Các Chuyên Gia Phương Tây và một Giả Định Sai Lầm

Một trong những bẫy sập của lý luận là sự giả định sai lầm về đối thể thế chấp (false alternative). Chẳng hạn như khi giả thiết rằng vũ trụ chỉ có hai con đường nếu không "thuận", tất nhiên đối thể phải là "nghịch"; không "trắng" tất phải "đen"; không "nhỏ" ắt phải "to"; không dài tất phải "ngắn"... Nhưng sự thật thực tế, ngay trong khoa học vật lý giờ đây, người ta không chỉ chứng minh Albert Eisteine đã từng sai mà còn vượt qua cả những giả định do ông đã đặt ra như thuyết không gian bốn chiều và tốc độ ánh sáng.

Với khoa học vật lý vô lượng (quantum physics, mechanics), tất cả sự biến chuyển đều không giới hạn mà là vô cùng vô tận. Không gian, thậm chí ngay cả “hình tướng” của vật chất (string theory) đều không chỉ giới hạn ở 4 chiều nữa, tốc độ ánh sáng không còn là nhanh nhất nữa, nguyên tử âm điện tử và ngay cả trung điện tử (neutrino) cũng không còn là nhỏ nhất nữa; chỉ tạm chấp nhận "điểm tử" (quarks) là nhỏ nhất của vật chất theo cách nhìn giới hạn của khoa học lý thuyết thực nghiệm. Tất cả gần như đã đồng thuận với “Phật thuyết” sau nhiều thể nghiệm của Vật Lý Vô Lượng đã có thể kết luận: Cái nhỏ nhất và lớn nhất của vũ trụ là CÁI KHÔNG hay TÍNH KHÔNG của VẠN VẬT hữu hình và vô hình.

Trong lãnh vực xã hội nhân văn, chủ nghĩa Cộng Sản băng hoại, sụp đổ sau khi gây ra biết bao tan hoang, đau khổ cho hàng trăm triệu con người và nhiều quốc gia, “người ta” cũng nhảy  lên, vội vã tuyên bố cái “đối thể thế chấp” (false altermative) của nó phải là chủ nghĩa tư bản và cho rằng chủ nghĩa này đã thắng cuộc... Để rồi chỉ cần chưa đầy 10 năm sau, nhân loại bắt đầu nhìn thấy sự băng hoại, phá sản và hiện trạng “dãy chết” của chủ nghĩa tư bản. Khi nhân loại bước vào thế kỷ thứ XXI, với hàng loạt khủng hoảng nội tại (về cấu trúc sản xuất, tiền tệ, xã hội) và chiến tranh, ngay cả nền dân chủ gián tiếp (representative democracy) cũng bị chính chủ nghĩa tư bản phá hoại. Nó không chỉ giúp chúng ta khẳng định tính bất lực nội tại của nền dân chủ gián tiếp với cứu cánh là bảo vệ và xiển dương quyền và hạnh phúc con người trong vị trí chủ thể mà nó còn minh chứng cho chúng ta một kinh nghiệm hi hữu mà chính Karl Marx không có cơ hội nghĩ đến, đó là nó đã tạo ra một thể chế quái thai “chủ nghĩa cộng sản thị trường” cưu mang đầy đủ tính phong kiến trong chủ nghĩa quốc gia nhà nước (statism), nghĩa là Nhà nước liên kết chặt chẽ với tập đoàn đại bản khống trị xã hội và thị trường.

Vừa qua, nhà nghiên cứu kinh tế nổi tiếng Richard Duncan đã đưa ra lời cảnh cáo về sự chủ quan của các nhà “tư bản trọng thương”. Họ cứ sai lầm cho rằng “tư bản hóa và toàn cầu hóa” sẽ giải quyết bài toán của nền kinh tế nhân loại.

Thật ra, cái gọi là “chủ nghĩa tư bản” coi như đã chết từ hơn nửa thế kỷ qua, nó chỉ sống với cái tên “tư bản truyền thống” hình thức còn “ruột” của nó lại là những chính sách xã hội tiến bộ cộng hưởng, tương tác và san sẻ cho nhu cầu của từng cá nhân để điều hòa xã hội hơn là “bàn tay vô hình” của lợi nhuận. Những chính sách này cứu sống những định chế nhà nước và tư bản cho đến nay. Hệ thống tiền giấy phi giá trị với nền tảng tín dụng cũng đang băng hoại khi HAI  điều kiện khách quan đối nghịch nhau đang tăng nhanh dần. Đó là sự suy giảm năng lượng và tài nguyên thiên nhiên đối trọng với sự gia tăng dân số (* chỉ số dân số gia tăng đang ở mức giảm dần-  vì lối sống, quan điểm sống, quan điểm gia đình, quan điểm tình dục hôn nhân đã đổi thay, nhất là kỹ thuật khoa học y tế tiến bộ v.v tất cả đã khiến người ta sống lâu hơn, lập gia đình trễ , và tự hạn chế sinh sản, sinh suất càng ngày càng giảm . Vấn đề này sẽ là vấn nạn của những thập niên đang đến) mà trong đó, những đột phá của khoa học công nghệ sản xuất và thông tin đã làm đảo lộn thị trường nhân dụng và phá vỡ sự quân bình của hệ thống phân chia lợi tức (công ăn việc làm).

Richard Duncan tuyên bố một điều mà rất nhiều người có tầm nhìn xa đã cảnh báo nhân loại như nhà kinh tế E.F. Schumacher với luận thuyết “Small is Beautiful”: Chủ nghĩa Tư Bản không thể kéo dài. Nó đang chết. Hay nói cách khác, những kẻ đang níu kéo chủ nghĩa này ĐANG GIẾT CHẾT CON NGƯỜI và  XÃ HỘI vì chủ trương LỢI NHUẬN TUYỆT ĐỐI.

Trên thế giới hiện nay, chúng ta thấy cả nhân loại đang khốn đốn vì những nỗ lực NÍU KÉO những chủ thuyết đã chết. Đó là chủ nghĩa Cộng Sản, Chủ nghĩa tư bản phong kiến. Và trong tiến trình tương tranh, nó đẻ ra chủ nghĩa thần quyền, tức là tôn giáo, và chủ nghĩa quốc gia dân tộc thánh hóa nhà nước (nationalism & statism). Những chủ nghĩa này tự nó không đứng vững nếu để cho con người tự do tư tưởng và tự do thông tin chọn lựa. Tất cả các loại chủ nghĩa nhìn như  là đối nghịch nhau này, nhưng thật ra đều nương nhau tồn tại sống còn, gián tiếp hay trực tiếp, bằng phương thức CƯỠNG CHẾ, bằng BẠO LỰC và LỪA BỊP với những mưu mô, thủ đoạn tinh vi, điều mà Duncan không đụng đến, (có thể vì không hiểu hoặc không muốn?)

Duncan cũng không vạch thẳng ra mấu chốt của tất cả khủng hoảng nhân loại đều nằm nơi sự tập trung quyền lực, dù bất cứ là quyền lực gì... Và hiện nay:
1. Quyền chính trị thì tập trung trong tay nhà nước chính trị.
2. Quyền kinh tế thì tập trung trong tay 1% đại bản với sự cấu kết, dung túng của quyền lực chính trị.
3. Quyền diễn giải “chân lý tâm linh sự sống” thì tập trung tay các giáo hội và 1% giới tăng lữ.

Những vị trí “lãnh đạo nắm quyền lực” trong 3 hệ thống này đều được xây dựng bằng thủ đoạn khủng bố tàn bạo hoặc sự gian manh và dối trá. Nghĩa là đều mang “tính chính trị”, tranh dành bằng thủ đoạn dưới mọi hình thức.

- Hệ thống xã hội đặt nền tảng vào sự chủ đạo quyền lực chính trị tập trung đã khuyến khích và khiến các “lãnh đạo chính trị” phải tận dụng thủ đoạn tàn bạo hoặc dối trá để nắm quyền lực thay vì bằng sự chọn lựa nhận thức của quần chúng.

- Hệ thống kinh tế đặt nền tảng trên quyển lực và tối đa lợi nhuận đã khiến các tập đoàn tư bản và tải phiệt phải tận dụng thủ đoạn lừa đảo, gian manh cấu kết phi pháp với quyền lực chính trị để đạt mục tiêu thay vì bằng sự cạnh tranh công bằng với khả năng và tính hũu hiệu tiện ích.

- Hệ thống tôn giáo với sự tập trung quyền lực chỉ đạo tư duy và chân lý tâm linh cũng buộc các giáo chủ đều phải nuôi dưỡng sự thuần phục đa số bằng biện pháp “ngu dân” với những thủ đoạn tuyên truyền khủng bố tinh thần gian dối thay vì qua sự ủy quyền bằng xác tín thể hiện sự xiển dương đạo đức tín ngưỡng nhân ái bao dung và cộng hưởng.

Cả ba hệ thống cấu kết với nhau một cách đồng bộ, nhịp nhàng để khống trị xã hội, đã và đang tạo ra bao nhiêu mâu thuẫn, xung khắc, chiến tranh mang đến đau khổ cho con người.

Đi từ những khiếm khuyết này trong phương pháp nhận định,  Duncan đưa ra giải pháp từ định chế nhà nước với những "công trình chính phủ" để kích thích sản xuất và tiêu thụ. Nói cách khác, chính Duncan đang gián tiếp tái xiển dương chủ nghĩa Nhà Nước (Statism) như là một giải pháp cho vấn nạn hiện tại.

Cùng với lập luận này, những người “tự do” như Paul Craig Roberts đã dùng hình ảnh kinh tế chính trị của Trung Quốc như một đối thể đang lên để phê phán sự suy thoái phương Tây, đặc biệt là Mỹ, mà không nhìn tận gốc rễ của vấn đề.

Lập luận chủ quan hiện nay của giới chuyên gia phương Tây chỉ dựa thuần vào những con số thống kê kinh tế chứ không thể nghiệm những vấn đề nền tảng của xã hội. Và rồi từ đó, họ đi đến một dự đoán rằng Trung Quốc sẽ thay thế Mỹ và trở thành mẫu mực hay ít ra là trọng tâm vận hành của nền chính trị, kinh tế thế giới.

