Why Obama is on the Offense in Ohio

September 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Want to know why President Obama has just gone on the offensive on China trade policy?   See the results of this just released Zogby poll commissioned by Death By China Productions.  The poll shows Obama faces a huge “soft on China” gap relative to Mitt Romney in the key swing state of Ohio – and some very interesting findings as well.

 

New Zogby Poll in Crucial Ohio Swing State

 

  • Obama and Romney in Statistical Dead Heat
  • Obama Faces Large “Soft on China” Gap
  • The Best Jobs Program is Trade Reform With China
  • Ohioans Overwhelming Support a Boycott of Made in China.

 

President Obama may have opened a lead in national polls, but it remains a statistical dead heat in the crucial swing state of Ohio.  In the latest Zogby Poll of 601 likely voters conducted by JZ Analytics, President Obama’s lead of 45%.3 to 43.2% over Mitt Romney is well within the statistical margin of error.

 

Candidates take note:  An overwhelming majority of Ohioans — 80% — agree that “the single most important issue in the 2012 Presidential race is jobs.

 

50% of Ohio respondents believe that the best jobs program for America is “cracking down on China’s unfair trade practices like currency manipulation, illegal export subsidies, and counterfeiting and piracy” while only 22% favor more government stimulus; and these results are consistent across liberals, moderates, and conservatives.

 

This finding is particularly bad news for President Obama as he faces a double digit “soft on China gap” relative to his opponent.  Fully 43% of Ohioans believe Mitt Romney is more likely to crack down on China’s unfair trade practices compared to only 30% for Obama.  Among independents where the largest bloc of undecided votes remains, this gap holds at 35% to 26% in favor of Romney.  (This finding may also help explain why Obama has recently ratcheted up his tough on China messaging.)

 

56% of respondents also believe “Americans should boycott Made in China products because of China’s unfair trade practices and human rights abuses” while only 19% are against the boycott.  This result is consistent across party affiliation, indicating the issue of China is an American issue, not a partisan issue.

 

If Obama is to win in the crucial swing state of Ohio – and thereby likely win the election — he would do well to try to close his very large “soft on China” gap not by attacking Romney for being soft on China – Ohioans won’t believe that.  Rather, Obama should carry the slogan “the best jobs program is trade reform with China” and lay out very specific policy actions that will curb China’s cheating.

 

For his part, Romney would do well to further press his “tough on China” advantage in Ohio by extending his campaign talking points significantly beyond his promise to brand China a currency manipulator on his first day in office.  Clearly, China’s cheating is a flashpoint for Ohio voters who have seen whole factories uprooted and replanted in China.

The Zogby Poll was commissioned by the filmmaker of Death By China Peter Navarro to benchmark attitudes of Ohioans on the China question.  Navarro is traveling throughout the state showing the film and conducting town hall meetings, with stops in Youngstown, Akron, Dayton, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Toledo, Mansfield, Portsmouth, Sandusky, Athens, and Findlay.

 

 

Filed Under: Blog Posts Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

What you See is, What you Get: On UFOs, Unicorns, Bigfoot, and Comparative Advantage

August 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Reposted from Greg Autry

Sometimes I think it’s a sin, when I fell like I winnin’, but I’m losin’ again.

-       Gordon Lightfoot, Sundown

As a lecturer and a PhD student, I’ve taught David Ricardo’s theory of Comparative Advantage to hundreds of MBA students. This is the brilliant little economic model that demonstrates how when each nation focuses their resources on the work they are best at – even if they are not better than all others – production will be maximized and consumers will benefit. In its pure, abstract form, Comparative Advantage represents an unarguable truth. There is a beautiful, transcendental moment when a business student suddenly “gets” the simple mathematical model and sees the nearly magical benefits Ricardo’s model offers to “all trading nations.” It’s comparable to the experience of an undergrad sociology student encountering Karl Marx for the first time. Suddenly the world is brilliantly clear and the solutions are so simple, if only everyone could be compelled to embrace them.

As different as Riardianism is from Marxism, the two economic theories share a common theme – they sound swell, but fail completely when faced with the reality of human behavior. The problem is that both of these grand ideas require that individuals or nations, respectively, repress their natural inclination to act in a self-interested manner, for the promise of a mutual beneficial outcome.

In the real world, we know this promise never works. Letting individuals pursue their own, inefficient, unplanned, selfish economic courses actually works out better than getting smart folks to organize them for the greater good – the free market has trumped socialism in every sad empirical test of Marx’s dream.

The ideology derived from Comparative Advantage that has erroneously been labeled “Free Trade” actually involves the same logic as socialism – that free nations subsume their national desires for control of their jobs and strategic resources to a greater global interest, which promises to benefit their consumers as well. Even more curiously, the strongest supporters of individual freedom are the first to villainize anyone who suggest “protecting” a domestic market for the benefit of their nation. They then invariably drag out the ghost of David Ricardo to explain to us simpletons that becoming the world’s trade bitch will be good for us. China’s 25% tariff on U.S. cars vs. our 2.5% tariff on their imports is no problem becauseAmerican consumers benefit from low prices when American producers shut down!

However, the empirical evidence is again, perfectly clear: nations that pursue the acquisition of technology and capital, fight for high-value manufacturing jobs, and seek smart trade advantages increase their national wealth and individual prosperity. Naïve countries that actually practice, “free trade” spiral into decline and unemployment. There is no better example of this than 19th century Britain, the first nation to embrace Ricardo’s crazy idea.

After the brilliant theoretician sold Parliament on his simplistic theory, the UK went on a free trade frenzy. During the next century the United States, operated on Hamilton’s “American System” featuring very high tariffs, and an active industrial policy geared toward rewarding production, building infrastructure and developing markets. America gutted England’s manufacturing base. Despite controlling a third of the world’s resources Britain entered a slow decline. Only those Brits involved in investing capital elsewhere gained real wealth. Building a welfare state became unavoidable to avoid revolt. Meanwhile, the U.S. developed a vibrant middle class and rose to global prominence.

However, in the last century smart leaders in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and others have followed the American System to perfection, while giving “free trade” the appropriate lip service for a senile America. The results were absolutely predictable to anyone with common sense.

