In God We Trust

12 April 2008

Britain’s Dire Warning

Posted by Joy Bischoff under: Constitution in Peril; Emergency Preparation; World Affairs; World Economy .

This article out of the UK was on the Drudge Report. I hope politicians read the article and begin to see what they have created by pandering to China. The situation is dire and needs immediate correction to minimize the consequences.

I am sharing only about half the article but even at that it is long, but it is very important and helps us to understand the bigger picture politically. The great master plan was to create global interdependence to ensure peace and prosperity for everyone and to put power into the hands of the few who felt mankind was no longer able to govern themselves. Free Trade and Global Warming were two of the tools used to leverage countries into globalism. Now we are beginning to learn that while countries like China had one hand out to receive their incentives to join the global market, their other hand was behind their back with fingers crossed. They no more intended to keep their promises of national disinterest for the sake of world unity than they meant to keep their promises of human rights improvements to the Olympic Committee.

Why China is the REAL master of the universe

by ANTHONY BROWNE

The global power shift from the West to the East is no longer just a matter of debate confined to learned journals and newspaper columns - it is a reality that is beginning to have a huge impact on our daily lives.

What would those Victorian masters of old have made of the fact that Chinese security men were on the streets of London this week, ordering our own police about and fighting running battles with British protesters while bewildered athletes carried the Olympic torch on its relay through the capital?

It was a brazen display of how confident China has become of its new place in the world, just as the British Government’s failure to take a firm stand on Chinese abuses of human rights shows how craven we have become.

The dire warnings from the International Monetary Fund this week that the West now faces the largest financial shock since the Great Depression, while the Asian economies are still powering ahead, simply underlines our vulnerability in this new world order.

The desperately weakened American dollar appears to be on the verge of losing its global dominance, in the same way as sterling lost it a lifetime ago.

The credit crunch has brought home to all of us in Britain how over-reliant our country has become on financial services. Meanwhile, the loss of our manufacturing industries to Asia continues unabated…

Just as the 19th century was the British century, and the 20th century was the American century, the 21st century is the Asian century.But the handover of global power from the UK to the U.S. was trivial compared to what is happening now…

But the world order we have grown used to - and comfortable with - over the last century is coming to an end... And not just China. The world’s second most populous country, India, is industrialising at a historically unprecedented pace.Their economies are growing on a long-term basis about four times the speed of the UK’s and that of the United States. Goldman Sachs, the bank, recently predicted that by 2050, China and India would have overtaken the U.S. to be the world’s first and second biggest economies.

We have long heard about the benefits this brings, in terms of plentiful cheap goods from toys to TVs, and huge opportunities for Western companies to sell their wares in these booming markets. But there are also downsides, which are becoming more apparent. Unskilled workers in the West have become unsettled by the threat to their jobs as production moves East.

The most vulnerable Western workers have found their wages stagnate as they struggle to compete in an increasingly global market place…

China is spending 35 times as much on crude oil as it did eight years ago, and 23 times as much on copper.As it builds gleaming skyscrapers on its fields, China alone consumes half the world’s cement and a third of its steel.

What is happening is so extraordinary that economists have had to invent a new word for it - this is not an economic cycle, but a supercycle, a shift in the world economy of historic proportions.

When demand increases and supply stands still, prices shoot up. Iron, wheat and oil are all at record prices, despite slackening demand in the faltering Western economies. The cost of living in Britain is now rising faster than wages, making the British on average poorer year on year…

…Western governments are concerned that the rules of the game are changing. Most worryingly, as China’s brutal suppression of the once independent Tibet shows, this is not a superpower that respects Western standards on human rights.

From Darfur to Myanmar, China is cuddling up to murderous dictators. At home, it holds mass executions of criminals with bullets in the back of the head while transplant surgeons stand by to harvest their still pulsating organs. Yet Western governments have been in such awe of China’s looming power that their response has not been to challenge its abuses, but to try to silence their own protesters at home.

From the UN to the IMF to the World Bank, the international institutions that attempt to govern the planet were made in the image of the victors of World War II. Now power is shifting from West to East, the whole liberal democratic world order will face its first serious challenge in decades. Many fear that things could get ugly.

There is only one thing worse than an unchallenged superpower - it is a superpower with a victim mentality, which feels the world owes it a favour. And the bitter truth is that, after centuries of humiliation in foreign affairs, there is a nationalist mood in China that the country’s time has come again, that it can again claim its rightful place as the world’s most powerful country…

As their economic confidence grows, Asians are discovering pride in their own cultures and are less inclined to mimic Western ones.

There is an infectious confidence in Bollywood, and the price of Chinese antiques is rocketing as the newly rich Chinese decide they want a slice of their history. Western culture, like the dollar, will soon find its heyday behind it.

But Western attitudes will change as well, with a likely shift to the political Right. White liberal guilt, the driving force behind political correctness, will subside as Westerners feel threatened by the global order changing, and their supremacy slipping away.

Anti-Americanism will disappear as Europeans realise how much better it was to have a world super power that was a democracy (however flawed) not a dictatorship.

There is even speculation that the intense economic pressure on countries such as Britain will cause them to trim down their bloated welfare state, simply because it will no longer be affordable at present levels…

“Enterprises and individuals must recognise and adapt to these fundamental economic changes. We believe that those with a fossilized frame of mind risk being marginalised.” In a world in which we are no longer masters, it is a warning that we ignore at our peril.

Full Article

9 Comments so far...

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.