The real problem with China’s economy The country risks making some of the mistakes the Soviet Union did

The crash in China’s economy has been a long time coming. Shenzou points oput what western magazines have been saying about China since 1990:

1990. The Economist: China's economy has come to a halt.
1996. The Economist: China's economy will face a hard landing.
1998. The Economist: China's economy entering a dangerous period of sluggish growth.
1999. Bank of Canada: Likelihood of a hard landing for the Chinese economy.
2000. Chicago Tribune: China currency move nails hard landing risk coffin.
2001. Wilbanks, Smith & Thomas: A hard landing in China.
2002. Westchester University: China Anxiously Seeks a Soft Economic Landing.
2003. New York Times: Banking crisis imperils China.
2004. The Economist: The great fall of China?
2005. Nouriel Roubini: The Risk of a Hard Landing in China.
2006. International Economy: Can China Achieve a Soft Landing?
2007. TIME: Is China's Economy Overheating? Can China avoid a hard landing?
2008. Forbes: Hard Landing In China?
2009. Fortune: China's hard landing. China must find a way to recover.
2010: Nouriel Roubini: Hard landing coming in China.
2011: Business Insider: A Chinese Hard Landing May Be Closer Than You Think.
2012: American Interest: Dismal Economic News from China: A Hard Landing.
2013: Zero Hedge: A Hard Landing In China.
2014. CNBC: A hard landing in China.
2015. Forbes: Congratulations, You Got Yourself A Chinese Hard Landing.
2016. The Economist: Hard landing looms for China.
2017. National Interest: Is China's Economy Going To Crash.
2018. The Daily Reckoning: China's Coming Financial Meltdown.
2019. BBC: China's Economic Slowdown: How worried should we be?
2020. New York Times: Coronavirus Could End China's Decades-Long Economic Growth Streak.
2021. Bloomberg: Chinese economy risks deeper slowdown than markets realize.
2022. Bloomberg: China Surprise Data Could Spell RECESSION.
2023. Bloomberg: No word should be off-limits to describe China's faltering economy.

… Yet it’s already 2024 and China’s economy is still going strong.

The first couple of minutes of this video¹ features economist Dr. Keyu Jin, a professor at the London School of Economics, who makes the point China is a hero not a villain in most of the world:

Ninety percent of the people in today’s world still live in developing countries, and they have a very different view and perspective on China compared to the more hawkish military perspective that we often hear in the West. Chinese technologies are eminently practical, cheaper, and either of the same quality or higher quality. They are intended to address the issues faced by developing countries.

A commenter on the video from Sudan reinforces Jin’s point:

Ask me and every Sudanese citizen you can find and they will tell you the same thing. The US crippled us with economic sanctions to make us comply to thier whims, while China assisted us in every possible way and respected our right to govern ourselves the way we want.

It’s high time we in the West started to cooperate with lower income countries and stopped trying to rob them to support our extravagant, spoiled and unproductive lifestyle.²

“We should not count on friends or neutrals to save our civilization.” Hear that Taiwan, Japan and South Korea? You must build your own nuclear deterrent immediately.

USA must restart or civil defense program to teach the population how to survive nuclear attack. Many lives can be saved with some basic knowledge, reinforced in the schools, like we did in the 1950s. See: The Good News About Nuclear Destruction (goodnewsnuke.com)

This madman unmasks what is a diabolical gambit, the new US paradigm of war:

Arm all its satrapies around the world with nuclear weapons and encourage “local” nuclear wars.

Clean hands USA avoids the action. Its enemies and its competitors (even friendly) are eliminated. Last one left standing. We can see this strategy in action in the Ukraine where the United States created a crisis, before midwifing a violent coup in 2014. The US Front person was the repugnant Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland but ultimately even Nuland is just a face, if an ugly one, with her biolabs and hatred.

Ten years of state terrorism slowly built up the conditions for war. Now that war has started and the Ukraine has lots its doomed war, the United States pushes its European vassals forward, as the next man up in confrontation with Russia.

Fortunately, even Poland is not that foolish. The US has to rely on the mad or bought like Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, who puts a pretty face on hate and serves as the point woman for the Fourth Reich, much as Lina and Reinhard Heydrich did for the Third Reich.

Spreading nuclear weapons around the world will result in their use. Every significant regional power, including states like Poland, should dread nuclear proliferation. Those arms will be used in local conflicts which will result in their own elimination. Damage to their larger neighbours will be significant but it’s small nations which will disappear completely in such exchanges.

It’s no coincidence that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping announced at their joint public statement in May, “Everyone loses in a nuclear war.”

Simultaneously to spread nuclear weapons and fan regional conflicts, is the most cynical and diabolical strategy yet from US imperialism.

China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning called Mr Biden’s remarks “extremely absurd and irresponsible”. Speaking at a regularly scheduled press conference on Wednesday, she said that the comments were “an open political provocation” that violated diplomatic etiquette.