In most ways, China’s rise has been no exception. It isn’t that the Communist Party has been run by brilliant new thinkers (the last really new thing out of China was probably gunpowder), it is simply that they steal good ideas and have belatedly copied a proven economic formula. China’s leaders have followed a policy of pure self-interest while mumbling all the right words in public as they dance their way through the free trade tango with skill. If they’d actually had good sense they would have done this fifty years earlier and spared the Chinese people decades of misery.

The exception with China is, of course, that the Communists never have any concern for personal misery. Their goal is nothing but building greater power for those at the top of the Communist Party dog pile and economic planning is just a tool to achieve that. That’s why handing over the torch of global leadership this time is a very different thing than it was with the UK-U.S. transition last century. Supporting the U.S. to Communist China power transfer is tantamount to endorsing a new Dark Ages for humanity.

In my next posting, I’ll address the theoretical weaknesses that cause comparative advantage to backfire in the real world. In the meantime, understand that counter-intuitive economic theories are always the rage with academics and pundits that need to sound cleverer than the average citizen. Remember, these are the folks that sold us the “we can borrow and spend our way to prosperity” theory under the label of Keynesianism. When something looks like economic slight of hand to you it probably is; and whenever you encounter an ideology-driven economic theory fiercely supported by a cadre of closed-minded, true believers run!

Empirical evidence should trump theory. When medical researchers see that an experimental treatment appears to be actually killing their patients they halt the research and re-evaluate, regardless of how good the thing looked on paper. This common sense protocol should apply to U.S. economic policy – where we only have one patient. If the theory is obviously not delivering economic benefits STOP! Instead, while we congratulate our self on the victory of free trade our trade deficit soars, unemployment skyrockets, GDP plummets, and a staggering debt accumulate. The true believers tell us to close our eyes and stay on course, because the enormous Chinese market is just about / very soon / any day now going to usher in a new generation of prosperity. Sure, right.

In my next post, I’ll address the theoretical problems with Comparative Advantage.

 

Greg Autry serves as Senior Economist with the American Jobs Alliance and is the co-author of the book Death by China, now a documentary film directed by Peter Navarro and narrated by Martin Sheen.

Please follow Greg on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/gregwautry

and sign up for email updates at: http://www.gregautry.us/updates

Filed Under: Blog Posts Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The Chinese Dress Code

August 11, 2012 By 1 Comment

reposted from Greg Autry

On July 20, the Wall Street Journal ran an apologist editorial on the front page of the Marketplace section entitled Does it Matter China Made the U.S. Olympic Uniforms?  This sanctimonious piece by John Bussey condemned Senator Harry Reid and Rep. John Boehner for questioning the Olympic Committees outsourcing of more U.S. jobs. The Senator and Congressman were right-on. It does matter. It matters quite a bit.

It matters because the Olympics is a show and everything about it is politically symbolic. At its best Olympic symbolism is about bringing together diverse people from around the globe to compete on a fair playing field, founded on the democratic traditions of ancient Greece. At its worst, the symbolism glorifies a totalitarian regime as in Hitler’s 1936 Nazi pageant and Hu Jintao’s 2008 Communist blow out.

While that over-the-top Chinese carnival offend the senses, under its saccharine coating lurked the usual Communist grime. With the world carefully distracted by astounding fireworks displays, the repression of the Falun Gong, the razing of Christian churches, the brutalization of peaceful Tibet, and organ harvesting for profit continued unabated.

Thousands of Beijingers were forced to relocate to build the Olympic facilities. The month before the spectacle, I took this picture. Here you see the last home still standing; its owner having plastered every wall with Communist flags and portraits of the Chinese Communist Pantheon in hopes of keeping the bulldozers at bay. That brave man understood the power of symbolism.

Meanwhile, the broadcast media, papers, and Internet were more restricted than ever and political protests were still aggressively squashed – despite a very public promise made to the international community that turned out to be just another convenient Chinese Communist lie.

Beijing also a high bar for cheating, typical for a government that has never recognized any rule of law beyond what power can get away with. Watching twelve-year-old girls used as props to boost the commie medal count was as symbolic as it gets. The Chinese government even forged passports to keep the charade going. After the Olympics ended, it was even reveled that a Chinese government run hacking ring had infiltrated the I.O.C., the World Anti-Doping Agency, and a number of national Olympic committees. This, like the Tiananmen massacre, should have told us something about how far China can be trusted in trade and military agreements – not one bit.

So what does a naïve American Olympic Committee do? Buy Chinese uniforms! And what does the co-opted U.S. media do? Tell us it doesn’t matter! If China lies, cheats, steals its way through the Olympics, why would the WSJ expect China to adhere to WTO rules? In reality that paper, like most of business press and lobby groups, simply doesn’t care about honesty in trade, because the multinational firms that support these institutions profit immensely from China’s cheating and abusive labor practices.

The Journal and their sold-out buddies at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce tell us that lost American jobs are OK, because we are all benefiting from the unseen miracle of Ricardian comparative advantage. Now, that’s a insidious abuse of economic theory that will require a whole ‘nother post to unravel, but let’s just say if you can’t see it, it probably doesn’t exist. During thirty years of empirical testing of that theory with China, American incomes and unemployment have risen in lockstep with our growing Chinese trade deficit. That is not a coincidence.

The Journal also dredges up a discredited report from two European economists at the Federal Reserve (see my piece here) as a further distraction. That report brutally twists trade data to, again, convince you of something that disagrees with your own vision: that only a tiny portion of our purchases are going to China. The bottom line is that China’s imports to the U.S. always outstrip our exports and the growing difference is now about $300Billion a year! That is an economic leakage that now accounts for nearly 2% of our GDP. If American had 2% more GDP, we’d be on easy street.

Reading the Journal article I choked on the line, “The Chinese are really good at producing low-cost uniforms.” A remarkably arrogant quip, since these little Ralph Lauren pretties cost $2,000 a piece. Maybe that’s cheap by Wall Street standards.  Its all part of turning a pump that brings in short term Wall Street profits in exchange for the transfer of our capital and technology to a regime that is both the largest abuser or human rights and America’s rising geopolitical enemy.  How dumb is that?

The good news is that in London, the demonstration of a free people celebrating both a culture and a government worthy of their pride will wash away the soot of Beijing. It’s too bad that America’s athletes won’t get clean uniforms for the games, it’s even worse when our free press dismisses legitimate concern for our unemployed and the prosecuted people of China as symbolic grandstanding.

