The Speech Glenn Beck Meant to Give
Posted on Aug 30, 2010
By Arthur Blaustein
I was inspired by Glenn Beck’s speech at his “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington to write the speech he intended to make:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all mega-corporations with legions of lobbyists are created more than equal to anybody.”
I have a dream that the Yalie son of a Houston oil magnate can walk hand in hand with the daughter of a Wall Street hedge fund operator on the white sands of Southampton while evading inheritance taxes.
I have a dream that from the glorious Pacific to the bountiful Atlantic the Castro will become gayless and Greenwich Village will become free of feminism.
I have a dream that the Republican Party will come up with one new idea, any new idea, even if it is a rerun of one of Rush’s or my ideas, just to show that it isn’t completely brain-dead.
I have a dream that the young white guys playing with rifles at survivalist retreats in northern Michigan, that the middle-aged white guys playing Minuteman with guns at the Arizona border, and the older white guys frolicking at the Bohemian Grove, playing with whatever they play with, will keep people of different races or religions in their place.
I have a dream that the Supreme Court will vote 5 to 4 to revoke the statehood of Hawaii—but not Alaska—vindicating you Birthers out there.
I have a dream that Rupert Murdoch and the Fortune 500, thanks to another Supreme Court vote of 5 to 4, will be free to buy the Senate, the House and the White House at a Sotheby’s auction, without elections or public financing of campaigns.
I have a dream that oil spills in the Gulf, mining in West Virginia, egg farming in Iowa and predatory lending in every state will keep evading oversight.
I have a dream that all our children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the content of their character, but by the size of their stock portfolios.
I have a dream that the former lily-white golf clubs of Georgia and the lily-white boardrooms of Halliburton will not be tainted by people of different races or religions.
May corporations get the American people and “government of the people, by the people and for the people” (Lincoln had it wrong) off our backs.
From the newsroom of Fox to the boardrooms of our corporate masters, let freedom ring.
Thanks to Justice Roberts Almighty, the tea party and the GOP, we’ll be free at last!
Arthur Blaustein is the chair of the editorial board of the Progressive Book Club and author of “The American Promise—Justice and Opportunity.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_speech_glenn_beck_meant_to_give_20100830/
Tuesday 31 August 2010
Give Me That Old Time Racism
Give Me That Old Time Racism
By JAMES ABOUREZK
I can still remember in the 1950s when, in Rapid City, South Dakota, a black African diplomat tried to get served in a Rapid City restaurant. He was asked to leave. After the newspaper reported the story, the owner of the restaurant said if he had known the guy was a diplomat, he would have served him instead of throwing him out.
When we think back, it wasn't that long ago that blacks were not allowed to sit in restaurants, but were, instead, asked to go around to the kitchen to get served out of the back door. That was a time when blacks were not allowed to buy homes in white neighborhoods. I spent part of my youth visiting my older sister and her family in West Virginia. There, blacks were told they could only sit in the balcony of movie theaters, a place expressly reserved for them should they want to enjoy a film. There were white only drinking fountains in public places, such as bus stations. And, of course, we all remember who had to sit in the back of the bus.
I have not yet heard anyone on television making the comparison between how blacks were treated in the god awful days of segregation and how Muslims are being treated by some of our political leadership today.
I remember when the Cold War came to an end. That was when the Zionist movement lost an enemy--the Soviet Union--and had to look around for another group to hate. That's when the demonization of Muslims--and Arabs--began. The pro-Israeli propagandists, aided and abetted by the mainstream media, leaned heavily into the Arab and Muslim population, making them the villains. It was easy then, as the Arabs, either in the Arab world or in the United States were not well organized, so they didn't fight back. That failure to resist has cost them, as has the actions of some--Al Qaeda for example--which made it easier to hate them.
Those of us who have read some history also know what happened to the Irish when they first came to America. We also remember how Jews were assaulted, both in the press and in person, until the remainder of the country put a stop to it by making it unpopular to isolate a community so they could be demonized.
Now, it's the turn of the Arabs and the Muslims to receive the same treatment that blacks, the Irish, and the Jews did before that treatment became unpopular.
How similar is the assault on the Muslims and Arabs when compared to what happened to other ethnic groups in our shady past. Where the similarity ends is how the media is treating the entire "mosque" at ground zero. The proposed building is neither a mosque, nor is it at ground zero. It is a community center that, among other activities, includes a prayer room. I know of no one who would build an eleven-story mosque, and I know of no mosque that would allow a swimming pool and recreation center to be built in it, or even above it.
So what we have here is a political football that leaves it open for the gaggle of demagogues and hustlers -- I'm thinking specifically of Newt Gingrich, Rick Lazio and Sarah Palin -- to try to reap some kind of political popularity from denouncing the project.
It used to be that both political leaders and the media would denounce this kind racism, and that such denunciations would soon bring such demagoguery to an end. But not this time. Most of the media, MSNBC being the major exception, has ducked its head, being content to just report on the onslaught against the Islamic Center, but not denouncing the demagoguery.
So far, this has resulted in someone setting fire to the construction of a real mosque in Tennessee. This usually follows acts of violence against Arabs and Muslims in different parts of the country. We've seen it before.
All this won't stop unless and until all the political leaders--now silent--come down hard on what is happening, when the haters begin themselves to feel isolated. Cheers to President Obama and to Mayor Bloomberg, who have tried to lead the way, but who lost Howard Dean and Harry Reid in the process. The rest of the political leadership--both Republican and Democratic--predictably are in hiding.
James Abourezk is a former U.S. Senator, who practices law in Sioux Falls. He is the author of Advise & Dissent: Memoirs of South Dakota and the US Senate.
http://www.counterpunch.org/abourezk08312010.html
By JAMES ABOUREZK
I can still remember in the 1950s when, in Rapid City, South Dakota, a black African diplomat tried to get served in a Rapid City restaurant. He was asked to leave. After the newspaper reported the story, the owner of the restaurant said if he had known the guy was a diplomat, he would have served him instead of throwing him out.
When we think back, it wasn't that long ago that blacks were not allowed to sit in restaurants, but were, instead, asked to go around to the kitchen to get served out of the back door. That was a time when blacks were not allowed to buy homes in white neighborhoods. I spent part of my youth visiting my older sister and her family in West Virginia. There, blacks were told they could only sit in the balcony of movie theaters, a place expressly reserved for them should they want to enjoy a film. There were white only drinking fountains in public places, such as bus stations. And, of course, we all remember who had to sit in the back of the bus.
