The Agonist - Globalization

China's Export Drive Moves Into High Gear

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:14:15 -0700

During this decade the global economic and financial dynamic that mattered most was the United States - China relationship. China sold cheap manufactured goods to American consumers desperate to maintain their standard of living in the face of a shrinking job market and declining real wages. Americans borrowed money to pay for the essentials of its lifestyle - college education, premium health care, two or more cars, etc. The Chinese were the major lenders to American consumers, financing the purchases of the goods China was selling.

What this dynamic was doing was forestalling the inevitable decline in the American standard of living that began when Deng Hsiao Ping first unleashed China's capitalist spirits. The West looked on this development greedily - 800 million new consumers ready to buy Western products! This was a great misconception, because it assumed somehow that China was going to make its way up the economic ladder by making Westerners richer. In fact the reverse began to happen. Hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurial manufacturers arose in China, with access to labor willing to work for pitiful wages and no benefits, and with no governmental regulation on working conditions or environmental degradation. The result has been an economic catastrophe for the West, which has seen its manufacturing sector whittled down, its trade deficits soar, and its debt levels skyrocket.

The credit crisis that arose in 2007 and 2008 was the end of the line for this financial dynamic, despite every effort of the US to keep the game going. The only way to do this is for the US to turn to the last agency that can still borrow money - the federal government. Last year the US government borrowed or issued debt guaranties for an amount equal to its entire gross national product for 2008. Since obviously no nation can borrow its way to prosperity, this is a last ditch effort at maintaining a First World lifestyle through programs that subsidize car purchasers and housing sales. This game can go on a few more years until China finally chokes on all the US paper it is accumulating, and which is progressively becoming less and less valuable since there are no other buyers.

There are already signs that the Chinese government has had enough and is buying only as much US paper as can help stabilize the global financial markets. If you want to see what really is going on, though, read this article in today's NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/business/global/14chinatrade.html?_r=1&ref=business

In it you will notice that China is ramping up its export machine, moving into downscale, cheaper products that are the only goods Americans can afford anymore. In doing this, China has replaced Germany and Canada as America's biggest trading partners. China is, as the article states, grabbing a bigger piece of a shrinking global trade pie.

The economic name for the effect of this export push is deflation. The low cost global producer is slashing prices, further undermining the export capabilities of the West, and further eroding Western living standards. Americans companies will not be able to restore wages and salaries to even the low levels seen at the peak of the market in 2007. Even government workers are now taking pay cuts, if they can even keep their jobs at all.

The West, and the US in particular, is unable to maintain its First World status. China is moving up from its Third World status (or at least the 10% of China's population which is benefiting from its export drive), and somewhere in the middle Chinese rising living standards will meet up with declining American living standards. This process will play out in years, if not decades, and the only people in the US who can still profit from it are the financiers who extract middle-man profits from shuffling pieces of debt around the globe. Making the whole situation even worse is that India, Brazil, Russia and other countries are pushing just as aggressively on Western living standards.

If you are an American and want to survive this, you have got to get your living costs down. You have to find a cheaper mortgage or cheaper housing, you have to monitor your food costs, shrink your electrical and heating bills, renegotiate your homeowners and life insurance, and pray that the federal government does something to reduce health care costs. Your wages are going to stagnate for a long time to come - if you can keep a job - and you are going to have to play the deflation game yourself when it comes to managing your costs.

If you are successful, you'll wind up in that Second World medium where Chinese and American living standards merge. If you fail, you're going to end up like the poorest Chinese, trying to wrest a subsistence living from a cruel and uncaring global economy.

The demise of the dollar

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:11:59 -0700

Robert Fisk | Oct 6

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading

Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. _Image

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

Snip

Chinese financial sources believe President Barack Obama is too busy fixing the US economy to concentrate on the extraordinary implications of the transition from the dollar in nine years' time. The current deadline for the currency transition is 2018.

Full article

** Denials abound ~ ed

The Big Question

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:10:56 -0700

As the bus twists and turns up the Sierra Madre del Sur coming out of Zihuatanejo the first thing you notice are the lush green hillsides. The next thought that logically follows is: wow, there is a lot of water here. But like the coastal ranges of California the water is deceiving as I soon discovered.

After climbing above the first range of crests, outcrops and rippling ridges we descended into a broad valley, much as I imagine the Salinas Valley in John Steinbeck's retelling. It was dry, cactuses proliferated. Grasses burned off in the heat of a Mexican summer. Corn fields baked on the banks of a river.

More after the jump.

"Lago muy seco," I asked the bus driver. "Si," he replied, "it's the lowest it's been in twenty five years." The scene was well nigh apocalyptic. Everyone here in Austin is concerned about the levels of Lake Travis, one of a chain of Hill Country reservoirs built for flood control (and water management) on the Colorado River during the Great Depression. LBJ's pork for the area when he was a Congressman and Senator. But this Mexican lake? It was forty feet low. In part of the lake fields of corn had taken over--the river snaking through where water and fish once thrived. This lake provides necessary drinking and farming water for the States of Guererro and Michoacan and now it was almost empty. The landscape was parched. Sure, I was in a rain shadow. But the sources of the lake were not, as they sat at the crest of a watershed, which in most years, brings in ample water to the region.