The poem is amusing and worth a read:

US 'etiquette'

Here is your new leader
we chose him just for you
the other guy is gonna die
and we've arranged a coup

our good and faithful minions
share all of our opinions
so if you want to live
here's what yer gonna do

Arrest our competition
and buy our submarines
and force your population
to submit to our vaccines

just do as you are told
don't make us use the stick
for we can be quite ruthless
when we want to be a prick.

While it’s doggerel, it’s both funny and on the money.

ld documents basically the story of Australia, who have lost several prime ministers when the US disapproves and are now stuck with boondoggle of a submarine deal, where Australia pays but the submarines and their weapons remain under the control of the USA. Canada is not much different but we don’t have to buy submarines. All the rest applies. It’s astonishing that the word democracy manages to come out of these puppets’ mouths. It’s been a long time in Canada or Australia or the US or the UK that there’s been a truly free election. It’s worst in the Homeland of course (US), where only made men and women are allowed anywhere near the starting line.

Illustration: created in MidJourney based on the poem above.

A good pal of mine created a Motorcycle Accessory. It all went FOUL when he sent one to China and within 6 months, the knock-offs came into his Motorcycle Dealerships all over the EU and finally the USA and his retail price was cut in HALF by Chinese crap that lost their stitching….this was a Bike Tie down system. He went bankrupt.

Thanks to the Chinese who said, “sue us if you want to enforce your patents.” THERE WE GO, theft.

I feel for this innovator. Seeing others profit, royalty-free, from one’s hard work would anger anyone. Others blame selfish Western consumers:

The consumers drive this. The only person loosing money was the inventor. Everyone else benefitted. If the argument is that the consumers didn’t, then one must convince them that the extra penny is worth it.

The problem is that the price difference is not a matter of pennies. The price difference is not 1/3 cheaper or even 1/2 cheaper. I’m not sure how well people remember the bad old days. In the 80’s and even 90’s,It used to be that every single cable, every single little adapter from Radio Shack was the equivalent of $30 to $50 in 2021 in the bad old days. Western businesses priced themselves out of the market, we were held hostage by the likes of Apple and Nokia and Sony.

Yes, the inventor should be paid, but I’m not sure the inventor was paid in the old days either. It was usually the multinational and duplicitous greedy MBA’s who worked for them and the Big Five consulting companies who were paid. Those same multinationals and MBA’s quickly decided to pay for Chinese quality but continue to charge German-built, Japanese-made and Made-in-America prices for second-rate gear.

There is enormous inefficiency in the Western system. We have almost no repair men (or people, if you like, albeit equipment repair is mostly a male thing) any more. There is no large class of people with good hands who like to make or build things. Those few that do exist cost north of $50/hour and are billed to us by the corporations at $150 or $200/hour, making it inefficient to repair anything.

Our IP system is predicated on patenting the obvious (RED has held up the entire camera industry for fifteen years now over a completely obvious repurposing of RAW compression to video: the reason it has not been done when Red patented it was the chips were not quite there; Apple’s design patents cover plain cardboard boxes at this point and buttons on the side of phones) and charging extortion fees. Slowly we are building a system for the rich and only the rich. Everything is available but one must belong to at least the 10 or 15% to be able to afford it.

China and Amazon are democratise the process of buying gadgets and repairing equipment. That said, very often Chinese-branded electric chargers are highly unsafe. The Chinese are learning the Japanese lesson and striving to build brands.

It used to be Western manufacturers offered better warranties and after-sales service than Chinese brands and were preferred. Anyone who has been through a recent SanDisk or Netgear or Linksys RMA process would quickly disabuse you of this notion. Canon still offers fantastic after sales service on their pro and semi-pro cameras. Both Nikon and Sony barely offer any after sales service at all, consolidating in a single repair center. Apple charges extortionary prices for spare parts or repair. Apple uses lawfare against us. Instead of simply replacing a keyboard now, the entire upper chassis must be replaced. Shimano does the same thing with crank sets. The entire crankset must be replaced, not the stripped gear. All the rest of that pricy and still almost new aluminum just goes straight into the trash, probably not even recycled.

Mercedes-Benz has gone from making extremely expensive but very high quality and very reliable automobiles which would run for decades, over 400K km, to building fragile cars which require the most service and which are the most expensive to service. Servicing the automobiles, the German Mercedes MBA’s have decided, should be a profit center, rather than an unfortunate necessity and a failure of engineering.

With this disposable and no repair is a good repair attitude, consumers are slowly losing their loyalty to Western brands. Chinese brands look attractive. Though the Chinese products also cannot be repaired, they last just as long and are priced to be replaced.

What is the solution for Western companies? Instead of predicating our industry on IP and access to markets, we should be building quality people will pay for. But no, the way to deal with the Chinese threat is apparently to block Western companies from doing business with them, to block Chinese access to Western markets through dubiously legal tariffs and via non-stop anti-China propaganda.