I have not yet heard anyone on television making the comparison between how blacks were treated in the god awful days of segregation and how Muslims are being treated by some of our political leadership today.
I remember when the Cold War came to an end. That was when the Zionist movement lost an enemy--the Soviet Union--and had to look around for another group to hate. That's when the demonization of Muslims--and Arabs--began. The pro-Israeli propagandists, aided and abetted by the mainstream media, leaned heavily into the Arab and Muslim population, making them the villains. It was easy then, as the Arabs, either in the Arab world or in the United States were not well organized, so they didn't fight back. That failure to resist has cost them, as has the actions of some--Al Qaeda for example--which made it easier to hate them.
Those of us who have read some history also know what happened to the Irish when they first came to America. We also remember how Jews were assaulted, both in the press and in person, until the remainder of the country put a stop to it by making it unpopular to isolate a community so they could be demonized.
Now, it's the turn of the Arabs and the Muslims to receive the same treatment that blacks, the Irish, and the Jews did before that treatment became unpopular.
How similar is the assault on the Muslims and Arabs when compared to what happened to other ethnic groups in our shady past. Where the similarity ends is how the media is treating the entire "mosque" at ground zero. The proposed building is neither a mosque, nor is it at ground zero. It is a community center that, among other activities, includes a prayer room. I know of no one who would build an eleven-story mosque, and I know of no mosque that would allow a swimming pool and recreation center to be built in it, or even above it.
So what we have here is a political football that leaves it open for the gaggle of demagogues and hustlers -- I'm thinking specifically of Newt Gingrich, Rick Lazio and Sarah Palin -- to try to reap some kind of political popularity from denouncing the project.
It used to be that both political leaders and the media would denounce this kind racism, and that such denunciations would soon bring such demagoguery to an end. But not this time. Most of the media, MSNBC being the major exception, has ducked its head, being content to just report on the onslaught against the Islamic Center, but not denouncing the demagoguery.
So far, this has resulted in someone setting fire to the construction of a real mosque in Tennessee. This usually follows acts of violence against Arabs and Muslims in different parts of the country. We've seen it before.
All this won't stop unless and until all the political leaders--now silent--come down hard on what is happening, when the haters begin themselves to feel isolated. Cheers to President Obama and to Mayor Bloomberg, who have tried to lead the way, but who lost Howard Dean and Harry Reid in the process. The rest of the political leadership--both Republican and Democratic--predictably are in hiding.
James Abourezk is a former U.S. Senator, who practices law in Sioux Falls. He is the author of Advise & Dissent: Memoirs of South Dakota and the US Senate.
http://www.counterpunch.org/abourezk08312010.html
Sunday 29 August 2010
The Nazification of the United States
Weekend Edition
August 27-29, 2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08272010.html
Death of the First Amendment
The Nazification of the United States
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Chuck Norris is no pinko-liberal-commie, and Human Events is a very conservative publication. The two have come together to produce an important article, “Obama’s US Assassination Program.”
It seems only yesterday that Americans, or those interested in their civil liberties, were shocked that the Bush regime so flagrantly violated the FlSA law against spying on American citizens without a warrant. A federal judge serving on the FISA court even resigned in protest to the illegality of the spying.
Nothing was done about it. “National security” placed the president and executive branch above the law of the land. Civil libertarians worried that the US government was freeing its power from the constraints of law, but no one else seemed to care.
Encouraged by its success in breaking the law, the executive branch early this year announced that the Obama regime has given itself the right to murder Americans abroad if such Americans are considered a “threat.” “Threat” was not defined and, thus, a death sentence would be issued by a subjective decision of an unaccountable official.
There was hardly a peep out of the public or the media. Americans and the media were content for the government to summarily execute traitors and turncoats, and who better to identify traitors and turncoats than the government with all its spy programs.
The problem with this sort of thing is that once it starts, it doesn’t stop. As Norris reports, citing Obama regime security officials, the next stage is to criminalize dissent and criticism of the government. The May 2010 National Security Strategy states: “We are now moving beyond traditional distinctions between homeland and national security. . . . This includes a determination to prevent terrorist attacks against the American people by fully coordinating the actions that we take abroad with the actions and precautions that we take at home.”
Most Americans will respond that the “indispensable” US government would never confuse an American exercising First Amendment rights with a terrorist or an enemy of the state. But, in fact, governments always have. Even one of our Founding Fathers, John Adams and the Federalist Party, had their “Alien and Sedition Acts” which targeted the Republican press.
Few with power can brook opposition or criticism, especially when it is a simple matter for those with power to sweep away constraints upon their power in the name of “national security.” Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan recently explained that more steps are being taken, because of the growing number of Americans who have been “captivated by extremist ideology or causes.” Notice that this phrasing goes beyond concern with Muslim terrorists.
In pursuit of hegemony over both the world and its own subjects, the US government is shutting down the First Amendment and turning criticism of the government into an act of “domestic extremism,” a capital crime punishable by execution, just as it was in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia.
Initially German courts resisted Hitler’s illegal acts. Hitler got around the courts by creating a parallel court system, like the Bush regime did with its military tribunals. It won’t be long before a decision of the US Supreme Court will not mean anything. Any decision that goes against the regime will simply be ignored.
This is already happening in Canada, an American puppet state. Writing for CounterPunch, Andy Worthington documents the lawlessness of the US trial of Canadian Omar Khadr. In January of this year, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the interrogation of Khadr constituted “state conduct that violates the principles of fundamental justice” and “offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.” According to the Toronto Star, the Court instructed the government to “shape a response that reconciled its foreign policy imperatives with its constitutional obligations to Khadr,” but the puppet prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, ignored the Court and permitted the US government to proceed with its lawless abuse of a Canadian citizen.
September 11 destroyed more than lives, World Trade Center buildings, and Americans’ sense of invulnerability. The event destroyed American liberty, the rule of law and the US Constitution.
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
August 27-29, 2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08272010.html
Death of the First Amendment
The Nazification of the United States
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Chuck Norris is no pinko-liberal-commie, and Human Events is a very conservative publication. The two have come together to produce an important article, “Obama’s US Assassination Program.”
It seems only yesterday that Americans, or those interested in their civil liberties, were shocked that the Bush regime so flagrantly violated the FlSA law against spying on American citizens without a warrant. A federal judge serving on the FISA court even resigned in protest to the illegality of the spying.