Greg Autry serves as Senior Economist with the American Jobs Alliance and is the co-author of the book Death by China, now a documentary film directed by Peter Navarro and narrated by Martin Sheen.

Please follow Greg on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/gregwautry

and sign up for email updates at: http://www.gregautry.us/updates

Filed Under: Blog Posts Tagged With: , , , ,

Tiananmen Remembered, Again

June 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

 

In remembrance of the anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen on 6/4, China’s  9/11, inflicted on the people by those who claim to lead them I’m reposting this piece I wrote with Tang Baiqiao.

We have forgotten the lessons of Tiananmen

From the San Diego Union Tribune, June 16, 2011

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/jun/16/we-have-forgotten-the-lessons-of-tiananmen/

Twenty-two years ago, millions of people gathered in public places across China to demand the respect of their government. As thousands jammed into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, one of us was there in the crowd as the other watched fascinated from the other side of the world. Unknown to each other at the time, we were connected by the common exhilaration of the moment as free people stood up to claim both their natural rights and a nation’s rightful place in the world order. It should have been a glorious moment as well as a new basis for a true partnership with China’s natural ally, the United States.

Of course, we all know what did happen that June 4. Though one of us was lucky enough to just miss the gunfire by returning to lead protests in Changsha and the other remained safely behind a television screen in America, we shared the horror, disgust and disillusionment of that day. We wept, shook our heads, cried out, “Why?” and reached the same, frankly obvious conclusion: The Chinese Communist Party is a murderous regime that couldn’t be trusted and America’s policy of engagement had failed.

History tells us that engagement with totalitarians has been a proven dead end since Napoleon used the 1801 Treaty of Amiens to consolidate his regime of fear and to prepare for war, and the lesson for democracies has been the same from Hitler to Gadhafi: Bad guys don’t change and they do not honor agreements.

Two decades of failure since have made clear that fake smiles aside, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao are no different from the rest of history’s rogue’s gallery. It’s no surprise that China’s dictators continue to lie, cheat and steal their way through domestic politics, international affairs and business engagements.

What is surprising is that America’s business leaders, politicians and pundits continue to pander to this particular group of thugs against all reason. Decades after Tiananmen, we ask those Americans just how many artists, peacemakers and religious practitioners must China lock up before America opens its sleepy eyes? How many millions of women need be subjected to forced reproductive control? How many executions must there be? To what degree must China’s cities, rivers and seas be polluted by a perverted state capitalism that keeps Communists in power?

If human rights no longer carries weight with America’s free traders, then we ask how many American jobs need to be sacrificed to China’s blatantly manipulated currency, sad labor conditions and abuse of World Trade Organization rules? How many American firms need to be destroyed by intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, “partnership” requirements, tariffs and export restrictions? How badly do our most promising new companies, like Facebook and Google, have to be cheated by market-restricting censorship and government-backed cyber attacks?

Before he was oddly silenced, Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, commented to the Financial Times, “I really worry about China. I’m not sure that in the end they want any of us to win, or any of us to be successful.” Of course they don’t. Why would a government whose very name – “The People’s Republic” – is a lie and that uses its own constitution – which guarantees freedom of speech, religion, and assembly – as a doormat honor any partnership with your company or America – the embodiment of the principles it despises?

Finally, if you find repression and economic warfare an unwelcome distraction from consumption of cheap goods, please consider this before you fill your shopping cart: China is building a massive, high-tech military force that grows faster than its breakneck gross domestic product. A rising armada of naval power, missiles, stealth aircraft and space weaponry is aimed squarely at our allies in Asia, U.S. armed forces and the heartland of America. Is this the kind of regime we should be doing business with?

Over the years we have become very familiar with the argument that U.S. policy should remain forever frozen regardless of how outrageous Beijing’s behavior becomes, because any action in support of our principles would either prove futile or worse, resulting in economic retribution. The former argument may be true, but has not altered our approach toward China’s good friends in Iran, Zimbabwe or Sudan, while the latter simply makes it clear that we are falling into the Communist Party’s web of intimidation. That is exactly the reason we must make a stand sooner rather than later.

—————–

Autry is the co-author of “Death by China” and teaches macroeconomics at UC Irvine. Tang was a student leader in China in 1989, still works for Chinese democracy, and is the co-author of “My Two Chinas: The Memoirs of Chinese Counter-Revolutionary.”

Filed Under: Blog Posts Tagged With: , , , , ,

Memorial Day

May 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Dear Lord,

Lest I continue
 my complacent way,


Help me to remember that somewhere,
 Somehow out there


A man died for me today.


As long as there be war,
 I then must
 Ask and answer


Am I worth dying for?

- Wartime Prayer by Eleanor Roosevelt

 

Let’s consider Mrs. Roosevelt’s question this Memorial Day and take a moment to remember the “forgotten war” of Korea. Sixty years ago 36,940 Americans (along with many brave Korean, Canadian, UK and other allied soldiers) died fighting Chinese communism in cold and miserable conflict. In Death by China, we shared Marine Lee Bergee’s memory of Frozen Chosin, “We all have memories of buddies killed, of the hordes of Chinese assaulting our frozen lines, and the long dangerous walk out . . .”

Today, most Americans don’t even know that we fought a war with China in the recent past and they are even more oblivious to the fact that we are losing a bigger one right now. That horribly cold war is still in progress, both technically and literally. Technically we are still at war in Korea because the Armistice Agreement of 1953 never progressed into a full-fledged peace agreement. And we are literally in a Cold War as China actively supports a nuclear dictatorship in North Korean, undermines our economy, corrupts our political system, infiltrates our educational system, steals our technology, buys up our land and businesses, and openly prepares for battle with the U.S. seventh fleet.

Every time we go into WalMart and pick up a Chinese product when we could have made another choice we are selling out the brave young men who gave their all to uphold freedom and liberty and the answer to Mrs. Roosevelt’s question is, “NO, we not worth dying for.”

 

-Greg Autry, Senior Economist with the American Jobs Alliance

 

 

photos: Greg Autry Korean War Memorial, Washington DC, February 2012

Filed Under: Blog Posts Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The Time Has Come – BOYCOTT

May 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The American Jobs Alliance and TAP America have joined in calling for a BOYCOTT of China. Further announcements of support and events will be forthcoming. It’s time for American Consumers to alert American Firms to the market risk they face when they cooperate with and support the Communist Government of China and its mechanisms of repression!

