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Economic Meltdown – Can China And Russia Jointly Provide An Alternative?

Economic meltdown – Can China

and Russia jointly provide an alternative?

 

Wendell W Solomons

  

In Beijing in 1958, Chairman Mao claimed that imperialism and all reactionaries were paper tigers.

* * *

 In Moscow, for his part General Secretary Khrushchev detected a tiger armed with nuclear teeth.

* * *

 History has now set aside the outward differences of the statements. To cater for its population today the USA imports every year $1000 billion worth of goods more than it exports. Thus we know how the USA became a magnet for migration. Besides fathering the US President, the Luo tribe’s Barack Obama, Sr. is uncle to Kenya’s own PM.

 

Millions of migrants arrived in the USA mostly drawn to a standard of living maintained by dollar bills printed for the Federal Reserve bank and their equivalent created by bookkeeping entries. In this manner we have a paper tiger.

 

It is said that “Beauty exists in the eye of the beholder.” The beauty of the dollar pyramid exists because it is associated with value by the eye. As awareness of this illusion dawned, several nations shifted from the dollar to EU currency including oil-rich monarchies in the Gulf. However, China has earned the largest reserves of dollars and should it suddenly shift its reserves to EU currency that would cause a breakdown in international trading.

 

What has China chosen to do to save itself from this beautiful paper pyramid?

 

China has chosen, for instance, to employ its dollars to create export-import infrastructure. Singapore no longer has space enough to service ships sailing East-West through the Indian Ocean so China is investing in a massive port complex in southern Sri Lanka. Fiji is receiving Chinese investment in the South Pacific. Australia has been disturbed by the development but that country too seeks Chinese investment so as to export more Australian minerals to China.

 

 

China – Spared Shock Therapy

 

China signed a free-trade pact with ASEAN. Yet, the most populous nation in ASEAN, Indonesia, finds that its products, ranging from motorcycles to steel, cannot compete with Chinese equivalents.

 

Chinese influence is experienced in Latin America. In Africa, besides buying minerals China leases land to grow food grain for its population.

 

Food grain takes us to the republics of the former Soviet Union. Currently, less than half of Russia’s arable land is cultivated. The picture is similar in Kazakhstan and the Ukraine. That leaves more space for Chinese farming infrastructure.

 

Yet, China also needs water, timber, petroleum, natural gas and coal. While the US clears a path through Afghanistan for energy pipelines from Central Asia, China has already built its own. China has been setting up saw mills in Siberia which vast region has timber reserves aplenty (at 13 million sq. km it constitutes 77% of Russia’s land area.) Chinese investment in petroleum, natural gas and coal has been welcomed by top Siberian officials in a situation where several Siberian towns have been deserted through Russians moving for work to large cities like Moscow in Russia’s European sector.

 

The Russia / China contrast arises in the first instance through China having being spared Shock

Therapy that was used in information warfare on Russia. The convener of economic hit men for Russia, ‘new US friend and partner’ in 1992, was discovered by journalist Anne Williamson to be Larry Summers (of whom later.)  Shock Therapy made many millions of Russians believe that they were individual ‘Napoleon Bonapartes.’ That set off a silent (and sometimes not so silent) war of each-against-the-other.

 

These millions of  ‘Napoleons’ had watched US hit men, shadow box and audio-visually demolish the concept of society on Russia’s central TV channels. As UK PM Margaret Thatcher had announced in the 1970s (and therefore proved adequately lethal by 1992): “There’s no such thing as society – there are only individuals and families.” In consequence a first ever public debate ‘What is the “Russian idea”?’ arose under President Boris Yeltsin.

 

Vladimir Putin, the next Russian leader, suggested a finance capital agenda behind this, “They want us to open our doors so that their banks can buy us up.” In the UK and USA, finance capital holding houses had bought up manufacturing industry. Yet, over the years the finance houses demonstrated their incapability in managing industry staff towards innovation. Anglo-American civilisation is presently lost in the crisis of paper capitalism created by (1) hit-man, banker’s capitalism and (2) hyper-active private media. The tail wags the dog.

 

These quotations suggest that diversion by media adds to lost productivity:

 

“To provide its happy people with perpetual fun is now the deepest purpose of Western civilization.”

– Jeremy Seabrook

 

“The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretense, and start hiring theatre directors instead of journalists.”

– Arundhati Roy

 

Anglo-American holding companies keep seeking to respond to their crisis by bursting overseas to solve the problems created at home.

 

To return to discussing China now, we see that Chinese manufacturing has deeply penetrated not only Vladivostok and Khabarovsk in the Far East but all major Russian population centres. If Russia restores its economic planning functions, then an orderly process of joint ventures will develop the economic potential of Siberia and pave the way for innovative new business as China has already done in winning consumers world-wide.