Nothing was done about it. “National security” placed the president and executive branch above the law of the land. Civil libertarians worried that the US government was freeing its power from the constraints of law, but no one else seemed to care.
Encouraged by its success in breaking the law, the executive branch early this year announced that the Obama regime has given itself the right to murder Americans abroad if such Americans are considered a “threat.” “Threat” was not defined and, thus, a death sentence would be issued by a subjective decision of an unaccountable official.
There was hardly a peep out of the public or the media. Americans and the media were content for the government to summarily execute traitors and turncoats, and who better to identify traitors and turncoats than the government with all its spy programs.
The problem with this sort of thing is that once it starts, it doesn’t stop. As Norris reports, citing Obama regime security officials, the next stage is to criminalize dissent and criticism of the government. The May 2010 National Security Strategy states: “We are now moving beyond traditional distinctions between homeland and national security. . . . This includes a determination to prevent terrorist attacks against the American people by fully coordinating the actions that we take abroad with the actions and precautions that we take at home.”
Most Americans will respond that the “indispensable” US government would never confuse an American exercising First Amendment rights with a terrorist or an enemy of the state. But, in fact, governments always have. Even one of our Founding Fathers, John Adams and the Federalist Party, had their “Alien and Sedition Acts” which targeted the Republican press.
Few with power can brook opposition or criticism, especially when it is a simple matter for those with power to sweep away constraints upon their power in the name of “national security.” Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan recently explained that more steps are being taken, because of the growing number of Americans who have been “captivated by extremist ideology or causes.” Notice that this phrasing goes beyond concern with Muslim terrorists.
In pursuit of hegemony over both the world and its own subjects, the US government is shutting down the First Amendment and turning criticism of the government into an act of “domestic extremism,” a capital crime punishable by execution, just as it was in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia.
Initially German courts resisted Hitler’s illegal acts. Hitler got around the courts by creating a parallel court system, like the Bush regime did with its military tribunals. It won’t be long before a decision of the US Supreme Court will not mean anything. Any decision that goes against the regime will simply be ignored.
This is already happening in Canada, an American puppet state. Writing for CounterPunch, Andy Worthington documents the lawlessness of the US trial of Canadian Omar Khadr. In January of this year, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the interrogation of Khadr constituted “state conduct that violates the principles of fundamental justice” and “offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.” According to the Toronto Star, the Court instructed the government to “shape a response that reconciled its foreign policy imperatives with its constitutional obligations to Khadr,” but the puppet prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, ignored the Court and permitted the US government to proceed with its lawless abuse of a Canadian citizen.
September 11 destroyed more than lives, World Trade Center buildings, and Americans’ sense of invulnerability. The event destroyed American liberty, the rule of law and the US Constitution.
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Thank You, Glenn Beck!
Weekend Edition
August 27-29, 2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/
Thank You, Glenn Beck!
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
This weekend brings us the August 28 anniversary of the March on Washington back in 1963. It was when Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech from the Lincoln Memorial. At least 250,000 people, 75-80 per cent black, rallied in the Mall. Each year the anniversary rolls around, you’ll hear plenty of high-flown strophes from prominent progressives, black and white, evoking Dr. King’s dream of racial justice and equality. Barack Obama’s speechwriters are, no doubt, polishing just such a commentary by their boss.
In terms of political energy, the event is as inert as Labor Day, itself just around the corner at the start of September.
But this year brings welcome relief from such pietism. The premier anniversary celebration of the March has been hijacked by the right-wing commentator, Glenn Beck. The prime speaker will be Sarah Palin, the Tea Party’s pinup girl and as unlikely as any woman in Alaska ever to have had a pinup of MLK on her dorm wall. To have the March on Washington honored by Beck and Palin is as shocking to liberal America as installing Jefferson Davis, president of the Southern slave states in the Civil War, next to Lincoln in the Memorial – an insertion which will no doubt be approved by Congress, and endorsed by Obama in the interests of bipartisanship, just as soon as the 14th Amendment is repealed.
Beck admits that when he scheduled a rally in Washington on August 28 to boost his new book, The Plan, and strut his stuff to the Tea Party masses, he had no idea it was the anniversary of the March. But he swiftly turned ignorance into opportunity. He’s now saying that’s he is working “to finish the job” that was at the heart of the 1963 March on Washington and King’s vision.
Beck claims the ideas of Dr. King have been corrupted and that he will resurrect the true King. As part of this mission, Beck is trying to separate Dr. King from social justice and limit King to advocacy of individual Christian salvation. According to Dedrick Muhammad of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, writing on this site last week, D.C., “Beck has even reached out to distant relatives of Dr. King, like Dr. King’s niece. After questioning her several times he gets her to say that King was not about social justice or government redistribution of the wealth.”
From the left comes the angry response that King was, indeed, committed to the need to redistribute wealth in order to advance a juster nation and was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, in the course of a visit to black city workers on strike.
If Beck’s hijacking provokes some honesty among the left in general about King and about black leadership today, then Beck will have performed a useful service. Too late now to organize the obvious, a huge counter demonstration to call Beck to accounts and run him and Palin off. The left is too weak for that, having now given up gluten which has given us leavened bread for 5,000 years.
The March of 1963 was actually called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It wasn’t King’s idea, but that of A. Philip Randolph who had planned a similar march in 1941. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was only one of five main sponsoring groups. Some of these saw the march’s purpose as not high-flown talk about dreams but as harsh reproof of President John Kennedy. They accused him dragging his feet on giving legislative heft to the civil rights movement that has moved into high gear three years earlier. John Lewis’s speech denouncing Kennedy’s weakness was famously censored by the March’s organizers.
King’s political career was heading into crisis. Three years later, in 1967, he was booed by blacks at a rally in Chicago. He recalled later what he thought that night: ”I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about the not-too-distant day when they would have freedom ‘all, here and now.’ I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had soared. They were now booing because they had felt we were unable to deliver on our promises…. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream they had so readily accepted turn into a nightmare.”
It was one thing to force a chain restaurant in Greensboro, North Carolina, to allow blacks sit at a previously Whites Only counter; it was quite another to attack the racism embedded in the American system so savagely excoriated by the greatest American black revolutionary of the 1960s, Malcolm X, who was assassinated in 1965.