Read about it at Business Week:

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/markets/news/article.asp?docKey=600-201205150753MRKTWIREUSPR_____887428-1&params=timestamp%7C%7C05/15/2012%207:53%20AM%20ET%7C%7Cheadline%7C%7CTAP%20America%2C%20American%20Job%20Alliance%20and%20Made%20In%20the%20USA%20Foundation%20Form%20National%20′Buy%20American’%20Coalition%7C%7CdocSource%7C%7CMarketwire%7C%7Cprovider%7C%7CACQUIREMEDIA

Complete Text of the Press Release:

TAP AMERICA, AMERICAN JOB ALLIANCE AND MADE IN THE USA FOUNDATION FORM NATIONAL ‘BUY AMERICAN’ COALITION

Organizations Partner to Promote Job Creation & Encourage Boycott of Products Made InChina

 

SEATTLE, WASH. – May 15, 2012 – TAP America, a non-profit organization dedicated to strengthening America, Made In the USA Foundation and the American Job Alliance today announced the ‘Buy American Coalition’ to stimulate our national economy, protect our nation’s values and weaken authoritarian regimes abroad that violate human rights.

 

The formation of the ‘Buy American Coalition’ comes on the heels of the latest troubling news out of China. Customs officials have seized thousands of pills made from the flesh of dead babies, the product of the Chinese Communist Party’s forced abortion policy.  The Chinese dissident who fled to the U.S. Embassy, Chen Guangfeng, was imprisoned and persecuted by Communist officials for protesting this inhuman practice.

 

TAP America Founder Mark Bloome said, “The ‘Buy American Coalition’ is of great importance to our country now more than ever. We are seeing our jobs being hollowed out in America by unfair competition from China. Working with both the American Jobs Alliance and Made In the USA Foundation, we believe that this issue is large enough to require examination by multiple organizations. We at TAPamerica.org are leading thecharge.”

 

The China Threat

The Buy American Coalition calls on citizens to buy American and boycott China. This grassroots action sends a clear message that Americans believe that our people and our nation prosper when we adhere to traditional values of liberty and human dignity, not when we abandon them to appease foreign tyrants.

 

China’s authoritarian regime is critically dependent on American cash and investment to fund its machinery of repression.   “When consumers buy American-made products they put Americans to work and starve the Chinese Communist Party of resources.  This is a double victory – for American workers and American values,” said Greg Autry, Senior Economist with the American Jobs Alliance.  “It is not possible or even necessary to completely shun Chinese-made products to have a positive impact.   Even the threat of a substantial boycott would change the behavior of corporations that benefit from China’s exploited labor and mercantilist trade behavior,” Autry notes. “A 20% drop in imports from China would easily destabilize Beijing.  Buying American will make U.S. firms appreciate that.”

 

“For decades the US government has said that doing business with China would bring democracy and human rights to the Chinese people, but it is now clearer than ever that buying up their cheap prison-made goods has only strengthened the Chinese Communist Party,” said Harry Wu, Human Rights Activist and Founder of the Laogai Museum in Washington D.C. the first U.S. museum to directly address the human rights issues in China. “This imbalanced relationship is hurting the American people too, as they see their health threatened by unsafe Chinese products, their jobs lost, and their economy undermined. If governments do not insist that the repressive Chinese regime abide by fair trade practices, then it is up to American corporations and consumers to hold China accountable for its prison slave labor, lack of compassion for other workers, and countless human rights violations.”

 

The coalition will explore the foundations of America’s chronic joblessness and rising underemployment with the goal of finding actionable solutions.  Important issues under consideration include: international trade, geopolitics, currency devaluation, product safety and compliance, human rights, resource availability, and consumer interest in American products. The coalition is already experiencing broad, non-partisan support from many individuals and organizations. It does not endorse any political party, candidate, union, trade association or corporation.

 

The ‘Buy American Coalition” is comprised of:

·       Mark Bloome, Founder of TAP America

·       Richard Tso, Executive Director of TAP America

·       Greg Autry, Senior Economist for the American Jobs Alliance

·       Curtis Ellis, Communications Director of American Jobs Alliance

·       Joel Joseph, Founder of Made In the USA Foundation

 

“Our organization is all about creating jobs for Americans,” said Curtis Ellis, Communications Director with the American Job Alliance. “Forming this coalition aligns our organization with TAP America so that we can tackle the issues preventing job creation in the United States.  High on the list are the predatory trade practices of the Chinese Communist regime.  We can put our money where our values are by buying American at every opportunity.  Our ancestors built this great country by doing what was right, not what was easy.  We must follow their example to rebuild the country.”

 

“There are three main causes of our trade deficit:  trade with China, imports of automobiles and imported oil,” said Joel Joseph at Made In the USA Foundation. “The deficit with China is the most dangerous because many Chinese industries are owned by the People’s Liberation Army, and American consumers are thus funding a military force that poses a significant danger to the well-being of the United States.”

 

TAP America recently announced their TAP Certified Merchant program to encourage stores to stock at least 20% ofU.S. goods and to increase their American made inventories by just 1% per month. As incentive, businesses who sign up are featured in news articles, included in the TAP online business directory, and are featured in a Groupon-like service called AmeriCoupon that helps people find deals on products made in America. TAP Merchant Filson was recently awarded the TAP America Loyalty to America Award for its commitment to keeping over 70% of manufacturing in the United States.

 

Since launching in January of 2011, TAP has created national awareness campaigns aimed at promoting tolerance, encouraging people to stay physically active, and to purchase products made in America. For more information about TAP America, to volunteer or to make a donation, please visit www.tapamerica.org.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Still Commies After All These Years

May 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It being International Worker’s Day and all it seemed like a good time to review the anachronism that is the Chinese Communist Party. In the Western World, particularly in board rooms, the halls of academia, and shallow business bestsellers it has become popular to repeat the favorite CCP propaganda line that Deng Xiaoping sent China on an irreversible path toward a modern, free market economy. Many Americans who’ve toured Shanghai and Beijing think they are seeing an open economy with a vibrantly growing private sector. Of course, like a lot of things that come out of China these days, the facade of Capitalism quickly falls apart upon closer inspection. This isn’t real Chinese capitalism like you’d see in Taiwan or Hong Kong.

