[Пятхъдесят Шест]

Originally Posted by hat and beard

that charming british wit (with which a good number of our english boardies seem to be blessed) is what keeps me coming back to this board. they're ok in my book.

Yes, this was the point I was trying to make.

[_slavo_]

Originally Posted by hat and beard

that charming british wit (with which a good number of our english boardies seem to be blessed) is what keeps me coming back to this board. they're ok in my book.

agreed.

[PAULYBEE2656]

just watch yr aim, dont wanna hit little ireland by mistake!

[Toilet & Bowels]

Originally Posted by PAULYBEE2656

just watch yr aim, dont wanna hit little ireland by mistake!

yes, we wouldn't want the irish to get a taste of their own medicine

[fishmonkey]

England is a lovely place, nothing like to roar of the crowd in Old Trafford Manchester when the reds go marchin in and London, London has suck fuckin character, i love London, london Nitelife is so alive an vibrant..

Hip Priest is from the UK, fuckin hell this is a mad statement Hayden.

[_slavo_]

Liverpool is OK too and Wirral peninsula in general.
The Scouses rule!

[HaydenAsche]

Originally Posted by Toilet & Bowels

yes, we wouldn't want the irish to get a taste of their own medicine

You're okay.

We're bombing France now, anyways.

[fishmonkey]

Originally Posted by Toilet & Bowels

yes, we wouldn't want the irish to get a taste of their own medicine

cant help but think there was venom in that statement right there,

but then again i did watch "the wind that shakes the barley" today

[Toilet & Bowels]

there was no venom, only jest.

and this is despite having being subject to many occaisions of listening to every single irish person i've ever met singing anti-english songs when drunk.

[HaydenAsche]

I watched a fat irish man with terrible teeth sing Dashboard Confessional covers the other night. That alone is enough to make me want to bomb Ireland.

[o o o]

Originally Posted by Glice

 

This is what we all really want.

so Corsica will become independent? or should they go too?

[porkmarras]

The Chinese economy is at a point where it also can defy the Mundell-Fleming thesis and free itself from dollar hegemony.

China has the power to make the yuan an alternative reserve currency in world trade by simply denominating all Chinese export in yuan. This sovereign action can be taken unilaterally at any time of China's choosing. All the State Council (the Chinese government's cabinet) has to do is to announce that as of, say, October 1, 2002, all Chinese exports must be paid for in yuan, making it illegal for Chinese exporters to accept payment in any other currencies. This will set off a frantic scramble by importers of Chinese goods around the world to buy yuan at the State Administration for Foreign Exchange (SAFE), making the yuan a preferred currency with ready market demand. Companies with yuan revenue no longer need to exchange yuan into dollars, as the yuan, backed by the value of Chinese exports, becomes universally accepted in trade. Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which import sizable amount of Chinese goods, would accept yuan for payment for their oil.

In 2000, the United States exported US$781.1 billion (12.3 percent of world exports - 11 percent year-to-year growth) and imported $1.2576 trillion (18.9 percent of world imports - 19 percent year-to-year growth). Germany exported $551.5 billion (8.7 percent of world exports - 1 percent year-to-year growth) and imported $502.8 billion (7.5 percent of world imports - 6 percent year-to-year growth). Japan exported $479.2 billion (7.5 percent of world exports - 14 percent year-to-year growth) and imported $379.5 billion (5.7 percent of world imports - 22 percent year-to-year growth). France exported $298.1 billion (4.7 percent of world exports - 1 percent year-to-year decline) and imported $305.4 billion (4.6 percent of world imports - 4 percent year-to-year growth). The United Kingdom exported $337 billion (5.1 percent of world export - 5 percent year-to-year growth) and imported $284.1 billion (4.5 percent of world imports - 6 percent year-to-year growth).

China exported $249.3 (3.9 percent of world exports - 28 percent year-to-year growth) and imported $225.1 billion (3.4 percent of world imports - 36 percent year-to-year growth). Hong Kong exported $214.2 billion (3.2 percent of world exports- 19 percent year-to-year growth) and imported $202.4 billion (3.2 percent of world imports - 16 percent year-to-year growth).

China (including Hong Kong) exported more than $463 billion (7.3 percent of world exports) in 2000 and imported about $428 billion, yielding a trade surplus of around $35 billion. If all Chinese exports are paid in yuan, China will have no need to hold foreign reserves, which currently stand at more than $200 billion. And if the Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the yuan instead of the dollar, Hong Kong's $100 billion foreign-exchange reserves can also be freed for domestic restructuring and development.