Does this help Western consumers? Definitely not. It will be back to the 80’s and 90’s and being held for ransom if you need a phone charger or an audio jack. Does this help Western inventors? Perhaps a little bit, as it’s somewhat easier to sue Western multinationals than small Chinese brands. The lawyers for the multinationals are better and much of the apparent winnings for inventors are siphoned out of the market by the patent lawyers and endless filings and repeated patent judgements.

Perhaps it would be better to set the stage to build higher quality gear at more reasonable prices? Gear that can be repaired and comes with a warranty and post-warranty service? No I don’t think the anti-Chinese rhetoric will extend to protect the environment and the consumer. Now that Western companies and Western multinationals have tasted cheap production and throw away items, it’s unlikely that the genie is going back in the bottle.

Manufactures like not having any expensive supply chains while they love the possibility for repeat sales when your item barely lasts the length of the guarantee. Detroit called it planned obsolescence³. It made US auto manufacturers billions until the consumer wised up and started to buy all imports and later all Japanese. Apple is executing the same plan now with non-repairable laptops.

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While the EU is aware of the problem and has taken steps to fight planned obsolescence, recent history has shown their regulations don’t hold up well in the long term against the multinationals. Cookie law anyone? As a stop-gap measure, individual consumers can fight back. My partner and I do, repairing many items ourselves. Here’s some tips. But this is a collective problem, not an individual one.

China is not the threat. We are to blame. It’s our fault that our governments are now toothless against the multinationals and that our legislators are all captured by high-powered lobbyists. Did China force the West to build a bureaucratic and corrupt plutocracy, every bit the corrupt rent-seeking equivalent of the Ottoman Empire? Like the late Ottoman Empire, hollowed out by lawyers, bankers and MIC stakeholders, the US Empire looks decrepit and moribund. It’s much easier to blame China.

“If a major incident happened [in Taiwan], it would not be strange at all if it touches on a situation threatening survival,” Aso said during a speech in Tokyo. “If that is the case, Japan and the U.S. must defend Taiwan together.”

This strange language stems from the prohibition against Japan taking up arms unless its national survival is at stake. Aso’s statements are a Sophistic attempt to get around Japan’s well-earned ban on Japanese extra-territorial military activity. No surprise, Rand corportation is coaching the Japanese through the intellectual cartwheels involved:

“For example, since the United States is responsible for defending Japan under Article 5 of the security treaty, if the United States is attacked, this could affect Japan’s survival and thus can be defined as such,” Hornung wrote. “In turn, this enables Japan to use force as the exercise of collective self-defense.”

Over at Zerohedge, the talk sounds pretty much like what one would hear in a Bavarian beer hall in 1932.

Declare open “hunting” season on all foreign chinese students who are children of CCP officials

Woodenman argues there will be severe consequences for the US economy:

A lot of foolish people here do not have a clue about what can happen. In three months the entire economy collapses when China stops shipping us 80 percent of the goods that are sold in the stores.

Every store and industry would shut down across America making the Great Depression look like a picnic.

Without China we are dead in the water and if we got into a war with them we would lose even if we killed all of them.

Frankly, I’m more concerned about all the lives lost first in conventional warfare (carrier groups sunk, Chinese cities carpet-bombed) and the massive exchange nuclear weapons certain to follow than empty stores.

Kayman talks tough:

Immediately institute the Marshall Plan for rebuilding American Industry. Biggest economic expansion ever.

Throat punch China.

It’s a bold suggestion, going cold turkey. AT counters:

Much easier said than done. That would require much more than rebuilding of factories, supply chains, etc. First think about the problems facing industry in the USA – rampant over-regulation by various government departments, massive taxation, labor laws with equity mandates, high costs for everything, various social groups pushing their agendas for preferences in the workplace, followed by the slavering law firms and endless lawsuits, then look at the corruption in those who are running the whole mess. Then start the usual 7-year process of getting a building permit.

Earlier today I was discussing China’s responsibility with a resident of North America who blamed China for Canada’s problems. It’s funny how middle class North Americans who are so keen to tell the poor to take responsibility for their own lives consider they have so little agency themselves. North Americans don’t want to build factories, work in factories or produce anything. Somehow the magic money printing tree in the US Treasury and some magic derivatives tricks sold to dim-witted European partners are supposed to make up for the almost total lack of real production of the North America.

Blame China, blame Russia, never a mirror in sight.

It’s astonishing the trouble the US is unleashing on Asia (and the whole world) by fuelling conflict between Taiwan and China and Japan and China. LetThemEatRand puts Taro Aso’s pronouncements in historical perspective:

The Japanese and the Chinese absolutely hate each other. You could even say they are racist against one another. This has been going on for a long, long time. It’s one of the many ridiculous things of our time that US children are being taught about racism of whites against everyone without the slightest mention of how virtually every ethnic group in the world has a history of racism against other groups.

