance: Improving Competitiveness and Access to Capital in Global Markets, A Report to the OECD by the Business Advisory Group on Corporate Governance, Organization for Economic Co- operation and Development, (OECD, Paris, France).
Vincke, François, Fritz Heiman, and Ron Katz: 1999, Fighting Bribery: A corporate manual, (International Chamber of Commerce, Paris, France).
i[1]. This research was funded in part by a SSHRC Strategic Funding Grant in support of a York University project entitled “Voluntary Codes: The Regulatory Norms of a Gobalized Society?”. The paper was first read to a conference in Bangkok, Thailand on Human Rights and Business Ethics marking the 50th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The Bangkok conference was funded in part by the Canadian International Development Agency. I would like to thank the Social Sciences and
Humanities Council and the CIDA for their support . For further information about the voluntary codes study, please contact Wesley Cragg.
ii[2]. See for example: "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profits" in The New York Times Magazine (Sept. 13, 1970).
iii[3]. American surveys indicate that “by the late 1980's as many as 77% of large US corporations had some sort of corporate code of conduct”. “ A 1981 survey of 125 of the largest Canadian businesses ranked by revenue found that 49% of the 51 responding corporations had ‘corporate statements of objectives” (Forcese, 1997, p. 14).
iv[4]. Ibid, p. 14. v[5]. Ibid, p. 12. vi[6]. Vincke et.al. 1999, p. 15. vii[7]. Ira M. Millstein (Chairman), April 1998. viii[8]. Ibid. p. 25. ix[9]. Ibid. p. 70 x[10]. Recent studies indicate the dimensions of the problem. A study by a Canadian accounting and consulting firm recently revealed that large Canadian corporations each lost on average $1.3 million (Can.) from fraud in 1997. Similar studies in the United States have revealed that white collar crime may cost the private sector as much as $100 billion (US) each year. In 1994, a study of over 4000 U.S. employees found that 31% of employees surveyed had observed conduct at work over the course of a year that violated either the law or the policies of the company for which they worked. Further, fewer than half of the 31% reported the misconduct they had observed to their employer.)
xi[11]. See, for example, Roy Culpeper and Gail Whiteman’s analysis in “The Corporate Stake in Social Responsibility” (Culpeper et. al.1998).
xii[12]. The ongoing dispute over European Union regulations governing the import of bananas and the conflict between Europe and Canada over the export of beef that has been exposed to genetic engineering are obvious cases in point. In both cases, attempts to regulate goods has been struck down by the WTO.
xiii[13]. See for example, Arthurs, 1997.
xiv[14]. For an interesting discussion of these and other aspects of the Asian economic crisis see Jomo, 1998.
xv[15]. See for example comments attributed to Paul Volcker, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, by Mathew Ingram in The Globe and Mail, Monday, Sept. 13, 1999. In an article entitled “The world according to Paul Volcker, is said to have described the activities of Long Term Capital as completely unregulated and speculative. He is described as saying further that their activities threatened to destabilize a substantial portion of the U.S. financial industry.
xvi[16]. I have in mind here examples like South African apartheid, corporate moral crises like the Lockheed, Bophal, Exon Valdez scandals, and the collapse of the “tiger” economies in the 1990's. Most recently, a Canadian Oil Company, Talisman, has been faced with scrutiny on the part of the Canadian and American governments, INGO’s in Canada and abroad and a number of Canadian and American pension funds. At issue is its participation in an oil extraction and export project in an oil field in an area of the country wracked by civil war. The controversy has depressed the value of its shares. In
response to the criticism, the company has had to examine its operating policies. It continues to defend its investment and involvement in the Sudan but is also beginning to take steps to define its ethical obligations. It has also signed a code of conduct for Canadian companies doing business internationally that recognizes that corporations have obligations to protect and respect human rights in their international operations.
xvii[17]. Located in London England.

20 Reasons Why All Americans Should Be Against The Insane Trade Policies Of The Globalists

2011-10-15T22:43:00.000-07:00

20 Reasons Why All Americans Should Be Against The Insane Trade Policies Of The Globalists

The end of Time

2011-10-09T00:39:00.000-07:00

I have been looking through the records of before. The world is losing intellectual capitol. The old knowledge may someday be forgotten, but not eliminated. The battle may be for space but the war is for time. The time is drawing near, and I have decided to share some of my heart here in the hopes that the value that may be drawn justifies the risks of speaking out.

What is prosperity?

If the balance of power is held by is held by a totalitarian, systematic human rights abuser, democracy is undermined. Trade is being used as a weapon. It is destroying the industrial capacity of the West and creating legions of internally displaced former members of the middle class. It is being used to coerce governments around the world to bend to the will of the Communist elite in Beijing. Take for example the recent decision of South Africa's ANC government to deny the Dali Lama entry to the country to attend the birthday of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The ANC once stood for ending apartheid when Nelson Mandela was at the helm. Now in a 180 degree turn it takes orders from the apartheid regime in Beijing. Human Rights have taken a backseat to trade for more than 20 years, it has not led to greater prosperity. Our current trajectory is not only economically unsustainable, but more importantly it is morally reprehensible.

As the world comes crashing down around us I think its time we did some soul searching and asked ourselves some hard questions. What is prosperity? Is it gadgets that track our every move and record our every conversation? Is is computers that log every article we read, and read our every thought? Is it the conversion of our our lives into fiat wealth of of binary digits? Is time money or as the philosophers of old whisper is money time? Is prosperity the destruction of the ideals that our civilization has held dear for two thousand years? Does prosperity mean forgetting the sacrifices made by millions of our forefathers in the great wars, that we may embrace the very thing they died trying to stop.

What kind of world do we want to leave behind? What if we could create an international system of trade based on human rights. What if business decisions were based on what is ethical, not what makes the most binary digits the fastest. What do we value? We need to look at the big picture now. We need to take into account the costs we choose to ignore. Change will come whether we like it or not. The future is a choice, and now is a time to choose.

The development of advanced means of surveillance, and therefore advanced means of control, is being coupled with the rise of a global totalitarian empire. Our language is being simplified, our young are not taught the ways of the old philosophers. Cultural decay, moral disintegration. Our growing dissident community lives in fear of what may befall them as the sun sets in the West.

It was foretold that without vision people parish. We need to lead with integrity. We need to protect the capacity of our nation to produce and the ability of our citizens to provide for themselves. We need to replace the WTO with a trading architecture that values human life. We need to stand up to the communist party in Beijing no matter how much they threaten to cut trade ties. The West is bleeding jobs and capital, we need to stop the bleeding. We should end all trade ties with those responsible for genocide. This is the way to have a future worth living. To live with compassion, love, and sacrifice. Every movement's objectives are labeled impossible, until its objectives are carved into history. I beg you now, turn the tide before its too late. We have the power.

How has it come to this?

How has it come to this. This corruption that permeates our every bit of being. The blood thats stains our collective consciousness and soaks every hand save none. How has it come to this. This machine that runs on moral compromise and misery. How is it that my hand steers it, just as every other hand that came before me.

We have created a global economy that appeases the most pervasive invasions of personal and collective decency. Liberty is laid bare upon the alter of progress awaiting the death blow. To the few who see it coming, it seems an inevitability. Whispers among the future dissident community speak of living in the last days. How much longer. The seed of hope has the potential to grow into something wonderful.

Tomorrow is the day that big brother has its hands on every nation. Upon the throat of every human voice, upon every breath. Today is the day that we do something about it, for tomorrow my friend, it will be to late. Open our eyes to the evidence around us and we will see a sickness our eyes perceive as normal. It is a sickness that has not yet reached its terminal stage. Tomorrow's terminal stage will become the new normal, just as today's.

Our economy is made in China. Each stitch carefully woven into the fabric of our soul. Every error, every tear in time loses more than nine. Factory cities build in the blink of an eye not to satisfy demand, but to force its hand. Demand, the hand that chokes the human spirit. Not indigenous to the tabula rasa, an acquired disease, a symptom of the sickness. Workers paid a dime for their time plus interest. Interest in the enumerable distractions that dull the mind and leave us feeling numb. Feeling nothing. When we don't feel we don't live. We don't take the time to make time, we always have something that demands our attention. We don't feel it is important to passionately caress every moment of the poetry that is our lives.

Our art is prewritten, forged for consumption, marketed as entertainment. Time is something to kill, what better way to kill our time than with some entertainment. No need to write ourselves, our world is written for us. Passified by the weapons of psychological war. Alcohol, our drug of choice to fill a void we can not explain. Sex, without a shred of love, to satisfy the demand of broken dreams. Demand that drives the factory cities, that pay the workers a dime plus interest, that create the goods that no one needs or wants, but demands. Goods that are loaded onto container ships and brought across the seas thousands of kilometres. Unloaded onto trucks and carried thousands more. Goods we buy, because after all they are good. It was prewritten in our entertainment.

And what of those who write themselves. The ones who choose to write their own destiny. Once more our final solution to them is made in China. We are networked now. We are all connected, not to each other but to the hand that deals the death blow. The hand upon the throat. Upon the airways and arteries that power the mind and feed the heart. The heart that doesn't have time to feel. The heart that does't love. The land that built the great wall, yet builds another. Walls provide the cover of darkness, within witch the machinery of the state can efficiently crush the human spirit, break the human body and sell the remaining organs to satisfy the horrors of demand. Blood turns the wheels of our existence. Blood fuels the machine that holds its hand upon our throat. Blood on our hands.

How has it come to this. Whispers among the dissidents that these are our last days. That tomorrow turns terminal. That the sickness has turned us blind, lying meek upon the alter. Awaiting the death blow. And yet in the story the prophets tell, that the meek and the humble shall inherit the earth, remains the seed of hope. The winter is coming. Beyond that, the spring. Hope is like a seed. It has the potential to grow into something wonderful. Let love nourish hope. Let hope inspire love. Let fate, all these things, bring.

Joel McLellan

China controls world governments with trade

2011-10-08T10:55:00.000-07:00

Dalai Lama: China is built on lies, run by hypocrites

Analysis: ANC in crisis after Dalai Lama visa move

South Africa's Tutu fetes 80th birthday amid controversy

Where do we stand now?

2011-09-18T21:36:00.000-07:00

Where do we stand now? For decades our leaders have mismanaged the international system. Our jobs have been exported overseas and everything we buy is imported. North American Industrial capacity has been in decline since before my generation, and with it the decline of democracy. Democracy is an experiment whose survival is not guaranteed. Every year we become less free and less prosperous.

We the people are under economic attack by foreign tyrants. Our leaders are at best complacent and at worst collaborators. A totalitarian china rises in the east and threatens to turn back the tide of human progress. Our culture is being diluted with mindless materialism. We are being watched everywhere at all times. Compassion has given way to contempt. Depression, war, we are in a pre-collapse state. At least we have the internet reformation. Although the free flow of information is not forever guaranteed.

Political change is necessary. We must establish a system of international trade based on human rights and civil liberties. We should not trade with states that violate their citizens human rights. Our governments should raise tariffs and allow our domestic industries a chance to function. We should stop outsourcing to our enemy and bring the jobs home. The American trade deficit is unsustainable and must be brought into balance. America is the defender of democracy and must be preserved lest tyranny and injustice engulf the world.

We must preserve our democracy at home and prevent foreign dictatorships from overpowering what we have fought so hard to establish, our individual sovereignty. From Athens to the Magna Carta, the English civil war to the American civil war, the Constitution to the Bill of Rights. Throughout the ages we have fought to establish and preserve a basic standard of human decency. The philosophers of the enlightenment period paved the way that we may live in a society where we are free to think and say and do as we like. Where we have a say in the decisions that affect our lives. This must be preserved.

If the communist party of china is to gain power over the world the human species will experience a de-evolution back to a more violent barbarism the likes of which we have not seen in generations. We are the guardians of the future. Now is the time to resist.

Free Trade Doesn't Work

2011-08-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

Free Trade Doesn't Work

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Trade-Doesnt-Work-Replace/dp/0578082667/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314730655&sr=8-1

Avoid Trade War? We're Already in One!

ZeroHedge

2011-08-20T23:51:00.000-07:00

http://www.zerohedge.com/

Journalism as it was meant to be.
The end is nigh.

How China Ate America's Lunch

2011-07-29T23:03:00.000-07:00

How China Ate America's Lunch

Re-post from zero hedge/ spread the word

In response to one of my recent posts, #999999;">The Sceptical Market Observer: A New Set of Crisis Villains, Clif Carothers sent me a very insightful and elaborate comment on the relative evolution of the economies of China and the United States over the last 35 years. He claims, very convincingly, that China has deliberately and successfully exploited Europe and America’s wealth to leverage its own development. Less a conspiracy than a brilliantly executed plan, the bottom line is that China’s strategy worked. The brilliant exposé below should be an eye opener for most.