Khi Nhật Bản vừa vươn lên bằng chính nội lực tự thân của nó, người ta đã vội vã tiên đoán sai lầm rằng Nhật Bản sẽ vượt đế quốc Mỹ và thay thế đế quốc Mỹ. Tiên đoán sai lầm này phần lớn là do chỉ nhìn vào khoa học kỹ thuật và con số tăng trưởng kinh tế, trong khi người ta quên đi một lãnh vực mà những xã hội như Mỹ, Anh, Úc, Canada, Tây Âu đã và đang nỗ lực vượt qua hơn nửa thế kỷ nay mà Nhật chưa có và có lẽ không có. Đó chính là khả năng “dung chứa” các “nền văn hóa” và  hòa nhập các “bản sắc”.  Hay nói một cách khác, hệ thống xã hội của một nền dân trí đã vượt khỏi tính câu thúc  bầy đàn của “văn hóa”, của ý niệm “bản sắc” lỗi thời (archaic concept) để trở thành phi văn hóa và phi bản sắc. Nơi mà chủ quyền cá nhân, tức là nhân quyền và dân quyền, được đặt làm nền tảng để cố kết nên xã hội con người. Xã Hội Âu Mỹ vận hành không dựa vào tính câu thúc của một chủ thuyết mà của tất cả các chủ thuyết được sàng lọc qua lý lẽ thông thường (common sense) và sự đồng thuận chung (consensus). Cho nên, hệ quả là Nhật Bản đã bị đứng khựng lại và có cơ suy thoái trẩm trọng với những vấn nạn không giải pháp đang lộ ra càng ngày càng rõ rệt.  Đặc biệt, Nhật cũng chưa bao giờ đạt đến vị trí mà các “chuyên gia” dự đoán, đó là chi phối, vận hành chính trị, kinh tế, văn hóa toàn cầu như Anh, Mỹ.

Nước Mỹ nói riêng và Tây phương nói chung, đã đạt đến vị trí chi phối, vận hành toàn cầu vì nó đã từ bỏ được sự câu thúc hủy hoại của “bản sắc văn hóa dân tộc” để khai triển khả năng “văn hóa” đúng nghĩa (biến đổi cho tốt đẹp, có ý nghĩa và hũu ích hơn) mà các xã hội Á châu hiện tại chưa có, chưa đạt đến. Và dĩ nhiên, Trung Quốc hiện nay chưa có khả năng này và với chiều hướng “độc quyền chính trị” ký sinh vào “chủ nghĩa quốc gia bản sắc dân tộc” lại càng xác minh Trung Quốc không thể có tiềm lực để hình thành khả năng “toàn cầu hóa” phi bản sắc.


Rõ ràng, chẳng có mấy ai trên thế giới, nhất là giới thanh niên đua nhau “sống theo lối sống Nhật hay Trung Quốc”; đua nhau nghe nhạc, sáng tác nhạc theo “lối Nhật, lối Tàu”; v.v... Và đặc biệt quan trọng, chẳng mấy ai rủ nhau ồ ạt chen chân đem gia đình vào Trung Quốc hay Nhât Bản để được “tự do theo đuổi hạnh phúc riêng tư” mà chúng ta chỉ thấy chiều hướng ngược lại, di dân Á châu chuyển “tổ quốc” sang phương Tây hoặc thay “bản sắc” tại chỗ bằng những sinh hoạt, lối sống bắt chước theo phương Tây càng ngày càng tăng.

Khi chúng ta nhìn sức tiến liên lập và những vấn nạn nội tại của các quốc gia chủ đạo, chúng ta cũng thấy rõ sức khai triển tiềm lực CÁ NHÂN của các thành viên xã hội mới là chủ thể của mọi thay đổi tích cực chứ không phải do chủ lực từ định chế Nhà Nước Chính Phủ. Và các vấn nạn đang xảy ra, dù là nội tại trong một xã hội hay trong bang giao quốc tế, đang khiến thế giới xáo trộn, căng thẳng, suy thoái với thảm họa chiến tranh v.v...  lại khởi đi chính từ sự băng hoại của các định chế Nhà Nước Chính Trị và các tập đoàn đại bản duy lợi nhuận dựa trên đặc quyền chính trị chứ không phải là sự mâu thuẫn giữa các nhóm người. Bằng chứng rõ ràng với sự kiện là từ xưa đến nay, khi người ta tự nguyện di dân hàng loạt khỏi “đất tổ”, tách khỏi “dân tộc truyền thống” để đến một xứ sở khác sinh sống thành công và hài hòa đã chứng minh bản chất hay khuynh hướng của con người xã hội là yêu chuộng hòa bình và hợp tác chứ không phải tự nó có sự xung khắc hay hiếu chiến. Sự xung khắc xảy ra là do chính thiểu số đặc quyền trong hệ thống quyền lực chính trị, trong tôn giáo và kinh tế tạo ra, áp đặt lên quần chúng mà thôi.

Như vậy, chúng ta đang thấy một số các nhóm trong Nhân Loại đã và đang nỗ lực vượt qua được những bức tường câu thúc hạn hẹp của ý niệm lỗi thời “văn hóa quốc gia, bản sắc dân tộc” để giải quyết những vấn nạn của xã hội loài người từng bế tắc hàng ngàn năm qua.

Trong cùng một nguyên nhân, những vấn nạn đang xảy ra, thực chất cũng đi từ tính băng hoại và xung khắc của giới đặc quyền thiểu số quyền lực hiện tại. Để giải quyết nó, Chúng Ta đã có kinh nghiệm vượt qua những bức tường “khác biệt” giả định của quá khứ về văn hóa, chủng tộc, tôn giáo như chúng ta đang chứng kiến sự thành công của di dân, các cuộc hôn nhân dị chủng, sự đa dạng chung sống khác tín ngưỡng nơi các xã hội tiến bộ.

Bức tường ngăn cách còn lại mà chúng ta, con người xã hội hôm nay, phải đối diện như một vấn nạn chính và chung, đó là hệ thống quyền lực chính trị của chủ nghĩa quốc gia nhà nước (The State, statism) mà hiện nay, các thế lực quyền bính phản tiến bộ đang nổ lực tái thiết lập để kéo nhân loại trở về với thời phong kiến bóc lột và tương tranh phi nhân bản.

Loài người, với vị thế là sinh vật xã hội, đã bị chính trị hóa trong hệ thống “quốc gia” như một tôn giáo chung với nền tảng bạo lực tập trung cả hàng chục ngàn năm. Từ khi chui ra khỏi hang động, loài người chúng ta chưa có nhiều kinh nghiệm và thành quả trong tiến trình vượt qua được chủ nghĩa quốc gia nhà nước, trừ trường hợp đơn lẻ của những cá nhân, nhóm nhỏ và một xã hội hiếm hoi là Thụy Sĩ, nơi công dân đã đạt khả năng và trình đội tự tin, tự điều hành chính trị của mình trực tiếp. Nơi định chế chính trị gần như bị biến thành phi chính trị để hành xử gần hơn với chức năng điều phối kinh tế xã hội. Nói ngắn gọn lại, đó chính là Nhà Nước Kinh Tế (economic government) mặc dù chưa trọn vẹn như lý thuyết mong ước. Đại đa số còn lại vẫn chưa thoát ra được cơn khủng hoảng tinh thần, mất tự tin vào khả năng tự điều hành chính trị của mình, vẫn còn bị nô lệ vào hy vọng mù quáng sẽ có một nhà nước chính trị toàn thiện (benevolent political government), một niềm tin mà xuyên suốt hàng chục ngàn năm từ khi có xã hội chưa bao giờ hiện hữu. Ngược lại, lịch sử đã minh chứng Nhà Nước Chính Trị chính là tên sát nhân hàng loạt ghê sợ nhất. Vì nó không chỉ giết hại và gây đau khổ cho hàng trăm triệu, hàng tỉ con người trải qua bao thế hệ mà nhà nước chính trị còn tàn bạo hơn cả thiên tai, ở chỗ nó còn nô lệ hóa con người để phục vụ tự nguyện cho nó như là một chủ thể thay vì nó phải phục vụ cho chính con người. Nhà Nước Chính Trị không bao giờ buông tha con người để con người có được tự do đích thật.

Chỉ khi nào Nhân Trí được khai triển và Dân Trí được phổ quát thì khả năng tháo gỡ Thần Quyền Tôn Giáo Mù Quáng và  Quyền Lực Chính Trị  đã được huân tập, nuôi dưỡng trong ba hệ thống xã hội của loài người mới đủ lực hình thành. Hay nói rõ hơn, rằng chỉ khi nào QUYỀN LỰC CHÍNH TRỊ trong định chế xã hội (nhà nước), trong định chế kinh tế, trong định chế tôn giáo được tháo gỡ thì lúc đó Nhân Loại mói không còn ngăn cách và có đủ năng lực lẫn chân tâm thiện chí để cùng bắt tay nhau san sẻ và giải quyết vấn đề SINH TỒN và HẠNH PHÚC của mình trên quả dịa cầu này, một tài sản chung duy nhất đang suy hoại, một cách hữu hiệu
 
Nguyên Khả Phạm Thanh Chuơng
22-04-2012

 * Tài Liệu Tham Khảo Đọc Thêm

   

       

April 18, 2012, 10:50 p.m. EDT

       

Capitalism is dead, credit new king, says Duncan

   

   

       

By Chris Oliver, MarketWatch

       

HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — The world needs to clue in to changes to its economic system, including the death of capitalism, according to noted financial author Richard Duncan, who warns that attempts to turn back the clock on our credit-driven economies could be cataclysmic

       

What’s evolved is a new global economic paradigm that no longer follows the old script and won’t respond favorably to fiscal austerity, says Duncan, who believes the global economy has remained on the brink since the global crisis.

       

“I think this represents a new economic system,” Duncan told Marketwatch in a telephone interview from his office in Bangkok. “The biggest impediment the world faces in overcoming this crisis is the broadly held misconception that we are operating in a capitalist system.”

       

           

            Economist and author Richard Duncan

       

Recognizing that the world operates on a different set of rules from the laissez-faire capitalism of the 19th century is among the key arguments in Duncan’s 2012 book, “The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy.”

       

While it might seem like an arcane economic question, Duncan said that, in fact, the stakes are huge.