(photo – Greg Autry, 2010) 

Some Facts:

The State Sector Accounts about HALF of China’s GDP – According to most economic analysis State Owned Enterprises are responsible for between 45-50% of China’s economy. Consider this recent testimony to the US China Commission by Andrew Szamosszegi

Far from privatizing, the State Owned portion of the economy has been INCREASING in recent years as corrupt officials use their inside track with China’s huge State Owned Banks to corner all the ready capital. Moody’s analytics calls this process a “two-speed economy.”

The size of State Owned Companies is increasing far faster than private firms as the government sheds its smaller, non-profitable enterprises and concentrates resources in heavy industrialized firms. These big SOEs also attract $billions in U.S. joint venture capital from the likes of General Electric and General Motors. Meanwhile the size of private firms has hardly progressed at all. On average SOEs are 13x bigger than China’s nominally private firms.

China’s response to the economic crisis was to dump even more money into the state sector driving a process the Chinese call “Guo Jin, Min Tui” (国进民退) or “The State Advances and the People Retreat.”

Maoism and old fashioned Marxist-Leninism has been enjoying a renaissance in China, as evidenced by the spectacular rise of hardline communism advocate Bo XiLai to a position where he threatened the very security of the state. Even members of the intellectual elite have embrace the “New Left.”

In China it has always been hard to draw a firm line between an SOE and private firm or even tell how involved the Party controlled military is in a business. Huawei being a notorious example of that.

 

Finally, let’s look at the reality of what are some of the good, ‘ol fashioned Communist firms:

All of China’s Big banks

All Important Resource Companies

All Big Military Suppliers

China’s Biggest Airlines

China’s Biggest Retailer  – yes, ironically even China’s biggest retailer isn’t WalMart, but a State Owned Chain who has used its connections to make life hell for the American firm and other Western competitors.

 

This List Doesn’t Lie
When some buddy of yours cracks “China’s economy is more open than America’s” or the next time you get stuck in a plane seat next to a meathead in a suit  who just bought some blather by Thomas Friedman in the airport “book store” and starts praising the “new”, “modernizing”, “liberalizing”, and “efficient” Chinese economy, hand that fool this list and ask them “Is this what a vibrant Capitalist Economy looks like to you?”

 

Top 20 Chinese Firms (according to Fortune Global 500) :

1. Sinopec (CNOCC) – State Owned oil company

2. China National Petroleum Corporation (PetroChina) – State Owned oil company

3. State Grid Corporation – State Owned utility

4. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China – State Owned bank

5. China Mobile – State Owned telecom provider

6. China Railway Group – State Owned railroad

7. China Railway Construction – State Owned railroad builder

8. China Construction Bank – State Owned bank

9. China Life Insurance – State Owned issuance (Nationalized, the “real” China Life is in Taipei)

7. Bank of China – State Owned bank

10. Agricultural Bank of China – State Owned bank

11. Bank of China – State Owned bank

12. Dongfeng Motor[1] – State Owned car company

13. China State Construction Engineering – State Owned construction firm

14. China Southern Power Grid – State Owned utility

15. Shanghai Automotive – State Owned Car company

16. China National Offshore Oil – State Owned colonial style oil exploration firm

17. Sinochem Group – State Owned Chemical company

18. China FAW Group – State Owned truck and bus firm

19. China Communications Construction – State Owned telecom construction

20. Baosteel – State Owned steel founder

It is often tricky to figure out that a firm like China Life, China Telecom, or Shanghai Auto is State Owned because the Chinese run a scam they call an “IPO” and sell powerless, minority shares in these opaque state monstrosities to naive Western investors and unscrupulous mutual fund managers. If you’ve got some sort of “Global Growth Fund” or “Asian Opportunity” B.S. in your 401k, you’re probably loaded with this crap. The fact is that these are nothing like public companies. Their CEO’s are appointed by the Central Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party, not by the token board of directors and your shares have exactly zero real voting power. When the CCP decides your shares are worthless, they will be. Check out “The Party” by Richard McGregor for the whole horror show on this.

If you go to the Fortune site, you can just click on each firm in the list and look down to see if its ownership is “50% or more government owned.”

Even most large nominally “private” firms are headed by a Party member or even the princeling grandkid of some old Commie who slogged through the Long March with Mao and his harem. They all work together in one of the world’s most closed good ‘ol boys club behind their great wall of Guanxi (关系). By the way, don’t let any Chinese tell you that word means “friendship.” The literal translation is more like: “to block a connection” and in the real world of Chinese business Guanxi most often used to define a social network setup to screw outsiders;  and that’s exactly what the Communist Party’s Guanxi system has been doing to the West for a generation.

While the luxury loving leaders of the “People’s Republic” do trample all the well meaning, albeit naive, qualities of Marxism – like wealth redistribution and social equality – the China body politic remains pure Leninist, with the usual back room dog fights, purges, censorship, propaganda and a brutally repressive police state.

Bottom line: When it says “Communist” right on the label, it probably is.

 

Greg Autry serves Senior Economist with the American Jobs Alliance and is co-author (with Peter Navarro) of Death by China: Confronting the Dragon – a Global Call to Action. He blogs regularly with Navarro on the Huffington Post.

 

[1] Note: Noble Group of Hong Kong omitted since it is not a PRC firm, but a legacy Hong Kong company.

Filed Under: Blog Posts Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Human Rights Activist? What Human Rights Activist? Oh, THAT Human Rights, Activist! Well, um . . .

April 30, 2012 By 1 Comment

Responding to the heroic escape of blind Chinese rights activist, Chen GuangCheng from brutal house arrest, the best comment a White House spokesman could muster on Sunday was that that the Obama administration hopes to “balance” its commitment to human rights with its commitment to maintaining the economic and strategic relationship with China’s dictators. In other words our former activist President is saying, “Human rights just doesn’t trump money and power.”

Sadly, this should come as no surprise, given the way this administration and its predecessors have dealt with China. Throwing Tibetans, Chinese Christians, Falun Gong, and democracy advocates under the bus in order to appease the Boys from Beijing and keep them funding Washington’s reckless spending has been the most successful bi-partisan policy this decade. Keeping WalMart’s aisle stuffed with undervalued Chinese goods has been important in both buying off consumers –who’ve lost their jobs to China’s predatory trade behavior – and in driving up profits for the multinational corporations that fund the campaign machines.