Originally entitled “Kyoto Protocols Would Have Accelerated China’s Plan to Reverse-Exploit EurAmerica”, I changed the title of the piece because Clif’s thesis covers much more ground. It is a fascinating story and I am very proud to present it here.

If you are patient and read the whole piece, you will get to the Kyoto Protocol part of the story. America’s response to Kyoto somehow suggests that not everyone is sleeping at the switch. But as Clif discusses towards the end of this post, the level of awareness about what needs to be done in this country needs to be raised if we are to succeed in getting back into the game.

Here it goes:

My set of Villains...

China had a better strategy and executed it brilliantly

Multinational Corporations (MNCs) saw an opportunity to ride the wave of America's destruction for profit and the business of business is profit so...

Bankers are in the business of transferring capital flow to the highest returns and those are to be found in China so..

Politicians are in the business of getting elected and that comes mostly from having more campaign funds from MNCs and bankers than one's opponent sooooooooo....

In 1978, the year China emerged onto the world stage with its four modernizations, China, a country with four times the population of the United States, had a paltry gross domestic product of $216 billion, less than eight percent of the United States. China exposed her strategy of four modernizations to the world as if to say, “Please invest in China and we will ensure that our workforce is educated, and that our business infrastructure is stable for your investment.” Yet, this openly expressed strategy, that may have seemed to the rest of the world as a difficult but noble goal for China to achieve, was only the tip of China’s Grand Plan, and only the part she wanted the world to see.

EurAmerica’s history with China was one of gunboat diplomacy, exploitation, and forced trading. When China opened her borders again in 1979, EurAmerica’s merchants were enthusiastic to exploit an opportunity again. Yet, China had not forgotten EurAmerica’s role in the Opium War, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Boxer Rebellion. China would never open her border again to be exploited. When she finally opened her border in 1979, it was from a position of power, deep strategy, and long lived planning that suggested EurAmerica was finally ripe for reverse exploitation. China’s grand plan was to emerge as the 21st century world power.

What boldness of purpose China must have felt as she aligned her nation’s efforts to that decade’s long task. Looking back today on her impossible achievements, one must give pause to the monumental economic goal she set for herself in 1978, indeed greater than America’s technical goal of landing on the moon early in 1961. Yet, with such a miniscule $216 billion GDP and few material assets how could China possibly build her empire to surpass that of the United States?

Through a hybrid statist-capitalist political structure, China would create a conduit through which American businesses would willingly draw down the wealth of Europe and America and transfer it to China in order to share in the prosperity of that wealth transfer. Through the centralized imposition of forced savings on its people, China would provide low cost labor to sell goods at low enough prices to cause EurAmerica to look the other way as their neighbors’ jobs went to China. Through low interest loans, China would entice EurAmerican politicians to spend beyond their means to temporarily ease the pain of EurAmerica as China’s sucked away their life force. These were the basis of her strategy.

Similarly to how a business cycle contains early adopters and late stage laggards, China planned a capital extraction cycle for EurAmerica, in which China would extract capital in multiple phases, each phase having an optimal extraction strategy. First extraction would be through the early adopter “gold rush” investors rushing into China to stake a claim. China would also plan for early majority, late majority and laggard’s capital extraction.

In 1978, China assessed America’s assets:

• America’s most valuable assets were intellectual capital that resulted from 200 years of publicly funded primary and publicly subsidized secondary education

• America’s physical assets included business assets, commercial, and residential real estate worth $7 trillion in addition to public assets of land, buildings, and infrastructure

• America produced 26% of the world’s GDP at $2.8 trillion and consumed a quarter of the world’s goods

• America’s debt was as low as it had been since WWII as a percentage of GDP and its 110 million workers were capable of doubling their loans to provide China more capital

• America’s Baby boomers were entering a peak spending phase followed by peak saving

• America’s constitutional republic allowed a relative few capitalists to control the direction of her economy

By 1978, multinational corporations had steadily grown in number and size for two decades. China’s success depended on corralling MNCs through direct foreign investment to create massive inflows of capital quickly monetized as hard assets and infrastructure.

China would entice merchants to invest by offering access to the future potential purchasing power of its people. However, given China’s low household incomes, market penetration would be low to start. Therefore, to entice the early adopters, China would create special economic zones that provided the perfect investment opportunity of cheap educated labor, loose regulation, low taxation, strengthened business law, and enhanced infrastructure and transportation, in which businesses could produce goods at very low arbitrage costs to sell back to their home countries for high margins.

With low cost of goods from special economic zones, early adopter businesses were highly profitable and banks poured investment into China as a result. But, China could not complete her Grand Plan to multiply her GDP 50 times by enticing early adopter investors alone. She had to implement a plan timed to extract maximum dollars from EurAmerica at each phase of her exponential growth.

During the next stage, the early majority stage, China manipulated baby boomers’ peak spending phase:

• China’s low prices secured America’s baby boomers as loyal customers

• Prior to America noticing a substantial loss of jobs, China secured free trade agreements, and mined American businesses for their intellectual capital.

• She reinvested profits back into America’s debt to keep America’s interest rates artificially low in order to spur on higher levels of consumer spending and government borrowing.

• China supported lobbying of America’s mass investment vehicles to fund MNCs. 401Ks and IRAs, created in ‘80and ’81, funneled money through the stock market into MNCs for investment into China.

Then, America was drawn into the late majority stage as America’s baby boomers entered their peak saving years. 401Ks and IRAs artificially fed the stock market frenzy. Baby boomers sensed they knew how to invest in a bubble market that kept rising. With access to low interest rate loans kept low by China’s reinvestment, speculators borrowed money to bet on the rising stock market. America ultimately increased its debt to pump up stock values to build more Chinese factories.

Inevitably, the stock market bubble burst, leaving America’s baby boomers with lower retirement savings. The stock market that seemed destined to go up forever finally reversed rapidly decreasing valuations. However, the debt that had funded its escalation remained.

During the late majority phase:

• More businesses began to invest in China just to remain competitive with businesses that had moved offshore earlier.

• Tens of thousands of businesses transferred factories to China to obtain low cost labor

• Millions of Americans lost jobs

• With a generation of education completed, China now was able to take more advanced jobs as well as factory jobs. America’s bastion of protected, more technically competent jobs was not a bastion after all.

• American retail outlets for Chinese goods grew exponentially

• China continued to loan its excess profits back to the American government to keep interest rates low.

After having lived through the weakness of the stock market, real estate appeared to be the baby boomers’ best retirement savings alternative. In the early stages of the Great Ponsi, housing prices went steadily up. With low interest rates, Americans could now borrow on the value of their homes to continue funding China’s growth. China’s final stages of extraction saw the housing bubble increase beyond what had ever been experienced before.

Even though American jobs were increasingly being driven offshore, the frenzy of increased housing prices allowed additional borrowing from Americans, feeding the China gold rush further. This behavior was not unexpected, following a pattern of historical boom-bust cycles and was part of China’s planning. As a result of the stock bubble and the housing bubble, America’s total debt had risen to over $55 trillion. With such exuberance in the housing market, secondary debt markets participated in credit default swaps to the tune of an additional $42 trillion. China now had extracted close to the maximum of America’s value, leaving America with the corresponding debt.

So China extracted maximum value, first in trade secrets and early adoptive money, then by IRAs and 401Ks, then by stock market and home equity loans, then by 2nd mortgages and housing speculation. China monetized the massive cash flows as quickly as possible, building infrastructure and excess manufacturing capacity, while leaving America holding debt in exchange.

Without any other rising asset values to borrow from, America has tapped out its debt. Having maxed its debt, America can only print money to finance its trade deficits. Without further real debt derived money extraction to give China for infrastructure investment and without a real ability to pay for low cost Chinese goods, America is fast losing her worth to China as an infrastructure vehicle. Recognizing that maximized extraction and rapid monetization of America’s wealth is nearing its end, China is now finalizing the implementation of her strategy, that of pulling out of American debt before other countries that maintain reserve currencies create a run on the dollar.

In thirty short years, China was able to accelerate her GDP from $216 billion to $11 trillion. She amassed reserve capital of $3 trillion. She reversed America’s fortunes from the greatest creditor nation to the greatest debtor nation. She gutted America’s factories while creating the world’s largest manufacturing base in her own country. A measure of output that highly correlates to GDP is energy consumption. In June of this year, 2011, China surpassed the United States as the largest consumer of energy on the planet. While the U.S consumes 19 percent of the world’s energy, China consumes 20.3 percent.

In 1992, the world came together to discuss the impact of climate change resulting from energy consumption. The talks resulted in Kyoto protocols being initially adopted in 1997 that attempted to create a framework for reducing greenhouse emissions. The protocols called for 33 industrialized nations to reduce their greenhouse gases to 1990 levels and then to maintain emissions at those levels. Although it called for emerging countries like China to voluntarily lower levels, it did not require them to be mandated.

Of course, all of the countries who had no requirements to reduce their emissions signed the agreement. The United States, under scrutiny from environmentalists and others did not sign. China did sign. This was an additional strategy perhaps not envisioned in 1978 that nonetheless would have assisted in accelerating America’s slide had we signed.

GDP highly correlates to energy usage. In 1990, America’s real GDP was about $8 trillion as compared to $14 trillion in 2011. Kyoto would have caused America to either:

• Invest billions in the attempt to lower our energy usage per dollar of GDP

• Pay billions to other countries to have them produce less so that we could grow our GDP from $8 to $14 trillion

• Or, maintain our GDP at 8 trillion

In the meantime, China’s GDP in 1990 was $1.3 trillion and has since grown to over $10 trillion. China’s energy use has correspondingly grown as well until the point that this month, she overtook America as the greatest polluter. Kyoto was a grand idea that was doomed from the start because of the flaw that allowed the now greatest polluter to play by different rules. It attempted to cap the economic growth of America while allowing other countries to grow unfettered.

China had a Grand Plan that has been executed with the finesse expected of a centrally planned economy. Kyoto added nicely to that plan. America has been thwarted by China’s plan but now has the ability to reverse course. Given China’s size and growth rate, she will pass us soon if she has not already and her stride will be too great for us to catch her. However, by avoiding traps like Kyoto, and understanding that economic gamesmanship can accomplish a much greater destruction of a nation’s wealth than warfare ever could, perhaps America can once again right its course.

ME: When a reader then asked Clif , “Are you concluding that the US does or doesn't have a prayer in hell of recovering any momentum or GDP growth to nice numbers ever again?” here was his answer:

The remaining debt capacity of any size that is capable of being used to support renewal remains with America's MNC's and they have not yet been incentivized to return home. The capacity for new jobs is contained in our private small businesses but access to credit has been denied to them by our current banking structure. It needs to be bypassed. Our contracted economy remains too risky to hire new employees. Their wages must be subsidized to reduce risks. America continues to allow our trade secrets to leave offshore for a fraction of their worth. We must revisit our private property laws as they pertain to offshore sales and investments. China and other countries continue to bring goods into our country at a net negative benefit to our citizens. An overhaul of our trade policies is needed.

One hundred percent of our federal tax revenues are spent on the three Ms of military, Medicare and Medicaid. It's an abomination of national compulsion that must be reversed. Our deficits will soon trigger a massive run on the dollar; we are that close. We obviously must incur massive cuts in public spending. Public spending cuts of the size needed to reverse course on our debt crisis would trigger a depression without an offsetting spend on the private side, thus the incentivizing of MNCs and dollar shifting from unemployment benefits to employment vouchers that are required for the offset.

These changes are all quite doable and could help avert what will otherwise be America's darkest days ahead. The challenge will be to fill our representative democracy with those that both understand the problems we face and that have the courage to act boldly on them.

ME: And a further comment on the nature of the “Republic”:

As a furtherance of the discussion, a potential villain is that an upgrade to our Republic form of government is required. It suited us well and certainly better than earlier versions of Republic governments before ours had suited their people. However, Madison was right to be concerned. Yet all the protections placed within our federal system may not have been enough.

When asked by a political commentator whether or not he would relax his stance on Medicare and Social Security being off the table as far as debt ceiling negotiations were concerned, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont stated today (that was around July 8th) that the vast majority of Americans have stated they want the wealthy to pay more instead of them having to sacrifice to solve the nation’s debt issues. It seems logical that if most are suffering while a privileged few are prospering, that the prosperous may be in some obscure way responsible for others’ misery and that they should be the ones that pull us all out of the economic fire.