It’s all about tribalism. The same reason people cheer for sports teams and political parties, and ethnic groups. Basic human psychology.

Upping the ante is rarely a good idea when war is on the cards. It’s been more than seventy-five years since the last global conflict. Peace rarely endures more than two generations, now it’s been four. How quickly we forget the horrors of war, how thin the veneer of civilisation.

One and Only asks a very good question:

Why do people want to work for the government so bad? I get it, job stability, decent paycheck, healthcare…

He gives a few examples:

• Nancy Pelosi 40 years.
• Barbara Boxer 38 years.
• Joe Biden 48 fuckin years.
• Donald Trump – 4 years but this weird. You’re old. You’re a billionaire. Hot wife. Family…what are you doing bro?

These people are old and rich. Everyone talks shit about you. Look at Rand Paul lost his lung. Scalise got shot. You’re getting spied on, if not by your enemies, by your friends who are trying to steal your spot. The longer you’re in the more culpable you are for screwing everything up.

What do people get out of it? How do people get intoxicated by this. It seems not that fun.

Truly it doesn’t seem like much fun, but One and Only is clearly not susceptible to the drug which is power. Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Nixon, Trudeau Sr., H.R. Clinton were all held in wholly in its thrall.

Nancy Pelosi was born rich, the daughter of a wealthy politician, closely associated with mobsters. Donald Trump also came to politics very wealthy. On the other hand, Barbara Boxer, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton all became rich because of politics. Nancy Pelosi’s husband has made a fortune on legal insider trading while she is in office.

State of the Nation: Achievements of US Politicians over the last forty years

Since he started with forty year career politicians, it makes sense to talk about what those lifer pols achieved. It’s not a pretty picture. Imagine if you will, the year 2000, the USA runs a $200 million surplus and the national debt is at $6 trillion and shrinking. The peace dividend from the end of the Cold War is finally paying off. In 2001, Dick Cheney and his dirty birds of war come into power, orchestrate 9/11 ("the new Pearl Harbour" described in Project for a New American Century) to the War on Terror which leaves the US trillions in debt.

Last year we had the War on Biological Warfare, which devastated the economy further and required enormous quantitive easing almost doubling the national debt or since the US runs a hundred odd illegal bio-weapons labs around the world, we could call it a spade a spade – the current war is a War on Chinese Technological Advancement. In the future, China has the right to own sweat shops but all the chip manufacturing will be in Japan, South Korea, Israel or in the worst case Taiwan. The only tool the Chinese will be given are smelters for toxic metals and screw drivers for electronics assembly. If the War on CTA follows the pattern of past US "Wars" – Cold, Vietnam, Drug, Terror – it means huge grants to the Military Industrial Complex at the expense of ordinary tax-payers. It’s an open question whether the US economy will survive this way. The current fifteen year old Sanctions War (primarily against Russia and Iran with a small cameo from North Korea) has already begun to blunt many of the US instruments of control.

The healthcare system is good enough but aside from advances in technology…the healthcare system is worse then 40 years ago. We don’t have borders anymore so people who haven’t lived here are getting to vote so what’s so special about American? Osama Bin Laden could walk over from the Mexican border and find a way to vote. My vote doesn’t feel that special anymore. Immigration is worse.

Security? We have mass shootings all the time and we get spied on so the spying isn’t even protecting us. Taxes? The rich pay nothing and the poor making less than $25,000 a year get audited 3 times more then the rich (because its cheaper). So the tax system is not even worth talking about. The economy? If you’re not pissing in a bottle in an amazon warehouse well most jobs have been outsourced or automated. Race relations? Well if you’re white you’re a Nazi and if you’re black you’re a holocaust survior or at least that’s how it gets portrayed. We have riots all the time. Race relations are non existant we can’t even talk about it.

Infrastructure? Well if you’re lucky enough to not be effected by it getting hacked maybe you get a rolling blackout if it gets hot in the desert while you’re taking off from a runway with holes in it. Science in America? The top scientist just got busted not only lying for over a year but come to find out…we funded the virus. Free Speech? Ok…bring up the lab leak theory? You’re cancelled. Our rights to speak freely? Not even a former president can speak freely without getting cancelled. No free speach anymore. I can’t even remember when the last comedy was released that I liked…in America comics get silenced for telling jokes.

I could go on and more in depth but it’s like…what do these people have to show? To brag about? Great democrats beat Trump and that’s all anyone cared about but the people who brought Trump down are all responsible for the above.

Now one and only takes us down nostalgia lane. It’s dangerous to flirt with memory. Men remember what was good and forget what was bad. Women’s memories seem to be much stickier for negative events. Still, I lived through these years too and they were pretty good in Canada too.