China's spectacular export growth has not reversed the shrinking of world trade volume since 1997. Its growth has come at the expense of the now wounded "tigers" of Southeast Asia. China is on the way to becoming a world economic giant but it has yet to assert its rightful financial power.

There is no stopping China from being a powerhouse in manufacturing. With the Asian economies trapped in protracted financial crisis from excessive foreign-currency debts and falling export revenue resulting from predatory currency devaluation, the International Monetary Fund, orchestrated by the US, has come to their "rescue" with a new agenda beyond the usual IMF austerity conditionalities to protect Group of Seven (G7) creditors. This new agenda aims to open Asian markets for US transnational corporations to acquire distressed Asian companies so that their newly acquired Asian subsidiaries can produce inside Asian national borders. The United States, through the IMF, aims to break down the traditionally closed financial systems all over Asia that mobilize high national savings to serve giant national industrial conglomerates, for massive investment in targeted export sectors. The IMF, controlled by the US, aims at dismantling traditional Asian financial systems and forcing Asians to replace them with a structurally alien global system, characterized by open markets in products and, crucially, in finance and financial services. The real target is of course China. For the US knows: as China goes, so goes the rest of Asia.

Trade flows under neoliberal globalization have put Asian countries in a position of unsustainable dependency on foreign loans and capital to finance export sectors that are at the mercy of saturated foreign markets while neglecting domestic development to foster productive forces and to support budding domestic consumer markets. In Asia, outside the small circled of well-heeled compradores, most people cannot afford the products that they produce in abundance for export or the high-cost imports. An average worker in Asia would have to work days making hundreds of pairs of shoes to earn enough to buy one McDonald's hamburger meal for his family while Asian compradores entertain their Western backers in luxurious five-star hotels with prime steaks imported from Omaha. Markets outside of Asia cannot grow quickly enough to satisfy the developmental needs of the populous Asian economies. Thus intra-region trade to promote domestic development within Asia needs to be the main focus of growth if Asia is ever to rise above the level of semi-colonial subsistence.

The Chinese economy will move quickly up the trade-value chain, in advanced electronics, telecommunications, and aerospace, which are inherently "dual use" technologies with military implications. Strategic phobia will push the United States to exert all its influence to keep the global market for "dual use" technologies closed to China. Thus "free trade" for the US is not the same as freedom to trade. Still, China will inevitably be a major global player in the knowledge industries because of its abundant supply of raw human potential. Even in the US, a high percentage of its scientists are of Chinese ethnicity. With an updated educational system, China will be the top producer of brain power within another decade. As China moves up the technology ladder, coupled with rising consumer demand in tandem with a growth economy, global trade flow will be affected, modifying the "race to the bottom" predatory competitive game of a decade of globalization among Asian exporters.

[porkmarras]

Asian economies will find in China an alternative trading partner to the United States, and possibly with more symbiotic trading terms, providing more room to structure trade to enhance domestic development along the path of converging regional interest and solidarity. The rise in living standards in all of Asia will change the path of history, restoring Asia as a center of advanced civilization, putting an end to two centuries of Western economic and cultural imperialism.

The foreign-trade strategies of all trading nations in the decade of neoliberal globalization have contributed to the destabilizing of the global trading system. It is not possible or rational for all countries to export themselves out of domestic recessions or poverty. The contradictions between national strategic industrial policies and neoliberal open-market systems will generate friction between the United States and all its trading partners, as well as among regional trade blocs and inter-region competitors. The US engages in global trade to enhance its superpower status, not to undermine it. Thus the US does not seek equal partners. With economic sanctions as a tool of foreign policy, the US government is preventing, or trying to prevent, an increasing number of US companies, and foreign companies trading with the US, from doing business in an increasing number of countries. Trade flows not where it is needed most, but to where it best serves the US national interest.

Neoliberal globalization has promoted the illusion that trade is a win-win transaction for all, based on the Ricardian model of comparative advantage. Yet economists recognize that without global full employment, comparative advantage is merely Say's Law internationalized (Say's Law states that supply creates its own demand, but only under full employment, a condition supply-siders conveniently ignore). After a decade, this illusion has been shattered by concrete data: 30 percent of the world's population live on less than $1 a day, and global wages, already low to begin with, have declined since the Asian financial crisis of 1997, and by 45 percent in Indonesia.

Yet export to the United States under dollar hegemony is merely an arrangement in which the exporting nations, in order to earn dollars to buy needed commodities denominated in dollars and to service dollar loans, are forced to finance the consumption of US consumers by the need to invest their trade surpluses in US assets (as foreign-exchange reserves), giving the US a capital account surplus to finance its current account deficit.