When it comes to solving our nation’s fiscal crisis, we are now in the “not in my backyard” stage of negotiations. No-one wants to feel the pain that we will all ultimately endure. The old saying that misery loves company is true for American politics. If any of us are called to sacrifice, we demand to see equal sacrifice by others as well. However, in this early stage of “not in my backyard”, we still are desperately hopeful that the evil doers will be caught and that justice will prevail without any of us having to sacrifice what we all had hoped would be our future prosperity.

Unfortunately, the size and scope of America’s travail is too great for any one American faction to accept full responsibility for its cause or to create a solution through their own efforts. We all must understand our small participation in America’s deterioration in order to rise to the calling for the responsible citizenship that will be required if we are to reverse our nation’s course.

If we cannot dispose of personal responsibility in our quest to blame others for our national predicament, neither can we blame fate itself. For those that say nothing can be done to right our ship of state because it was merely happenstance that placed China in the good fortunes of becoming the next great empire and not some nationalistic conspiracy that created China’s opportunity for preeminence, I would ask, did China’s leadership not conspire to achieve world fiscal dominance? Did America not conspire to achieve world military dominance? Did England not conspire to achieve world colonial dominance?

Do most world achievements occur through mere happenstance or are they the result of the greatest minds of the time conspiring to set the stage for dominating implementation? Interestingly, studies have shown that the difference between individual achievers and the vast majority of lesser men is that achievers create a written plan and then set about to implement it. If that is so for accomplished individuals, would it not be more so for great societies? No, fate is not the purveyor of our misfortune.

Our founders wrote in the federalist papers of their concerns for the eventual collapse of our country when they expounded on why previous republics failed. In creating our newest form of Republic, they studied the failures of others stating that when elites were able to place puppet politicians in the functions of government, their republics failed. While our founders created a system of bicameral government, overlapping terms of the house, president, and senate, shared system of government between local, state, and federal systems, all designed to thwart the overtaking of government by the elite, but they failed to realize the concentration of power that capitalism would eventually afford our elite over our political system as the centuries progressed.

China certainly had a strategy for mining America's wealth but it could not have been exercised if not for the weak underbelly of our political system. That underbelly was the dependence of political leaders on the fortunes of business and banking for their re-elections. This was the incipient crack through which the corruption of our American Republic began, and it is this symbiotic poison that we must now severe if we wish to avoid being dashed against the historical rocks of other failed republics, some of which also were the world’s political giants of their time.

A New Hope?

2011-06-22T12:18:00.000-07:00

China Will Suspend Open Market Operations Tomorrow In Response To Liquidity Freeze

Chinese Interbank Liquidity Freeze Continues For Third Day, Will Persist As Inflation Expected To Rise Over 5.5%

Never Forget June 4 1989

2011-06-04T13:09:00.000-07:00

Tiananmen Square Massacre

In the Jaws of the Dragon

2011-05-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

In the Jaws of the Dragon: America's Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Dominance [Paperback]

Goldman Aligns Itself Against US, UK, And Europe, Alongside China In Choice For Next IMF Head

2011-05-22T20:15:00.000-07:00

Goldman Aligns Itself Against US, UK, And Europe, Alongside China In Choice For Next IMF Head

News

2011-04-19T18:56:00.000-07:00

Vancouver government under Chinese influence
Amended Bylaw No Solution for Falun Gong Protest: Lawyer

Activist on Trial For Subversion

Three Reasons for Beijing's Current Campaign Against Dissent

Police Step Up Block Monitoring System in China

Tense Situation as Chinese Troops Surround Monastery

Chinese Media Campaign Against Ai Weiwei

China’s espionage in Chile raised U.S. Worry

China Aircraft Carrier Could be Tested by Summer

China’s Bad Growth Bet

Is the People’s Bank of China Insolvent?

An Inconvenient Truth About China

2011-04-07T21:05:00.000-07:00

An Inconvenient Truth About China

Cost of US 'free' trade: collapse of two centuries of broadly shared prosperity

2011-04-02T00:16:00.000-07:00

Cost of US 'free' trade: collapse of two centuries of broadly shared prosperity

News

2011-03-28T22:05:00.000-07:00

Cell Phones Tracking our Every Move Worldwide

Beijing Monitors Citizens’ Whereabouts via Mobile Phone

Beijing's Blueprint for Tackling Mass Incidents and Social Management

Emails: Insiders worried over abuse of powers at Homeland Security

Google Funds Web Tool For Underground Freedom Fighters

Google Accuses China of Tampering With Gmail

Crises Nudge Debt Loads to Brink

The PLA’s "Orient Express": Militarization of the Iron Silk Road

Taiwan’s Intelligence Chief Warns about the PLA’s Growing Strategic Weapon Systems

Chinese Regime’s New Missile Troubles Taiwan

Researchers Unravel Horrors of Organ Harvesting in China

China Executes Thousands

Chinese Dissident Gets 10 Years for Writing Essays

Chinese Activist Detained For Subversion

UN Demands Chinese Lawyer's Release

Gao Zhisheng Wins Freedom of Expression Award

Tibetan Celebrations Suppressed

China’s Drinking Water Crisis

Putin’s Energy Games Turn Increasingly Erratic

Ukraine Set To Take Over Transneft Oil Product Pipeline

Update: Red Dawn Censored

2011-03-18T22:08:00.000-07:00

MGM’s profits here are coming at a very steep price for the rest of us: that of free speech

MGM's 'Red Dawn' re-edit: A whitewash to preserve corporate profits

Red Dawn Censored

2011-03-16T21:37:00.000-07:00

In a disturbing revelation it has been made public that the much anticipated film Red Dawn is being re-edited to remove all references to China and replace them with North Korea. The censorship is being imposed upon the makers of the film in order to satisfy business interests. The regime in China is bringing Western media further under its control.
This is a blow to all those who believe in personal freedom and human rights.

How an invading army changes from Chinese to North Korean

America cutting investments and subsidizing consumption

2011-03-05T12:39:00.000-08:00

Recipe for Destruction

America "cutting investments and subsidizing consumption — exactly the opposite of what are the main drivers of economic growth."

News

2011-02-28T20:07:00.000-08:00

China determined to rival US nuclear arsenal

No transparency over nukes, China tells US

Wikileaks: 16 More Secrets on China to Follow

China blocks report on North Korea's new nuclear facility, UN diplomats say

Chinese Police Crack Down on Foreign Reporters and Lawyers to Quell a ‘Jasmine Revolution’

Chinese Police Smother Jasmine Protests

Ambassador's Name Blocked in China after protest

Uyghurs Targeted Amidst Reform Call

Chinese Police Crack Down on Banned Tibetan Songs

North Koreans Take to the Streets

North Korea, South Korea standoff heats up as war games begin

Russia unveils huge rearmament drive

Russia Vows to Sell Missiles to Syria

Russian Government Helpless as Rebels Expand Operations in Kabardino-Balkaria

South Stream Project Contravenes EU’s Energy Market Legislation

Towns in Gadhafi Stronghold Falling

Pro-Gadhafi forces fight rebels in 2 cities

UN Accuses Belarus of Arming Ivory Coast Military in Violation of Embargo

Intelligence Community Fears U.S. Manufacturing Decline

2011-02-14T21:54:00.000-08:00

Intelligence Community Fears U.S. Manufacturing Decline

The War of the World

2011-01-16T15:56:00.000-08:00

The most accurate history ever produced:

The War of the World I

The War of the World II

The War of the World III

The War of the World IV

The War of the World V

The War of the World VI

News

2010-11-14T14:45:00.000-08:00

China still bans rare earth shipments to Japan

Chinese Missiles Could Close 5 of 6 major US Pacific airforce bases in Attack

Japan To Send Troops To Remote Isle Over China Fears

THE CHINA NIGHTMARE

China The Bully

Victim of New Brainwashing Campaign Dies at Labor Camp within Days of Arrival

Why Is Russia Building 5000 More Nuclear Bomb Shelters In Moscow By The End Of 2012?

Russia sends hit squad to kill renegade colonel who gave up Anna Chapman spy ring

Suu Kyi Calls For Burma Dialogue

Irish Debt Causing New Jitters Across Europe

New Report Warns Of "Unprecedented Decline" In Home Values And No Stabilization In Q3

Stand up to Communist China /------------------- Vote Trump in 2012

2010-10-09T16:22:00.000-07:00

Donald Trump has stepped forward to proclaim he is considering a run for the Presidency of the United States in 2012. One of his primary stances is that the United States must stand up to China as China has been economically exploiting the United States for decades. Mr. Trump has stated he will defend American interests and put in place sound economic policies that will prohibit China from exploiting America. He is the only presidential candidate so far to dare to publicly stand up to the increasingly aggressive Chinese regime.

21 Reasons Why Donald Trump Is Right – China Is Just Ripping This Country Like Nobody Has Ever Ripped Us Before

China's economic war on America biggest since world war two

China voices fury over Nobel Peace Prize for Civil Rights Activist

China Tightens State Secrets Law

China threatened to kill B.C. reporter on Canadian soil

2010-09-26T13:14:00.000-07:00

China has an extensive espionage network in and around Vancouver that hides among the large ethnic Chinese community. Agents set up front companies as cover for their operations of influence and intimidation among the local populace. They maintain mutually beneficial connections with organized crime crime groups, mostly of Chinese origin, in exchange for protection back in the motherland. Decisions made by the Communist party in Beijing can be enforced on Canadian soil by a network of highly trained and dangerous foot soldiers. The primary objectives are to steal secrets, influence politicians and the media, and to silence dissent. Recently a Surrey reporter came forward with details on threats made against his life for reporting negatively about the Chinese government.

"You actually think there is nothing we can do to you because you are in Canada."
Agent of China's Ministry of State Security.

Here is a link for more information:
China threatened to kill B.C. reporter on Canadian soil

The RCMP has reportedly taken the issue very "seriously". That is not very reassuring based on the fact that the RCMP is extremely incompetent when it comes to intelligence gathering. Its not the kind of organization that hires the brightest minds this nation has to offer. Their greatest source of intelligence is through the programs designed to monitor everyone's facebook. China's Ministry of State Security Agents only use facebook to track targets and are specifically instructed not to use it for any other traceable personal purpose. I should hope that CSIS will have their hands in the investigation although the fact that it has come to this is troubling. Ultimately the corrupt incompetent political class bears responsibility for this massive violation of Canadian sovereignty. There exists no longer leadership in the West that represents the interests of the people until once again the Sons of Liberty rise.

News

2010-09-01T16:02:00.000-07:00

Waiting for WikiLeaks: Beijing's Seven Secrets

Organ Harvesting Worse Under Chinese Reforms

China’s Secret Satellite Rendezvous Suggestive of a Military Program

China's Eyes in the Skies

China: Rumors of the Central Bank Chief's Defection

Detained Woman Dies Eight Days After Arrest in China

Ending a Long Nightmare by Speaking the Truth

China Intensifies Build-Up Against Taiwan: Reports

Backlash over China curb on metal exports

Chinese Activist Emerges from Jail to Find Lake Still Polluted

Chinese 'Anti-Vulgarity Campaign' Targets Independent Artist

China requires ID to buy mobile phone numbers

Chinese Police Fire on Mine Protesters

Chinese Companies Target Journalists

Renminbi to Become a World Trade Currency

Hopeful Chinese Dissidents Petition for an End to Forced Re-education through Labor

Will intimidation win China the Yellow Sea?

China set to exert military influence abroad

China's Water Grab

Beijing's Petitioners Grow in Number and Indigence, but Not Satisfaction

US senators raise concern about Huawei-Sprint deal

Japan to Stage Drill in Response to Chinese Naval Buildup

Elderly Farmer Recaptured By Chinese Police

China channeling money through Chavez to drug cartels

News

2010-08-19T18:27:00.000-07:00

China Targets U.S.

China's development of Quantum Teleportation a Serious Threat

PLA Expands Network of Military Reconnaissance Satellites

Pentagon Takes Aim at China Cyber Threat

Canada Calls on Chinese Embassy to Give Back Journalist's Passport

Political Persecution Tears a Chinese Family Apart

Activist Detained in Beijing

The Caspian Sea: China’s Silk Road Strategy Converges with Damascus

Analysis: Iran Gas Ambition Requires China to Crack LNG Secret

Iran's secret pipeline into the U.S.