Beck, to a certain extent, has it right. In 1963 King was on the same tack as another man professing confidence in the American system to engender justice out of an innate, individually virtuous moral tropism to do the right thing -- Barack Obama in 2008. King was wrong then, just like Obama is two generations later. It’s a matter of class war, not individual character traits.
King moved to the left in the mid-60s. He had to. In Riverside Church in New York, a year before his death he gave a far more powerful speech than 1963’s “I have a dream” address. He called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today… A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. …[T]rue compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar... it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
This was a far cry from what White Power wanted from King, which was the soft rhetorical pillow on which all Dreamers could lay their heads: MLK’s 1963 dream that “we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”
On August 28, 2010,, forty-seven years after the March for Jobs and Freedom, America has plunged into the vortex of long-term mass unemployment. No jobs, particularly for young blacks.
So much for jobs. What about freedom?
Thirty years ago, fewer than 350,000 people were held in prisons and jails in the United States. Today, the number of prisoners in the United States exceeds 2,000,000. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32 per cent, or 1 in three. Black boys are five times as likely as white boys to go to jail. Former prisoners are permanently relocated on society’s margins, these days some 5 million of them, denied the right to vote in most states. Professor Michelle Alexander, in her book The New Jim Crow argues convincingly that we have a purposeful system of mass incarceration, with blacks as the prime victims.
Today, in this fearful crisis there is no effective black leadership, starting with President Obama who has marvelously has fulfilled his function as political sedater of black aspirations, starting with the promotion of his own success story. “Yes, we can.” Oh, no they can’t. It’s not in the Master Plan. Black politicians are well aware that most of their black constituents will stay with Obama till the end, whatever he does. So most of them remain quiet – and yield the stage to an opportunist like Beck, flanked by Ms. Palin. Malcom X, who called the 1963 March on Washington “a picnic” and “a circus,” would have had a good laugh about that.
The Left and Iraq: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
“The US isn't withdrawing from Iraq at all – it's rebranding the occupation… What is abundantly clear is that the US , whose embassy in Baghdad is now the size of Vatican City , has no intention of letting go of Iraq any time soon.” So declared Seumas Milne of The (UK) Guardian on August 4.
Milne is not alone among writers on the left arguing that even though most Americans think it’s all over, They say that Uncle Sam still effectively occupies Iraq, still rules the roost there. They gesture at 50,000 US troops in 94 military bases, "advising" and training the Iraqi army, "providing security" and carrying out "counter-terrorism" missions. Outside US government forces there is what Jeremy Scahill calls the "coming surge" of contractors in Iraq , swelling up from the present 100,000. Hillary Clinton wants to increase the number of military contractors working for the state department alone from 2,700 to 7,000. Of these contractors 11,000 are armed mercenaries, mostly "third country nationals, typically from the developing world. “The advantage of an outsourced occupation,” Milne writes, “ is clearly that someone other than US soldiers can do the dying to maintain control of Iraq.
“Can Iraq now be regarded as a tolerably secure outpost of the American system in the Middle East ?” Tariq Ali asked in the New Left Review earlier this year. He answered himself judiciously,“They have reason to exult, and reason to doubt.”, but the thrust of his analysis depicts Iraq as still the pawn of the American Empire., with a “predominantly Shia army—some 250,000 strong—… trained and armed to the teeth to deal with any resurgence of the resistance,” all this with “ the blessing of the saintly Sistani’s smile”
The bottom line, as drawn by Milne and Ali is oil . Milne gestures to the “dozen 20-year contracts to run Iraq's biggest oil fields that were handed out last year to foreign companies”.
Is it really true that though the US troop presence has dropped by 120,000 in less than a year, Iraq is as much under Uncle Sam’s imperial jackboot as it was in, say, 2004, even though now no US troops patrol the streets? If Iraq’s political affairs are under US control, how come the U.S. Embassy—deployed in its Vatican City-size compound, (mostly as vacant as a foreclosed subdivision in Riverside, California and planned in the same phase of megalomania) cannot knock Iraqi heads together and bid them form a government? Those 50,000 troops broiling in their costly bases are scarcely a decisive factor in Iraq’s internal affairs; nor are the private contractors.
Is a Shi’a-dominated government really to America’s taste and nothing more than its pawn? It was Sistani who forced the elections of 2005, calling Bush on his pledge of free elections, thus downsizing the excessive representation of the Sunni – who boycotted the election anyway. And if all this was a devious ploy to break “the Iraqi resistance” how come the United States constantly invokes the menace of Iran and decries its influence in Iraq?
The “Iraqi resistance” invoked in worshipful tones by Tariq Ali, as opposed to his ironic “saintly” reserved for Sistani, means, in his perspective, the Sunni. But if the Sunni ever had a strategy beyond a strictly sectarian agenda, it was scarcely advanced by blowing up Shi’a pilgrims and their shrines and setting off bombs in market places. If Moqtada al Sadr has been side-lined by the US and its supposed creature, Sistani, why has he been described as the “kingmaker” since his success in the parliamentary election this past March.?
As for the contractors, those sinister Third World mercenaries should not be oversold, unless the Shiites are supposed to quail before ill-paid Peruvians, Ugandan cops and the like., who will now be supposedly handing down orders to the Iraqi government. This takes a very imperial, and contemptuous attitude towards the capabilities of the Iraqi people.
If this really was a “war for oil,” it scarcely went well for the United States.
Run your eye down the list of contracts the Iraqi government awarded in June and December 2009. Prominent is Russia’s Lukoil, which, in partnership with Norway’s Statoil, won the rights to West Qurna Phase Two, a 12.9 billion–barrel supergiant oilfield. Other successful bidders for fixed-term contracts included Russia’s Gazprom and Malaysia’s Petronas. Only two US-based oil companies came away with contracts: ExxonMobil partnered with Royal Dutch Shell on a contract for West Qurna Phase One (8.7 billion barrels in reserves); and Occidental shares a contract in the Zubair field (4 billion barrels), in company with Italy’s ENI and South Korea’s Kogas. The huge Rumaila field (17 billion barrels) yielded a contract for BP and the China National Petroleum Company, and Royal Dutch Shell split the 12.6 billion–barrel Majnoon field with Petronas, 60-40.
