Hua Guofeng, dictator of China from 1976-80, has died at age 87. He betrayed his principles and constituancy an act of treachery that deserves the eternal thanks of a grateful world.

The Chinese Olympic and Humiliation

By Jerome Grossman

 

For China the Olympics are a demonstration of the ascendancy of the host nation -from historic international humiliation "to the gate of greatness."  

Here are a few odds and ends from this trip to China.  The more time you spend riding this dragon the more you find out that many things you assumed were far from true.

On Friday, Naomi Klein and Christian Parenti appeared on Democracy Now discussing Chinese security arrangements for the Olympics, and how among other things technological surveillance has largely replaced neighborly snitching.  They looked at how, since 9/11, China and the U.S. have come closer in some ways, including American acceptance of domestic spying, and changes in China's economy.  It has become difficult for us (or Europe) to take the moral high ground, so China's promise of openness at the Olympics has gone unfulfilled and unlamented.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) has just released its new policy paper on China policy for progressives: A Global Imperative: A Progressive Approach to U.S.-China Relations in the 21st Century (full report in PDF). What does it call for? How progressive is it?

I was told once when you point a finger, there are 3 pointing right back at you . The Olympics and the pseudo debate on CNN have proven this. China is oppressive ? Has anyone touting their human rights 'abuses' looked at the Dhali Lamma's policies on religion or workers rights? yes, I am not a fan.
But, as we point fingers at China, Russia or whatever dictator is falsifying elections those fingers are pointing right back. Anyone recall Jimmy Carter being labeled a traitor for wanting the UN to monitor elections in Florida in 2004? As China's security is being questioned I wonder if those same people have read the PATRIOT Act? China almost seems open. And forget that while the Olympics are covered the media is overlooking the Disney factories . Hey, they wouldn't let a 7 year old girl sing because she wasn't cute ! Forget she is going to be shipped back to a factory to make shirts for your favorite pro sports team or for your child's loved cartoon character.
There are plenty of fingers pointing at us every time we point one-and when I consider our national healthcare crisis, we better be careful pointing fingers, because chances are your not covered.

Remember the Cold War? First Tail-Gunner Joe ran all the dirty commies out of the United States, then Ronald Reagan built the Death Star and used it to blow up the Berlin Wall and we raised Old Glory above the Kremlin. And that's how America won the Cold War. I might have a few of the details wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's how it's being taught in all the schools these days.

The early decades of the Twentieth Century were to economic and political systems what the Burned-over District was for religion movements a century earlier -- an incredible period of fecundity and experimentation. The remaining decades of that century were spent in vigorous testing of these systems against each other. Which is a nice way of saying that millions upon millions of people died horribly.

In looking at the clash between states organized around communism and those based on capitalism the answer seems obvious. Capitalism won. Trounced them. Kicked their red asses, took their names, and sent them home with a hearty Nelsonian (Muntz, not Admiral) "Ha ha!"

It wasn't a sure thing. Capitalism is an ancient system, with roots that go back into deep prehistory and a reach that touches every pocket on the planet. But communism could also draw on all the varied places and times in which people had chosen to share their property in common. Their side of the struggle was definitely a minority position, but then it had only been a bit over a century since an upstart called Democracy made a comeback on the world stage, and that kid had done okay.

Communism was based around the idea of freedom. Shocking, I know, but then every form of government not centered on a genealogical chart puts freedom somewhere high on the menu. In the communist view, the biggest obstacle to freedom was the slavery imposed by economic and social inequality. Break that grip by giving everyone a fair share of the pie, and we'd all be free. Guys like Marx envisioned their system as clearing the deadwood of ineffective management from the pipeline, creating such abundance that workers would be able to chose how they wanted to contribute to the system. Spend the morning building cars, the afternoon writing novels, and take some law classes at night? Sure, comrade! And a different schedule tomorrow if you want.

Marx' position sounds Nice as that might sound on paper, it didn't work that way in the real world. Marx pictured his workers' paradise coming about in a series of stages, the first of which required a strong central state. What he never realized was that stage one would be, almost by definition, so royally screwed up and the people living under it so royally screwed over, that even Estragon and Vladimir would not have the patience to wait out the arrival of stage two.

With the hindsight of a century of authoritarian state excesses this looks obvious, but when Marx was writing the grinding, relentless capitalism that engulfed Europe and America was so ugly that anything seemed preferable. He was writing against a world that had not even a hint of a social safety net – quite the opposite. It was full of social razor blades, where one slip could cut to the bone. Child labor, employers who tricked their workers into accepted inflated company scrip, unregulated products filled with poison, and military force used to keep workers toiling in horrid conditions. In competition with communism, capitalism in Europe and America had to clean up its act. What we live with today in most of the western world is capitalism with many of its sharpest edges blunted. Thousands of workers died to wear down those edges.

People respond to incentives.  With the worst aspects of capitalism softened, the vague (and ever receding) promises of communism turned out to be a miserable way to organize and motivate people when compared to the personal, immediate gain possible in capitalism.

And so communism tumbled and capitalism soared.  The End.

