Needlenose

I was naturally suspicious a few years back when Rupert Murdoch decided to build a McMansion in Beijing, but now I’m certain there is something evil afoot there – the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman just used the term ‘fair and balanced’ in a discussion regarding the U.S.’s concerns that China is deliberately undervaluing the yuan in order to maintain the flow of under priced goods to the U.S.  It’s pretty clear from the context that he means it exactly in the ‘Fox’ sense – whatever we want or believe is “fair and balanced, so screw you!”

My previous post about alternative energy technology being manufactured in China attracted a fair bit of discussion.  Beyond the snark, the U.S. does indeed have legitimate concerns about how China conducts its business.

The yuan needs to float freely against the dollar and the euro – like a real currency.  Right now they have a built in mechanism to ‘not be undersold’ by U.S. goods.

Why is the U.N. still giving them development aid?  If they can afford to loan us trillions of dollars, then can afford to lift themselves out of poverty.

We need to enforce environmental concerns with excise taxes.  Chinese pollution doesn’t just stay in China – their crap comes wafting in the air and affects everyone.  They don’t want to commit to emissions caps?  Well estimate their emissions, put a price on them, and attach the price to their cheap goods.  They won’t come to the table unless we force them to come to the table.

I could go on in the same vein about labor concerns, sustainable sourcing of resources, etc.  Right now China is acting like the ‘bad boy’ of the planet, and will continue to do so if there are no consequences.

We may have invented the solar cell, but China has taken the lead in manufacturing solar panels – and wind turbines as well, to add a little salt into the wound.

President Obama, in his State of the Union speech last week, sounded an alarm that the United States was falling behind other countries, especially China, on energy. “I do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders — and I know you don’t either,” he told Congress.

That’s just rhetoric, Mr. President, Congress wants whatever their corporate masters tell them to want.  And in spite of what Justice Alito  may have been muttering during your speech, that’s regardless of where those corporate masters may live.  Multinationals just follow the money.

…Far East.  I’m really happy for the Chinese, really I am, when I hear that their economy is booming again, although admittedly I’d be happier if our own recovery wasn’t jobless.  Still, Horace Greeley’s advice to a job seeker: “Go West, Young Man,” is relevant once again, assuming you go so far West that you are in the Far East.

There is a growing trend for young job seekers to look for work in China.  It’s only a matter of time before the “Chinese Only” and the “Red Brigade” Minutemen movement arise to protest American illegals sneaking over to the new land of opportunity.

The ‘big news’ today today was non-news – how the leaders of the G-8 agreed that they’d work to keep the global average temperature from rising 3.6 degrees F (even though it went up 1/2 that already).  But as you’ve already suspected, they wouldn’t agree on any particular mechanisms to make that happen.  More hot air we didn’t need.

To top it off, neither India nor China would agree to any climate management deal.

With leaders like these, who needs enemies?  They’ll destroy the planet faster than any alien invaders ever could.

I just had to chuckle when I read this article about the U.S. is refusing to send 17 Chinese Muslim Guantanamo detainees to the PRC for “fear they might be tortured.”  As opposed to the coddling they are getting at Gitmo?  Maybe they are just jealous of the PRC, afraid their techniques will do a better job of extracting fantastic tales of imagined conspiracies than the waterboarding, stress positions and other “Bush League” methods we employ?

Seriously, how could a government PR person issue a statement like that with a straight face?