       

Global policy makers are running out of time to take advantage of opportunities offered up by the new system to help resolve the crisis, or otherwise face sliding into a corrosive period of economic contraction and rising geopolitical tensions, he said.

       

“The danger is that this new economic paradigm will collapse through debt deflation,” Duncan said.

       

Stuck with ‘creditism’

       

Duncan sees the global economy as having undergone a fundamental transformation during the past 43 years. Since changes in 1968 that freed the Federal Reserve from holding physical gold in reserve against dollars in circulation, total global credit has expanded 50 times, or from about $1 trillion to $50 trillion in 2007.

       

Over that period, credit creation and consumption, or what Duncan calls “creditism,” took hold as the growth dynamic behind the global economy, displacing capitalism, which he says relied upon sound money, hard work and capital accumulation.

       

Attempts to break the global economy’s reliance on credit creation as a driver and reboot back to earlier ways won’t work, said Duncan, who sees “sound money” policy recommendations as a recipe for disaster.

       

Underscoring the system’s dependence upon credit is the fact that there were only nine occasions in the past five decades when total system credit in the U.S. grew less than 2% annually.

       

However, each one of the slower credit-growth years was accompanied by a recession that ultimately was brought to an end by another round of massive credit creation, Duncan said.

       

Duncan believes that true capitalism died in 1914, when nations across Europe abandoned gold-backed currencies, running up huge deficits in preparation for what would come to be known as the Great War.

       

More recently, changes wrought by the global credit explosion can be seen in the behavior of U.S. Treasury debt, where rates at which the Federal government borrows have remained low, even as the national debt has doubled in just a few years.

       

Duncan said that governments can now prop up their economies through government spending longer than would have been thought possible a few years ago, owing to the new dynamic.

       

           

Click to Play

           

Predicting when the Fed will hike

           
Will the euro still exist in five years? And when will the Federal Reserve change course on interest rates? At a recent MarketWatch Investing Insights event in New York, bond-market experts made their predictions. (Photo: Getty Images)
       

       

“I’m recommending making use of this new economic system. Borrow money at the government level at very low interest rates and then invest that money and change our world for the better.” Duncan said.

       

Duncan said some of his ideas were inspired by the U.S. economist Irving Fisher, whose 1912 writings helped identify the role of money supply in determining prices and economic activity.

       

It’s important to realize that “money essentially became credit” when the dollar lost its gold backing, heralding a new era where increased government spending doesn’t necessarily push up interest rates, Duncan said, adding that he reworked Fisher’s theories in a chapter entitled, “Quantity Theory of Credit”.

       

Globalization getting tired

       

What lies ahead is a much more difficult period for the global economy, Duncan believe, in which coming changes will debunk commonly held notions about growth in emerging markets.

       

In particular, the view that China will soon become the world’s biggest economy is likely to fade away, just as optimistic attitudes towards Japan did after its asset bubbled popped in the late 1980s, ending a long period of rapid growth that had lifted the Japanese economy into the global No. 2 spot.

       

“When I moved to Hong Kong in 1986, it seemed almost everyone believed that Japan’s rapidly growing economy would soon become the largest in the world,” Duncan said.

       

“That didn’t happen. Japan’s economy was a bubble, and today it’s no bigger than it was in 1993 if you don’t adjust for deflation,” he said.

       

Now it’s China that’s at risk as its trade surpluses with the U.S. “flatten out,” heralding the end of its rapid credit growth, Duncan said.

       

Glutted with excess industrial capacity and a banking system laden with massive loans that will never be paid back, China faces difficult decisions much as Japan did, according to Duncan.

       

China’s federal debt, believed to be around 70% of gross domestic product, will be ramped up to 100%-200% of GDP in the next five to seven years in order to achieve annual 3% growth, he said.

       

The forecast represents the “best-case scenario” in Duncan’s view, and a more dire outcome is possible, since China — unlike Japan — won’t have support in the form of a booming global economy to absorb its exports.

       

As it enters the twilight of its boom, China has reached the limits of its consuming.

       

“This is the peak,” Duncan said in reference to China’s appetite for everything from iron ore to luxury consumer goods.

       

Duncan believes that South Korea’s shrinking exports in March were an early warning sign of the end of export-driven growth in the Asian region. ( Read report on South Korean economic and market outlook. )

       

No libertarian is he

       

While Duncan’s talk of sound gold-backed money and overreliance on credit sounds close to standard libertarian and Austrian school arguments, his policy recommendations are downright Keynesian.

       

In suggestion a future course for the U.S., Duncan warns against repeating Japan’s mistake of squandering stimulus money on useless make-work projects and instead invest in sectors that would give an edge in future technologies that could be commercialized to help bring global trade back into balance.

       

Building a national solar-energy grid that could tap the arid landscapes of Nevada are among Duncan’s recommendations.

       

Duncan said he first outlined his thinking on government-led investment in a 2008 book. On speaking tours, he encountered the “greatest push-back” from free-market, libertarian thinkers who are skeptical of government involvement in the economy.

       

He says many libertarians “are with me along through the argument” on causes of the global crisis, but that they tend to be “very surprised” by his conclusion that part of the solution requires governments to spend more — not less.

       

Duncan says he tried to counter those views by bringing up previous examples of successful government initiatives, ranging from victory in World War II to the invention of the Internet.

       

“I’d like to offset the toxic effect cable news television has had on the way the economy works and what needs to be done to fix this crisis,” Duncan said.

       

       

   

   

       

           
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Unplugging Americans From The Matrix
   
    By Paul Craig Roberts
   
    April 20, 2012 --- Americans, the British, and Western Europeans are accustomed to thinking of themselves as the representatives of freedom, democracy, and morality in the world. The West passes judgment on the rest of the world as if the West is God and the rest of the world are barbarians in need of chastisement, invasion, and occupation. As readers know, from time to time I raise questions about the validity of the West’s extreme hubris. (See for example, the following articles: Washington’s Insouciance Has No Rival and Is Western Democracy Real or a Facade? )
    China is often a country about which Washington’s moralists get on their high horse. However, China’s “authoritarian” government is actually more responsive to its people than America’s “elected democratic” government. Moreover, however incomplete on paper the civil liberties of China’s people, the Chinese government has not declared that it can violate with impunity whatever rights Chinese citizens have. And it is not China that is running torture prisons all over the globe.
    For some time I have had in mind a realistic comparison of the two countries instead of the standard propagandistic comparison, but Ron Unz has beat me to the task (see, China’s Rise, America’s Fall and Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison ). Unz provides a chance for an education. Don’t miss it.
    Unz has done an excellent job. Moreover, he cleverly understates the case for China and overstates the case for America so as not to unduly arouse the flag-wavers. Nevertheless, the conclusion is clear: The Chinese are less threatened by their “extractive elites” than Americans are by their counterparts.
    Moreover, it is America’s, not China’s, extractive elites who are bombing, occupying, and droning other countries. As the bumper sticker says, “Be nice to America or we will bring democracy to your country.”
    As for economic management, there is no comparison. Unz reports that during the past three decades China has achieved the most rapid rate of economic development in human history. Moreover, most of the new income has flowed into the pockets of Chinese workers, not to the one percent. While American real median incomes have been stagnant for decades, incomes for Chinese workers have doubled every decade for three decades. A recent World Bank report attributes more than 100 percent of the drop in global poverty rates to China’s rise.
    In the last decade China’s industrial output quadrupled. China now produces more automobiles than America and Japan combined and accounted for 85 percent of the increase in the world’s production of cars in the past decade.
    In 1978 the American economy was 15 times larger than China’s. In the next few years China’s GDP is expected to exceed that of the US.
    This is heady stuff providing astonishing details of how poorly Americans are served by their elites.
    America has failed, because political elites represent only the powerful special interests that write the country’s laws in exchange for funding the political campaigns of “lawmakers.” To divert attention from their failures, American elites point fingers at external scapegoats. China, for example, is accused of manipulating its currency. As Unz says, the scapegoating is political theater designed for the ignorant and gullible.
    America’s economists, or most of them, have so prostituted themselves that propaganda has become wisdom. Most Americans believe that if China would simply let the value of its currency rise more rapidly relative to the dollar, America’s economic woes would be at an end. It is beyond belief that any economist could think that Americans with stagnant and declining incomes would be made better off by a sharp rise in the prices of goods manufactured in China on which Americans are dependent, or that the US dollar’s role as reserve currency, the main source of American power, could survive such a manifestation of Chinese economic superiority.
    Americans associate lawlessness with unaccountable governments and view China’s government as unaccountable. However, Unz points out that it is the Bush/Obama Regime that has declared itself to be unaccountable to both US and international law.
    The demise of the War Powers Act and the Geneva Conventions, and the asserted power of the executive to imprison without trial or charges or to assassinate any American whom the executive thinks might be a “national-security threat” are indicative of a total police state masquerading as an accountable democracy. In America six-year old little girls who misbehave in school are handcuffed, jailed, and charged with felonies. (see, 10 Disgusting Examples of Very Young School Children Being Arrested, Handcuffed and Brutalized By Police ) Not even Hitler and Stalin went this far.
    Americans have lost control of the government, and governments that are not controlled by the people are not democracies. In America today, Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and the entire social safety net are threatened by the vociferous desire for war profits by armament plutocrats and by financial institutions determined that ordinary citizens bear the cost of the banksters incompetence and fraud.
    Unz’s comparison of how the Chinese media and government handled the melamine or infant formula scandal and how the American media and government handled Merck’s Vioxx scandal is especially damning. It was China’s controlled media and unaccountable government that punished the infant formula wrongdoers, while America’s free press and accountable government allowed Merck to walk.
    Unz’s conclusion is that it is in America, not China, where life is regarded as cheap.
    Ron Unz is an American hero, and a very courageous one. As George Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
    It is an even more courageous act when no one wants to hear the truth. As Frantz Fanon said, “Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”
    Or as it is explained to Neo in the film, “The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”
    Most of the people I know personally are not willing to be unplugged. I assume my readers are, so seize the opportunity to be further unplugged and read Ron Unz’s comparison of America and China.
    Then do what you can to unplug others.
    Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. www.paulcraigroberts.org
     
   
    China’s Rise, America’s Fall
   
    Which superpower is more threatened by its “extractive elites”?
   