Except... somewhere along the line, we had made a mental connection between capitalism and freedom. Anything good for one was seen as good for the other. We viewed liberty and greed as soul mates. Often enough, we couldn't tell one from the other, and in that confusion we ignored the other half of the struggle -- the one being waged by that still wet behind the ears idea, democracy. In short, we bought our own press.

There's absolutely no doubt that when it comes to economic systems, we signed on with the winner, and if you look at the sheer number of countries in the world that are at least nominally democracies, the victory of "one man one vote" also seems to be marching on. With communism licking it's wounds, democracies rushed in to fill the void. By 2005, 64% of all nations were democracies, up from 40% before Lech Walesa and the boys at Solidarity pointed out that the Soviet emperor's robes were looking awfully thin.  

That sounds impressive, but something else was going on behind those raw numbers. When the Economist took a more detailed look, they found that only about 28 of the 165 countries they surveyed were functional democracies. Most of the world's countries fell into intermediate categories (both Russia and Georgia are listed as "hybrid" regimes -- with Russia getting a slightly higher democracy score). At the far end of the scale, there were twice as many authoritarian regimes in the list as there were full democracies.  

If you looked at those authoritarian regimes and the other governments providing less than full democracy, all but a handful are capitalist. But they are authoritarian capitalist states. The "end of the Cold War" didn't represent a new birth of freedom, it represented the a new, more economically efficient form of dictatorship.

In some ways, we should be grateful that this combination didn't come along sooner. A Soviet empire fueled by a more competitive economy might well have had the resources to continue its invasion of Afghanistan and hold onto its fractious European territories. For the most part, the four decade standoff of enormous mechanized armies has vanished. What happened in Poland was real. What happened in Berlin was real. But we shouldn't pretend that we've seen anything resembling victory.

In 1984 the Doomsday Clock, a measure of the danger of catastrophic destruction maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, stood at only three minutes from midnight. By 1991, the clock had been rolled back to 17 minutes short of the witching hour, the largest margin since the symbolic clock was created. Unfortunately, the optimism of that moment didn't last. The clock is back to just five minutes shy of destruction, representing a danger greater than at any time in the 1970s or 1960s.

In 1984, East Germany controlled 30% of the territory that now makes up Germany. In the face of this occupation, Germany was a staunch opponent of Soviet policies. In 2008, Russia supplies 40% of the natural gas that powers German factories and homes. That's great, but as a result, Germany tends to keep its mouth shut on Russian activities.

Through the 1970s, soldiers from communist countries worked to overthrow democratic nations in Africa. In 2008, wealthy authoritarian capitalist states are purchasing resources, access, and control in Africa. The new arrangement between China and the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which the former is providing enormous sums of money for exclusive access to copper from the later, is only one of many such deals. States that a dozen years ago were America's closest allies now favor Chinese firms and agencies who offer ready cash without the strings of requiring any silly human rights or ecological concerns. Child workers still die in African mines, but now those mines have Chinese owners.

Capitalism has never been more comfortable in its perch as the way that human beings exchange goods. Freedom has rarely been more threatened. This is a war the United States is losing, mostly because we're not bothering to fight. We've become slaves to a pernicious ideology that pretends, in the face of all evidence, that trade inevitably leads to freedom. Buy what they're selling, and democracy will follow. Any day now. Just you wait.

Even that pretense is little more than a coat of thin paint. The truth is, we've taken the freedom part of the equation completely off the table.

John McCain has declared that the conflict is in Georgia is the first international conflict of the post-Cold War. It's a laughably ignorant statement, but even when listing all the international conflicts that have taken place since then, the most telling is universally left from the list. The most important international event of the last twenty years happened while the Soviet Union still existed -- in name, at least -- and Russian troops were still trailing home from the disaster in Afghanistan.  It happened right in the midst of where the Olympics are now being contested. It happened at Tiananmen Square.

The 1989 protests at Tianamen Square weren't an international incident in the sense of armies clashing on a field. It was much more important than that. In 1989, China was then still experimenting with how the "free market" and an authoritarian government could co-exist. They made their moves with one eye on the dancing students, and one eye on the western world. What they learned that spring was the truth about the west. They learned the capitalism has not just defeated communism, it had also defeated all the ideals of democracy. They learned that we would put up with anything, even the brutal killing of thousands of innocents, if it meant $50 VCRs and cheap socks at Walmart.

After World War II, American troops went to Japan to help put the wounded economy on its feet. The Japanese learned those lessons so well, that within two decades Americans were traveling to Japan to study their success.

After the Cold War, China, Russia, and other authoritarian states learned a different lesson. They learned that the west's vaunted concern for human rights would always play second fiddle to making a dollar. And within two decades, those nations were far more powerful than they had ever been during the days of green uniforms and shoes on the UN podium.

For the first eleven millennia of human civilization, capitalism and democracy were only rarely and loosely coupled. There's no reason it should be otherwise. In an unregulated market child labor, environmental destruction, government corruption, and ideological rigidity often provide an advantage. Capitalism can serve an authoritarian state as well as a democratic one -- perhaps better.