Throughout the two auctions there were frequent bleats from the oil companies at the harsh terms imposed by the auctioneers representing Iraq, as this vignette from Reuters about the bidding on the northern Najmah field suggests: “Sonangol also won the nearby 900-million-barrel Najmah oilfield in Nineveh.… Again, the Angolan firm had to cut its price and accept a fee of $6 per barrel, less than the $8.50 it had sought. ‘We are expecting a little bit higher. Can you go a little bit higher?’ Sonangol’s exploration manager Paulino Jeronimo asked Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani to spontaneous applause from other oil executives. Shahristani said, ‘No.’”
So either the all powerful US government was unable to fix the auctions to its liking, or the all powerful US-based oil companies mostly decided the profit margins weren’t sufficiently tempting. Either way, “the war for oil” doesn’t look in very good shape.
Milne advances the odd idea that with the (entirely imaginary) US “control” of Iraqi oil “the global oil price could be slashed and the grip of recalcitrant Opec states broken.” In fact, the last thing the majors want is to cut world oil prices.” Ask BP.
Milne and Ali are being naive and credulous in taking at face value US officials declaring that they are not wholly withdrawing and they will still be in business in Iraq for the foreseeable future. The reason for saying this is that they don't want to see their influence go wholly to zilch. They therefore have to maintain -- and are dutifully echoed on the left - that their power in Iraq is only a little affected by reduction of troop numbers from 150,000 to less than a quarter of that number.
The US line on this is in one sense sensible: In Iran many Iranians saw the hidden hand of Britain behind developments long after the Brits' real power had faded almost to nothing. In the case of the US in Iraq it is easy to sell this when the right and left agree that US too powerful to have suffered a defeat.
The American right tried to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by claiming that “the surge” – a pr ploy by General David Petraeus to mask US withdrawal – was a military success, rather than the Sunni abandoning “national resistance” and throwing in their lot with the Americans. The left – or the substantial slice of it hewing to the Milne/Ali line – snatches defeat from the jaws of a victory over America’s plans for Iraq by proclaiming that America has successfully established what Milne calls “a new form of outsourced semi-colonial regime to maintain its grip on the country and region.” Iraq is in ruins – always the default consequence of American imperial endeavors. The left should report this, but also hammer home the message that in terms of its proclaimed objectives the US onslaught on Iraq was a strategic and military disaster. That’s the lesson to bring home.
August 27-29, 2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/
Thank You, Glenn Beck!
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
This weekend brings us the August 28 anniversary of the March on Washington back in 1963. It was when Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech from the Lincoln Memorial. At least 250,000 people, 75-80 per cent black, rallied in the Mall. Each year the anniversary rolls around, you’ll hear plenty of high-flown strophes from prominent progressives, black and white, evoking Dr. King’s dream of racial justice and equality. Barack Obama’s speechwriters are, no doubt, polishing just such a commentary by their boss.
In terms of political energy, the event is as inert as Labor Day, itself just around the corner at the start of September.
But this year brings welcome relief from such pietism. The premier anniversary celebration of the March has been hijacked by the right-wing commentator, Glenn Beck. The prime speaker will be Sarah Palin, the Tea Party’s pinup girl and as unlikely as any woman in Alaska ever to have had a pinup of MLK on her dorm wall. To have the March on Washington honored by Beck and Palin is as shocking to liberal America as installing Jefferson Davis, president of the Southern slave states in the Civil War, next to Lincoln in the Memorial – an insertion which will no doubt be approved by Congress, and endorsed by Obama in the interests of bipartisanship, just as soon as the 14th Amendment is repealed.
Beck admits that when he scheduled a rally in Washington on August 28 to boost his new book, The Plan, and strut his stuff to the Tea Party masses, he had no idea it was the anniversary of the March. But he swiftly turned ignorance into opportunity. He’s now saying that’s he is working “to finish the job” that was at the heart of the 1963 March on Washington and King’s vision.
Beck claims the ideas of Dr. King have been corrupted and that he will resurrect the true King. As part of this mission, Beck is trying to separate Dr. King from social justice and limit King to advocacy of individual Christian salvation. According to Dedrick Muhammad of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, writing on this site last week, D.C., “Beck has even reached out to distant relatives of Dr. King, like Dr. King’s niece. After questioning her several times he gets her to say that King was not about social justice or government redistribution of the wealth.”
From the left comes the angry response that King was, indeed, committed to the need to redistribute wealth in order to advance a juster nation and was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, in the course of a visit to black city workers on strike.
If Beck’s hijacking provokes some honesty among the left in general about King and about black leadership today, then Beck will have performed a useful service. Too late now to organize the obvious, a huge counter demonstration to call Beck to accounts and run him and Palin off. The left is too weak for that, having now given up gluten which has given us leavened bread for 5,000 years.
The March of 1963 was actually called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It wasn’t King’s idea, but that of A. Philip Randolph who had planned a similar march in 1941. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was only one of five main sponsoring groups. Some of these saw the march’s purpose as not high-flown talk about dreams but as harsh reproof of President John Kennedy. They accused him dragging his feet on giving legislative heft to the civil rights movement that has moved into high gear three years earlier. John Lewis’s speech denouncing Kennedy’s weakness was famously censored by the March’s organizers.
King’s political career was heading into crisis. Three years later, in 1967, he was booed by blacks at a rally in Chicago. He recalled later what he thought that night: ”I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about the not-too-distant day when they would have freedom ‘all, here and now.’ I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had soared. They were now booing because they had felt we were unable to deliver on our promises…. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream they had so readily accepted turn into a nightmare.”
It was one thing to force a chain restaurant in Greensboro, North Carolina, to allow blacks sit at a previously Whites Only counter; it was quite another to attack the racism embedded in the American system so savagely excoriated by the greatest American black revolutionary of the 1960s, Malcolm X, who was assassinated in 1965.
Beck, to a certain extent, has it right. In 1963 King was on the same tack as another man professing confidence in the American system to engender justice out of an innate, individually virtuous moral tropism to do the right thing -- Barack Obama in 2008. King was wrong then, just like Obama is two generations later. It’s a matter of class war, not individual character traits.
King moved to the left in the mid-60s. He had to. In Riverside Church in New York, a year before his death he gave a far more powerful speech than 1963’s “I have a dream” address. He called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today… A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. …[T]rue compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar... it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
This was a far cry from what White Power wanted from King, which was the soft rhetorical pillow on which all Dreamers could lay their heads: MLK’s 1963 dream that “we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”
On August 28, 2010,, forty-seven years after the March for Jobs and Freedom, America has plunged into the vortex of long-term mass unemployment. No jobs, particularly for young blacks.