Extremist Muslims in UK Threaten Civil War

Kurdish PKK Using PJAK to Isolate Turkey

Round Seven? The Houthi Rebellion in Northern Yemen

Al-Shabaab’s Unavoidable Clash with Somaliland Democracy

The Tricks of Hezbollah

Germany charges two over Iran exports

Report: Saudi Judge Considers Paralysis Punishment

Russia Throws Open French Warship Buy to Tender

Chavez Signs Law That Will Kill Private Brokerages

Body of kidnapped mayor dumped in northern Mexico

Rebels kill 3 Indian peacekeepers in Congo

The Erosion of America's Middle Class

Difficult economic times ahead, CBO warns

News

2010-08-17T17:17:00.000-07:00

China Targets US Troops with Arms Buildup

China and the US battle to assert presence in South China Sea

Taiwan, Japan Vow To Keep Close Eye On China

China tests space station module to launch in 2011

China's Greedy Communists

Where China Hides Its Debt

Chinese authorities confiscate photos of an exiled Tibetan religious figure

North Korea’s ‘Enormous Achievements’ Highlighted by Chinese Media

North Korea succession: A new contender

S. Korea Studies North's New Battle Tank

Russia's intelligence attack: The Anna Chapman danger

Iran To Unveil Array Of Weapons Next Week

Bomb kills head of Iran's military drone program

Mayor of northern Mexican town of Santiago is kidnapped

Barclays To Pay $298 Million For Evading U.S. Economic Sanctions

W T F - Feds: No charges in Pa. school laptop-spying case

News

2010-08-16T17:30:00.000-07:00

China's military power growing

China surges past Japan as No. 2 economy

Southeast Asian nations beef up to counter China

SANDERS: World economy coming in for a landing

China Extending Advantage Over Taiwan

Chinese dam projects raise alarm in Asia

Tibetan Protest Monks Evade Arrest

Chinese Media Toe Party Line Over Disaster

China reduces holdings of Treasury debt in June

Pro Moscow Government Targets Opposition in Ukraine

Iran Details Plans for New Mountain Nuke Sites

S-300 deployment cut off northern route to Iran

Eagleburger: World's Going to War Over Iranian Nukes

Signs point to trouble ahead for Hezbollah

US may ban weapon sales if Turkey-Israel relations don't improve

Israel aims to increase Space Program

Mexican cartel blockades streets in Monterrey

Threats of int'l BlackBerry bans echo US debate

News

2010-08-14T21:48:00.000-07:00

Russia’s Police State

Rule Of Law Still Anemic In Russia

Drunken Nation: Russia’s Depopulation Bomb

China Floods May Be Sign of Wider Problems

Smile! Aerial images being used to enforce laws

Google has joined Verizon in lobbying to erode net neutrality

Judge's ruling uproots use of biotechnology beets

Bosnian court confirms genocide indictment

Amid drug-war weariness, Felipe Calderón calls for a debate on legalisation

Shifting battle lines bring violence to new parts of Mexico

Colorado agency blows off law restricting money for illegals

Underneath Lebanon, Israel sees hidden battlefield

No More Debt!

Hey Ayatollah, leave those kids alone
Video Link^

Pink Floyd anthem rewritten for young Iranians

"images of everyday life in Iran appearing in between shots. In the Islamic Republic, playing and listening to rock music is illegal."

News

2010-08-13T15:01:00.000-07:00

John Bolton: Russia's Loading of Nuke Fuel Into Iran Plant Means Aug. 21 Deadline for Israeli Attack

Russian Advancing in the Black Sea-South Caucasus Region

New START: Increasing the Risk of Nuclear War

Russian actions don't jibe with reset

Russia looks beyond its oil reserves

Stocks fall for 4th day after retail sales report

Fed Policymakers Screw It Up Again

When Japan's debt bubble bursts – watch out

Missing Lawyer Important for China’s Future

Jailed Tibetan Made Donations

Chinese Regime Uses Doctored Photo to Discredit The Epoch Times

Lawyer: Iranian who faced stoning likely tortured

Turkish gasoline sales to Iran soared amid new UN sanctions

Fear of involvement of organised crime in the energy sector

Federal appeals court in NY rules against ACORN

Study: Illegals Account for 1 in 12 US Births

Governor: Violence Paralyzes Mexico Border

Blogger Beats Mexico Media on Drug News Blackout

Sagem To Test Patroller UAV in Civil Security Role

Questions and answers about BlackBerry objections

News

2010-08-11T17:27:00.000-07:00

China: The Mother of All Bubbles

If mulling over an espionage career for Beijing, think twice

Uyghur Evictee Detained

India Deploys Su-30s Near China

US Trade gap likely points to slower economic growth

Stocks fall sharply as investors' gloom grows

Fed extends crisis policies as outlook downgraded

UK doctors: New superbug gene could spread widely

Ariz. residents find freedom, protection under new gun law

Russia Deploys S-300 Air Defense Systems in Abkhazia

Enforce international law in Lebanon

Lebanon's crisis strikes discord in Palestinian Gaza

The Point of No Return for Iran

USS Truman posted opposite Hormuz as Iranian threats spiral

News

2010-08-10T15:21:00.000-07:00

PLA Posturing for Conflict in the South China Sea

Maui man guilty in leak of B-2 secrets to China

The Japanese Archipelago through Chinese Eyes

Chinese Warships Tour the Mediterranean

Promotion of Mao's Grandson a Definite Political Gesture

Pattern of Harsh Prison Sentences for personal views in China

Uyghur Web Moderators Get Life

Missing Chinese Lawyer Honored With Human Rights Award

North Korea fires artillery into waters near border with South Korea

Russia plans major defense budget upgrade

Quashing rallies may not stave off discontent in Russia

SPIES WHO LOOK JUST LIKE US: THE GAME THAT IS NOT A GAME

Russia Counts on Western Input For Modern Arms Production

Fires Producing Chernobyl-Type Panic In Russia

Russia Insults Japan Even As It Seeks Peace and Friendship

Iran Navy Equipped With Four New Submarines

___________________________________________________________________

Video Link: Worse Than War..........Genocide

A film about government mass murder in countries like China, Nazi Germany, Russia.

"By the most fundamental measure -- the number of people killed -- the perpetrators of mass murder since the beginning of the twentieth century have taken the lives of more people than have died in military conflict. So genocide is worse than war," reiterates Goldhagen. "This is a little-known fact that should be a central focus of international politics, because once you know it, the world, international politics, and what we need to do all begin to look substantially different from how they are typically conceived."

News

2010-08-05T18:00:00.000-07:00

Organ Harvesting Witness Faces Deportation to China

Chinese missile could shift Pacific power balance

Hot political summer as China throttles rare metal supply and claims South China Sea

China Builds Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile Base within range of Taiwan, South China Sea

China's Real Estate Bubble Threatens to Burst

Vanity GDP Hurts China’s Living Standard

Parents of China quake victims say they have been threatened by local authorities

Tibetans Reject Quake Plan

Toxic Levels of Manganese Found in Guangdong Tap Water

Babies in China Left Partially Blind After Overdose of Oxygen Experiment

U.S. To Sell Taiwan Two Frigates: Report

Russian wildfires destroy secret naval airbase 2512 Kolomna destroying hundreds of naval aircraft and specialized equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars and years of production.
Some components lost are no longer in production, irreplaceable due to the degradation of the Russian defence sector.

Closed city Sarov, the main nuclear design and production facility in Russia since 1949,
has had it's perimeter breached by the fires advancing towards nuclear arms producing facilities.
(Closed cities were built in soviet times for sensitive military research and production activities. They are completely walled off and isolated from the rest of the the country and house both the scientists and engineers and the facilities they work at along with the local garrison. All movement in and out is controlled by the authorities as to minimize the risk of espionage and provide a barrier to prevent Russian scientists from defecting to the West. Conditions within the closed cities are said to be much better than in the rest of the country.)

Link to Report on Russian Wildfires

Lots of Questions, Few Answers in Lebanon attack

Iran Publishes New Holocaust-Denying Website

Iran's deadly hand in Afghanistan

Arizona Immigration Law Author: Failure to Enforce Law Impeachable Offense

News

2010-08-02T16:04:00.000-07:00

Leaked Memo Outlines Chinese Regime Plans to Up Internet Censorship

China Steps Up Web Controls

Strategic jousting between China and America

Venezuela Sends Troops To Colombian Border

32 billion of Chinese Credit sent to Venezuela

State-Owned Bidders Fuel China's Land Boom

Villagers Clash with Gang and Police in Shanwei

More Uyghur Homes Demolished

Beijing Running Short of Water

Dozens Detained In Protest Rallies Held Across Russia

LYING TO THE DEAD: SOVIET ATROCITY IN UKRAINE IS 21ST CENTURY WARNING

Hot Summer in Moscow Emerges as a Political Problem

Islamists Gain Upper Hand in Dagestan

Czech Republic Ready to Host U.S. Missile Warning Center

State and Local Debt Bombs Ticking Throughout US Heartland

News

2010-07-27T18:53:00.000-07:00

Lessons From the Holocaust, Organ Harvesting in China

Renewed Calls for Investigation Into Organ Harvesting

China, the Mother of all Grey Swans

China: the coming costs of a superbubble

Grand March Near White House by Practitioners of Falun Gong

U.S. Senators Demand DoD Release China Report

China Warns U.S. to Stay Out of Islands Dispute

Japan to Beef Up Submarines to Counter Chinese Power

North Korea threatens 'sacred' nuclear war

US vulnerable and unprepared for nuclear attack

Tensions Rise as Largest US-South Korea Military Exercise Kicks Off, China Launches Surveillance Aircraft and Anti Ship Missile Destroyers on Behalf of Ally North Korea

Lead Poisons Children in China

Pollution makes quarter of China water unusable-ministry

Chinese Real Estate Development Wipes Out Homes and Heritage

Another Financial Crisis May Be Brewing In Hungary

Taleb: Government Deficits Could Be the Next 'Black Swan'

Gorbachev Warns of Explosive Problems With Medvedev’s “Modernization”

Will Russia Buy Up Ukraine?

French “Tin Cans” or Technology Transfer? Vysotskiy on the Mistral

Burma is working on nuclear weapons programme

Turkey Going Nuclear

Cuban Fantasies of Nuclear War

Israel warns of N. Korea missile proliferation in Mideast

Hizballah saber-rattling over its expected indictment in Hariri murder

Hizballah Takes Aim At Israel's Natural Gas Discovery

A Clouded Outlook for Japan

Alternate QDR: Boost Equipment Modernization, U.S. Force Size

BAE: Hybrid-Electric Design Will Pay Off in U.S. Army GCV program

Setting Cyber Traps

Jack-Booted Thugs Terrorizing Law-Abiding citizens

News

2010-07-23T15:04:00.001-07:00

When the gulag meets capitalism with Chinese characteristics

On North Korea and More, China Flexes Its Muscles

Japan Building Missiles to Counter China's Naval Power

Tens of Thousands in Standoff with Police in Eastern China

Thousands Protesting in Southern China Violently Suppressed

Protest at Lead Contamination zone Suppressed

Inside Stories of Bloody Conflict in Xinjiang

Uyghur Journalist Gets 15 Years

Jailing of US Citizen Raises Concerns Over Chinese State Secrets Laws

Famed Chinese Human Rights Lawyer Gao Zhisheng Missing Again

Internet TV Company Helps Break Beijing's Censorship

Oil Spill in China Spreads

Number of political prisoners in Cuba still murky

South Lebanon’s Shiites Clash with French Peacekeepers – A Hezbollah Strategy

A Quiet Alliance Forms Against Iran in the Middle East

France To Build Russia 2 Ships

White House predicts record $1.47 trillion deficit

Where’s the Credit?

Wal-Mart to roll out tracking chips on men's basics

Solar UAV Lands After Record 2 Weeks Aloft

Shortened URLs Drive Need for New Security

News

2010-07-22T19:14:00.000-07:00

Poor Chinese Are Throwing Money Into An Unescapable Capital Trap

China Has a Painful Surprise for the Global Economy

Foreign companies in China sound off on business policies

Report Details Tibet Crackdown

Uyghur Journalist To Face Trial

U.S. aircraft carrier drops out of training drill due to China pressure

China’s Cyber Command

The Chinese Navy’s Emerging Support Network in the Indian Ocean

Assessing the PLA’s Promotion Ladder to CMC Member Based on Grades vs. Ranks

Russia Will Spend 20 Trillion Rubles on New Weapons

More Muslim Riots in France

Outgoing comptroller accuses Ban Ki-moon of thwarting war on corruption at UN

Venezuela Severs Ties With Colombia

US-Iranian combat looms in Iraq as US plans UN role for US troop remnant

US spy chief nominee warns of N Korea 'direct attacks'

U.S. announces new sanctions against N.Korea

Ukraine Expects a new loan from the IMF

Kosovo's independence is legal, UN court rules

Vindicated for Removing Saddam

News

2010-07-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

2000 Chinese missiles targeted at Taiwan

New Chinese anti ship missile

China a debt junkie?