So, while President Obama was happy to endorse China’s non-democratic succession process by welcoming dictator-in-waiting, Xi Jinping to the White House, having one brave, blind man show up at the U.S. embassy in Beijing asking for refuge has created a political nightmare.  While nobody in the government has officially confirmed that Chen is in the embassy, the fact that they have also refused to deny the rumors makes it pretty obvious, that they are true. The silence over this issue has made the administration’s discomfort, palpable.

Mr. Chen’s case has handed Mr. Obama’s Republican opponents the ripest of tomato’s to toss at the administration’s appeasement policy.  Mitt Romney quickly called on the administration to “take every measure” to protect Chen and Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey has written Secretary of Sate Clinton urging her to, “raise the issue of all harassed, arrested, disappeared, and disbarred human rights lawyers and defenders with the Chinese Government on an on-going basis and link this issue to the United States’ interests in the rule of law and respect for human rights generally in China.”

Of course, that is exactly what Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton do not want to be doing on the eve of an economic and strategy summit with China’s oligarchy. That sort of talk could disturb the very cozy status quo that America’s crony capitalists have struck with Beijing’s corrupt communists. Threatening the flow of profits to multinationals like General Electric and banks like Goldman Sachs, could reveal just how weak this supposed economic recovery is and would surely mean a drop in contributions to Obama friendly PACs during the most expensive Presidential campaign in history.

Coming at this critical juncture in Chinese and American politics Chen’s case offers the perfect opportunity to disrupt the current paradigm. It’s time for all the interested parties to come together and say “Human rights, jobs, and peace are more important than low prices and WalMart and next quarter’s stock indices.”  Boycott China! Do your best to avoid Chinese goods until there is regime change in Beijing along with a change in attitude in Washington and in America’s boardrooms. I call on every decent free person to commit to reducing their purchases of Chinese products by 20% until blind men no longer have to escape beatings by crawling over walls and swimming rivers to hide, unacknowledged in an American embassy.

Greg Autry serves Senior Economist with the American Jobs Alliance and is co-author (with Peter Navarro) of Death by China: Confronting the Dragon – a Global Call to Action. He blogs regularly with Navarro on the Huffington Post.

Filed Under: Blog Posts Tagged With: , , , , ,

David Kilgour on China

April 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The following is speech made at University of Dubuque, Iowa by the Honorable David Kilgour. It is perhaps the best, short and concise overview of the China problem I have seen. It’s an excellent piece to share with those who are oblivious to the threat that the growing power and wealth of this brutal regime presents to humanity.

Mr. Kilgour is has served as a Member of the Parliament in Canada and as Secretary of State for Asia. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. 

You can find David Kilgour online at: http://www.david-kilgour.com/  and this piece at: http://www.david-kilgour.com/2012/IOWA_TALK_BY_DAVID_KILGOUR_2012.pdf

China and the West: An Uncomfortable Connection

Hon. David Kilgour, J.D.
Sixth Annual Wendt Lecture
Stolz Center, University of Dubuque, Iowa April 12, 2012

It has been a fascinating week on campus as a Woodrow Wilson fellow; I’m grateful to Dr. Henry Pitman and the Wendt Center for being able to engage with so many of you. You are an academic family: curious, courteous, optimistic, hard- working, diverse, helpful and caring. It is now clear to me why China’s president designate, Xi Jinping, came to Iowa 25 years ago to experience the heart of America and why he returned this past February to revisit the family who hosted him then. He was quoted after February as saying that he was first impressed with your hospitality and American industriousness all those years ago.

I admire the people of China greatly, including their often heroic protests against acts of misfeasance by their government. To his credit, the outgoing premier, Wen Jiabao, has spoken often about the necessity for democratic reform. He recently had a major role in blocking the advance of Bo Xilai to the nine-member Standing Committee of the Communist Party. Bo and his mentor, former President Jiang Zemin, have been among the worst offenders in the ongoing persecution of the Falun Gong movement since July, 1999. You might have noticed yesterday press reports from Beijing that Bo has been removed from his remaining posts and that his wife, Gu Kailai, is under investigation concerning the murder of a British citizen. The next to go will hopefully be Zhou Yongkang, the Party head of security, who worked closely with Jiang and Bo in the persecution of Falun Gong.

 

Premier Wen Jiabao (Photo credit: zimbro.com)

The differences real friends of China in open societies everywhere have are with the party-state in Beijing, which is unworthy of the Chinese people and has ruled contrary to their best traditional values since seizing power in 1949. Four major areas of concern at home and internationally today are Maoist governance practices, persecution of religions, state capitalism, and systematic attacks on Internet freedom.

page1image9372

 

Jon Halliday and Jung Chang

 

Governance

As a university student, I valued my little red book of Mao Zedong’s sayings and naively wanted to believe his then many apologists. A number of books, individuals and visits to China have since opened my eyes, but none more than Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang (author of Wild Swans) and Jon Halliday. Their meticulous research has demolished virtually every claim to legitimacy or respect for Mao.

Mao portrait in Tiananmen Square today

The authors conclude that Mao, holding absolute power over the Chinese people for decades, was “responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth century leader.” This places him with Stalin and Hitler among the century’s three worst mass murderers of civilians. Yale history professor Timothy Snyder’s stunning 2010 book Bloodlands explains how and why in “the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people.” Jung-Halliday expose Mao’s political murders, including the death by starvation of 25-40 million Chinese during his bizarre “Great Leap Forward” between 1959 and 1961. They sum up the regime as of 2006, “Today Mao’s portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square…The current Communist regime declares itself to be Mao’s heir and fiercely perpetuates (his) myth.

I’ll add a word here about the Confucius Institutes, which Beijing has established on a number of campuses in America and other countries. Mao disapproved of the philosopher Confucius and any authentic Confucian scholar would probably be arrested today in China. The Party realizes that enough is known about Mao now that it could not plant institutes bearing his name in the West, so it uses the much-respected name of Confucius. As to what they are intended to do beyond Mandarin teaching, you might wish to look at evidence given in your Congress recently by Greg Autry: http://deathbychina.com/archives/865 .