So much for jobs. What about freedom?
Thirty years ago, fewer than 350,000 people were held in prisons and jails in the United States. Today, the number of prisoners in the United States exceeds 2,000,000. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32 per cent, or 1 in three. Black boys are five times as likely as white boys to go to jail. Former prisoners are permanently relocated on society’s margins, these days some 5 million of them, denied the right to vote in most states. Professor Michelle Alexander, in her book The New Jim Crow argues convincingly that we have a purposeful system of mass incarceration, with blacks as the prime victims.
Today, in this fearful crisis there is no effective black leadership, starting with President Obama who has marvelously has fulfilled his function as political sedater of black aspirations, starting with the promotion of his own success story. “Yes, we can.” Oh, no they can’t. It’s not in the Master Plan. Black politicians are well aware that most of their black constituents will stay with Obama till the end, whatever he does. So most of them remain quiet – and yield the stage to an opportunist like Beck, flanked by Ms. Palin. Malcom X, who called the 1963 March on Washington “a picnic” and “a circus,” would have had a good laugh about that.
The Left and Iraq: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
“The US isn't withdrawing from Iraq at all – it's rebranding the occupation… What is abundantly clear is that the US , whose embassy in Baghdad is now the size of Vatican City , has no intention of letting go of Iraq any time soon.” So declared Seumas Milne of The (UK) Guardian on August 4.
Milne is not alone among writers on the left arguing that even though most Americans think it’s all over, They say that Uncle Sam still effectively occupies Iraq, still rules the roost there. They gesture at 50,000 US troops in 94 military bases, "advising" and training the Iraqi army, "providing security" and carrying out "counter-terrorism" missions. Outside US government forces there is what Jeremy Scahill calls the "coming surge" of contractors in Iraq , swelling up from the present 100,000. Hillary Clinton wants to increase the number of military contractors working for the state department alone from 2,700 to 7,000. Of these contractors 11,000 are armed mercenaries, mostly "third country nationals, typically from the developing world. “The advantage of an outsourced occupation,” Milne writes, “ is clearly that someone other than US soldiers can do the dying to maintain control of Iraq.
“Can Iraq now be regarded as a tolerably secure outpost of the American system in the Middle East ?” Tariq Ali asked in the New Left Review earlier this year. He answered himself judiciously,“They have reason to exult, and reason to doubt.”, but the thrust of his analysis depicts Iraq as still the pawn of the American Empire., with a “predominantly Shia army—some 250,000 strong—… trained and armed to the teeth to deal with any resurgence of the resistance,” all this with “ the blessing of the saintly Sistani’s smile”
The bottom line, as drawn by Milne and Ali is oil . Milne gestures to the “dozen 20-year contracts to run Iraq's biggest oil fields that were handed out last year to foreign companies”.
Is it really true that though the US troop presence has dropped by 120,000 in less than a year, Iraq is as much under Uncle Sam’s imperial jackboot as it was in, say, 2004, even though now no US troops patrol the streets? If Iraq’s political affairs are under US control, how come the U.S. Embassy—deployed in its Vatican City-size compound, (mostly as vacant as a foreclosed subdivision in Riverside, California and planned in the same phase of megalomania) cannot knock Iraqi heads together and bid them form a government? Those 50,000 troops broiling in their costly bases are scarcely a decisive factor in Iraq’s internal affairs; nor are the private contractors.
Is a Shi’a-dominated government really to America’s taste and nothing more than its pawn? It was Sistani who forced the elections of 2005, calling Bush on his pledge of free elections, thus downsizing the excessive representation of the Sunni – who boycotted the election anyway. And if all this was a devious ploy to break “the Iraqi resistance” how come the United States constantly invokes the menace of Iran and decries its influence in Iraq?
The “Iraqi resistance” invoked in worshipful tones by Tariq Ali, as opposed to his ironic “saintly” reserved for Sistani, means, in his perspective, the Sunni. But if the Sunni ever had a strategy beyond a strictly sectarian agenda, it was scarcely advanced by blowing up Shi’a pilgrims and their shrines and setting off bombs in market places. If Moqtada al Sadr has been side-lined by the US and its supposed creature, Sistani, why has he been described as the “kingmaker” since his success in the parliamentary election this past March.?
As for the contractors, those sinister Third World mercenaries should not be oversold, unless the Shiites are supposed to quail before ill-paid Peruvians, Ugandan cops and the like., who will now be supposedly handing down orders to the Iraqi government. This takes a very imperial, and contemptuous attitude towards the capabilities of the Iraqi people.
If this really was a “war for oil,” it scarcely went well for the United States.
Run your eye down the list of contracts the Iraqi government awarded in June and December 2009. Prominent is Russia’s Lukoil, which, in partnership with Norway’s Statoil, won the rights to West Qurna Phase Two, a 12.9 billion–barrel supergiant oilfield. Other successful bidders for fixed-term contracts included Russia’s Gazprom and Malaysia’s Petronas. Only two US-based oil companies came away with contracts: ExxonMobil partnered with Royal Dutch Shell on a contract for West Qurna Phase One (8.7 billion barrels in reserves); and Occidental shares a contract in the Zubair field (4 billion barrels), in company with Italy’s ENI and South Korea’s Kogas. The huge Rumaila field (17 billion barrels) yielded a contract for BP and the China National Petroleum Company, and Royal Dutch Shell split the 12.6 billion–barrel Majnoon field with Petronas, 60-40.
Throughout the two auctions there were frequent bleats from the oil companies at the harsh terms imposed by the auctioneers representing Iraq, as this vignette from Reuters about the bidding on the northern Najmah field suggests: “Sonangol also won the nearby 900-million-barrel Najmah oilfield in Nineveh.… Again, the Angolan firm had to cut its price and accept a fee of $6 per barrel, less than the $8.50 it had sought. ‘We are expecting a little bit higher. Can you go a little bit higher?’ Sonangol’s exploration manager Paulino Jeronimo asked Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani to spontaneous applause from other oil executives. Shahristani said, ‘No.’”
So either the all powerful US government was unable to fix the auctions to its liking, or the all powerful US-based oil companies mostly decided the profit margins weren’t sufficiently tempting. Either way, “the war for oil” doesn’t look in very good shape.