Second China stimulus?

Sea change in U.S. China Relations

Motives of China's east sea drills

Bay of Bengal littorals in Chinese strategic calculus

Beijing revenue exacerbates central local tensions

China's emerging Eurasian transport corridor

Chinese police disperse land grab protest

Chinese police detain Uyghurs

China put curbs on traditional burials to stamp out protests

Russia expands powers of secret police

Russia doubles money for weapons

Russia circumvents sanctions on Iran

North Korea orders purge

Mexican gangs maintain lookout bases on U.S. territory

Lost decade new threat to economy

Growing Number of Prosecutions for Videotaping the Police

Chinese agents in Canadian Government

2010-07-05T17:57:00.000-07:00

China has been at war with the free peoples of the west since the communist takeover.
I have witnessed first hand the control China has over local government in Canada these days.
Citizens are no longer allowed to protest in front of Chinese government buildings in parts of Canada. As our constitutional rights are one by one disappearing agents of foreign influence are growing in number in our houses of parliament under the guise of "multiculturalism". Democracy is under attack and it is up to the sons of liberty to defend it.
Liberty or Death.

On behalf of all true Canadians Many thanks to our Hero CSIS Director Richard Fadden for revealing to the general public this devious part of the china threat. However Freedom Fighters have long known that sections of the government are already under chinese influence.
We will resist, until the last man is standing.

Some Canadian politicians paid agents of China

Canadian Spymaster Criticized by Beijing Front Organization for revealing Chinese infiltration of Canadian government

Beijing's Coalition of the Willing

2010-07-02T13:58:00.000-07:00

Beijing's Coalition of the Willing

News

2010-05-29T21:27:00.000-07:00

China’s Currency Manipulation: About to Cause a Global Explosion

China Killing Falun Gong Practitioners for Profit

Falun Gong Practitioner Involved in Changchun TV Broadcast Dies in Custody

China: The Next Ill Wind?

Worldwide financial crisis 2?

Credit Crisis Indicators

US military alert level raised in Seoul, 24 stealth fighters jets ready

U.N.: North Korea Is Exporting Nuclear Missile Technology

Europe heading for a meltdown

Iran hid equipment from inspectors

Syria arming Hezbollah from secret bases

China ban on fishing as tension runs high

Brazil and Argentina: China's Growing Foothold in Latin America

Tiananmen Massacre Memorial Blocked In Hong Kong

Parents of Kindergarten Killing Victims Silenced by Chinese Authorities

Chinese authorities still detaining Uyghurs without charge

Chinese Farmers Lie on Railroad Tracks to Protest Land Grab

China’s Use of ‘World Expo’ Tactical and Peculiar

The FSB Returns to Ukraine

Dark But Short: Russia’s Shadow on Georgia’s Elections

Maoist attack derails 13 coaches of Express train, 68 dead

French secret service fear Russian cathedral a spying front

UK ID cards to be scrapped in 100 days

What sites such as Facebook and Google know and whom they tell

USAF vehicle breaks record for hypersonic flight

Navy’s Drone Death Ray Takes Out Targets at Sea

News

2010-05-15T16:45:00.000-07:00

Shanghai Expo Intensifies Chinese Regime's Crackdown of Falun Gong

Former Chinese Prison Official Reveals the Dark Side of the System

Shifting Sands in the Gulf: The Iran Calculus in China-Saudi Arabia Relations

Missile Developments in China, India and Pakistan: A Burgeoning Missile Race

Confessed Spy Convicted of Exporting U.S. Crypto Gear to China

Case of Death in Police Custody Still Alive 10 Years On

China’s CPI Increases as Food Prices Soar

Junta Hampers Water Aid

Russia developing new anti-missile system, S-500

Russia to sell Syria warplanes, air defense systems

Syria, Hizballah are building a massive wall in eastern Lebanon

Iran expands enrichment facility

Europe Only Postpones Its Day of Reckoning

Bomb explodes in Greek courthouse

Thai Army Cites ‘Live Fire Zone’ as Clashes Continue

Former Mexico presidential candidate missing

Candidates threatened in local Mexico elections

Amnesty? Bureaucrats already drawing up plan to implement

Google grabs personal info off of Wi-Fi networks

News

2010-05-13T13:55:00.000-07:00

Iran Targeting Dissidents Through Global Police INTERPOL
Obama issued executive order, grants INTERPOL to operate on U.S. soil without the usual restraints that apply to domestic law enforcement

China's navy changing the game

U.S. Should Address Human Rights Backsliding in China

Chinese authorities detain worshippers in a raid on an underground church

Uyghur Held, Boss Vows Crackdown

China’s High GDPs: Facts or Fabrications?

China’s 2009 Real Estate Market Regulation a Failure

China formally Bans Anonymous Internet Messages

Serial Killings Reveal Deteriorated Social Relationships in China

Moscow Grooming a Political Team in Tbilisi

NATO code compromise

'Eight dead' in blast in Russia's Dagestan

North Korea shipping WMDs to Syria

Arsons Reported in North Korea

Rogue Thai general aiding Red Shirts shot in head

The Case for Economic Doom and Gloom

Japan financing towards a fiscal crisis

Broad Approval For Smart New Arizona Immigration Law

US drug war has met none of its goals

Meet traitor Maurice Strong

Google hides Obama's Social Security Number story

New Hawaii law shuns Obama birth document requests

Nine accused of accessing Obama’s student loan records

A Declaration on behalf of Internet Liberty

2010-05-10T16:15:00.000-07:00

Secret negotiations have been taking place for some time on the formulation of an International treaty giving governments all over the world the legal authority to monitor and police all internet activity without warrant. Under the guise of intellectual property protection the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement uses vague wording that could be interpreted not only to track down and apprehend those who allegedly download illegally copied files but also could be used to silence political dissent. It puts legal responsibility on search engines for the content they provide in their results. This creates enormous pressure from a business standpoint on the search engines to self censor their search results to match government guidelines out of fear of legal reprisal from the authorities. Anyone anywhere can be put under surveillance tracked down arrested and criminally prosecuted based on the alleged “illegal” content they encounter online. The treaty does not take into account that anyone who knows how can mask their online identity as someone else leaving all individuals open to prosecution even if they are not involved in piracy or deviant political speech. This international law is the basis for the formation of the modern police state. It has been my conclusion for some time that with the pervasive surveillance oriented nature of modern technology it is only a matter of time before it is abused on a wide scale by governments to control people. This system of control has been pioneered by the Chinese regime and it has enabled them to keep better tabs on deviant political thought.
The western internet has remained relatively free so far but there is no bill of internet rights or sufficient constitutional protection for internet rights. Laws, and more importantly law makers, have not kept up with the pace of technology and this has left open the possibility of exploitation by the powers that be. In order to operate and compete in the modern world one must have access to the internet. All modern citizens are vulnerable to the threat of undue government interference in their privacy. Freedom should not end at the tip of a keyboard. If adopted the international treaty would bypass legislatures and scrutiny and come into force through executive order. Of course I do not assume that all politicians the world over are conspiring to curb freedom and destroy what makes the West better than the rest of the world. What I am saying is that many of today’s politicians of all political stripes grew up in yesterdays world and have not the foresight to see the implications that their decisions today will have on the world of tomorrow. Any law that gives the authorities power over the internet will also give authorities power over the physical world as well. All of your personal information will be subject to constant scrutiny. You will be open to having your front door busted down by a police raid based on what those in power say you can and can not do or think, even if you did nothing. Under international law you will have no sovereign individual rights. No domestic legal protection. What our forefathers fought bloody revolutions for is disappearing behind closed doors by methods conceived of by foreign tyrants. The day will come when it may be necessary to rise up once again to protect our way of life as it is under constant threat from both foreign and domestic pressures. A free sovereign society is always under attack as the very idea is threatening to the opulent privilege of the old world tyrants. Vigilance to such subtlety crafted seismic shifts in the human condition is not common among the corrupted materialistic masses of lambs being led to the slaughter. From this day forward let all those who heed the call look upon existence through the prism of justice that they may be protected from the evils of eternal enslavement.

News

2010-05-08T18:27:00.000-07:00

CHINA, IRAN, AND NORTH KOREA: A TRIANGULAR STRATEGIC ALLIANCE

China, Iran, North Korea have formed strategic alliance

Three Chinese Bloggers Sentenced for Exposing Crimes

Beijing Demands Internet Providers Report ‘State Secret Leaks’

Macau Police Clash with Protesters, 41 Injured

Hong Kong Marches for Democracy

Russian Military Personnel Crisis: Medvedev and the General Staff Join the Fray

Pakistan test-fires two ballistic missiles

Pakistan’s Ongoing Azm-e-Nau-3 Military Exercises Define Strategic Priorities

Is Brazil Developing the Bomb?

Will World Learn from Greece Crisis? Probably Not

Greek Debt Crisis Raises Doubts About the European Union

Gates Seeks Pentagon Overhaul

News

2010-04-29T18:50:00.000-07:00

With a growing economy, China becomes increasingly repressive

PLAN East Sea Fleet Moves Beyond First Island Chain

Taiwan Exercise Focuses on Possible Chinese Invasion

Tibetan Scholars Issue Joint Statement, One Arrested

China’s “Charm Offensive” Loses Momentum in Southeast Asia

Chinese Leaders Revive Marxist Orthodoxy

Seoul Vows Retaliation For Ship Sinking

Iranian aircraft hover over carrier Eisenhower gathering intelligence

Oil-rich Venezuela gripped by economic crisis

Warning for Britain as financial chaos spreads to Spain

Financial Crisis in Greece, Europe Could Threaten US> and World Economy

Roubini sees 'significantly rising' risk that European monetary union will rip apart

Remember, The Great Depression Had Two Parts

News

2010-04-28T19:32:00.000-07:00

China Opens Missile Plant In Iran

US, Europe press China to drop tech security rule

An Analysis of the CCP's Earthquake Response

Tibetan Quake Critic Arrested

Forced Evictions Over Dam

Uyghur Scholar Slams Exit Ban

China set to tighten state-secrets law forcing Internet firms to inform on users

Russia considers new powers for KGB successor

North Korea: The drumbeats of war

Call for Burma Energy Data

Spain downgraded as Europe debt crisis widens

Jim Rogers: The Next Crisis is Already Unfolding

BOLTON: Folding our nuclear umbrella

Illegal Immigrants Plan to Leave Over Ariz. Law

U.S. Aerial Refueling Capacity Deemed Insufficient

Facebook's expansion triggers political backlash

May 20 Is 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day'

2010-04-24T21:39:00.000-07:00

In the Defense of Freedom of Speech

Link

May 20 Is 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day'

News

2010-04-24T21:07:00.000-07:00

April 24 2010

Regime Stops Civilian and International Quake Rescue Teams

Tibet Independence Activists Could be Shot in Earthquake Zone

Government Worker Who Exposed Embezzlement of Quake Relief Fund Allegedly Murdered

Implications of Kyrgyzstan Revolt on China's Xinjiang Policy

Syria in China’s New Silk Road Strategy

Taiwan’s Navy: Able to Deny Command of the Sea?

North Korea seizes assets at Mt. Kumgang

Venezuelan judge jailed after ruling angers President Hugo Chavez

Top Venezuelan Army General Resigns to Protest Cuban Influence

____________________________________________________________________

April 23 2010

U.S. Faces Choice on New Weapons for Fast Strikes

Greece presses "help" button, markets still wary

Greek debt crisis worsens as EU revises figures

Europe economy: Troubling times

Front Half of Cheonan to Be Raised Today

Once-docile Afghan parliament stands up to Karzai and becomes an ally of U.S.

About Time: Ariz. governor signs immigration enforcement bill

Air Force Launches Secretive X-37B Space Plane on Mystery Mission

'South Park' producers say network cut fear speech over Muslim threats

____________________________________________________________________

April 21 2010

Chinese authorities tell monks aiding quake rescue efforts to leave

Intelligence Agencies Warn: Burma May Be a Budding Rogue Nuclear State

Georgia confirms highly enriched uranium seizure

Challenging China in Rare Earth Mining

Analysts say NKorea hinting at 3rd nuke test

U.N.'s $732 Million Haiti Budget Mostly Staff

NATO to debate future of nuclear arms in Europe

Teacher Pension Plans Could Trigger Next Big Bailout Crisis

News

2010-04-15T21:41:00.000-07:00

Scud missiles? Syrian provocation of war?

