You probably don’t know that China and the U.S. are squabbling like an old married couple. That kind of news isn’t sexy enough for TV or your local newspaper. And I’ll bet you don’t read The Nation. Not many people do. Pity.
And even if you are one of the few people who have the patience to try and sort out global economics and its effect on your life, you are probably scratching your head because it’s all so damned confusing.
I know I am scratching my head.
Consider this passage from an article in The Nation by national affairs correspondent William Greider:
The political push-pull zeroes in on China. Beijing is accused of playing dirty, stealing jobs, production and wealth. Washington imposes a penalty tariff on Chinese tires and tubular steel. Beijing pushes back with a tariff on US poultry. President Obama once again urges China to stop manipulating its currency to underprice Chinese exports and stymie US goods going the other way. China once again blows off his request. United Steelworkers ups the ante by filing a 5,800-page complaint detailing how China is scheming to corner the global market in green technologies. Obama promptly orders an investigation. “What do the Americans want?” asks the vice chair of Beijing’s National Development and Reform Commission. “Do they want fair trade? Or an earnest dialogue?… I don’t think they want any of this. I think more likely, the Americans just want votes.” He has a point. But so do American politicians, who think China’s hardball industrial strategy has had something to do with America’s anemic recovery. The House, divided on everything else, voted 348-79 in September to authorize tariffs on nearly all Chinese imports if Beijing does not relent in its currency game.
Is that all America’s leaders really want? Votes?
Or is there more to this apparent craziness than that? Something more sinister?
How does this fit into the Fed’s reckless flooding of the global economy with U.S. dollars?
Is an international cartel of bankers really behind it all – scheming to reduce the world to chaos and then take it over?
That’s what my neighbor Ricky thinks. And I’m beginning to wonder if he’s right.
Consider the lead paragraph from Greider’s article:
The world economy is on the brink again, facing a crisis of epic dimensions for reasons largely obscured by the inflamed politics of 2010. Against their wishes, the United States and China have been drawn into an increasingly nasty and dangerous fight over currencies and trade. American politicians, especially desperate Democrats, have framed the conflict in familiar moral terms—a melodrama of America wronged—and demand retaliation. Other nations, sensing the risk of a larger breakdown, have begun to take protective measures. Every man for himself. The center is not holding.
“Against their wishes.” How on earth could that happen? If not their wishes, whose?
My neighbor Marvin, who lectures me regularly about the evils of welfare and voted for the Republicans last week, tells me that “Obama has handlers.”
Aha!
Are they the same handlers that Bush had? According to some of the stuff I see on the web, yes indeed! One article even argues that the line of handlers goes all the way back to FDR.
“Family of Secrets,” a new book by Russ Baker that fingers Karl Rove as the evil Svengali behind the massive spending that determined the results of the U.S. midterm elections, talks at length about “America’s Invisible Government.”
Who are the people in America’s invisible government? And what do they want?
The Nation’s Greider blames the world’s economic woes on “a massive loss of demand.”
And I think that happened because the international moneyed class has declared war on American workers, who create so much of the world’s demand for goods and services. The American middle class is shrinking fast. And the emerging middle class in China, India and other nations cannot grow fast enough to take up the slack.
Is this happening by accident? Or design? And what’s the end game? You tell me.
To read Greider’s article, click on “The End of Free-Trade Globalization.”