Milne advances the odd idea that with the (entirely imaginary) US “control” of Iraqi oil “the global oil price could be slashed and the grip of recalcitrant Opec states broken.” In fact, the last thing the majors want is to cut world oil prices.” Ask BP.
Milne and Ali are being naive and credulous in taking at face value US officials declaring that they are not wholly withdrawing and they will still be in business in Iraq for the foreseeable future. The reason for saying this is that they don't want to see their influence go wholly to zilch. They therefore have to maintain -- and are dutifully echoed on the left - that their power in Iraq is only a little affected by reduction of troop numbers from 150,000 to less than a quarter of that number.
The US line on this is in one sense sensible: In Iran many Iranians saw the hidden hand of Britain behind developments long after the Brits' real power had faded almost to nothing. In the case of the US in Iraq it is easy to sell this when the right and left agree that US too powerful to have suffered a defeat.
The American right tried to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by claiming that “the surge” – a pr ploy by General David Petraeus to mask US withdrawal – was a military success, rather than the Sunni abandoning “national resistance” and throwing in their lot with the Americans. The left – or the substantial slice of it hewing to the Milne/Ali line – snatches defeat from the jaws of a victory over America’s plans for Iraq by proclaiming that America has successfully established what Milne calls “a new form of outsourced semi-colonial regime to maintain its grip on the country and region.” Iraq is in ruins – always the default consequence of American imperial endeavors. The left should report this, but also hammer home the message that in terms of its proclaimed objectives the US onslaught on Iraq was a strategic and military disaster. That’s the lesson to bring home.
Monday 16 August 2010
China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy
China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy
By DAVID BARBOZA
Published: August 15, 2010
SHANGHAI — After three decades of spectacular growth, China passed Japan in the second quarter to become the world’s second-largest economy behind the United States, according to government figures released early Monday.
The milestone, though anticipated for some time, is the most striking evidence yet that China’s ascendance is for real and that the rest of the world will have to reckon with a new economic superpower.
The recognition came early Monday, when Tokyo said that Japan’s economy was valued at about $1.28 trillion in the second quarter, slightly below China’s $1.33 trillion. Japan’s economy grew 0.4 percent in the quarter, Tokyo said, substantially less than forecast. That weakness suggests that China’s economy will race past Japan’s for the full year.
Experts say unseating Japan — and in recent years passing Germany, France and Great Britain — underscores China’s growing clout and bolsters forecasts that China will pass the United States as the world’s biggest economy as early as 2030. America’s gross domestic product was about $14 trillion in 2009.
“This has enormous significance,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It reconfirms what’s been happening for the better part of a decade: China has been eclipsing Japan economically. For everyone in China’s region, they’re now the biggest trading partner rather than the U.S. or Japan.”
For Japan, whose economy has been stagnating for more than a decade, the figures reflect a decline in economic and political power. Japan has had the world’s second-largest economy for much of the last four decades, according to the World Bank. And during the 1980s, there was even talk about Japan’s economy some day overtaking that of the United States.
But while Japan’s economy is mature and its population quickly aging, China is in the throes of urbanization and is far from developed, analysts say, meaning it has a much lower standard of living, as well as a lot more room to grow. Just five years ago, China’s gross domestic product was about $2.3 trillion, about half of Japan’s.
This country has roughly the same land mass as the United States, but it is burdened with a fifth of the world’s population and insufficient resources.
Its per capita income is more on a par with those of impoverished nations like Algeria, El Salvador and Albania — which, along with China, are close to $3,600 — than that of the United States, where it is about $46,000.
Yet there is little disputing that under the direction of the Communist Party, China has begun to reshape the way the global economy functions by virtue of its growing dominance of trade, its huge hoard of foreign exchange reserves and United States government debt and its voracious appetite for oil, coal, iron ore and other natural resources.
China is already a major driver of global growth. The country’s leaders have grown more confident on the international stage and have begun to assert greater influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America, with things like special trade agreements and multibillion dollar resource deals.
“They’re exerting a lot of influence on the global economy and becoming dominant in Asia,” said Eswar S. Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell and former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China division. “A lot of other economies in the region are essentially riding on China’s coat tails, and this is remarkable for an economy with a low per capita income.”
In Japan, the mood was one of resignation. Though increasingly eclipsed by Beijing on the world stage, Japan has benefited from a booming China, initially by businesses moving production there to take advantage of lower wages and, as local incomes have risen, by tapping a large and increasingly lucrative market for Japanese goods.
Beijing is also beginning to shape global dialogues on a range of issues, analysts said; for instance, last year it asserted that the dollar must be phased out as the world’s primary reserve currency.
And while the United States and the European Union are struggling to grow in the wake of the worst economic crisis in decades, China has continued to climb up the economic league tables by investing heavily in infrastructure and backing a $586 billion stimulus plan.
This year, although growth has begun to moderate a bit, China’s economy is forecast to expand about 10 percent — continuing a remarkable three-decade streak of double-digit growth.
“This is just the beginning,” said Wang Tao, an economist at UBS in Beijing. “China is still a developing country. So it has a lot of room to grow. And China has the biggest impact on commodity prices — in Russia, India, Australia and Latin America.”
There are huge challenges ahead, though. Economists say that China’s economy is too heavily dependent on exports and investment and that it needs to encourage greater domestic consumption — something China has struggled to do.
The country’s largely state-run banks have recently been criticized for lending far too aggressively in the last year while shifting some loans off their balance sheet to disguise lending and evade rules meant to curtail lending growth.
China is also locked in a fierce debate over its currency policy, with the United States, European Union and others accusing Beijing of keeping the Chinese currency, the renminbi, artificially low to bolster exports — leading to huge trade surpluses for China but major bilateral trade deficits for the United States and the European Union. China says that its currency is not substantially undervalued and that it is moving ahead with currency reform.
Regardless, China’s rapid growth suggests that it will continue to compete fiercely with the United States and Europe for natural resources but also offer big opportunities for companies eager to tap its market.
Although its economy is still only one-third the size of the American economy, China passed the United States last year to become the world’s largest market for passenger vehicles. China also passed Germany last year to become the world’s biggest exporter.
Global companies like Caterpillar, General Electric, General Motors and Siemens — as well as scores of others — are making a more aggressive push into China, in some cases moving research and development centers here.
Some analysts, though, say that while China is eager to assert itself as a financial and economic power — and to push its state companies to “go global” — it is reluctant to play a greater role in the debate over climate change or how to slow the growth of greenhouse gases.