Japan says China subs, warships came near Okinawa

Iran using Chinese companies to buy nuclear equipment

China to send Iran gasoline

China’s Economic Growth Surges

Recently Released Chinese Human Rights Lawyer Shows Signs of Torture

Chinese Villagers Beaten in Land Grab

Villagers Warned to 'Back Off' in Their Support of Torture Victim's Family

Bizzare Deaths: Chinese Prison Guards Get Creative With Explanations

China's CCTV Suspected of Staging Mine Rescue

Chinese spy trial begins

Taiwan Displays Plans For Missile-Carrying Corvette

SKorea says external explosion likely sank ship

Debt Crisis Watch Turns to Portugal

Who’s Who in Kyrgyzstan’s New Government

Kyrgyzstan's deposed president flies to Kazakhstan

Mistral Case Presages Russian Shopping Spree for Western Military Technology

Russian Economy Failing to Modernize

Afghan Police Training Contract Lacks Oversight: DoD

U.S. doubles anti-Taliban special forces

U.S. Army Unveils UAV Road Map

U.S. To Send Hummingbird UAV to Afghanistan

EADS To Build 3 Demo Armed Aerial Scouts

NSA on the Flash-Media Hunt

News

2010-04-09T16:49:00.000-07:00

Sovereign debt crisis at 'boiling point', warns Bank for International Settlements

China on ‘Treadmill to Hell’ Amid Bubble, Chanos Says

The Maturing Saudi-Chinese Alliance

China 'Watching' Kyrgyzstan

Concern Over Chinese Bids for Energy Exploration Off Taiwan

Chinese Dissidents Harassed on Tomb-Sweeping Day

Tibetan Monk Detained

Tibetan middle school locked down by Chinese communist authorities

Cuban advisers bolster Venezuelan regime

Mexico may cut millions of cellphones to fight crime

The Dow's up but trades are scarce, worrying bulls

Obama's false START

News

2010-04-08T21:52:00.000-07:00

Is Greece at the Tipping Point?

Greece plunges deeper into crisis, banks, euro hit

Debt burden weighs on developed nations

Geithner Caves, postponing release of report on China currency

No peace unless China removes missiles: Ma

A Chinese ISP Momentarily Hijacks the Internet

Chinese Shadow cyber spy network revealed

Chinese hackers stole India's defence secrets: Report

Indian Army Warns of Possible Cyber Attacks

China’s Shadow Looms Over the Mekong

Chinese Regime Interferes in Law Practice

Amnesty Urges China to Disclose Execution Figures

Jointness a Threat To Beating China: Analyst

Obama's poor nuclear posture

Gaffney: Obama Nuclear Plan Takes 'Dangerous' Risks With U.S. Security

Obama’s Nuclear Revision: Simply MAD

Tulip Revolution Reloaded

Kyrgyz opposition says it will rule for 6 months

Iran is still holding at least 35 journalists after crackdown

Rights group says Caracas attacks judicial freedom

Failed Cyprus Talks May Scuttle Turkey's EU Bid

DoD To Seek Long-Range Strike Funds in '12 Budget

Public employee pensions burdening states, localities

Political implications of China’s economic condition

2010-04-01T16:55:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of speculation lately as to whether China’s economy is in the midst of a bubble that may burst. To put the question in such simplified terms does not do justice to the importance of the events occurring right now. Policy makers must not only asses the current economic situation and plan for contingencies but re-asses our entire approach to China in light of the massive foreign policy failures suffered over the past 20 years. Large returns on select groups of private capital with out concern for the hidden costs is not the foundation for national policy. The way the west has conducted its relations with China during its rise has ultimately been detrimental to western interests. Without an understanding of the larger events and issues news of a possible Chinese bubble can lead to out of context assumptions regarding the implications.

Speculation on risk in the Chinese economy is primarily focused on a possible credit fuelled real estate bubble. A growing body of literature published focuses on the statistics emerging out of china today. Admittedly there are some troubling but possibly misleading figures. In response to the global financial crises the regime in china implemented a program of stimulus spending equal to approximately 15 percent of GDP. Supplementary to that spending banks were ordered to massively expand lending. In 2009 bank lending increased by 30 percent to equal approximately $1.4 trillion. The strategy was to massively stimulate the domestic economy to compensate for falling exports. Supposedly GDP grew by approximately 8.7 percent in 2009 despite the fall in exports leading many to come to the conclusion that the stimulus measures had succeeded in keeping growth levels high. Property sales have increased 76 percent in 2009 in what looks to be a result of the increased lending and stimulus measures. As prices rapidly rise the assumption is that no increase this large and fast is sustainable, it must be a bubble. A quarter of properties bought are paid for in cash and it is common practice if a loan is needed to pay a 50 percent down payment. The minimum down payment is 20 percent and on investment properties its 40 percent. These practices have a stabilising effect on the market. The size of the population means demand for housing will be high supporting prices, however much of the population is priced out of the market. If there were to be a meltdown in housing the contagion would spread to the stock market and banks. Estimates from china state one quarter of the increased lending was used to play the stock and real estate markets. Keep in mind that many loans in china are to meet government mandates and are inefficient. Savings from workers are deposited in state controlled banks and lent on no consequence terms at below market prices to state controlled enterprises with the goal of increasing employment. There is no incentive for efficiency of capital and therefore waste is rampant. There is a lot of information that could be used to support an argument for or against the china bubble. This question is of secondary importance to wider trends. Anyone who knows china knows the numbers produced by the government are unreliable. Even the stated procedures for gathering economic statistics exhibit irregularities. The GDP is calculated with projected values of developments instead of the real selling price. Growth targets are set and officials strive to make those targets regardless of the real costs or the issues of sustainability. Regardless of all these traditional economic indicators used by economists to forecast future events one thing seems to be overlooked. A large volume of analysis does acknowledge the unreliability of statistics but regardless predicates their conclusions based on those statistics and disregards the political realities. Both economic and political events have mutual feedback on each other. I have yet to see an outlook that properly takes into account the influence that political actions have on economic events. All economic decisions involve an underlying often hidden political action of participation in the trade and acceptance of the implications of the terms. The less informed a participant in trade is, the more advantage the rival participant has over the terms. Trade is often a zero sum game as for it to be truly mutually beneficial both participants would have to exhibit a similar degree of altruism. Statistics charts and graphs are not effective substitutes for a logical reasonable understanding of the world around us. China is by no means in any way an altruistic political actor. It is a self interested unenlightened materialistic mafia state.
In order to understand the economic situation the political reality that the west has completely mismanaged its relations with China for the past twenty years must be acknowledged. It is debatable that the initial American engagement with china under the Nixon administration was necessary or a wise move. Of coarse the goal was isolation of the soviet union. However after the fall of the soviet union American policy failed to re-orient to the new world order. The theory behind Bretton woods was that America would open its markets and accept trade deficits in order to build up the broken economies of the allies after world war two. The cost to the American economy was rewarded by giving America a great deal of influence over the foreign policy of the states recipient of such favourable terms. The allies were provided security and economic recovery while the American led alliance was maintained beyond the war with the objective of countering the soviet union. In this way open markets were used to political ends, and the rejection of mercantilist policies were not based on economics but political considerations. Ironic that the new twisted ideology of open markets and anti-protectionism has taken on a life of its own in recent years, this is spurred on by the short term profit seeking of the industrial elite who have not concern for the triumph of the rights of man over the forces of savagery and barbarism. They see the philosophy of the enlightenment only as an obstacle to their power over their fellow man and in this way are no different than the communist regime in china. The greatest miscalculation in the history of American policy was to keep American markets open to china beyond the fall of the soviet union. By doing so America the greatest force for the advancement of human liberty in the world has created a vastly more powerful china, the greatest force for Orwellian control. After the fall of the soviet union America should have rapidly changed its focus to isolating china. Markets should have been closed and capital controls should have been enacted. New Marshall plans for Russia and the Eastern block should have been implemented and open market like Bretton woods agreements should have been given in exchange for our new partners participation in an expanded alliance whose goal would have been the economic isolation and implosion of the last authoritarian center of power remaining on the globe at the time, china. Instead Russia was left alone to stagnate and disintegrate into chaos in the 90s giving its citizens the notion that democracy and increased freedoms equal disorder and economic hardship. In the midst of this they abandoned their pursuit of freedom and turned to a new authoritarian power to take away their liberties in exchange for comfort. Much like Germany post world war one turned away from the Weimar republic and to the Nazi party, Russia post cold war turned away from democracy and to the KGB(FSB). This development only made matters worse for containment efforts with china. Instead of closing ties, under both the Clinton and Bush administrations trade with china skyrocketed and with it the wealth, power and technological prowess of the communist regime. The goal of American foreign policy should have been neutralising the china threat and bringing to justice the perpetrators of acts like the Tiananmen Square Massacre and countless others where people have been systematically imprisoned tortured and murdered to maintain the one party state. Instead the primary objective of American foreign policy was to massively enrich china and increase its power in the hopes that eventually it will be so wealthy it will become a more open and free society and less of a threat. It appears America got it backwards in more ways than one. With the increase in wealth china has become more oppressive and acquired the technology to monitor its citizens to a greater extent. This has given the state new tools to stamp out dissent. With the proceeds of the economic boom based in exports to America and American investment capital, technology and know how the regime has also spend a considerable amount on upgrading the Chinese war machine. New advancements in anti satellite, anti ship ballistic missiles (carrier killers) and cyber warfare have increased the china threat as these asymmetric capabilities can massively damage American assets. Furthermore weaponry can and has been proliferated to other problem states. After the cold war American policy makers got the equation wrong. Increased Wealth does not bring Increased liberty. This fallacy of the short sighted pursuit of wealth was no doubt helped along by the elite industrial lobby in Washington pressing for pro china policy orientation in the hopes of making a buck. While the American market has been kept open to Chinese goods china has manipulated its currency keeping it low to increase exports. On april 15 lets hope the treasury department does the right thing after years of denial and labels china a currency manipulator. This will hopefully spur congress to take anti china protectionist moves that would be massively beneficial to America and the world. A state that does not act in the interest of the freedoms of its people should not be given access to the largest market in the world. We have created a monster out of our own inability to manage the post cold war world. Much like our inability to manage the world post world war one which brought us world war two.

Many will look to possible economic calamity by way of the china bubble mentioned earlier as reason to dismiss the china threat. At this point no matter what happens economically the threat is real. We are faced with a number of scenarios some better that others but all containing risk. The worst and best are as follows:

1. The worst scenario is that china’s economy keeps humming along and does not experience a bubble bursting or a bubble bursts but does not have a significant impact on the wider economy leading to a fast recovery. America does not take protectionist measures and continues to let itself be exploited to the detriment of its interests. Over time china becomes the dominant force in the world and uses its significant economic and political power along with its military might and large population of single young males (due to the fact that through the one child policy many couples opt to abort females) to force its will on the world. By this time technological development will have allowed the regime to watch us all more closely. All political actors who pose a threat to the regime will be targeted. The spread of democracy will be reversed (a process some say is already under way). Under such a new world order the west and its values based in enlightenment philosophy of the rights of man will be systemically undercut and open to both soft and hard power attacks. The earth would descend into general barbarism as the few centers of political power left based on reason, decency, human rights and the rule of law would shift to base self interested groups of criminal demagogs who maintain their legitimacy not by ideals of morality but by force. The experiment of democracy would eventually implode and the world returned to the way it was before the enlightenment.

2. The best case scenario is that due to a change in American policy shutting china out of markets and controlling capital flows combined with a burst in the china bubble the Chinese economy destabilizes and wreaks havok on the regimes finaces. After an intiatal shock to some elements of the American economy due to a sharp drop in growth in china, the American Economy Rebounds strongly in the long term due to the loss of a jobs and capitol sucking competitor. Economic collapse in china would neutralize that last superpower threat to democracy and human decency and would be an ultimate foreign policy victory. Democracy and the values of enlightenment philosophy would reign supreme to the benefit of all mankind. Human rights abuse and the forces of genocide and injustice would be dealt a severe blow. Even after economic collapse brought on by the loss of exports and capital inflows the regime may or may not implode. This creates sub scenarios:
A. The best case: a rapid revolution based on discontent for conditions overthrows the regime before it can take action. A democratic government is installed.
B. The worst case. Either the regime stays in power or a revolution brings about the instalation of an unfriendly new dictatorship.
Either way China’s power and influence will have been greatly reduced and therefore the threat is reduced.