    By Ron Unz | April 18, 2012
     [1]The rise of China surely ranks among the most important world developments of the last 100 years. With America still trapped in its fifth year of economic hardship, and the Chinese economy poised to surpass our own before the end of this decade, China looms very large on the horizon. We are living in the early years of what journalists once dubbed “The Pacific Century,” yet there are worrisome signs it may instead become known as “The Chinese Century.”
    But does the Chinese giant have feet of clay? In a recently published book, Why Nations Fail, economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson characterize China’s ruling elites as “extractive”—parasitic and corrupt—and predict that Chinese economic growth will soon falter and decline, while America’s “inclusive” governing institutions have taken us from strength to strength. They argue that a country governed as a one-party state, without the free media or checks and balances of our own democratic system, cannot long prosper in the modern world. The glowing tributes this book has received from a vast array of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, including six Nobel laureates in economics, testifies to the widespread popularity of this optimistic message.
    Yet do the facts about China and America really warrant this conclusion?
   
    China Shakes the World
    By the late 1970s, three decades of Communist central planning had managed to increase China’s production at a respectable rate, but with tremendous fits and starts, and often at a terrible cost: 35 million or more Chinese had starved to death during the disastrous 1959–1961 famine caused by Mao’s forced industrialization policy of the Great Leap Forward.
    China’s population had also grown very rapidly during this period, so the typical standard of living had improved only slightly, perhaps 2 percent per year between 1958 and 1978, and this from an extremely low base. Adjusted for purchasing power, most Chinese in 1980 had an income 60–70 percent below that of the citizens in other major Third World countries such as Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Kenya, none of which were considered great economic success stories. In those days, even Haitians were far wealthier than Chinese.
    All this began to change very rapidly once Deng Xiaoping initiated his free-market reforms in 1978, first throughout the countryside and eventually in the smaller industrial enterprises of the coastal provinces. By 1985, The Economist ran a cover story praising China’s 700,000,000 peasants for having doubled their agricultural production in just seven years, an achievement almost unprecedented in world history. Meanwhile, China’s newly adopted one-child policy, despite its considerable unpopularity, had sharply reduced population growth rates in a country possessing relatively little arable land.
    A combination of slowing population growth and rapidly accelerating economic output has obvious implications for national prosperity. During the three decades to 2010, China achieved perhaps the most rapid sustained rate of economic development in the history of the human species, with its real economy growing almost 40-fold between 1978 and 2010. In 1978, America’s economy was 15 times larger, but according to most international estimates, China is now set to surpass America’s total economic output within just another few years.
    Furthermore, the vast majority of China’s newly created economic wealth has flowed to ordinary Chinese workers, who have moved from oxen and bicycles to the verge of automobiles in just a single generation. While median American incomes have been stagnant for almost forty years, those in China have nearly doubled every decade, with the real wages of workers outside the farm-sector rising about 150 percent over the last ten years alone. The Chinese of 1980 were desperately poor compared to Pakistanis, Nigerians, or Kenyans; but today, they are several times wealthier, representing more than a tenfold shift in relative income.
    A World Bank report recently highlighted the huge drop in global poverty rates from 1980 to 2008, but critics noted that over 100 percent of that decline came from China alone: the number of Chinese living in dire poverty fell by a remarkable 662 million, while the impoverished population in the rest of the world actually rose by 13 million. And although India is often paired with China in the Western media, a large fraction of Indians have actually grown poorer over time. The bottom half of India’s still rapidly growing population has seen its daily caloric intake steadily decline for the last 30 years, with half of all children under five now being malnourished.
    China’s economic progress is especially impressive when matched against historical parallels. Between 1870 and 1900, America enjoyed unprecedented industrial expansion, such that even Karl Marx and his followers began to doubt that a Communist revolution would be necessary or even possible in a country whose people were achieving such widely shared prosperity through capitalistic expansion. During those 30 years America’s real per capita income grew by 100 percent. But over the last 30 years, real per capita income in China has grown by more than 1,300 percent.
    Over the last decade alone, China quadrupled its industrial output, which is now comparable to that of the U.S. In the crucial sector of automobiles, China raised its production ninefold, from 2 million cars in 2000 to 18 million in 2010, a figure now greater than the combined totals for America and Japan. China accounted for fully 85 percent of the total world increase in auto manufacturing during that decade.
    It is true that many of China’s highest-tech exports are more apparent than real. Nearly all Apple’s iPhones and iPads come from China, but this is largely due to the use of cheap Chinese labor for final assembly, with just 4 percent of the value added in those world-leading items being Chinese. This distorts Chinese trade statistics, leading to unnecessary friction. However, some high-tech China exports are indeed fully Chinese, notably those of Huawei, which now ranks alongside Sweden’s Ericsson as one of the world’s two leading telecommunications manufacturers, while once powerful North American competitors such Lucent-Alcatel and Nortel have fallen into steep decline or even bankruptcy. And although America originally pioneered the Human Genome Project, the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) today probably stands as the world leader in that enormously important emerging scientific field.
    China’s recent rise should hardly surprise us. For most of the last 3,000 years, China together with the Mediterranean world and its adjoining European peninsula have constituted the two greatest world centers of technological and economic progress. During the 13th century, Marco Polo traveled from his native Venice to the Chinese Empire and described the latter as vastly wealthier and more advanced than any European country. As late as the 18th century, many leading European philosophers such as Voltaire often looked to Chinese society as an intellectual exemplar, while both the British and the Prussians used the Chinese mandarinate as their model for establishing a meritocratic civil service based on competitive examinations.
    Even a century ago, near the nadir of China’s later weakness and decay, some of America’s foremost public intellectuals, such as Edward A. Ross and Lothrop Stoddard, boldly predicted the forthcoming restoration of the Chinese nation to global influence, the former with equanimity and the latter with serious concern. Indeed, Stoddard argued that only three major inventions effectively separated the world of classical antiquity from that of 18th-century Europe—gunpowder, the mariner’s compass, and the printing press. All three seem to have first appeared in China, though for various social, political, and ideological reasons, none were properly implemented.
    Does China’s rise necessarily imply America’s decline? Not at all: human economic progress is not a zero-sum game. Under the right circumstances, the rapid development of one large country should tend to improve living standards for the rest of the world.
    This is most obvious for those nations whose economic strengths directly complement those of a growing China. Massive industrial expansion clearly requires a similar increase in raw-material consumption, and China is now the world’s largest producer and user of electricity, concrete, steel, and many other basic materials, with its iron-ore imports surging by a factor of ten between 2000 and 2011. This has driven huge increases in the costs of most commodities; for example, copper’s world price rose more than eightfold during the last decade. As a direct consequence, these years have generally been very good ones for the economies of countries that heavily rely upon the export of natural resources—Australia, Russia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and parts of Africa.
    Meanwhile, as China’s growth gradually doubles total world industrial production, the resulting “China price” reduces the cost of manufactured goods, making them much more easily affordable to everyone, and thereby greatly increases the global standard of living. While this process may negatively impact those particular industries and countries directly competing with China, it provides enormous opportunities as well, not merely to the aforementioned raw-material suppliers but also to countries like Germany, whose advanced equipment and machine tools have found a huge Chinese market, thereby helping to reduce German unemployment to the lowest level in 20 years.
    And as ordinary Chinese grow wealthier, they provide a larger market as well for the goods and services of leading Western companies, ranging from fast-food chains to consumer products to luxury goods. Chinese workers not only assemble Apple’s iPhones and iPads, but are also very eager to purchase them, and China has now become that company’s second largest market, with nearly all of the extravagant profit margins flowing back to its American owners and employees. In 2011 General Motors sold more cars in China than in the U.S., and that rapidly growing market became a crucial factor in the survival of an iconic American corporation. China has become the third largest market in the world for McDonald’s, and the main driver of global profits for the American parent company of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC.
   