I remember being a kid and it was a lot better here in America. The thing that sucks if you were born like 20 years ago you’ll never know how better it was. Getting on a plane without taking your stuff off and getting groped. Telling jokes how you wanted without consequence. The dollar menu…can’t get anything for a dollar. Food in school was ok…for a kid. You could start lemonaide stand as a kid…and not get shutdown by the police for not having a permit. SCHOOL SHOOTINGS AND MASS SHOOTINGS WEREN’T EVEN A THING. Bombing weren’t a thing. You could smoke in restaurants (smoking section) and no one complained or cared. The music was pretty good (content was not Wet Ass Pussy).

You didn’t have to press 1 for English because that was our language it wasn’t an option. Even if you came illegally you learned it. Almost everyone used to be able to afford medical costs and education costs (if not there was a scholarship if you deserved it) you didn’t graduate with a mortgage. You used to be able to support a family with 1 job…and the jobs were pretty good people were shitting in bags in their delivery van like they do now with Amazon. People used to stand PROUDLY for the national anthem not kneel for it. People used to stay married, the divorce rate now is 55% and that’s not very romantic or confidence inspiring. There was a time where we were more influential than Russia…now it seems we can’t vote, we can’t protect our infrastructure or culture because Russia is omnipotent now. Anything goes its Russia.

If you’re a politician and you’ve been in the government for 40 years. What brings you back to the table with all these accomplishments? What makes it worth it? You’re rich. You’re old. None of you are in good health. You’ve really ruined our future at least our present.

Why do you want to be a politician?

While One and Only may be mostly right about the good old days – single income, two-parent families certainly lead to better childhoods – he’s mistaken about the motivation of politicians. It’s not about money or comfort. It’s about power. Some people are sociopathic and what they require from life is neither happiness or joy.

Not even debauchery and satiated hedonism are enough for them. It’s the power over others, even the power of life and death. What motivates many politicians in an unhealthy society can be seen in the serial killer confessions, whether real life or cinematic. The release, the joy is in the ability to end or destroy another human life. The crazy lady laugh of Hillary Clinton when talking about the destruction of Libya and death of Ghadaffi is a good real life example caught on film.

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The US system is thoroughly broken though. Barrack Obama’s Cairo Speech was fabulous, where a clear commitment was given to peace in the Middle East. Obama was not allowed to implement any of it. Donald Trump’s commitment to end the new Cold War and focus on building US infrastructure and creating new technology would have been a breath of fresh air for the world. Any politician with principles who is not under the control of the Permanent War cabal is run out of politics, a recent example being Tulsi Gabbard. So we live on as the chattel of crooked sociopaths, themselves doing the bidding of psychotic plutocrats.

What happened to government of the people, for the people, by the people?

In terms of the treatment of Uighurs in China, the only comment I would make is that violent revolutionaries and separatists in the West have been fairly harshly dealt with. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declared martial law in the face of the Quebec separatist movement. Currently Catalonian elected members of European Parliament have had their immunity lifted and are subject to extradition to Spain where draconian prison sentences await them. Sedition is usually the charge we bandy about.

To leave the Uigher question for another day and more generally address the slave labour issue, dustinthewind makes a very good argument against general slave labour in China. Call it the Henry Ford argument.

The slave labor nonsense is BS as is the torture and selling of organs of the Uighars which came from on paper written by someone in Germany and has been proved false. Those in the west are simply gullible and governments using the media know that if they repeat something enough learning from Goebbels the public will believe. Weapons of mass destruction, a guy in a cave planned and coordinated 9-11, Syria gassed its own people, Russia invaded and stole Crimea, Contra drugs for weapons in Nicaragua, Chinese suppressing religion and “western values” in Hong Kong, destroying Venezuela and its population to remove another elected leader as in Ukraine, removing Trump and of course no election fraud, and its goes on and on and on. China has been building the largest consumer economy on the planet and many international firms like Volkswagen sell more units there than anywhere. Obviously you do not create the largest consumer economy and have the population buy things from all over the world if you are paying slave labor. The west likes to compare wages using exchange rates which the dollar being stronger than most other currencies gives people a false sense of reality. A good example in reverse is Japan back over 2 decades ago and the Big Mac index. Back then a Mac would cost you over $10 US dollars using our currency but obviously Mcdonalds could never survive if the Japanese were actually paying that much in yen terms in purchasing power. Using PPP how much does $100 yuan in China buy you compared to $100 dollars in the US if you bought the same exact items. The yuan would buy you everything on the list and have money left over while in the US the $100 would not even buy the whole list. So the bottom line is not only in China but other countries how far does a currency go in that specific country compared to how far does a dollar go in the US. The yuan has more buying power so using exchange rates to compare wages is misleading. The wages seem lower using this example as the west is famous for but in reality the yuan buys much more. You need more dollars in income to survive in the US hence higher wages when compared to other countries. That does not mean others are receiving slave labor. Their paychecks although lower simply buy more and hence why China now has such a large consumer economy. Last months retail sales there were a disappointment and the Central Committee met and their goal at that meeting was “How do we increase disposable income” and increase living standards” while Biden and his other communist and socialist are going to reduce disposable income, lower living standards, lower GDP, create more wealth inequality in a period of the economy headed for a depression next year which these polices are the last thing any sane human would do. Add in the cost of illegal immigrants and the next massive $4 trillion debt plan, the US is in trouble, big trouble. As Dr Hunt has said the government has taken and taken a larger piece of the pie from the people to survive and now even before the new taxes the economy can no longer generate any significant growth or job creation. Mismanagement on an indescribable scale. As he also states GDP does not subtract from the massive capital and wealth destruction from the lockdowns and these jobs and businesses simply cannot be replaced in a few years. The economic stats are misleading. GDP falling 32% and then going back up doesn’t account for the massive hollowing out from the destruction that it caused. China has now the largest economy surpassing the US measuring GDP using PPP and soon it will pass the US using nominal GDP as the polices in the west of the Great Reset will destroy western society and its economies. Again the models at Armstrong Economics also forecast China becomes the world’s financial center as capital will accelerate from west to east as the massive tax increases start in the west. The models are already tracking capital fleeing Europe to China buying mostly 3% bonds which will accelerate as we move into the future. China also last year has passed the US in foreign direct investment. Capital knows no national boundaries or ideology and will always move to where it can get yield and it believes is safe. The US and the west are losing that belief in safety and return as the dems controlled by the World Economic Forum are implementing their destruction of economies, fossil fuels, businesses, pensions, owning small businesses, etc. as the coming tax increases will wipe out the remaining middle class and create massive wealth inequality and massive job losses as we enter 2022 and the Great Depression. The US along with the west are headed for a breakup which is post 2032 and economic hardships starting next year worse than now.