China passed the United States in 2006 to become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, which scientists link to global warming. But China also has an ambitious program to cut the energy it uses for each unit of economic output by 20 percent by the end of 2010, compared to 2006.
Assessing what China’s newfound clout means, though, is complicated. While the country is still relatively poor per capita, it has an authoritarian government that is capable of taking decisive action — to stimulate the economy, build new projects and invest in specific industries.
That, Mr. Lardy at the Peterson Institute said, gives the country unusual power. “China is already the primary determiner of the price of virtually every major commodity,” he said. “And the Chinese government can be much more decisive in allocating resources in a way that other governments of this level of per capita income cannot.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/business/global/16yuan.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy&st=cse&scp=1
By DAVID BARBOZA
Published: August 15, 2010
SHANGHAI — After three decades of spectacular growth, China passed Japan in the second quarter to become the world’s second-largest economy behind the United States, according to government figures released early Monday.
The milestone, though anticipated for some time, is the most striking evidence yet that China’s ascendance is for real and that the rest of the world will have to reckon with a new economic superpower.
The recognition came early Monday, when Tokyo said that Japan’s economy was valued at about $1.28 trillion in the second quarter, slightly below China’s $1.33 trillion. Japan’s economy grew 0.4 percent in the quarter, Tokyo said, substantially less than forecast. That weakness suggests that China’s economy will race past Japan’s for the full year.
Experts say unseating Japan — and in recent years passing Germany, France and Great Britain — underscores China’s growing clout and bolsters forecasts that China will pass the United States as the world’s biggest economy as early as 2030. America’s gross domestic product was about $14 trillion in 2009.
“This has enormous significance,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It reconfirms what’s been happening for the better part of a decade: China has been eclipsing Japan economically. For everyone in China’s region, they’re now the biggest trading partner rather than the U.S. or Japan.”
For Japan, whose economy has been stagnating for more than a decade, the figures reflect a decline in economic and political power. Japan has had the world’s second-largest economy for much of the last four decades, according to the World Bank. And during the 1980s, there was even talk about Japan’s economy some day overtaking that of the United States.
But while Japan’s economy is mature and its population quickly aging, China is in the throes of urbanization and is far from developed, analysts say, meaning it has a much lower standard of living, as well as a lot more room to grow. Just five years ago, China’s gross domestic product was about $2.3 trillion, about half of Japan’s.
This country has roughly the same land mass as the United States, but it is burdened with a fifth of the world’s population and insufficient resources.
Its per capita income is more on a par with those of impoverished nations like Algeria, El Salvador and Albania — which, along with China, are close to $3,600 — than that of the United States, where it is about $46,000.
Yet there is little disputing that under the direction of the Communist Party, China has begun to reshape the way the global economy functions by virtue of its growing dominance of trade, its huge hoard of foreign exchange reserves and United States government debt and its voracious appetite for oil, coal, iron ore and other natural resources.
China is already a major driver of global growth. The country’s leaders have grown more confident on the international stage and have begun to assert greater influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America, with things like special trade agreements and multibillion dollar resource deals.
“They’re exerting a lot of influence on the global economy and becoming dominant in Asia,” said Eswar S. Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell and former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China division. “A lot of other economies in the region are essentially riding on China’s coat tails, and this is remarkable for an economy with a low per capita income.”
In Japan, the mood was one of resignation. Though increasingly eclipsed by Beijing on the world stage, Japan has benefited from a booming China, initially by businesses moving production there to take advantage of lower wages and, as local incomes have risen, by tapping a large and increasingly lucrative market for Japanese goods.
Beijing is also beginning to shape global dialogues on a range of issues, analysts said; for instance, last year it asserted that the dollar must be phased out as the world’s primary reserve currency.
And while the United States and the European Union are struggling to grow in the wake of the worst economic crisis in decades, China has continued to climb up the economic league tables by investing heavily in infrastructure and backing a $586 billion stimulus plan.
This year, although growth has begun to moderate a bit, China’s economy is forecast to expand about 10 percent — continuing a remarkable three-decade streak of double-digit growth.
“This is just the beginning,” said Wang Tao, an economist at UBS in Beijing. “China is still a developing country. So it has a lot of room to grow. And China has the biggest impact on commodity prices — in Russia, India, Australia and Latin America.”
There are huge challenges ahead, though. Economists say that China’s economy is too heavily dependent on exports and investment and that it needs to encourage greater domestic consumption — something China has struggled to do.
The country’s largely state-run banks have recently been criticized for lending far too aggressively in the last year while shifting some loans off their balance sheet to disguise lending and evade rules meant to curtail lending growth.
China is also locked in a fierce debate over its currency policy, with the United States, European Union and others accusing Beijing of keeping the Chinese currency, the renminbi, artificially low to bolster exports — leading to huge trade surpluses for China but major bilateral trade deficits for the United States and the European Union. China says that its currency is not substantially undervalued and that it is moving ahead with currency reform.
Regardless, China’s rapid growth suggests that it will continue to compete fiercely with the United States and Europe for natural resources but also offer big opportunities for companies eager to tap its market.
Although its economy is still only one-third the size of the American economy, China passed the United States last year to become the world’s largest market for passenger vehicles. China also passed Germany last year to become the world’s biggest exporter.
Global companies like Caterpillar, General Electric, General Motors and Siemens — as well as scores of others — are making a more aggressive push into China, in some cases moving research and development centers here.
Some analysts, though, say that while China is eager to assert itself as a financial and economic power — and to push its state companies to “go global” — it is reluctant to play a greater role in the debate over climate change or how to slow the growth of greenhouse gases.
China passed the United States in 2006 to become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, which scientists link to global warming. But China also has an ambitious program to cut the energy it uses for each unit of economic output by 20 percent by the end of 2010, compared to 2006.
Assessing what China’s newfound clout means, though, is complicated. While the country is still relatively poor per capita, it has an authoritarian government that is capable of taking decisive action — to stimulate the economy, build new projects and invest in specific industries.
That, Mr. Lardy at the Peterson Institute said, gives the country unusual power. “China is already the primary determiner of the price of virtually every major commodity,” he said. “And the Chinese government can be much more decisive in allocating resources in a way that other governments of this level of per capita income cannot.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/business/global/16yuan.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy&st=cse&scp=1
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