    Social Costs of a Rapid Rise
    Transforming a country in little more than a single generation from a land of nearly a billion peasants to one of nearly a billion city-dwellers is no easy task, and such a breakneck pace of industrial and economic development inevitably leads to substantial social costs. Chinese urban pollution is among the worst in the world, and traffic is rapidly heading toward that same point. China now contains the second largest number of billionaires after America, together with more than a million dollar-millionaires, and although many of these individuals came by their fortunes honestly, many others did not. Official corruption is a leading source of popular resentment against the various levels of Chinese government, ranging from local village councils to the highest officials in Beijing.
    But we must maintain a proper sense of proportion. As someone who grew up in Los Angeles when it still had the most notorious smog in America, I recognize that such trends can be reversed with time and money, and indeed the Chinese government has expressed intense interest in the emerging technology of non-polluting electric cars. Rapidly growing national wealth can be deployed to solve many problems.
    Similarly, plutocrats who grow rich through friends in high places or even outright corruption are easier to tolerate when a rising tide is rapidly lifting all boats. Ordinary Chinese workers have increased their real income by well over 1,000 percent in recent decades, while the corresponding figure for most American workers has been close to zero. If typical American wages were doubling every decade, there would be far less anger in our own society directed against the “One Percent.” Indeed, under the standard GINI index used to measure wealth inequality, China’s score is not particularly high, being roughly the same as that of the United States, though certainly indicating greater inequality than most of the social democracies of Western Europe.
    Many American pundits and politicians still focus their attention on the tragic Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, during which hundreds of determined Chinese protesters were massacred by government troops. But although that event loomed very large at the time, in hindsight it generated merely a blip in the upward trajectory of China’s development and today seems virtually forgotten among ordinary Chinese, whose real incomes have increased several-fold in the quarter century since then.
    Much of the Tiananmen protest had been driven by popular outrage at government corruption, and certainly there have been additional major scandals in recent years, often heavily splashed across the pages of America’s leading newspapers. But a closer examination paints a more nuanced picture, especially when contrasted with America’s own situation.
    For example, over the last few years one of the most ambitious Chinese projects has been a plan to create the world’s largest and most advanced network of high-speed rail transport, an effort that absorbed a remarkable $200 billion of government investment. The result was the construction of over 6,000 miles of track, a total probably now greater than that of all the world’s other nations combined. Unfortunately, this project also involved considerable corruption, as was widely reported in the world media, which estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars had been misappropriated through bribery and graft. This scandal eventually led to the arrest or removal of numerous government officials, notably including China’s powerful Railways Minister.
    Obviously such serious corruption would seem horrifying in a country with the pristine standards of a Sweden or a Norway. But based on the published accounts, it appears that the funds diverted amounted to perhaps as little as 0.2 percent of the total, with the remaining 99.8 percent generally spent as intended. So serious corruption notwithstanding, the project succeeded and China does indeed now possess the world’s largest and most advanced network of high-speed rail, constructed almost entirely in the last five or six years.
    Meanwhile, America has no high-speed rail whatsoever, despite decades of debate and vast amounts of time and money spent on lobbying, hearings, political campaigns, planning efforts, and environmental-impact reports. China’s high-speed rail system may be far from perfect, but it actually exists, while America’s does not. Annual Chinese ridership now totals over 25 million trips per year, and although an occasional disaster—such as the 2011 crash in Weizhou, which killed 40 passengers—is tragic, it is hardly unexpected. After all, America’s aging low-speed trains are not exempt from similar calamities, as we saw in the 2008 Chatsworth crash that killed 25 in California.
    For many years Western journalists regularly reported that the dismantling of China’s old Maoist system of government-guaranteed healthcare had led to serious social stresses, forcing ordinary workers to save an unreasonable fraction of their salaries to pay for medical treatment if they or their families became ill. But over the last couple of years, the government has taken major steps to reduce this problem by establishing a national healthcare insurance system whose coverage now extends to 95 percent or so of the total population, a far better ratio than is found in wealthy America and at a tiny fraction of the cost. Once again, competent leaders with access to growing national wealth can effectively solve these sorts of major social problems.
    Although Chinese cities have negligible crime and are almost entirely free of the horrible slums found in many rapidly urbanizing Third World countries, housing for ordinary workers is often quite inadequate. But national concerns over rising unemployment due to the global recession gave the government a perfect opportunity late last year to announce a bold plan to construct over 35 million modern new government apartments, which would then be provided to ordinary workers on a subsidized basis.
    All of this follows the pattern of Lee Kwan Yew’s mixed-development model, combining state socialism and free enterprise, which raised Singapore’s people from the desperate, abject poverty of 1945 to a standard of living now considerably higher than that of most Europeans or Americans, including a per capita GDP almost $12,000 above that of the United States. Obviously, implementing such a program for the world’s largest population and on a continental scale is far more challenging than doing so in a tiny city-state with a population of a few million and inherited British colonial institutions, but so far China has done very well in confounding its skeptics.
     [2]
    America’s Economic Decline
    These facts do not provide much evidence for the thesis in Why Nations Fail that China’s leaders constitute a self-serving and venal “extractive” elite. Unfortunately, such indications seem far more apparent when we direct our gaze inward, toward the recent economic and social trajectory of our own country
    Against the backdrop of remarkable Chinese progress, America mostly presents a very gloomy picture. Certainly America’s top engineers and entrepreneurs have created many of the world’s most important technologies, sometimes becoming enormously wealthy in the process. But these economic successes are not typical nor have their benefits been widely distributed. Over the last 40 years, a large majority of American workers have seen their real incomes stagnate or decline.
    Meanwhile, the rapid concentration of American wealth continues apace: the richest 1 percent of America’s population now holds as much net wealth as the bottom 90–95 percent, and these trend may even be accelerating. A recent study revealed that during our supposed recovery of the last couple of years, 93 percent of the total increase in national income went to the top 1 percent, with an astonishing 37 percent being captured by just the wealthiest 0.01 percent of the population, 15,000 households in a nation of well over 300 million people.
    Evidence for the long-term decline in our economic circumstances is most apparent when we consider the situation of younger Americans. The national media endlessly trumpets the tiny number of youthful Facebook millionaires, but the prospects for most of their contemporaries are actually quite grim. According to research from the Pew Center, barely half of 18- to 24-year-old Americans are currently employed, the lowest level since 1948, a time long before most women had joined the labor force. Nearly one-fifth of young men age 25–34 are still living with their parents, while the wealth of all households headed by those younger than 35 is 68 percent lower today than it was in 1984.
    The total outstanding amount of non-dischargeable student-loan debt has crossed the trillion-dollar mark, now surpassing the combined total of credit-card and auto-loan debt—and with a quarter of all student-loan payers now delinquent, there are worrisome indicators that much of it will remain a permanent burden, reducing many millions to long-term debt peonage. A huge swath of America’s younger generation seems completely impoverished, and likely to remain so.
    International trade statistics, meanwhile, demonstrate that although Apple and Google are doing quite well, our overall economy is not. For many years now our largest goods export has been government IOUs, whose dollar value has sometimes been greater than that of the next ten categories combined. At some point, perhaps sooner than we think, the rest of the world will lose its appetite for this non-functional product, and our currency will collapse, together with our standard of living. Similar Cassandra-like warnings were issued for years about the housing bubble or the profligacy of the Greek government, and were proven false year after year until one day they suddenly became true.
    Ironically enough, there is actually one major category in which American expansion still easily tops that of China, both today and for the indefinite future: population growth. The rate of America’s demographic increase passed that of China over 20 years ago and has been greater every year since, sometimes by as much as a factor of two. According to standard projections, China’s population in 2050 will be almost exactly what it was in 2000, with the country having achieved the population stability typical of advanced, prosperous societies. But during that same half-century, the number of America’s inhabitants will have grown by almost 50 percent, a rate totally unprecedented in the developed world and actually greater than that found in numerous Third World countries such as Colombia, Algeria, Thailand, Mexico, or Indonesia. A combination of very rapid population growth and doubtful prospects for equally rapid economic growth does not bode well for the likely quality of the 2050 American Dream.
    China rises while America falls, but are there major causal connections between these two concurrent trends now reshaping the future of our world? Not that I can see. American politicians and pundits are naturally fearful of taking on the fierce special interest groups that dominate their political universe, so they often seek an external scapegoat to explicate the misery of their constituents, sometimes choosing to focus on China. But this is merely political theater for the ignorant and the gullible.
    Various studies have suggested that China’s currency may be substantially undervalued, but even if the frequent demands of Paul Krugman and others were met and the yuan rapidly appreciated another 15 or 20 percent, few industrial jobs would return to American shores, while working-class Americans might pay much more for their basic necessities. And if China opened wide its borders to more American movies or financial services, the multimillionaires of Hollywood and Wall Street might grow even richer, but ordinary Americans would see little benefit. It is always easier for a nation to point an accusing finger at foreigners rather than honestly admit that almost all its terrible problems are essentially self-inflicted.
   
    Decay of Constitutional Democracy
    The central theme of Why Nations Fail is that political institutions and the behavior of ruling elites largely determine the economic success or failure of countries. If most Americans have experienced virtually no economic gains for decades, perhaps we should cast our gaze at these factors in our own society.
    Our elites boast about the greatness of our constitutional democracy, the wondrous human rights we enjoy, the freedom and rule of law that have long made America a light unto the nations of the world and a spiritual draw for oppressed peoples everywhere, including China itself. But are these claims actually correct? They often stack up very strangely when they appear in the opinion pages of our major newspapers, coming just after the news reporting, whose facts tell a very different story.
    Just last year, the Obama administration initiated a massive months-long bombing campaign against the duly recognized government of Libya on “humanitarian” grounds, then argued with a straight face that a military effort comprising hundreds of bombing sorties and over a billion dollars in combat costs did not actually constitute “warfare,” and hence was completely exempt from the established provisions of the Congressional War Powers Act. A few months later, Congress overwhelmingly passed and President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, granting the president power to permanently imprison without trial or charges any American whom he classifies as a national-security threat based on his own judgment and secret evidence. When we consider that American society has experienced virtually no domestic terrorism during the past decade, we must wonder how long our remaining constitutional liberties would survive if we were facing frequent real-life attacks by an actual terrorist underground, such as had been the case for many years with the IRA in Britain, ETA in Spain, or the Red Brigades in Italy.
    Most recently, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have claimed the inherent right of an American president to summarily execute anyone anywhere in the world, American citizen or not, whom White House advisors have privately decided was a “bad person.” While it is certainly true that major world governments have occasionally assassinated their political enemies abroad, I have never before heard these dark deeds publicly proclaimed as legitimate and aboveboard. Certainly if the governments of Russia or China, let alone Iran, declared their inherent right to kill anyone anywhere in the world whom they didn’t like, our media pundits would immediately blast these statements as proof of their total criminal insanity.
    These are very strange notions of the “rule of law” for the administration of a president who had once served as top editor of the Harvard Law Review and who was routinely flattered in his political campaigns by being described as a “constitutional scholar.”
    Many of these negative ideological trends have been absorbed and accepted by the popular culture and much of the American public. Over the last decade one of the highest-rated shows on American television was “24”, created by Joel Surnow and chronicling Kiefer Sutherland as a patriotic but ruthless Secret Service agent, with each episode constituting a single hour of his desperate efforts to thwart terrorist plots and safeguard our national security. Numerous episodes featured our hero torturing suspected evildoers in order to extract the information necessary to save innocent lives, with the entire series representing a popular weekly glorification of graphic government torture on behalf of the greater good.
    Now soft-headed protestations to the contrary, most governments around the world have at least occasionally practiced torture, especially when combating popular insurgencies, and some of the more brutal regimes, including Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, even professionalized the process. But such dark deeds done in secret were always vigorously denied in public, and the popular films and other media of Stalin’s Soviet Union invariably featured pure-hearted workers and peasants bravely doing their honorable and patriotic duty for the Motherland, rather than the terrible torments being daily inflicted in the cellars of the Lubyanka prison. Throughout all of modern history, I am not aware of a single even semi-civilized country that publicly celebrated the activities of its professional government torturers in the popular media. Certainly such sentiments would have been totally abhorrent and unthinkable in the “conservative Hollywood” of the Cold War 1950s.
    And since we live in a entertainment-dominated society, sentiments affirmed on the screen often have direct real-world consequences. At one point, senior American military and counter-terrorism officials felt the need to travel to Hollywood and urge its screenwriters to stop glorifying American torture, since their shows were encouraging U.S. soldiers to torture Muslim captives even when their commanding officers repeatedly ordered them not to do so.
    Given these facts, we should hardly be surprised that international surveys over the past decade have regularly ranked America as the world’s most hated major nation, a remarkable achievement given the dominant global role of American media and entertainment and also the enormous international sympathy that initially flowed to our country following the 9/11 attacks.
   