Furthermore, the trade surpluses are achieved not by an advantage in the terms of trade, but by sheer self-denial of basic domestic needs and critical imports. Not only are the exporting nations debasing the value of their labor, degrading their environment and depleting their natural resources for the privilege of running on the poverty treadmill, they are enriching the US economy and strengthening dollar hegemony in the process. Thus the exporting nations allow themselves to be robbed of needed capital for critical domestic development in such vital areas as education, health and other social infrastructure, by assuming heavy foreign debt to finance export, while they beg for even more foreign investment in the export sector by offering still more exorbitant returns and tax exemptions. Yet many small economies around the world have no option but to continue to serve dollar hegemony like a drug addiction.

Japan provides the perfect proof that even a dynamic, successful export machine does not by itself produce a healthy economy. Japan is aware that it needs to restructure its domestic economy, away from its export fixation and upgrade the living standard of its overworked population and to reorder its domestic consumption patterns. But Japan is trapped into helplessness by dollar hegemony.

[porkmarras]

Japan sees its sovereign credit rating lowered by international rating agencies while it remains the world's biggest creditor nation. Moody's Investor Service downgraded Japanese government bonds by two notches recently to A2, or one grade below Botswana's, not to mention Chile and Hungary. Japan has the world's largest foreign-exchange reserves: $446 billion; the world's biggest domestic savings: $11.4 trillion (US gross domestic product was $10 trillion in 2001); and $1 trillion in overseas investment. And 95 percent of the sovereign debt is held by Japanese nationals, which rules out risk of default similar to Argentina. Japan has given Botswana, where half of the population is infected with the AIDS virus, $12 million in grants and $102 million in loans.

Why does the New York-based rating agency prefer Botswana to Japan? The Botswanan government budget is controlled by the foreign diamond-mining interests to protect their investment in the mines. Botswana does not run a budget deficit to develop its domestic economy or help its poverty-stricken people. Thus Botswana is considered a good credit risk for foreign loans and investment. Japan, on the other hand, is forced to suffer the high interest cost of a low credit rating because its government attempts to solve, through deficit financing, the nation's economic woes that have resulted from excessive focus on export. Dollar hegemony denies a good credit rating even to the world's largest holder of dollar reserves.

The Asia-Pacific trade system has been structured to serve markets outside of Asia by providing low manufacturing production cost through the use of cheap Asian labor. This enables the United States to consume more without inflation and without raising domestic wages. Yet all the trade surpluses accumulated by the Asian economies have ended up financing the US debt bubble, which is not even good for the US economy in the long run. Cheap imports allow the US to keep domestic wages low and contribute to a rising disparity of both income and wealth within the US where consumer purchasing power comes increasingly from capital gain rather than rising wages. The result is that when the equity bubble of inflated price-earning ratio finally bursts, wages are too low to keep the economy from crashing from a collapse of the wealth effect.

After thoroughly impoverishing the Asian economies with financial manipulation of crisis proportions, the US now works to penetrate the remaining Asian markets that have stayed relatively closed: notably Japan, China and South Korea. Control of access to its markets has been Asia's principal instrument for its sub-optimized trade advantage and distorted industrial development. This strategy had been practiced successfully first by Japan and copied with various degree of success by the Asian tigers. Protectionism will survive in Asian economies long after formal accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO).

China, with a giant integrated market composed of a fifth of the world population, can swap market access for technology transfer from the world's transnational technology corporations. Once free from dollar hegemony, China can finance its domestic development without foreign loans and capital. The Chinese economy then will no longer be distorted by excessive reliance on export merely to earn dollars that by definition must be invested in dollar assets, not yuan assets. The aim of development is to raise wage levels, not to push wages down to achieve predatory competitiveness. Yet export under dollar hegemony requires keeping wages low, a prerequisite that condemns an economy to perpetual underdevelopment.

[porkmarras]

Terms such as "openness" need to be reconsidered away from the distorted meanings assigned to them by neoliberal cultural hegemony. The contradiction between globalizing and territorially based national social and political forces is framed in the context of past, present and future world orders.

The emerging world order has always been, and will again be, the result of a struggle for the direction of structural transformation of the current order, involving economic, political and sociocultural changes. The prevailing trend of the past two decades toward the marketization and commodification of social relations has led to the argument that socialism needs to be redefined away from the total visions associated with Marxism-Leninism, and toward the idea of the self-defense of society and social choice to counter the disintegrating and atomizing effects of globalizing and unregulated market forces. But this is precisely a Marxist-Leninist vision: that under globalization, national sovereignty in the form of nation-states and governments will give way to a pervasive socioeconomic order. In other words - the withering away of the state.