I call it the Henry Ford argument as Ford revolutionised the car industry and created the largest car manufacturer in the world in 1903. By 1910, Ford was selling more Model T cars than all the other car manufacturers in the world. He did not do so by employing slave labour but by paying a living wage, allowing his own employees to buy Model T’s. In his own words:

I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.

I’m not a huge fan of cars – cars have done and continue to do enormous damage to the natural world – more of a bicycle man myself. And I keep my bicycles for ten, fifteen, twenty years. Most of the bicycles I’ve retired were due to theft. But Ford is right here about living wages. One cannot sustain an economic boom by failing to pay workers enough to participate in general prosperity. If slave labour worked, the Pharaohs would still reign over the entire Middle East and would have taken over Europe too.

This charge of slave labour looks like another propaganda stick invented with which to beat China. It’s sad that our politicians and captains of industry only hope to win in business is by making up stories to exclude competition. Not a very free enterprise approach, I must say.

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The next day Biden doubled own on his anti-China position. Apparently, he and Boris Johnson are taking on China’s Belt and Road initiative together:

there was full agreement. One of the things I suggested to do is — we talked about China and the competition they’re engaging in in the Belt and Road Initiative. And I suggested we should have, essentially, a similar initiative coming from the democratic states, helping those communities around the world that, in fact, need help.

Here’s a map of what the $3.7 trillion Belt and Road initiative looks like. There’s not a lot of roads there through the UK or the US. Effectively the Chinese through activity and real on the ground investment and diplomacy have effectively rebuilt Marco Polo’s Silk roads Eurasian trade empire. Before he open his mouth again to make silly promises he can’t keep, Joe Biden might first want to take a quick look at the 90% cuts to foreign aid planned in 2020-21 by the UK government.

As the BRI is basically built, the only option left for the Anglo-Saxon raiders is to try to destroy links in the chain. Bribing certain governments to act hostile or inculcating civil unrest in others – highly productive, positive behaviour as we’ve all come to expect from Washington and London over the last twenty years.

From the most prosperous nation on earth, how did the USA descend into the humiliating and pathetic position of trying to spoil someone else’s party? Very simple, greed. Almost all actual productive activity was outsourced to China (electronics, pharmaceuticals), Russia (rockets) and Germany (cars, industrial machines). There’s almost nothing left in the USA apart from military production and even that is scattered willy-nilly across dozens of states in an extremely inefficient and difficult to manage network of factories, instead of centralised by industry.

Here’s what American CEOs have done over the last thirty years instead of build factories, pay and train their workers properly in the words of ZeroHedge commenter not dead yet

So your poor average CEO had a gun held to his head that forced him to outsource. That same gun forced him to spend huge sums naming stadiums and lining the pockets of ball players and race teams. Same gun forced them to buy catered skyboxes at the big venues and lots of executive jets to fly to them, go shopping, or just plain see the world on the company dime. That same gun forced them to give themselves huge raises, bonuses, and stock options for the hard work the management didn’t do as they outsourced the tough stuff along with the manufacturing. Just call up the Chinese and scream where’s my shit. The pols forced them to buy back their stock at inflated prices instead of investing the money into R&D and their workforce making the company and it’s stock more valuable. etc etc etc. I was reading about a company that went from dire financial straits to juicy profits in 6 months. They fired the old CEO and got rid of his 29 plane jet fleet, wife used the planes for shopping trips as I’m sure other execs did and one time his dog was the only passenger, and shi! canned the many booze parties for execs and customer CEO’s.