    An Emerging One-Party State
    So far at least, these extra-constitutional and often brutal methods have not been directed toward controlling America’s own political system; we remain a democracy rather than a dictatorship. But does our current system actually possess the central feature of a true democracy, namely a high degree of popular influence over major government policies? Here the evidence seems more ambiguous.
    Consider the pattern of the last decade. With two ruinous wars and a financial collapse to his record, George W. Bush was widely regarded as one of the most disastrous presidents in American history, and at times his public approval numbers sank to the lowest levels ever measured. The sweeping victory of his successor, Barack Obama, represented more a repudiation of Bush and his policies than anything else, and leading political activists, left and right alike, characterized Obama as Bush’s absolute antithesis, both in background and in ideology. This sentiment was certainly shared abroad, with Obama being selected for the Nobel Peace Prize just months after entering office, based on the widespread assumption that he was certain to reverse most of the policies of his detested predecessor and restore America to sanity.
    Yet almost none of these reversals took place. Instead, the continuity of administration policy has been so complete and so obvious that many critics now routinely speak of the Bush/Obama administration.
    The harsh violations of constitutional principles and civil liberties which Bush pioneered following the 9/11 attacks have only further intensified under Obama, the heralded Harvard constitutional scholar and ardent civil libertarian, and this has occurred without the excuse of any major new terrorist attacks. During his Democratic primary campaign, Obama promised that he would move to end Bush’s futile Iraq War immediately upon taking office, but instead large American forces remained in place for years until heavy pressure from the Iraqi government finally forced their removal; meanwhile, America’s occupation army in Afghanistan actually tripled in size. The government bailout of the hated financial manipulators of Wall Street, begun under Bush, continued apace under Obama, with no serious attempts at either government prosecution or drastic reform. Americans are still mostly suffering through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, but Wall Street profits and multimillion-dollar bonuses soon returned to record levels.
    In particular, the continuity of top officials has been remarkable. As Bush’s second defense secretary, Robert Gates had been responsible for the ongoing management of America’s foreign wars and military occupations since 2006; Obama kept him on, and he continued to play the same role in the new administration. Similarly, Timothy Geithner had been one of Bush’s most senior financial appointments, playing a crucial role in the widely unpopular financial bailout of Wall Street; Obama promoted him to Treasury secretary and authorized continuation of those same policies. Ben Bernanke had been appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve by Bush and was reappointed by Obama. Bush wars and bailouts became Obama wars and bailouts. The American public voted for an anti-Bush, but got Bush’s third term instead.
    During the Cold War, Soviet propagandists routinely characterized our democracy as a sham, with the American public merely selecting which of the two intertwined branches of their single political party should alternate in office, while the actual underlying policies remained essentially unchanged, being decided and implemented by the same corrupt ruling class. This accusation may have been mostly false at the time it was made but seems disturbingly accurate today.
    When times are hard and government policies are widely unpopular, but voters are only offered a choice between the rival slick marketing campaigns of Coke and Pepsi, cynicism can reach extreme proportions. Over the last year, surveys have shown that the public non-approval of Congress—representing Washington’s political establishment—has ranged as high as 90–95 percent, which is completely unprecedented.
    But if our government policies are so broadly unpopular, why are we unable to change them through the sacred power of the vote? The answer is that America’s system of government has increasingly morphed from being a representative democracy to becoming something closer to a mixture of plutocracy and mediacracy, with elections almost entirely determined by money and media, not necessarily in that order. Political leaders are made or broken depending on whether they receive the cash and visibility needed to win office.
    National campaigns increasingly seem sordid reality shows for second-rate political celebrities, while our country continues along its path toward multiple looming calamities. Candidates who depart from the script or deviate from the elite D.C. consensus regarding wars or bailouts—notably a principled ideologue such as Ron Paul—are routinely stigmatized in the media as dangerous extremists or even entirely airbrushed out of campaign news coverage, as has been humorously highlighted by comedian Jon Stewart.
    We know from the collapsed communist states of Eastern Europe that control over the media may determine public perceptions of reality, but it does not change the underlying reality itself, and reality usually has the last laugh. Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his colleagues have conservatively estimated the total long-term cost of our disastrous Iraq War at $3 trillion, representing over one-fifth of our entire accumulated national debt, or almost $30,000 per American household. And even now the direct ongoing costs of our Afghanistan War still run $120 billion per year, many times the size of Afghanistan’s total GDP. Meanwhile, during these same years the international price of oil has risen from $25 to $125 per barrel—partly as a consequence of these past military disruptions and growing fears of future ones—thereby imposing gigantic economic costs upon our society.
    And we suffer other costs as well. A recent New York Times story described the morale-building visit of Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to our forces in Afghanistan and noted that all American troops had been required to surrender their weapons before attending his speech and none were allowed to remain armed in his vicinity. Such a command decision seems almost unprecedented in American history and does not reflect well upon the perceived state of our military morale.
    Future historians may eventually regard these two failed wars, fought for entirely irrational reasons, as the proximate cause of America’s financial and political collapse, representing the historical bookend to our World War II victory, which originally established American global dominance.
   
    Our Extractive Elites
    When parasitic elites govern a society along “extractive” lines, a central feature is the massive upward flow of extracted wealth, regardless of any contrary laws or regulations. Certainly America has experienced an enormous growth of officially tolerated corruption as our political system has increasingly consolidated into a one-party state controlled by a unified media-plutocracy.
    Consider the late 2011 collapse of MF Global, a midsize but highly reputable brokerage firm. Although this debacle was far smaller than the Lehman bankruptcy or the Enron fraud, it effectively illustrates the incestuous activities of America’s overlapping elites. Just a year earlier, Jon Corzine had been installed as CEO, following his terms as Democratic governor and U.S. senator from New Jersey and his previous career as CEO of Goldman Sachs. Perhaps no other American had such a combination of stellar political and financial credentials on his resume. Soon after taking the reins, Corzine decided to boost his company’s profits by betting its entire capital and more against the possibility that any European countries might default on their national debts. When he lost that bet, his multi-billion-dollar firm tumbled into bankruptcy.
    At this point, the story moves from a commonplace tale of Wall Street arrogance and greed into something out of the Twilight Zone, or perhaps Monty Python. The major newspapers began reporting that customer funds, eventually said to total $1.6 billion, had mysteriously disappeared during the collapse, and no one could determine what had become of them, a very strange claim in our age of massively computerized financial records. Weeks and eventually months passed, tens of millions of dollars were spent on armies of investigators and forensic accountants, but all those customer funds stayed “missing,” while the elite media covered this bizarre situation in the most gingerly possible fashion. As an example, a front page Wall Street Journal story on February 23, 2012 suggested that after so many months, there seemed little likelihood that the disappeared customer funds might ever reappear, but also emphasized that absolutely no one was being accused of any wrongdoing. Presumably the journalists were suggesting that the $1.6 billion dollars of customer money had simply walked out the door on its own two feet.
    Stories like this give the lie to the endless boasts of our politicians and business pundits that America’s financial system is the most transparent and least corrupt in today’s world. Certainly America is not unique in the existence of long-term corporate fraud, as was recently shown in the fall of Japan’s Olympus Corporation following the discovery of more than a billion dollars in long-hidden investment losses. But when we consider the largest corporate collapses of the last decade that were substantially due to fraud, nearly all the names are American: WorldCom, Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, and Adelphia. And this list leaves out all the American financial institutions destroyed by the financial meltdown—such as Lehman, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia—and the many trillions of dollars in American homeowner equity and top-rated MBS securities which evaporated during that process. Meanwhile, the largest and longest Ponzi Scheme in world history, that of Bernie Madoff, had survived for decades under the very nose of the SEC, despite a long series of detailed warnings and complaints. The second largest such fraud, that of Allen R. Stanford, also bears the label “Made in the USA.”
    Some of the sources of Chinese success and American decay are not entirely mysterious. As it happens, the typical professional background of a member of China’s political elite is engineering; they were taught to build things. Meanwhile, a remarkable fraction of America’s political leadership class attended law school, where they were trained to argue effectively and to manipulate. Thus, we should not be greatly surprised that while China’s leaders tend to build, America’s leaders seem to prefer endless manipulation, whether of words, money, or people.
     [3]How corrupt is the American society fashioned by our current ruling elites? That question is perhaps more ambiguous than it might seem. According to the standard world rankings produced by Transparency International, the United States is a reasonably clean country, with corruption being considerably higher than in the nations of Northern Europe or elsewhere in the Anglosphere, but much lower than in most of the rest of the world, including China.
    But I suspect that this one-dimensional metric fails to capture some of the central anomalies of America’s current social dilemma. Unlike the situation in many Third World countries, American teachers and tax inspectors very rarely solicit bribes, and there is little overlap in personnel between our local police and the criminals whom they pursue. Most ordinary Americans are generally honest. So by these basic measures of day-to-day corruption, America is quite clean, not too different from Germany or Japan.
    By contrast, local village authorities in China have a notorious tendency to seize public land and sell it to real estate developers for huge personal profits. This sort of daily misbehavior has produced an annual Chinese total of up to 90,000 so-called “mass incidents”—public strikes, protests, or riots—usually directed against corrupt local officials or businessmen.
    However, although American micro-corruption is rare, we seem to suffer from appalling levels of macro-corruption, situations in which our various ruling elites squander or misappropriate tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of our national wealth, sometimes doing so just barely on one side of technical legality and sometimes on the other.
    Sweden is among the cleanest societies in Europe, while Sicily is perhaps the most corrupt. But suppose a large clan of ruthless Sicilian Mafiosi moved to Sweden and somehow managed to gain control of its government. On a day-to-day basis, little would change, with Swedish traffic policemen and building inspectors performing their duties with the same sort of incorruptible efficiency as before, and I suspect that Sweden’s Transparency International rankings would scarcely decline. But meanwhile, a large fraction of Sweden’s accumulated national wealth might gradually be stolen and transferred to secret Cayman Islands bank accounts, or invested in Latin American drug cartels, and eventually the entire plundered economy would collapse.
    Ordinary Americans who work hard and seek to earn an honest living for themselves and their families appear to be suffering the ill effects of exactly this same sort of elite-driven economic pillage. The roots of our national decline will be found at the very top of our society, among the One Percent, or more likely the 0.1 percent.
   