Of course the question of war must be addressed. If china gains dominance in the world it will wage war whenever it pleases on whomever it wants. China has made claims on many territories around it. In the words of Thucydides “the strong do what they will the weak suffer what they must.” China must not be allowed a position of strength. Hovever if china sufferes a reduction in strength it will be detered in the long run from waging wars and will be less capable of wining them. Innitialy after economic colapse the regime may start a war if it feels it has to in order to stay in power. It has spoon fed its children on a heavy deit of ultra nationalism and visions of racial superiority and glorius reclamaiton of territories lost at the hands of the west. Its propaganda has created a strong streak of hostile imperialistic nationalism. Nothing rallies the people behind the flag more that war. And to keep a populace disproportionately full of unemployed single young males without any political freedoms or outlets of expression from rebelling, war is a solution bejing will have no problem implementing if it means the party maintains its monopoly on power. If the facists declare war as a result of economic and political conditions so be it. It is not the fault of the west. America must stand up for its interests and not appease such a regime under the threat of force. We can give them everything that they want and still eventually, when they have us where they want us they will make war. We must reorient our trade policy to serve our interests and if that iks china to the point of making a move on Taiwan the responsibility for their actions will be thiers and thiers alone. Not ours for failing to crumble to their demands. Nothing can be gained by surrendering to the perpetrators of genocide.

The forces of justice find themselves in a precarious position. Even if we do not reorient our trade policy the burst china bubble alone could seriously damage the Chinese economy and be enough to prompt the regime to rally the nation to war in order to preserve its power monopoly. When we speak of war in the west we hold our leaders to account that they may make every effort to stop the outbreak of hostilities. We must understand that in this time it is not our leaders who have any control over war. We can appease china and let it continue to feed on us until it becomes strong enough to eliminate us. Or we can put up trade barriers and block them out of our markets. If they choose to attack the free world as a result of a fair trade environment that is their decision. To all those who would argue that we must maintain current policy in order to maintain so called “good relations” with china consider what is good about an economically damaged America acting on behalf of a hostile foreign dictatorship. The failure to respond to the post cold war realities has created the current situation of a hostile nation rapidly growing in power. We must not allow China under its current leadership to continue to grow.

News

2010-03-25T23:43:00.000-07:00

Google co-founder Sergey Brin urges US to act over China web censorship

Network Solutions, GoDaddy cease registering Web sites in China

AP test of Google offers peek at China Net filters

China VP due in Sweden as Volvo takeover nears

Is China Building the Next Bubble?

China Just Halted The Sale Of All Land

North Korea vows 'nuclear strikes' in latest threat

Tensions Rise in Wa Region, Burma

Demographic Problems, Budgetary Limitations Block Russian Army From Maintaining Levels

Russia will only buy fully-equipped Mistral from France - Gen. Staff chief

Arrest of politician in Venezuela raises free speech concerns

Anti-Chavez TV channel owner arrested in Venezuela

Venezuelan Grid to Remain ‘Vulnerable,’

Pakistan: 5 soldiers, 21 alleged militants killed

Kyrgyzstan: New Junta in Formation

Turkey Signs Nuclear Deal with South Korea

Circassians Look to Georgia for International Support

Will Tymoshenko Unite Ukrainian Opposition?

Report: Mexican Traffickers Cement Grip in US

Bribery Study in Mexico Says Police the Problem

UK police asks Internet cafes to monitor customers

Eurozone agrees on bailout plan for Greece

Social Security payout to exceed pay-in this year

News

2010-03-24T21:20:00.000-07:00

China vows to escalate trade war if US does not submit

Google to phase out China search partnerships

GoDaddy Stops Selling Chinese Domains Over Censorship Concerns

China's satellite killer and BMD upgrades under way

Taiwan’s air defenses would not be able to fight off an attack by China

The Coming China-India Conflict: Is War Inevitable?

Tibetans detained for reporting on protests

Xinjiang Internet Still extremely Limited after riots

Riyadh mulls big Russian missile buy

How Iraqi Oil Is Changing the World

Satellite imagery suggests pakistan is building another large plutonium reactor

IMF warns of acute debt challenges for West

Alleged Private Spy Ring Prompts DoD Study

News

2010-03-20T22:51:00.000-07:00

Hidden cause of great recession and next financial crisis? Debt

The Next Wave Of The Housing Crisis: Much More Pain In 2010, 2011

Taiwan’s aging Naval capabilities

Strategic Implications of China's Access to the Rajin Port

One year later Gao Zhisheng remains missing

Tibetan Students Stage Protest

Thousands in Russia protest government in 'Day of Wrath'

Russia’s violent and corrupt police

Russia Looks East and Sees Storm Clouds: Part One

Russia Looks East and Sees Storm Clouds: Part Two

Russian secrets for sale, no questions asked

North Koreans fear the country is on the verge of a new famine

Will Palestinian leaders again turn to violence to shore up domestic support

Iranians train Taliban to use roadside bombs

Why Hugo Chávez's friends can't save his petrostate

Army, Drug Gangs Battle in Mexico Amid Blockades

Ethiopian PM Says He Will Authorize Jamming VOA

Preliminary Design Of Free Electron Laser Weapon Completed

Bill Calls for Establishment of First U.S. Rare Earth Minerals Stockpile

General David Petraeus tipped as Republican 2012 presidential candidate

Report: Canada Needs Defense Industry Road Map

Days of Darkness

2010-03-15T14:29:00.000-07:00

The rise of a Nazi Superpower:

“We have a rightful sense of superiority."

Ministry of Propaganda: "If you want to do something that disobeys Chinese law and regulations, you are unfriendly, you are irresponsible, and you will have to pay the consequences,"

China announced plans to force Western companies to turn over their most sensitive technology and patents to Chinese competitors in exchange for access to the country's markets.

Internet cafes to be taken over by the government and a declaration that all cellphones should be equipped with surveillance cameras.

Internally, it has carried out more arrests and indictments for endangering state security (thought crime) over the past two years than in the five-year period from 2003 to 2007

also reined in the news media and attempted to control the Internet more vigorously than in the past.

the closer China gets to a variety of firsts -- No. 1 exporting nation and even No. 1 economy in the world -- the more its government seems to exhibit a nagging insecurity and opposition to the West.

Newly powerful China defies Western nations with remarks, policies

Chinese oil giant to buy stake in Argentine firm

chinese Currency Manipulation

2009-12-19T02:44:00.000-08:00

Published recently in Harvard Business School Faculty Research this article discusses in detail chinese currency manipulation:

The End of Chimerica

Link to PDF of paper

My thoughts:

If it was in china’s leaderships perceived interest to correct the value of its currency it would have done it by now.

For the most part a good article, however I disagree with Mr. Ferguson’s statement that it is in both America and china’s interest that proper revaluation take place. From a western perspective it is in everyone’s interest the trade imbalance be corrected, but from an eastern perspective this government policy of imbalance is in line with eastern interests, that being the collapse of the modern international financial architecture and by extension western dominance. Why else would the chinese maintain such a policy for so many years when it is obvious what the results would be. Mr. Ferguson lists china’s suggestion that the international reserve currency be changed from the dollar to IMF Special Drawing Rights as evidence that china is concerned about American fiscal policy, he fails to recognise the realist mercantilist worldview the boys in beijing subscribe to. To the chinese a devaluation of the value of their foreign exchange reserves and temporary increase in unemployment is a price they are willing to pay to severely damage the American economy and turn Pax Americana on its head. The chinese policy of unsustainable sustained global imbalances is intentional and the cheapest way to wage war in the twenty first century. For decades in chinese policy papers an emphasis has been made on asymmetric warfare, a strategy first outlined in the centuries old text the art of war. These people wrote the book on war and for thousands of years have been perfecting the methods of imperial conquest. In the past 60 years a small hand full of evil geniuses, the latest communist dynasty, has mastered how to control over a billion people with the realisation of the ultimate modern police state. Their ambitions are not restricted within their borders, but rather global. If it was in china’s leaderships perceived interest to correct the value of its currency it would have done it by now. They know exactly what they are doing, they have been doing it for years. You cannot compare their model of export driven growth with Germany or Japan because both those nations are American allies and are under the American security umbrella. They had incentive to correct imbalances to maintain stability of the international system. china has no interest in a permanent Pax Americana as America is their chief rival. The Chimerica marriage is an exploitation of western liberal naiveté. Instead of becoming a responsible stakeholder in the international political economy beijing has fattened itself at the expense of said institution in preparation for a great leap outward. The west over the years is one by one giving away the keys to the store. How long will our policy makers wait until taking decisive action to correct this global imbalance? Until the keys to the commanding heights are under new management? Let us hope Uncle Sam has one last ace up his sleeve. If not, our window of opportunity to turn things around is closing as history passes us by. We must cause an implosion of the communist state. Rising propaganda induced chinese nationalism and the all powerful modern police state apparatus make grass roots political revolution unlikely. Political instability in china must be brought about by external economic coercion. We must throw a wrench in the chinese economic machine.

Tame China now or face war later

2009-11-14T08:18:00.000-08:00

Tame China now or face war later

Chinese occupying forces crackdown on Uyghurs

2009-07-07T14:45:00.000-07:00

Since 1949 East Turkestan has been occupied by chinese communist troops.
The region which the chinese government has renamed xinjiang is rich in oil and natural resources. Like in Tibet, the chinese government has been bringing chinese people in to the region to settle while eliminating the idiginous population so as to eventualy absorb the region as as another part of china's modern day Authoritarian Empire.

Chinese Police Shoot Uighur Protesters in Xinjiang

Death Toll Unknown in Uighur Massacre

Bloody crackdown in iran

2009-06-20T22:42:00.000-07:00

death to ayatollah

2009-06-18T17:59:00.000-07:00

News

2009-04-01T21:25:00.000-07:00

China’s Industrial Policies Hurting U.S. Industries and Workers

Chinese Regime Tightens Control of Uyghurs

Chinese Nuclear Tests Caused at least 750,000 Deaths

Rights Activist Is Attacked Outside Home in Moscow

AIG chiefs pressed to donate to Dodd

Massive ammo shortage in US

______________________________________________________________________

March 30 2009

Russia, China cooperate on new currency proposals

Another Tibetan Monk Beaten to Death by Chinese

CCP Occupiers in Tibet: Arrests and Rape

Riots Occurring More Frequently In Chian’s Hainan Province

Anti-China tensions on the rise in Australia

Alarming News: Bank Losses Spreading

Warships set sail ahead of N. Korean rocket launch

Iran missile experts in North Korea 'to help with rocket launch'

Iran Ups Support for Gaza and Lebanon Hardliners

Sudan's wanted president welcomed at Arab summit

Afghanistan plan lacking, McCain says

News

2009-03-27T18:16:00.000-07:00

Japan OKs deployment of missile defense system

Opening Salvos of a New Gas War: Russia Versus the EU and Ukraine

Russia Building New Nuclear Submarines

Analysis: Iranian nuclear threat, Hamas and Hizbullah rockets pose great challenges in '09

Hezbollah Using Mexican Drug Routes Into U.S.

With Eye Against Iran, Arabs Wooing Syria

!!!

Freedom Tower Renamed “One World Trade Center”

U.N. 'Climate Change' Plan Would Likely Shift Trillions to Form New World Economy

New cameras in police cruisers can analyze thousands of license tags a day

YouTube protest star summoned to White House over content

Obama raised cash after leaving Senate

News

2009-03-26T17:07:00.000-07:00

Eligibility lawyer says Homeland Security shadowing him

'Mandatory youth service' bill advances in US

Chinese Military Surrounds Tibetan Town

Navies Deploy Warships As N. Korea Threatens Missile Launch

Uyghur Economist Silenced in china

Thai Officials Move to Quash Dissent in Book, Newspaper

Thai Officials Sent Hmong refugees Home, Some Flee

Rahm Emanuel's profitable stint at mortgage giant

Federal criminal complaint contends Obama ineligible

Obama Facing Democratic Defections

Economy Shrank at 6.3 Percent Rate at End of 2008

Iran is only months away from building a nuke, has ballistic warhead capability

IAF airstrike in Sudan hit convoy of weapons destined for Gaza

Hamas source confirms Sudan convoy attack

Crisis Hits Czech Republic

U.S. Puts $11M Bounty on Three al-Qaida Terrorists

Saudi Arabia: Senior Al-Qaida Leader Surrenders

News

2009-03-25T21:32:00.000-07:00

Rare footage smuggled out of Tibet exposes chinese communist occupation forces oppressing Tibetan protesters. It doesn't take much for the chinese to haul you off, torture you and execute you.