 

Richard McGregor

The book, The Party, was published in 2010 by Richard McGregor, former China bureau chief for the Financial Times. It documents the continuing role of the Party and its grip on the government, courts, media and military. Among its observations:

  • “Top leaders adhere to Marxism in their public statements, even as they depend on a ruthless private sector to create jobs. The Party preaches equality, while presiding over incomes as unequal as anywhere in Asia” (Perhaps you noticed that among the hand-picked delegates at the recent National People’s Congress were 61 billionaires.).
  • “…the three pillars of (the Party) survival strategy (are): control of personnel, propaganda and the People’s Liberation Army…(It) has eradicated or emasculated political rivals; eliminated the autonomy of the courts and press; restricted religion and civil society; denigrated rival versions of nationhood; centralized political power; established extensive networks of security police; and dispatched dissidents to labour camps.”
  • “The communists rode to power on popular revulsion against corruption but have become riddled by the same cancer themselves…Since 1982, about 80 per cent of the 130,000 to 190,000 officials disciplined annually for malfeasance …received only a warning. Only 6 per cent were criminally prosecuted, and of them only 3 per cent went to jail.”

Persecution of Religions

In mid-2006, Canadian lawyer David Matas and I were asked to report independently on allegations that peaceful Falun Gong practitioners were being killed for their vital organs. To our dismay, we located 52 kinds of evidence that a new crime against humanity was occurring across China on a large scale, which continues today. You can access our revised report in 18 languages at http://organharvestinvestigation.net or our 2009 book, Bloody Harvest, which is available in Mandarin and English.

 

page3image8180

International gathering of Falun Gong practitioners

Matas and I have since travelled as volunteers to more than 40 national capitals, meeting with Falun Gong practitioners who managed to leave both forced labour camps across China and the country itself, citizens, legislators, government ministers, academics and journalists in a campaign to persuade the party-state to cease a barbaric national and international commerce. I understand that Wen Jiabao has recently called on the party-state to cease the persecution.

There is much on the Internet and elsewhere about party-state persecution of religions in general, but a reasonably current article, which I co-wrote can be accessed at http://david-kilgour.com/2011/convivium2011.pdf .

page4image3592

Christian house church destroyed

Tibetan Buddhist monks at sit-in

The piece concludes that the persecution of Falun Gong, Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims and other spiritual communities continues across China and that “All people of faith and their governments must let the party-state know continuously that they decry its tactics of persecution and intimidation against … spiritual communities.”

If experts are correct that, apart from Falun Gong whose numbers were 70-90 million by the government’s own estimate before the persecution began in 1999,

200-300 million Chinese now practise religion–mostly Buddhists or Daoists, with estimates of Christians varying from 50-100 million–the need for residents of open societies and their governments to ‘blame and shame’ the party-state has probably never been greater.

Uighur Muslims

 

State Capitalism

Manufacturing remains the lifeblood of most prosperous economies. Western and other economies have watched myriad manufacturing jobs at home and elsewhere disappear because investors outside China felt they could make greater profits there, where an ‘anything-goes’ and ‘workers-and-the-natural- environment-be-damned’ export model prevails. A report on state capitalism in the January 21, 2012, issue of the Economist makes a number of points about the Chinese model:

  • State capitalism, going back to Japan in the 1950s and Germany in the 1870s, sees itself as an alternative to liberal capitalism by fusing the power of government with capitalism through such mechanisms as listing government-owned companies on international stock markets. The Chinese party-state is the largest shareholder in the country’s 150 largest companies and directs thousands of others. The heads of the 50 or so leading companies have encrypted telephones on their desks, providing a link to the Party’s high command. It also has cells in most companies in the private sector.
  • A culture of corruption permeates China’s economy today, with Transparency International ranking it far down its list at 75th place on its perceived corruption index for 2011. The Economist quotes a central bank of China estimate that between the mid-1990s and 2008 some 16,000- 18,000 Chinese officials and executives of state-owned companies “made off with a total of $123 billion.” The piece concludes, “By turning companies into organs of the government, state capitalism simultaneously concentrate power and corrupts it.”

Premier Wen Jiabao, China’s senior economic official, said on March 14, “The reform in China has come to a critical stage. Without the success of political structural reform, it is impossible for us to fully institute economic structural reform. The gains we have made… may be lost, new problems that have cropped up in China’s society cannot be fundamentally resolved and such (a) historical tragedy as the Cultural Revolution may happen again.” Only last week, Wen added courageously in a radio broadcast across China that the state-controlled banks are a “monopoly” that must be broken.

As Martin Wolf noted in the Financial Times (March 21), “ getting from an investment rate of 50 per cent of gross domestic product to one of 35 per cent, without a deep recession…, requires an offsetting surge in consumption. China has no easy way to engineer such a surge, which is why its response to the crisis has been still higher investment. In addition, China has come to rely heavily on investment in property construction: over the past 13 years investment in housing has grown at an average annual rate of 26 per cent. Such growth will not continue.”

Concerning the housing bubble in parts of China, I recently noticed a news item in the Financial Times. In the coastal city of Wenzhou, luxury apartments are to be built for as much as 70,000 Yuan ($11,000) a square metre, which is about twice the annual income of the average resident. To finance a 150 square metre apartment would consume every penny of a typical resident’s income for 350 years. In my opinion, that bubble is going to burst soon.

Rebecca Mackinnon

Abuse of Internet

Rebecca MacKinnon worked for CNN in Beijing from 1992 to 2001. Her book,

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom,

published this year is in part about empowering the oppressed and disaffected among two billion Internet users worldwide. Here are three of her points of relevance to China:

Western companies have helped to legitimize what she terms “networked authoritarianism” in which their networks become the paid extensions of China’s party-state power, with most failing to accept responsibility to the public interest in any way by helping the regime to create and enforce its “great firewall”.

  • Google stopped censoring its Chinese search engine, Google.cn, and moved it out of China in March, 2010 in response to attacks on its G-mail service from computers with military grade sophistication located within China. Later in the year, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, and Jared Cohen wrote quite correctly, “Democratic governments have an obligation to join together while also respecting the power of the private and nonprofit sectors to bring about change.”
  • In China today, an estimated five million of China’s 500 million Internet users are able to evade censorship screens in cyberspace. Until this number can grow to a critical mass large enough that truthful information can become known generally by the Chinese people, party-state censorship will be able to maintain a ‘gilded cage’ around the country. Three of the best censorship circumvention tools are FreeGate, Ultrasurf and DynaWeb; open society governments and civil society organizations should support then all.