    Thus, the ideas presented in Why Nations Fail seem both true and false. The claim that harmful political institutions and corrupt elites can inflict huge economic damage upon a society seems absolutely correct. But while the authors turn a harsh eye toward elite misbehavior across time and space—from ancient Rome to Czarist Russia to rising China—their vision seems to turn rosy-tinted when they consider present-day America, the society in which they themselves live and whose ruling elites lavishly fund the academic institutions with which they are affiliated. Given the American realities of the last dozen years, it is quite remarkable that the scholars who wrote a book entitled Why Nations Fail never glanced outside their own office windows.
    SIDEBAR
    Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison [4]
    A similar dangerous reticence may afflict most of our media, which appears much more eager to focus on self-inflicted disasters in foreign countries than on those here at home. Presented below is a companion case-study, “Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison [4],” in which I point out that while the American media a few years ago joined its Chinese counterparts in devoting enormous coverage to the deaths of a few Chinese children from tainted infant formula, it paid relatively little attention to a somewhat similar domestic public-health disaster that killed many tens or even hundreds of thousands of Americans.
    A society’s media and academic organs constitute the sensory apparatus and central nervous system of its body politic, and if the information these provide is seriously misleading, looming dangers may fester and grow. A media and academy that are highly corrupt or dishonest constitute a deadly national peril. And although the political leadership of undemocratic China might dearly wish to hide all its major mistakes, its crude propaganda machinery often fails at this self-destructive task. But America’s own societal information system is vastly more skilled and experienced in shaping reality to meet the needs of business and government leaders, and this very success does tremendous damage to our country.
    Perhaps Americans really do prefer that their broadcasters provide Happy News and that their political campaigns constitute amusing reality shows. Certainly the cheering coliseum crowds of the Roman Empire favored their bread and circuses over the difficult and dangerous tasks that their ancestors had undertaken during Rome’s rise to world greatness. And so long as we can continue to trade bits of printed paper carrying presidential portraits for flat-screen TVs from Chinese factories, perhaps all is well and no one need be too concerned about the apparent course of our national trajectory, least of all our political leadership class.
    But if so, then we must admit that Richard Lynn, a prominent British scholar, has been correct in predicting for a decade or longer that the global dominance of the European-derived peoples is rapidly drawing to its end and within the foreseeable future the torch of human progress and world leadership will inevitably pass into Chinese hands.
    Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative and founder of Unz.org [5].
     
   
    Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison
    By Ron Unz | April 18, 2012
    Main article:
    “China’s Rise, America’s Fall [1]“
    In contrasting China and America, pundits often cite our free and independent media as one of our greatest strengths, together with the tremendous importance which our society places upon individual American lives. For us, a single wrongful death can sometimes provoke weeks of massive media coverage and galvanize the nation into corrective action, while life remains cheap in China, a far poorer land of over a billion people, ruled by a ruthless Communist Party eager to bury its mistakes. But an examination of two of the greatest public-health scandals of the last few years casts serious doubt on this widespread belief.
    First, consider the details of the Chinese infant formula scandal of 2008. Unscrupulous businessmen had discovered they could save money by greatly diluting their milk products, then adding a plastic chemical compound called melamine to raise the apparent protein content back to normal levels. Nearly 300,000 babies throughout China had suffered urinary problems, with many hundreds requiring lengthy hospitalization for kidney stones. Six died. A wave of popular outrage swept past the controlled media roadblocks and initial government excuses, and soon put enormous pressure on Chinese officials to take forceful action against the wrongdoers.
    China’s leaders may not be democratically elected, but they pay close attention to strong popular sentiment. Once pressed, they quickly launched a national police investigation which led to a series of arrests and uncovered evidence that this widespread system of food adulteration had been protected by bribe-taking government officials. Long prison sentences were freely handed out and a couple of the guiltiest culprits were eventually tried and executed for their role, measures that gradually assuaged popular anger. Indeed, the former head of the Chinese FDA had been executed for corruption in late 2007 under similar circumstances.
    Throughout these events, American media coverage was extensive, with numerous front-page stories in our leading newspapers. Journalists discovered that similar methods of dangerous chemical adulteration had been used to produce Chinese pet food for export, and many family dogs in America had suffered or died as a result. With heavy coverage on talk radio and cable news shows, phrases such as “Chinese baby formula” or “Chinese pet food” became angry slurs, and there was talk of banning whole categories of imports from a country whose product safety standards were obviously so far below those found in Western societies. The legitimate concerns of ordinary Americans were fanned by local media coverage that sometimes bordered on the hysterical.
    However, the American media reaction had been quite different during an earlier health scandal much closer to home.
    In September 2004, Merck, one of America’s largest pharmaceutical companies, suddenly announced that it was voluntarily recalling Vioxx, its popular anti-pain medication widely used to treat arthritis-related ailments. This abrupt recall came just days after Merck discovered that a top medical journal was about to publish a massive study by an FDA investigator indicating that the drug in question greatly increased the risk of fatal heart attacks and strokes and had probably been responsible for at least 55,000 American deaths during the five years it had been on the market.
    Within weeks of the recall, journalists discovered that Merck had found strong evidence of the potentially fatal side-effects of this drug even before its initial 1999 introduction, but had ignored these worrisome indicators and avoided additional testing, while suppressing the concerns of its own scientists. Boosted by a television advertising budget averaging a hundred million dollars per year, Vioxx soon became one of Merck’s most lucrative products, generating over $2 billion in yearly revenue. Merck had also secretly ghostwritten dozens of the published research studies emphasizing the beneficial aspects of the drug and encouraging doctors to widely prescribe it, thus transforming science into marketing support. Twenty-five million Americans were eventually prescribed Vioxx as an aspirin-substitute thought to produce fewer complications.
    Although the Vioxx scandal certainly did generate several days of newspaper headlines and intermittently returned to the front pages as the resulting lawsuits gradually moved through our judicial system, the coverage still seemed scanty relative to the number of estimated fatalities, which matched America’s total losses in the Vietnam War. In fact, the media coverage often seemed considerably less than that later accorded to the Chinese infant food scandal, which had caused just a handful of deaths on the other side of the world.
    The circumstances of this case were exceptionally egregious, with many tens of thousands of American deaths due to the sale of a highly lucrative but sometimes fatal drug, whose harmful effects had long been known to its manufacturer. But there is no sign that criminal charges were ever considered.
    A massive class-action lawsuit dragged its way through the courts for years, eventually being settled for $4.85 billion in 2007, with almost half the money going to the trial lawyers. Merck shareholders also paid large sums to settle various other lawsuits and government penalties and cover the heavy legal costs of fighting all of these cases. But the loss of continuing Vioxx sales represented the greatest financial penalty of all, which provides a disturbing insight into the cost-benefit calculations behind the company’s original cover-up. When the scandal broke, Merck’s stock price collapsed, and there was a widespread belief that the company could not possibly survive, especially after evidence of a deliberate corporate conspiracy surfaced. Instead, Merck’s stock price eventually reached new heights in 2008 and today is just 15 percent below where it stood just before the disaster.
    Furthermore, individuals make decisions rather than corporate entities, and none of the individuals behind Merck’s deadly decisions apparently suffered any serious consequences. The year after the scandal unfolded, Merck’s long-time CEO resigned and was replaced by one of his top lieutenants, but he retained the $50 million in financial compensation he had received over the previous five years, compensation greatly boosted by lucrative Vioxx sales. Senior FDA officials apologized for their lack of effective oversight and promised to do better in the future. American media conglomerates quietly mourned their loss of heavy Vioxx advertising, but continued selling the same airtime to Merck and its rivals for the marketing of other, replacement drugs, while their investigative arms soon focused on the horrors of tainted Chinese infant food and the endemic corruption of Chinese society.
    This story of serious corporate malfeasance largely forgiven and forgotten by government and media is depressing enough, but it leaves out a crucial factual detail that seems to have almost totally escaped public notice. The year after Vioxx had been pulled from the market, the New York Times and other major media outlets published a minor news item, generally buried near the bottom of their back pages, which noted that American death rates had suddenly undergone a striking and completely unexpected decline.
    The headline of the short article that ran in the April 19, 2005 edition of USA Today was typical: “USA Records Largest Drop in Annual Deaths in at Least 60 Years.” During that one year, American deaths had fallen by 50,000 despite the growth in both the size and the age of the nation’s population. Government health experts were quoted as being greatly “surprised” and “scratching [their] heads” over this strange anomaly, which was led by a sharp drop in fatal heart attacks.
    On April 24, 2005, the New York Times ran another of its long stories about the continuing Vioxx controversy, disclosing that Merck officials had knowingly concealed evidence that their drug greatly increased the risk of heart-related fatalities. But the Times journalist made no mention of the seemingly inexplicable drop in national mortality rates that had occurred once the drug was taken off the market, although the news had been reported in his own paper just a few days earlier.
    A cursory examination of the most recent 15 years worth of national mortality data provided on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website offers some intriguing clues to this mystery. We find the largest rise in American mortality rates occurred in 1999, the year Vioxx was introduced, while the largest drop occurred in 2004, the year it was withdrawn. Vioxx was almost entirely marketed to the elderly, and these substantial changes in national death-rate were completely concentrated within the 65-plus population. The FDA studies had proven that use of Vioxx led to deaths from cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes, and these were exactly the factors driving the changes in national mortality rates.
    The impact of these shifts was not small. After a decade of remaining roughly constant, the overall American death rate began a substantial decline in 2004, soon falling by approximately 5 percent, despite the continued aging of the population. This drop corresponds to roughly 100,000 fewer deaths per year. The age-adjusted decline in death rates was considerably greater.
    Patterns of cause and effect cannot easily be proven. But if we hypothesize a direct connection between the recall of a class of very popular drugs proven to cause fatal heart attacks and other deadly illnesses with an immediate drop in the national rate of fatal heart attacks and other deadly illnesses, then the statistical implications are quite serious. Perhaps 500,000 or more premature American deaths may have resulted from Vioxx, a figure substantially larger than the 3,468 deaths of named individuals acknowledged by Merck during the settlement of its lawsuit. And almost no one among our political or media elites seems to know or care about this possibility. A recent Wall Street Journal column even called for relaxing FDA restrictions aimed at avoiding “rare adverse events,” which had been imposed after the discovery of “unanticipated side effects of high-profile drugs like Vioxx.”
    There are obvious mitigating differences between these two national responses. The Chinese victims were children, and their sufferings from kidney stones and other ailments were directly linked to the harmful compounds that they had ingested. By contrast, the American victims were almost all elderly, and there was no means of determining whether a particular heart attack had been caused by Vioxx or other factors; the evidence implicating the drug was purely statistical, across millions of patients. Furthermore, since most of the victims were anyway nearing the end of their lives, the result was more an acceleration of the inevitable rather than cutting short an entire young life, and sudden fatal heart attacks are hardly the most unpleasant forms of death.
    But against these important factors we must consider the raw numbers involved. American journalists seemed to focus more attention on a half-dozen fatalities in China than they did on the premature deaths of as many as 500,000 of their fellow American citizens.
    The inescapable conclusion is that in today’s world and in the opinion of our own media, American lives are quite cheap, unlike those in China.
   