The sole function of government is to protect the weak, because the strong is itself government and needs no other. This truth gave birth to monarchism: the king's function was to protect the peasants from aristocratic abuse. So in modern terms, the government's function is to maintain socialist/populists values in the context of capitalist market fundamentalism. So the withering away of the state prior to the end of economic exploitation is putting the cart before the horse.

The unwitting by-product of the rightist quest to get government off the back of the people is a Marxist dialectic. The only flaw is the economic structure. The right wants the withering away of the state prior to the progressive transformation of capitalism into socialism.

The perpetual boom has not replaced the business cycle, new economy or not. In the age of information and communication, the majority interest will prevail - with luck, without violence. Despite US fixations, majority interest does not necessarily spell capitalism, corporatism or representative democracy. Socialism collapsed in the 1980s not because its economic theories were inoperative, but because in defending the authority to make socialist principles work, socialist governments had to adopt a garrison-state mentality that overshadowed all other potential benefits. On the other hand, capitalist market fundamentalism appeared more desirable as long as this mutation of socialism was posed as a false alternative. Now, as the sole surviving operative system, capitalist market fundamentalism is faced squarely with its own internal contradictions. Unregulated markets have produced the debt bubble and financial manipulation and corporate fraud that impoverish unsuspecting investors and workers who placed their pensions in the shares of the companies that employed them. And the war on terrorism runs the risk of instilling in the United States the same garrison-state mentality that brought about the demise of the Soviet bloc.

Finance capitalism may turn out to be the deadliest enemy of industrial capitalism, and it may well be the last transformation of capitalism. There are clear indications that insufficient demand is caused by the abandonment of the labor theory of value and the wholesale acceptance by neoliberalism of the theory of marginal utility. Lack of demand caused by insufficient wages is more deadly to finance capitalism than the fear of socialism. Technology has finally turned Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times into reality. The rhetoric of the current political debate in the United States on corporate fraud is more populist than those of the New Deal, and the recession has yet to begin in earnest. Socialism, by other names (the Wall Street Journal calls it mass capitalism), is now about to be viewed as the vaccine against a catastrophic implosion of the capitalist system in its home garden.

Globalization is not a new trend. It is the natural policy for all empire building. Globalization under modern capitalism began with the British Empire, marked by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, five years after the Opium War with China (I have written on the historical parallel between the Corn Laws and WTO), and two years before the Revolutions of 1848. Great Britain embarked on a systemic promotion of free trade and chose to depend on imported food, which gave a survivalist justification to empire. France adopted free trade in 1860 and within 10 years was faced with the Paris Commune, which was suppressed ruthlessly by the French bourgeoisie, who put to death 20,000 workers and peasants, including children. Despite a backlash movement toward protective tariffs in Britain, Holland and Belgium, the global economy of the 19th century was characterized by high mobility of goods across political borders. As Europe adopted political nationalism, international economic liberalism developed in parallel, until 1914. Only World War I, the 1929 Depression and World War II caused a temporary halt of free trade.

Like the United States now, Britain was a predominantly importing economy by the close of the 18th century. Despite the Industrial Revolution's expanded export of manufacturing goods, import of raw material, food and consumer amenities grew faster than export of manufacturing goods and coal. The key factor that sustained this imbalance was the predominance of the British pound, as it is today with the US dollar and its impact of the trade deficit. British hegemony of marine transportation and financial services (cross-currency trade finance and insurance) earned Britain vast amounts of foreign currencies that could be sold in the London money markets to importers of Argentine meat and Canadian bacon. International credit and capital markets were centered in London. The export of financial services and capital produced the the returns which serves as hidden surplus to cushioned the trade deficit. To enhance financial hegemony, the British maintain separate dependent currencies in all parts of the empire under pound-sterling hegemony. This financial hegemony is now centered on New York with the dollar as the base currency. When the Asian tigers export to the United States, all they get in return are US Treasury bills, not direct investment in Asia. Asian labor in fact is working at low wages mainly to finance the expansion of the US economy.

Market fundamentalism, a modern euphemism of capitalism, is thus made necessary by the finance architecture imposed on the world by the hegemonic finance power, first 19th-century Great Britain, now the United States. When the developing economies call for a new international finance architecture, this is what they are really driving at. Foreign-exchange markets ensure the endless demand for dollar capital import by the poor exporting nations. John A Hobson and Lenin identified the surplus of capital in the core economies and the need for its export to the impoverished parts of the world as the material basis of imperialism. For neo-imperialism of the 21st century, this remains fundamentally true.