A Foxconn factory

Many know that the working conditions at Foxconn in China, where so many Apple products are manufactured, were so bad that in 2010 a number of employees killed themselves by jumping from the roof of one of its buildings. Both Apple and Foxconn have recently promised to improve, but how many other manufacturers across China continue to treat employees inhumanly?

Chrystia Freeland, editor of Thomson Reuters Digital, asks timely questions. She refers to Daron Acemoglu, an MIT economist, who asserts that China’s rulers have been until now been able to deliver strong economic growth without loosening political and social controls. Technology, which could only be developed in open societies, is today a factor in preserving authoritarianism in China.

Conclusion

Governments of open societies and their private sectors should examine why they are supporting the violation of so many universal values in order to increase tradeand business with China. For years, this has resulted mostly in our jobs being outsourced to China and continuous increases in our bi-lateral trade deficits. Do those in our business communities so overinvested in China feel no responsibility to the employment needs of fellow citizens? Are the rest of us too focused on access to inexpensive consumer goods and essentially ignoring the human, social and natural environment costs paid by Chinese nationals to produce them?

Peter Navarro, a professor at the University of California, asserts that consumer markets worldwide have been “conquered” by China largely through cheating. For its trading partners, Navarro has various proposals intended to ensure that trade becomes fair. Specifically, he says all trading nations should:

 

  • define currency manipulation as an illegal export subsidy and add it to other subsidies when calculating anti-dumping and countervail penalties;
  • respect intellectual property; adopt and enforce health, safety and environmental regulations consistent with international norms;
  • ban the use of forced labour effectively-not merely on paper as now- and provide decent wages and working conditions for all;
  • adopt “zero-tolerance” for anyone selling or distributing pirated or counterfeit goods; and
  • apply provisions for protection of the natural environment in all trade agreements in order to reverse the ‘race to the environmental bottom’ in China and elsewhere.

Peter Navarro

The 2010 Report to Congress of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Commission noted that the American trade deficit in goods with China in the first eight months of 2011 was $173.4 billion, with the total cumulative deficit in goods with China since it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 now exceeding $1.76 trillion. The Commission judges that the value for the yuan is between 20- 40 percent lower than what it would otherwise be if it were allowed by the Chinese government to respond to market forces.

The party-state in Beijing is currently making major political changes in its senior personnel. Those appointed should seek dignity for all Chinese if they wish to

achieve sustainable prosperity at home. The current roles in Burma/Myanmar, Iran, Syria, Nepal, North Korea, Sudan, Taiwan, Zimbabwe and elsewhere will also require significant change if the new government’s goal is to build international harmony with justice for all nations.

The people of China want the same things as the rest of us: respect, education, safety and security, good jobs, the rule of law, democratic governance and a sustainable natural environment.

If the party-state ends its violations of human dignity at home and abroad and begins to treat all members of the human family in a transparent and equitable way, the new century can bring harmony for China and the world.

Thank you

page9image3396
Filed Under: Blog Posts Tagged With: , , , , ,

Pigs on the Wing

April 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you didn’t care what happened to me.
 And I didn’t care for you. We would zig zag our way through the boredom and pain.
Occasionally glancing up through the rain.
 Wondering which of the buggars to blame. 
And watching for pigs on the wing.

- Pink Floyd, Animals

My co-author, Peter Navarro, had a rambunctious bout on CNBC this week with China apologist, Derek Sissors over the value of Chinese real estate investment to the U.S. economy. If you like a little of the ol’ verbal ultra-violence check it out. It’s a pretty good viddy. It’s notable that the title of the segment, “Can China Rescue U.S. Housing” embraces a couple of very questionable assumptions that are unfortunately common. Namely:

  1. The Real Estate Market is heading in the wrong direction
  2. China is a normal nation.

As to the first point, I fail to understand why 99% of Americans are brainwashed into believing that jacking up the price of housing is a desirable thing in a nation with falling real incomes.  Do we want them to be more expensive so we can use them as ATMs again? As long as we insist on opening our markets to one-way trade with China we will continue to see reduced returns to our domestic labor and increased returns to our capital invested elsewhere and the 99% will find it harder and harder to buy into the market or even rent. So apparently, it just seems natural to the Washington elite that we should sell the homes repossessed from our dispossessed to the very foreigner slave drivers who put them out of work. Charles Schumer (D – NY) and Mike Lee (R – UT) would like to give foreign buyer’s visas to make that process easier.

As to the second point, the host actually compares China to Canada! Well, after all, both are large countries that start with the letter “C.” Maybe if you overlook the organ harvesting, flammable Tibetan monks, and the frightening military build up you could be confused with our noble neighbor to the North. Not.

While Peter takes on the large scale threat of $Trillions in Chinese hands ready to buy up America, an interesting backside of this issue is in the private housing market. The CNBC story notes, a third of KB home sales in a major subdivision might be going to Chinese. That’s pretty ironic, since KB is still recovering from eating millions of dollars in damages from hundreds of homes they built with dangerous Chinese drywall.

Friends in the real estate biz confirm this Chinese trend has been going on for a couple of years and I was told that in a recent quarter more than half of homes sold in my area of Orange County, California went to Chinese with cash.

What is really interesting is who these cash buyers are. Chinese American friends tell me that a LOT of these new buyers, are wealthy business people, corrupt officials, and Communist Party members moving their families to safety in America.

Apparently Wang Lijun isn’t the only one looking to get the heck out of Dodge before the bullets start flying.

Now, I don’t blame anyone who wants to flee the ironically misnamed “People’s Republic”, but the sad fact is that while Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo is still in jail and artist Ai Wei Wei is under virtual house arrest, many of the types that put them there are moving to California to keep their own sorry necks safe. Since China’s business environment runs from mildly corrupt to the utterly criminal it reasonable to believe that a decent percentage of anyone who can afford to pay cash for a million dollar home might be a shady character. The idea of using immigrants to “rescue” our housing market might not be as poetic as it seems. Attracting “high-end” immigration does offer a number of economic benefits, but importing a ready-made mafia is another song entirely.

 

- Greg Autry has taught business Strategy and Macroeconomics at the Merage School of Business,UC Irvine where he is now working on a PhD in Public Policy and Economics. He is co-author with Peter Navarro of Death by China and serves as Senior Economist for the American Jobs Alliance.

Filed Under: Blog Posts Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
« Older Posts