Capitalism is as indifferent to freedom as a whale is to the lives of plankton on which it feeds. If we continue in the pretense that the market in and of itself favors democracy, we'll be witness to the end of the experiment that began a bit over two centuries ago in Philadelphia. The market won't mind -- it's seen democracies rise before. If we don't unbuckle our concern for human rights from our concern from corporate profits, it will surely see this one fall.

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Table of Government Democracy Ratings

Economist article on the slowing spread of democracy

Chaotic capitalism in African Mines

From Democracy Now!

The equipment and integrated security systems used to detain Olympic protesters will remain long after the Olympics, to be used, many fear, on China’s own population. And some of the biggest beneficiaries of this surveillance boom are US hedge funds and corporations, including Cisco, General Electric and Google.

Now wonder GE has that huge ad campaign.

One thing I'm realizing that this Olympics is showing us is that, YES, it is possible for a government to effectively contain all resistance.  Thank God for Democracy.

For the video, click here.

I miss out on all the good jobs.

I apparently missed the ads looking for judges to determine which young women would be selected as hostesses to lead athletes to their events during the Olympic games in Beijing.

The U.S. response to Russia’s invasion of Georgia would be laughable if not so ominous for the future. I read statements of the President, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense. With the subsitution of a few nouns I saw how the past is coming back to bite. Indulge me:

"Russia {The U.S.} is putting its aspirations at risk by taking actions in Georgia {Iraq} that are inconsistent with the principles of those institutions," Bush said.

"Those institutions" refers to "international institutions" in which Russia desires to be a major player.

Today's Democracy Now featured Naomi Klein and Christian Parenti, two progressive journalists who have recently been following events in China.

But the relevance of their testimonies was neither in the Olympics, nor China's spectacular economic rise.  It was about surveillance and its growing universality.

In my blog of  July 31, entitled "Semantic Differences",   I stated that governments are in agreement among themselves on the need to keep their respective people's in order, whatever their differences vis a vis each other.

Well, have you had enough or are you looking for more? China is leading in the Gold Medal count while the US is leading in the overall. The swim judge who disqualified the Chinese swimmer hasn't been seen since. ;7) And that explains the strange scoring in Gymnastics.
 
And with the world distracted, Russia invades Georgia using the George W. Bush line of reasoning and "legal" arguments. And the GOPpers and their buddies at AEI (American Enterprise Institute)are all aghast at Russia's legal reasoning. What George, someone forgot to tell you about a thing called precedent setting? You know when you lay out a legal "justification" others may/can use it to justify their actions?

Russia May be about to try to clear the table, Georgia is the first pawn play is a larger game

http://groups.google.com/...

August 12, 2008
Sean Lewis

If anyone has been paying attention,

Russia has been getting Rich
China has been getting Rich

The US has been getting Poor.

The reasons?

Exporting technologies via Free Trade
agreements which allowed US companies
to set up state of the art Manufacturing facilities
in China, enriching their population while
trouble shooting and perfecting their industries.
In the process we have decimated our own middle class
and economy.

Exporting technology to Russia to show them how
to cost effectively and efficiently extract oil from the
frozen tundra.

Finally depleting our own wealth via two wars and
exhausting and over extending the military.

This has left the US vulnerable on numerous levels.

(this is my opinion, rough and not representative of any official position of any organization. Just a thought that came to mind that I felt should be voiced based on current events)

As you know, Charlie Brown just released his energy plan ---a pragmatic, "all of the above" strategy that calls for more domestic oil supply, a new energy economy that creates thousands of new jobs, and an end to the practice of spending taxpayer dollars on Middle-East oil.
 
Hundreds of people from across the political spectrum have signed our petition to put Charlie's plan into action.

A new study called "The Contribution of Chinese Exports to Climate Change" just published in the journal Energy Policy (firewalled) delivers some sobering news.
All that shopping at Wal Mart has more to do with China's soaring carbon footprint than the lifestyle of the average Chinese person.

If you are tempted to feel impressed by the Chinese successes in the Olympics, I've got some grub for thought for you.

I came across this article by Olivier Montalba in the French daily Le Monde.  The article is entitled "Ici se fabrique le champion "'made in China'", or "Here is produced the champion 'made in China'."  It describes a visit to a Chinese sports school, and the role of such schools in the Chinese sports machine.  The reality it describes is nothing short of tragic.  Join me on the flip for quotes.  All translations are mine.  Corrections are welcomed, though I know that I've got the gist right.

Pardon me but the only words I have upon seeing this are WTF?!?!

In today's Washington Post Harold Meyerson outdoes himself for insight into the week's news' meaning.  His article The Drums of Change is really full of good observations about the two events that have lasting consequences for all of us:

On or about last Friday, the world changed. With two very different coming-out parties -- the opening ceremonies of the Olympics and the invasion of Georgia -- China and Russia put everyone on notice that the power relationships of the past have been reshuffled and that formidable new powers are challenging the established order.

 Look below the break for more on this man's thoughts about the meaning of these events.