Then and now, the international economy rests on an international money system. Britain adopted the gold standard in 1816, with Western Europe and the US following in the 1870s. Until 1914, the exchange rates of most currencies were highly stable, except in victimized, semi-colonial economies such as Turkey and China. The gold standard, while greatly facilitating free trade, was hard on economies that produced no gold, and the gold-based monetary regime was generally deflationary (until the discovery of new gold deposits in South Africa, California and Alaska), which favored capital. William Jenning Bryan spoke for the world in 1896 when he declared that mankind should not be "crucified upon this cross of gold". But the 50-year lead time of the British gold standard firmly established London as the world's financial center. The world's capital was drawn to London to be redistributed to investment of the highest return around the world. Borrowers around the world were reduced to playing a game of "race to the bottom".

The bulk of economic theories within the context of capitalism were invented to rationalize this global system as natural truth. The fundamental shift from the labor value theory to the marginal utility theory was a circular self-validation of the artificial characteristics of an artificial construct based on the sanctity of capital, despite Karl Marx's dissection that capital cannot exit without labor - until assets are put to use to increase labor productivity, it remains idle assets.

Mergers and acquisitions became rampant. Small business capitalism disappeared between 1880 and 1890. Workers and small businesses found that they were not competing against their neighbors, but those on other sides of the world, operating from structurally different socioeconomic systems. The corporation, first used to facilitate the private ownership of railroads, became the organization of choice for large industries and commerce, issuing stocks and bonds to finance its undertakings that fell beyond the normal financial resources of individual entrepreneurs.

[porkmarras]

This process increased the power of banks and financial institutions and brought forth finance capitalism. Cartels and trusts emerged, using vertical and horizontal integration to eliminate competition and manipulate markets and prices for entire sectors of the economy. Middle-class membership was mainly concentrated in salaried workers of corporations, while the working class were hourly wage earners in factories. The 1848 Revolutions were the the first proletariat revolutions in modern time. The creation of an integrated world market, the financing and development of economies outside of Europe and the consequence of rising standards of living for Europeans were the triumphs of the 19th-century system of unregulated capitalism. In the 20th century, the process continued, with the center shifting to the United States.

Friedrich List, in his National System of Political Economy (1841), asserted that political economy as espoused in England at that time, far from being a valid science universally, was merely British national opinion, suited only to English historical conditions. List's institutional school of economics asserted that the doctrine of free trade was devised to keep England rich and powerful at the expense of its trading partners and that it had to be fought with protective tariffs and other protective devices of economic nationalism by the weaker countries. List influenced revolutionaries in Asia, including Sun Yatsen, who until coming under the influence of Marx and Lenin after the October Revolution was primarily relying on List in formulating his policy of economic nationalism for China. List was also the influence behind the Meiji Reform Movement in Japan.

The current impending collapse of neoliberal globalized market fundamentalism offers Asia a timely opportunity to forge a fairer deal in its economic relation with the West. The United States, as a bicoastal nation, must begin to treat Asian-Pacific nations as equal members of an Asian-Pacific commonwealth in a new world economic order that makes economic nationalism unnecessary.

China, as the largest economy in the Asia-Pacific region, has a key role to play in shaping this new world order. To do that, China must look beyond its current myopic effort to join a collapsing global market economy and provide a model of national domestic development in which foreign trade is reassigned to its proper place in the economy from its current all-consuming priority. The first step in that direction is for China to free itself from dollar hegemony.

Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group.

(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by HaydenAsche

English board FRIENDS?

The only bastards from England worth saving are Toilette and Porky(if he's from England. I fucking forget.)

Fuck all the others.

too angry to be funny... please don't tell me you finally joined the rest of your town and acquired a meth habit?

[PAULYBEE2656]

Originally Posted by Toilet & Bowels

yes, we wouldn't want the irish to get a taste of their own medicine

ha ha, i know. ive just taken my balaclava off, the smell of semtex in my jacks is awfil. off to the shops now to buy some more bottles of milk for my multidenominational petrol bomb.......

christ man, dont you know belfast is in the U.K. or is this an alan pertridgeism.... "were from ireland.... yeah, but thats where u make them"

dont you have a football riot to go to????? ;-) (joking!!!)

[PAULYBEE2656]

Originally Posted by Toilet & Bowels

there was no venom, only jest.

and this is despite having being subject to many occaisions of listening to every single irish person i've ever met singing anti-english songs when drunk.

actually yeah, that is a horrible experience especialy when you are irish and sitting in an english pub when it happens.

1916 the struggle continues!!!!- anal bullplop at this stage!

[HaydenAsche]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

too angry to be funny... please don't tell me you finally joined the rest of your town and acquired a meth habit?

Meth is for school children. I seek harder drugs.