    URL to article: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/chinese-melamine-and-american-vioxx-a-comparison/
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    ________________________________________
    9 Comments (Reveal Comments | Hide Comments)
    9 Comments To "Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison"
    #1 Comment By Luke Lea On April 18, 2012 @ 9:37 pm
    Well done. Let’s see what happens next. I’m especially keen on the idea that corporate officers be held personally responsible for criminal corporate behavior under their jurisdiction. Only the boss can police the organization.
    #2 Comment By emchvfhi On April 18, 2012 @ 11:53 pm
    Remember the story where a company sold the remainder of its stock of vaccine that it found out was tainted with Aids, to Asia.
    Big Pharma IS evil.
    #3 Comment By J On April 19, 2012 @ 4:50 am
    Wow. I’m not American, and I had never heard of this story.
    #4 Comment By SFG On April 19, 2012 @ 7:44 am
    There’s a simpler reason, though I won’t deny these guys aren’t pro-American. American corporations own bits of each other, and CEOs sit on each others’ boards. A newspaper might well be afraid of ruffling feathers with someone higher up. But a Chinese corporation? Who cares about them?
    #5 Comment By mijj On April 19, 2012 @ 7:28 pm
    the obvious conclusion:
    US media believes one Chinese infant is more valuable than 80,000 American senior citizens.
    #6 Comment By James Guest On April 19, 2012 @ 11:02 pm
    Merck’s attempt to save taxpayers from the expense of over long lives, and unhealthy ones at that, went too far, like the tobacco industry’s heroic efforts which were almost making 65 an acceptable retirement age when we (in Australia) legislated in ways designed to discourage smoking with the result that the new middle-aged in mid 70s are still working hard to pay for the new longevity of the unhealthy elderly…… Ten years of dementia from 95 ought to just about get me my share…..
    Ron, your interesting and well aimed article raises a collateral question or two that you would be well-equipped
    to handle.
    When McKinsey’s former man-in-Australia, Bob Waterman, got together with Tom Peters to write “In Search of Excellence” (Wow! How time passes) they used a filter to select the companies they looked at but still came up with some, or so Tom Peters says at
    [2] ,
    which were not well known at the time. The contrast is made by Peters with Jim Collins’s blank slate start looking at masses of data to unearth his candidates for “Built to Last” and “Good to Great”.
    My interest in all this is prompted by remembering that Merck was one of the Great, or maybe Built to Last, that Collins and his team found in their data and analysis. And also remembering, that corporate culture/ethics was supposed to be a big part of the great companies’ essence.
    The questions become more interesting and worthy of a high-powered Unz attack when one questions much of what passes for great management theory and theorising. My recollection was that Waterman & Peters had nominated praised quite a few duds, as time proved them to be. Delta airlines came to mind. Peters (supra) does not mention it but does say “To be sure, the likes of Wang and Atari and Kmart are today embarrassments. ”
    I was particularly impressed by Collins’s methodology and thoroughness. I don’t remember many particulars in his list but, if he got Merck wrong he did, from memory, get Ford right as a superior performer, late in the day, to GM.
    In economics there are long term changes which the average economist is slow to pick up on, like increased longevity, like the current position on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs of significant parts of the world’s increasingly prosperous population(s), like the beliefs that people have which matter, and which should be compared with the past when, e.g. people did not anticipate and act to protect themselve from over-enthusiastic application of supposedly “Keynesian” policies. I guess the general public only began to believe in the permanency of inflation about the late 1970s…
    What are the equivalent time lags for analysts and advisers in the field of management, private sector and/or public sector? (Both economists and management theorists probably need to have cottoned on early to Mancur Olson’s work and, more recently, the solid evidences of public sector “producer capture” which appears to be ruining the chances of American governments at all levels keeping faith with those they led to believe had binding contracts or undertakings that they would be treated honestly, fairly and even generously).
    With your usual mildness Ron, and only your usual modesty, you might give your readers something considered under a punchy headline such as “Peters v. Collins – did they both get it mostly wrong?”. I would be an avid reader.

-----------------

Einstein wrong again! New experiment confirms doubts
over his speed of light theory

By Tamara Cohen
UPDATED: 22:10 GMT, 18 November 2011

When a team of physicists announced that they had proved Einstein wrong, even they weren’t convinced.

So they ran the test again – and broke the speed of light for a second time.

Scientists from Cern, the Swiss home of the Large Hadron Collider, sent another beam of subatomic particles over 450 miles to a laboratory in Gran Sasso in the Italian Alps.

Breaking the speed of light... again: Scientists from Cern, the Swiss home of the Large Hadron Collider (above), sent another beam of subatomic particles over 450 miles to a laboratory in Gran Sasso in the Italian Alps - with amazing results

And after running the modified follow-up test 20 times, they recorded exactly the same results as before.

According to Albert Einstein’s 106-year-old theory of special relativity, nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum because its particles have no mass.

More...

• Large Hadron Collider to get major upgrade by 2020 to discover 'new physics'
• Large Hadron Collider may not have found the 'God particle'... but has just explained the existence of the universe

By contrast, neutrinos – said to be ‘ghostly’ because they can travel through anything – have a very small mass.

Their apparently record-breaking speed raises a host of possibilities straight out of science fiction stories.

Seeing the light: The Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Racking Apparatus detector (OPERA) at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, which received the nippy neutrinos

Defying physics: The neutrinos arrived at the detector in Italy 60 nanoseconds earlier than light particles

One explanation for the results could be the existence of other dimensions that provided the neutrinos with a shortcut – a scenario that would leave Einstein’s theory intact.

Tested and re-tested for six months before it was announced, the initial finding shocked the science world  in September.

It was greeted with scepticism as experts raised questions about every aspect of the physicists’ equipment and methodology.

Light fantastic: Scientists at Cern say that the neutrinos really did break the cosmic speed limit. This picture shows members of the OPERA team studying the results of the incredible experiment

Critics of the first test said that running all 15,000 neutrinos at once meant there could be errors in the measurement that said they had beaten the speed of light by 60 nanoseconds (or billionths of a second).

The researchers claim to have used a more accurate method for the second trial, by sending shorter bunches of the tiny neutrinos with larger gaps in between.

Nuclear Physics at Gran Sasso, said the scientists were now ‘more confident’ about the result, but urged other laboratories to join his in repeating the test.

Was Albert Einstein wrong? Cern physicists are certainly doing their best to prove he was

‘A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication on physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny,’ he stressed yesterday.

Many experts remain unconvinced.

Jim Al-Khalili, of the University of Surrey’s physics department, who has offered to eat his boxer shorts on live television if neutrinos really can travel faster than light, said: ‘I am not yet ready to get out my knife and fork.

‘The results have only dealt with some possible errors.

'There are still a number of other possible errors and uncertainties that they are working on ruling out.

'Ideally, the experiment would have to be done somewhere else entirely to try to verify the controversial result that these tiny particles really are going faster than light, in case there is still a systemic problem with this particular experiment at Cern.’

Only two other labs in the world have the equipment to take up Professor Al-Khalili’s suggestion.

Scientists working on the Minos experiment in the U.S. and Japan’s T2K study will both try the same test and reveal their results next year.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2063163/Einstein-speed-light-2nd-set-scientists-
Albert Einstein was one of the greatest geniuses in human history, but qu emuchos not know is that he also made ​​many mistakes in some of his theories, formulas and studies.

In the book Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius (WW Norton, $ 12.93), Hans Ohanian writes exclusively about the errors of Einstein and his mathematical mistakes.

In DISCOVER Magazine also posted it the story of Einstein's errors, such as black holes thought were impossible, he believed that the universe was static, and said "God does not play dice."
Chronology of the 23 biggest mistakes of Albert Einstein

    1905: Error in the synchronization process on which Einstein based special relativity.
    1905: Failed to consider the Michelson-Morley.
    1905: Error in the transverse mass of the particles at high speed.
    1905: Multiple errors in the mathematical and physical calculations used to determine the viscosity of liquids, I estimate that Einstein used to deduce the size of molecules.
    1905: Errors in the ratio of thermal radiation and light quanta.
    1905: Error in the first Test of E = mc2.
    1906: Errors in the second, third and fourth test of E = mc2.
    1907: Error in the process of accelerated clock synchronization.
    1907: Errors in the principle of equivalence of gravitation and acceleration.
    1911: Error in the first calculation of the bending of light.
    1913: Failed the first attempt to present a general theory of relativity.
    1914: Error in the fifth test of E = mc2.
    1915: Error in the Einstein-de Haas experiment.
    1915: Several bugs in several attempts at general theories of relativity.
    1916: Error in the interpretation of Mach's principle.
    1917: Error in the introduction of the cosmological constant.
    1919: Mistakes in two attempts to modify general relativity.
    1925: Mistakes and more mistakes in attempts to create a unified theory.
    1927: Errors in discussions with Bohr on quantum uncertainty.
    1933: Errors in the interpretation of quantum mechanics (Does God Play Dice?).
    1934: Error in the sixth proof of E = mc2
    1939: Error in the interpretation of the Schwarzschild singularity and gravitational collapse.

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