 

Besides restoring economic planning, Russia must re-address the issue of motivating cadre (that Anglo-American management books struggled for during 1960-1990 but failed.) Moscow had tried a system of work brigades in the 1970s (notably used by Volvo.) On the other hand, the system of participative group work pioneered by corporations such as CANON, SONY or TOYOTO will create trust, innovation and job satisfaction more rapidly. Today, face-to-face group collaboration, say for new engineering designs, is possible even over large distances thanks to the Internet and factories providing private electronic communication.

 

 

Why US can’t match China’s economic planning

 

Today US fears China as Russia’s partner in Siberia.

 

Why?

 

US consumers depend on manufactures from China while at the same time the ‘New York Times’ has been calling China a superpower.

 

President Obama mentioned China twice in his January 2010 State of the Union address. His address still continued his ‘empowerment’ election slogan that paralleled the famous Mahatma Gandhi quote, “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.”

 

Yet, President Obama is trapped in the coils of Larry Summers, the thick Wall Street python who heads the White House Economic Council (though a nephew of economics text-book writer Paul Samuelson, his boorishness and villainy brought in academic staff to push him out of the prestige seat of Harvard University’s head that had been bought for him by Wall Street.) This heavyweight

hit man is now in the process of returning Obama to media-minted crises overseas.

 

As Michael Parenti mentions –

 

“With each newly minted crisis, US leaders roll out the same time-tested scenario. They start demonizing a foreign leader … charging them with being communistic or otherwise dictatorial, dangerously aggressive, power hungry, genocidal, given to terrorism or drug trafficking, ready to deny us access to vital resources, harboring weapons of mass destruction, or just inexplicably “anti-American” and “anti-West.” Lacking any information to the contrary, the frightened public … are swept along.”

 

The Anglo-American bankers’ shadowy cross-Atlantic war against the EU and its common currency was toned down (NY’s George Soros ceased talking down the euro in 2001,) but China and Iran are now being hauled up for attack by network media.

 

As far as military attacks on Iran go, the US airforce knows it will be met with Sunburn missiles flying at twice the speed of sound. Therefore an air-battle will set off a blazing inferno of oil tankers in the Gulf through which 40% of the world’s petroleum passes. So the US choice to sabre-rattle on media will affirm China’s strategy of more coordination with Russia. China and Russia are already partners in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

 

Even if 300 million US citizens lose access to China’s products, we live in a 7,000 million population world. To meet demand for manufactured goods from the world, more activity will clearly be scheduled with next-door Siberia for several basic resources that China’s will need.

 

Singapore offered incentives to mothers who avail themselves of higher education because children would benefit from more knowledge and skills. For the part of China, that nation uses its state sector to send investment into chosen targets and therefore enrollment in higher education institutions increased by 65% as compared with 1998 – China responded with a full basket.

 

Clean energy has been discussed in the world for several decades. For the part of China, it has now become the world’s leading manufacturer of solar cells. China is also making great strides in the use of other alternative sources of energy, including wind energy.

 

With China expanding its manufacturing capacity, Russia can at first hand earn revenue on timber, water, petroleum, natural gas and coal.

 

Yet, with Larry Summers coiled around him in the manner of a python, President Obama has made little progress in using the state sector as President Roosevelt did to tackle the Great Depression in the 1930s. The World Bank’s globalist planners in Washington DC for their part developed planning techniques to destabilise numerous countries (Summers occupied the post of Chief Economist there.)

 

As opposed to Washington DC offices, Russia possesses experience, manuals and teachers to utilise the GOSPLAN planning techniques that Russia had itself shared in the 1950s with China.

 

In this connection we also have an important historic precedent to remember.

 

The devastation of Kievan Rus during 1237–1240 AD by Tatar hordes was no less catastrophic than US Shock Therapy. Russia arose again thanks to the culture preserved by Christian monasteries in Siberia which area the Tatars did not invade. The Siberian monasteries helped people regroup. The Russian movement could then go back west and consolidate in Moscow. That created a capital north of Kiev and it was Muscovite Tsar Ivan IV (Grozny/Terrible) who finally overcame the Tatars in battles in Astrakhan in 1556.

 

In summary

 

China will inevitably use its huge foreign exchange reserves in Asia and the world. Until consumer goods manufacturing arises in Russia from a knowledge-intensive base as President Dmitry Medvedev advises, Siberia can serve China as a source for water, timber and energy. This would happen during five years subject to three factors:

 

1. Russia must restore economic planning functions for participation with China. GOSPLAN will help in the onward development of Siberia but will also help provide a social safety net in Russia.

 

2. Russia must protect its population from media disinformation attacks as China has been doing. At the World Social Forum (WSF) held in January 2010 in Brazil several speakers suggested introducing a subject for schools so as to “dismantle disinformation.” Key resource persons of the WSF include Arundhati Roy with experience gained in India.

 

3. Besides a return to economic planning – after half a century the management issue of motivating people towards working in cooperation must be solved again in Russia as it did upto the era of the launch of the world’s first satellites.

 

 

On the Internet, for further details see these two reports –

 

1. “Petrograd connection, planning and statecraft”

 

2. “Saturday’s Miracle”

About the Author

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