In fairness to Biden, he did mention that he plans to push US investment in research and development from its current 0.7% of GDP back up to the 2%, the US invested in the heyday of its prosperity during the fifties, sixties and seventies. Investing in research is a very good idea. Unfortunately more money is unlikely to succeed as long as admissions are now mostly on the basis of skin colour and/or ethnicity and not merit. As I mentioned yesterday, the focus in the US is so much on short-term gain and selfishness, their brightest minds are focused on fintech and other borderline scams, not expanding knowledge.

So now the “Free World” is counting on a Hail Mary pass to win the game (didn’t realise that economics was zero-sum competition, I thought it was rising tide floats all ships). That Hail Mary pass is subterfuge, sabotage, bribery and war. Thank you for your leadership, Joe Biden, thank you for you for the positive role model America. Here’s what the director of the CIA told West Point graduates what American power and ethics are really about:

[fvplayer id=”9″]

It’s no better in the UK. The House of Lords last August passed legislation to allow its agents to commit any crimes including murder in the pursuit of the objectives of state.

Personally, I look forward to more trade, more prosperity and positive economic growth in developing nations. Surely that was the point of globalism, non? Not forever wars, coup-d’états and massive economic migration into newly erected ghettos and slums in Europe.

And while the rest of the world was told the only initial Covid-19 cases in China had originated from a wet market in Wuhan, Redfield is confident the evidence suggests that was simply not the case. According to Redfield, even his counterpart at the China CDC, Dr. George Gao, was initially left in the dark about the magnitude of the problem until early January. He described a private phone call he had with Gao in early January 2020, when Gao became distraught and started crying after finding “a lot of cases” among individuals who had not been to the wet market. Gao, Redfield says, “came to the conclusion that the cat was out of the bag.”

Dangerous accusations and finger pointing at China have led to demands from people like End Times Prophecy for reparations from China:

Why hasn’t the United States sued China for all the losses/damages that occurred during the shutdown/false imprisonment? Where do U.S. Citizens go to sue the government for civil rights violations and breaches along the same lines (There are no courts)?

Strange. Since when is China accountable in US courts? The USA has been desperately trying to eliminate sovereign immunity for the last thirty years and had some success with Argentina, but their ham-fisted attempts at extortion don’t fly against peers (Russia, China).

More to the point, the US National Institute of Health was funding the Wuhan research. It was a contract assignment as A guy points out:

“Why hasn’t the United States sued China for all the losses/damages that occurred” Because the US was deeply involved in the Gain of Function work done at the Wuhan lab. including funding it. A CCP indictment would also be a US gov’t indictment.

As the world’s largest creator of biological weapons, the last legal change the United States would want would be for countries who allow for the escape of biological weapons to be held responsible for the damages. In this particular case though, is the US biological weapons program responsible for the Covid-19 in the wild?

It’s very strange though that the initial gain of function research had been done in the United States (Fort Derrick) and that the research in Wuhan was actually funded by Dr. Fauci via the NIAID (National Institutes of Health).

Ockhams Razor notes the connection even documented in research papers.

As a 30+ year physician with Masters in Human Molecular Genetics, and 30 years operational military medicine, this has all been known since Nov of 19. Any one can go to PUB MED and look up the NAIAD, Chapel Hill, Ft. Detrick, and labs research progress through 2004 to 2019. This bug is Dr Fauci’s.

vova 3.2018 notes these biological weapons programs have been going on for a long time and this is not the first accident.

The first casualty of war is always truth. да – Redfield, the same guy who caused Trumps downfall is now spinning it. Redfield knows that this is the Fort Detrick-19 leak he talking about and simply switched the lab to Wuhan. They actually reported the closing down of Fort Detrick in August 2019 them blamed subsequent deaths on Vaping and attempted to keep a lid on it till US military turned up at Wuhan October 2019 and thus spreading it to China so could conclude the cover up and get away with it scot free. It was documented by Fort Detrick in 2015 they working on this exact virus at this bio warfare lab. ​​​​​​Pentagon Biolaboratories – Investigative Documentary [fvplayer id=”6″] Research by the pentagon on virus, bacteria & tocsins is done in the US & overseas (25 countries). In the US the work is done under DTRA, DARPA & private contractors. Only scientists with top-secret clearances are allow inside these pentagon top-secret bio-labs AV9 – Pentagon Bio-weapons … EXPOSED! [fvplayer id=”7″] Case closed and no back tracking now. Clear evidence trail.