Geithner 'open' to China proposal

Fed begins move that could sink dollar

Pentagon Questions Growing Chinese Military Power

E.U. President Blasts Obama's Economic Policies

Is Hungary the Financial Crisis' Next Iceland?

Russia seeks to weaken US, West: NATO general

Russia Moving From Conflict-Solving To Conquest-Guaranteeing in Transnistria

Detained American Journalists Seen as Leverage for North Korea

Tibetans Stage Farm Boycott

Behind South Africa's Snub of the Dalai Lama

Hamas accused in Lebanese assassination

Secret summit to target bin Laden

Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange--the rest of the story

_____________________________________________________________________

News March 24 09

No cheerleader for propping up greenback at G20 summit

Intel agencies warn of danger during G20 meetings

Rights Group: China Cracks Down on Dissenters

S. Africans Angered by Decision to Deny Visa to Dalai Lama

Justice, Supremes confirm getting eligibility challenge

_____________________________________________________________________

News March 23 09

China: End the Greenback as Reserve Unit

China calls for new reserve currency

China Arrests Monks in Attack

New video of torture exposes Chinese brutality in Tibet

Video Confirms Chinese Regime’s Use of Extreme Violence in Tibetan Protests

Chinese Ex-Spy Speaks Out

Iran Has Started a Mideast Arms Race

Poland Hopes Obama Doesn't Abandon Them, Missile Shield

Lebanon bomb kills PLO official

Eastern Europe's Economic Crash

House adopts plan for mandatory 'volunteer' service corps

Report: 'Global warming' simply no longer happening

Global Government Genocide

2009-03-10T22:56:00.000-07:00

Global tyrants are clamping down.
Who among us is next.
The time has come to let them fear us.
Open your eyes,
let them know where you stand,
and prepare to defend what you know you must.

Live Free or Die Trying.

(this video was blocked by youtube, see it before they find out)

News

2009-03-10T18:42:00.000-07:00

Dalai Lama Says Tibet Hell on Earth Under China

Obama Intel-chief pick withdraws over China Ties

Civil Unrest in America?

75 in Congress Demand No Stimulus for Illegals

Senate Rejects Move to End Automatic Pay Raises

U.S. dollar replaced by digital gold?

News

2009-03-09T14:45:00.000-07:00

Nazi China^

Chinese Ships Harass U.S. Navy Vessel

China ups security on eve of key Tibet anniversary

NKorea puts troops on alert, warns of war danger

N. Korea warns intercepting 'satellite' will prompt counterstrike

Iran test-fires new missile

Israel Intel Chief: Iran Has 'Crossed Threshold'

Polish president: Missile defense should go ahead

Global Slump Could Trigger Unprecedented Chaos

Controlling Carbon a Bureaucrat’s Dream

Wikipedia scrubs Obama eligibility

News

2009-03-03T20:30:00.000-08:00

Financial woes don't stop Russia funding new nuke weapon systems

Kant Air Base and Russia's Strategic Planning in Central Asia

Slideshow: Chinese Forces Swarm Tibet

Petitioners Targeted During Major Meetings

Police Violently Attack Villagers Protesting Land Expropriation

Iranian bomb possible in a few months

Iranian Authorities Detain U.S. Journalist

Troops Assassinate President of Guinea-Bissau

Senate ignores McCain, keeps thousands in earmarks

Congressman: Audit the Fed's books

British PM calls for 'Global New Deal'

U.S. soldier gagged on prez's eligibility

News

2009-03-02T20:44:00.000-08:00

Dow Closes Below 6,800; Lowest in 12 Years

UN Inspector: Iran, Syria Both Hiding Nuke Programs

Hariri Tribunal Worries, Elates Lebanese

Cuba Shakeup Ends Any Chance of Reform

President of Guinea-Bissau said to be killed by soldiers

Economic Catastrophe Propels Russia into an Identity Crisis

MISS NORTH DAKOTA ARRESTED IN IRAN

More military officers demand eligibility proof

News

2009-03-01T17:06:00.000-08:00

Iran has Enough Nuclear Fuel to Make Bomb

Wen Warns Economic Crisis Spreading in China

Pennsylvania Company Discovers Marine One Security Breach

Economic & Financial Markets Forecast 2009: Collapsing Global Financial System

Gates: U.S. Military Can Help Mexico in Drug War

UN Promises Justice in Lebanon's Hariri Trial

Mitt Romney: Democrats' Pet Liberal Projects Will Bankrupt Nation

News

2009-02-28T20:09:00.000-08:00

Radio chip coming soon to your driver's license?

Kassam rockets continue to hit Negev

Pakistan says Taliban beaten back in border region

Russia to build nuclear-powered 60,000-ton aircraft carrier

Despotism 101: Communist Officials Train to Disperse Unrest

News

2009-02-27T19:08:00.000-08:00

Tibet Monk Shot by Chinese Police After Setting Himself on Fire

Canadian Fighters Chase Russian Bomber On Eve of Obama Visit

IS PUTIN PUSHING RUSSIA OFF A FINANCIAL CLIFF?

The danger of economic contagion in eastern Europe

North Korea Readying Rocket

President Calderon: We Are Not Losing Control of Mexico

Economists: Obama Budget Too Rosy

News

2009-02-27T14:24:00.000-08:00

Hillary's old Chinese pals

Obama intel pick works for Chinese government

Tibetan Monks in Protest March

3 People Set Themselves Afire to protest in Beijing

Tibetans Skip New Year

The late, great state of Taiwan

Georgia Prepares to Repel Russian Aggression

Russia focuses on upgrading its nuclear arsenals

Putin's "Power Vertical" Doesn't Leave Other Ties to Keep Russia Together

Iran makes first test-run of Bushehr nuclear reactor

New Israel killer drone can take out Iran's S-300 anti-air missile

Bombed Syrian reactor now missile base

Violence Breaks Out Along Bangladesh's Frontiers

Jailed Burmese Reporter Honored

North Korea says satellite, neighbours think missile

Army manual raises emphasis on electronic warfare

Budget sees $1.75 trillion deficit

Recession, bailout, stimulus: US security threats

Democrats buried mortgage scandal under the rug five years ago

Power Plays in the Indian Ocean

News

2009-02-24T22:06:00.000-08:00

Clampdown Ahead of Tibet Anniversaries

ANALYSIS-Infrastructure left to rot may cripple Russia

Russia's New Energy Doctrine

As it falters, East Europe raises risks

N. Korea Says Launch Imminent — of Satellite or Missile

Iran-Israel Nuclear End Game Now Much Closer

News

2009-02-21T21:53:00.000-08:00

Activists shocked at Clinton cave in on China human rights

Beijing imposes crackdown in Tibet

Signs Point To New Russian war on Georgia this summer

Russian Agents gun down Chechen dissident in Vienna

Al-Qaeda founder launches fierce attack on Osama bin Laden

Syria rebuilding chemical weapons capability

Official: S. Korea to Retaliate if N. Korea Attacks

Yemen could be headed for total collapse

Cost of security for 2010 Olympics rises to $900 million
Total cost of operating the Games is $1.7 billion

GeoEye-1 Satellite Attains Full Operational Capability Certification

News

2009-02-20T20:08:00.000-08:00

Iran holds enough uranium for bomb

Obama, Clinton Cave in to China

China Starts Investing Globally

Taiwan, China Negotiating a Landmark Free-Trade Agreement

China Psychiatric Abuse

N. Korea Ready to Test Fire Missile in Days

Kyrgyzstan issues eviction notice to key US base

States prepare to combat stimulus strings

News

2009-02-18T19:00:00.000-08:00

New Tibetan Protests Erupt

Chinese County Locked Down After Tibet Protests

Possible Cave in on Burma Policy

North Korea running secret nuclear plant

Fed says economy even worse than thought

Emerging global elite to use new global media to educate 'global citizens'

Global Elite call for new internet control

News

2009-02-13T16:50:00.000-08:00

China Needs U.S. Guarantees for Treasuries, Yu Says

China to Create Blacklist of Local Journalists

Underground Opposition Party Advocates Democracy in China

Demonstrators Rally In Beijing to Oppose Corruption

Russia Admits China Illegally Copied Its Fighter

Bulgaria's "Overgas," a Russian Spy in Canada, and Gazprom

Report: N. Korea Preparing Massive Long-Range Missile

Iran bulldozes the mass graves of political prisoners

Feinstein comment on U.S. drones likely to embarrass Pakistan

Europe's industrial base may never recover from crisis

As Vacant Office Space Grows, So Does Lenders’ Crisis

Census battle intensifies; GOP leader threatens lawsuit

President's attorneys demand birth, college records be withheld from public

News

2009-02-12T19:19:00.000-08:00

Russia's Coming War with Georgia

Fujian City Warned Over Unrest

China's January Exports Plunge 17.5 Percent

N. Korean leader displays his power with military shakeup

Chávez Erecting Obstacles for Foes Who Won Office

Official: Mumbai Attack Partly Planned in Pakistan

Freedom of speech trampled in Britain
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Video: One with Courage (Tank Man)

News

2009-02-11T22:21:00.000-08:00

Report: N. Korea Moving Missile Equipment to Site

28 die after bombers and gunmen launch attack on Afghan government

Azerbaijan's air force chief killed

Is Russia making mischief for U.S. in Central Asia?

69 computers missing from nuclear weapons lab

Chavez: Lech Walesa Unwelcome in Venezuela

British ban on Dutch MP triggers diplomatic row with Holland

Wind Turbines Do Nothing for Emissions Reduction

State lawmakers demand eligibility documentation from Obama

News

2009-02-10T19:50:00.000-08:00

Ship movements signal possible North Korea missile test

Russia Preparing to Buy Allies Through Anti-Crisis Assistance

Russia's Allies Should Not Help Vladimir Putin

Film maker banned from UK for criticizing radical islam

News

2009-02-09T22:03:00.000-08:00

Possible disaster on a Tiananmen scale looms for the CCP

Chavez: A Decade of Disaster

Mexican drug violence spills over into the US

White House Nabs Political Control over Census

U.S. Taxpayers Risk $9.7 Trillion on Bailout Programs

U.S. Tank Round Guides Self To Target

News

2009-02-07T18:46:00.000-08:00

China hammers dissent despite looming UN review

From the Depths: China Invests in Submarines

Report: N Korea Testing Ballistic Missile

RUSSIA PLANS THREE MILITARY BASES IN ABKHAZIA

Danish jets repel Russian bomber breach

Economic Crisis Causes Spike in Crime in Russia

Europe's New Wave of Toxic Debt

Why the Talk Has Turned to Depression

Palestinian Authority: Hamas used Gaza hospitals as detention centers

Pakistan frees nuke salesman Khan

Spies Form Virtual Units on The Fly to Track Terror

US Fed borrowing could reach $4 trillion

McCain blasts Obama over spending

Lawmakers in 20 states move to reclaim sovereignty

News

2009-02-06T19:16:00.000-08:00

Israel on the verge of conflict with Syria

Turkish Warplanes Hit Kurdish Rebels in Northern Iraq

UN Halts Aid to Gaza, Cites Hamas Disruption

China increases submarine patrols

Details of Tibet Protests Emerge

Russia To Start Up Iran Nuclear Plant This Year

What happens when Iran goes nuclear?

Dangers in Khan's Release

Kyrgyzstan Says Decision to Close US Base Is Final

U.S. Military Seeks Lighter Vehicles, Gear for Afghanistan

MBDA Develops New Bunker-Busting Bomb

MIT researchers make 'sixth sense' gadget

Bill forces citizens to submit DNA

Tibetan Uprising

2008-03-18T21:46:00.000-07:00

smuggled out of the country>
chinese troops fire on protesters in Tibet
bloody bodies lay cold in the streets
in the wake of beijings crackdown
hundreds rounded up sent to the camps

Tibetans Cite Spreading Unrest, Mounting Death Toll, as China Clamps Down

China Is Adding to Its Lethal Arsenal

2008-03-10T23:58:00.000-07:00

China Is Adding to Its Lethal Arsenal

Chinese Takeover Bid of 3Com Fails

2008-03-08T22:48:00.000-08:00

Chinese Takeover Bid of 3Com Fails

China's Air Defense and Cyber Threat

2008-02-16T16:31:00.000-08:00

Chinese Air Defense Now Top Notch

Trojan Dragon: China's Cyber Threat

SELF-DECEPTION AND THE TRAIN FROM CHINA

2008-01-21T20:41:00.000-08:00

The China Russia Axis

SELF-DECEPTION AND THE TRAIN FROM CHINA