China, Inc.

With all the Google and India and Rio Tinto and such going on, I thought it opportune to ruminate on China, and where it is headed in respect to the USofA. I don't see a happy ending.

Some of the Right Wingnuts are now lambasting Google for standing up to China; they see this as $$$ lost. Right Wingnuts would, of course, take this point of view, as they are not really Patriots when there isn't a Gummint Contract to be had. Which brings us to the core issue: Right Wingnut Capitalists are so in love with China (and India to a lesser degree, only because India is just a tad less fascist) just because it is anti-democratic.

American Capitalists moved so much of their business to China just because it represses its citizens, thus making for cheap labor. The problem for both China and American Capitalists is that this industrial production has to be consumed here, since Chinese earn not enough to buy the things they make. One of the logic errors made by free trade apologists is to extrapolate from the British experience in the 19th century. The Brits were a small population, newly industrializing, and producing far more than their population could absorb, so they exported.

China (and the rest of BRIC) is assuredly not in that situation; China has more than enough population to be a self-sustaining domestic economy, if the Chinese overlords deemed it so. But they have no interest in the welfare of Chinese, only of the oligarches. The question: what does the future hold for the two countries?

First and foremost, China is a fascist country, the Communist moniker only a head fake. If one reads Marx, neither Russia nor China were countries he was writing about, either specifically or generally. He was writing about Britain, where he wrote the book. China, going forward, is intent on domination, both of its people and the planet. It is no accident that China is reaping commercial coups in Afghanistan while Americans (and a few Europeans) die for the "cause of Democracy", and such propaganda.

In the near term, the financial pas de deux must continue: China won't absorb its industrial output internally, so it has to export to middle class economies. The USofA has to figure out a way to re-distribute income such that we, on the whole, can continue to buy these imported goods. Without this arrangement, both countries suffer; China more so. In the long run, if China gets its way, the planet will die, but only from the point of view of humans. The planet will continue on for billions of years, just without humans in the billions. Here's some numbers. The USofA (about 5% of the planet's population) consumes about 25% of the planets raw materials. Of that 25%, 1% of the USofA's population consumes about 1/4. It is this 1% which is presented as "the American dream", oft times as just our Middle Class. The situation cannot be sustained. As I wrote in an earlier essay, what we need to do is nuke most of the developed world in order to get to a point where humans can be a sustaining species. That's not going to happen, of course (well unless Israel decides to).

Populations move in geometric and exponential ways, not linearly. In 1950, the USofA had about 150 million; today it's about 330 million. Yet, these 330 million expect to consume not just as much as their grandparents, but more. It's insane. It won't happen, and the degradation will be gradual for a few years, then will be terminal in less than a generation. Climate scientists worry that global warming will raise sea levels dramatically by 2100; as if there'll be any kind of structured society left by then. That's fantasy.