It’s not just the Russians who think this either. Buckaroo Banzai puts an American and very alarming spin on the vova’s comments:

lol, who believes the CDC anymore about anything? But the CDC does perform a useful service now. A good starting point for discerning the truth is to closely examine everything the CDC says, and then assume the opposite is actually true. Covid is one half of a binary bioweapon that was created at the Army/CIA bioweapons lab at Fort Detrick, MD during the summer of 2019. Once development of the weapon was complete, the Ft. Detrick lab was “shut down for safety reasons” so they could destroy all the evidence. Then the virus was released by the US Army at the Military World Games in Wuhan in October of 2019. End of story. PS–what’s the other half of the binary bioweapon? The mRNA/viral vector gene-altering shot masquerading as a “vaccine”. Act accordingly. PPS–who is this bioweapon targeted at? You. Because the people that rule over you, despise you.

How and why? For the moment, I think it’s an (inevitable) accident. Play with fire, get burnt. Some believe it’s deliberate. halleys5 swings for the fences:

It would have taken too long to transform society a la “Logan’s Run”(1976) where we all just accept that TPTB don’t want you around past the age of productivity, unless you are part of the ruling class. A virus and vaccine is much faster, plus someone might still remember the Logan’s Run movie and smell the rat. “It’s 2274, and on the surface, it all seems to be an idyllic society. Living in a city within an enclosed dome, there is little or no work for humans to perform, and inhabitants are free to pursue all of the pleasures of life. There is one catch however: your life is limited and when you reach thirty, it is terminated in a quasi-religious ceremony known as “carrousel”.” aka the vaccine ;)

I’m not ready to accept the Logan’s Run version of events but there are many, many inconsistencies in the official stories. The current vaccines are basically untested. We are in the middle of a global medical experiment, South Korean population as lab rats. For better or worse, most developing and undeveloped nations will neither be able to pay for or organise mass vaccinations on the scale of the West.

Overbet takes exception to the original author’s simplistic strategy for the USA to catch up to China economically: “The US will aim to counter China’s rise by increasing investment in science and research.”

If the competition promotes the less talented, Overbet argues, the US simply won’t be able to compete:

This is meaningless so long as the US continues to pass over their best and brightest so lower IQ people can get accepted and get hired. China does not believe math and science are racist.

Overbet has a point. By refusing to allow its most capable and brightest minds to fill the halls of science, the USA is doomed to produce second-rate ideas and science. But we are in the very early innings still of such a policy. Reverse discrimination cannot explain the current failures of American science. Ohm points out that even before the dumbing down started in earnest, the real reason US science has fallen down is structural failure in the economy.

The best and the brightest are going into Wall Street trying to figure out how to front run trades and create “innovations” like NFTs and Fintechs through math and AI. Climate Change so they can figure out how to make energy more expensive making poor people poorer. Social media sites so they can more effectively addict and propagandize the masses. In short, the best and the brightest are going where the money is and are busily working to destroy society. I can only hope that the best and brightest get passed over for these activities and are forced to work on things beneficial to society.

Having graduated just before the glory years of fintech and had the opportunity to meet with some of the very intelligent young engineers and scientists who chose that career path, his assessment seems right on the money. By incentivising its most intelligent young citizens to partake in purely parasitical and economically destructive acts (borderline crimes in some cases), the USA has doomed itself. The result is that what had been a land of plenty and innovation has become the land of the grifter and the rentier.

Most money in the USA is now earned on schemes and a glorified protection racket, with the US military shaking down any country who refuses to be pillaged and vassalised. Sadly, there’s no good exit from this strategy. The turning point was the election of Dick Cheney (nominally G.W. Bush, Dubya). Under the Clinton administration, the USA had focused on a cold war strategy of a rising tide floats all ships, with win-win deals for American industry and foreign partners as the primary strategy. Of course the secondary shakedown strategy was always there. Vietnamese, Chileans, Cubans, Nicaraguans can all attest to the darker side of US power through the sixties and seventies and eighties of the last century.

But with Cheney in office, there was no longer any pretence of balancing budgets or economically driven victories. The focus became to take whatever they want, whenever they want from whomever. A straight protection racket, no more sophisticated than the Italian mob had been running in the boroughs of New York City for decades. This strategy has produced an incredible cycle of failure, with literally trillions of dollars of wealth which could have gone into education, medicine and infrastructure wasted on laying waste other people’s countries (principally Afghanistan and Iraq, not to forget Libya, Syria, Yemen). This losing strategy has started to fall apart at the seams now though.

The USA is like a poker player who is playing on borrowed chips and credit trying to recoup past losses. At some point, the losing gambler is denied further credit and crumbles completely. Geopolitical observers have been noting the signs of US decline and pointing out the financial incongruities for fifteen years. Yet the USA continues to trundle along, failing to improve its infrastructure, fracking its water supply (long term death of agriculture, one of the mainstays of American independence) and laying waste to other countries. The failure of a leaking dam to crumble on initial observation does not make its eventual collapse and the following flood any less sudden, imminent and terrifying.

Photo: US National Archives, Teton Dam Rupture.