"It's the hottest and dryest summer I can remember," said Resendo, the owner of a small cafe in Melaque. Melaque is on the coast. Tropical. It is supposed to rain every day in July, August and September. Not this year. And when a Mexican complains about the heat, you know it is unseasonably warm. "It's the rainy season," he went on. "And you've been here, what, almost two weeks? Has it rained?"

"Once, for half a day?" I replied.

"Exactly," he said.

In the last year I have traveled in almost twenty foreign nations. And there were only two (Vietnam and Singapore) where the people didn't complain in one sense or another about massively altered traditional weather patterns. I'm not talking about 'global warming' here. That's a misnomer, in my opinion, for what is happening. What I've heard about and what I am discussing is nothing short of global climate change.

In Indonesia Lake Toba was 10 feet higher than it had ever been. "Too much rain," said Efan, the young man who managed the guest house I stayed in.

"The Highlands are extremely dry this year," said Les an Australian ex-pat (and bug collector) living in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia. "I haven't seen my favorite beetle this year at all. And it's not rare. It just needs water," he said.

In Laos and Thailand the late onset of the cool season messed up food production. And it's almost paralyzing Cambodia.

Although the Monsoon didn't fail in India in 2008, my farming friends in Kerala had already almost run out of water in the Western Ghats and were worried about the cardamom crop failing. "It's not as water hungry," said Ahmed, "as cotton, but it is a thirsty plant."

Oman had been devastated by a hurricane the year before. Yes, a hurricane.

Turkey? Central Anatolia was greener than many people could ever remember. But spring was late in coming. And it was a cold spring. The Judas Trees blossomed a full month later than they normally do.

"We only had a week or two of snow this year," said Stuart, my best friend in Denmark.

Yes, you read that correctly. Viking-land lacked real snow.

And here I sit in Austin, Texas. The mercury in the thermometer is at the point of bubbling and it's only 1100am.

All this is anecdotal. Dismiss it. Or don't.

But here's the whole point of my anecdotes, from an interview of Jared Diamond:

“The average per-person consumption rate in the first world of metal and oil and natural resources is 32 times that of the developing world,” says Diamond. “That means that one American is consuming like 32 Kenyans.” The problem is not the number of Kenyans, the problem is when Kenyans or, more pressingly, big developing countries such as China, gain the ability to consume like Americans.

Can’t humans simply increase the supply of resources as they have done before? “We can change the supply of some things if there is only one limiting resource. If it is food, then we can have a green revolution and produce more crops,” he says. “Unfortunately, we need lots of resources. We need food, we need water. We are already using something like 70 or 80 per cent of the world’s fresh water. So you say, ‘Alright, we’ll get around water by desalinating sea water.’ But then there’s the energy ceiling, and so on.”

That's the big question. The question no one is willing to voice. Am I, a member of the advanced world willing to forgo some of my standard of living for those in the developing world? And if I do so, do I have the moral and ethical standing to ask those of the developing world to forgo some of their wants?

I don't have an answer.

I can promise you one thing: we cannot have it all. The Chinese cannot live like Americans and the Americans cannot continue to live as they are. Something will break.

One night in June, as Stuart and I sat in the garden, polishing off a bottle of tequila, he asked me how I saw the world in fifty years.

"Hotter, poorer, hungrier and more violent," is how I put it. "But it'll still be round," I said, taking a swipe at Tom Friedman.

"That's pretty grim, brother," he said, smiling at the joke.

"If history has taught me anything, Stuart, it's this: life can be grim and history is inexorable," I held my finger up silencing an emergent query. I gathered my thoughts and finished up, "but humanity will muddle through."

I don't know if I want to bequeath a world of 'muddling through' to our children. But that's what they'll get.

WTO sees rising protectionism

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:49:36 -0700

Sue Lannin | July 2

abc.net.au - A leaked report from the World Trade Organisation (WTO) says that nations are throwing up trade barriers in response to the global recession.{snip} WTO director-general Pascal Lamy says the global economy is fragile and that wealthy nations will see exports drop by 14 per cent this year, and that is not going to help the world recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression.

The organisation says while the slowdown in the global economy appears to be easing, it expects trade volumes to fall by 10 per cent this year.Fariborz Moshirian, a Professor of Finance at the University of New South Wales, says despite all the rhetoric there is no real commitment to free trade.

"Their situation is not good because we know that since the G20 summit in November 2008, we have seen in this further deterioration in trade and increase in trade protectionalism. Seventeen countries from amongst the G20 group introduced 47 trade restricting measures," Professor Moshirian said.

"When you look at, for instance, the case of the European Union, they have applied anti-dumping duties on the US. The EU, for instance, introduced export subsidiaries on butter, cheese, milk power. China and India, for instance, embarked on export subsidiaries while India banned the importing of toys from China."

Mr Lamy says there are twice as many trade barriers than free trade measures. One dispute is between China, the European Union and the United States. The EU and the US says Beijing is breaching WTO rules by restricting exports of raw materials. China says it is not breaking the rules

American Jobs in a Global Economy

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 09:57:50 -0700

“We very much want to work with others to make sure that we have … as pro-American a tax system for corporations as we possibly can …” Lawrence Summers

The Administration is struggling to fund its spending spree in ways that would nominally be consistent with the President’s campaign promises. The Obama budget proposed to inflict two substantial tax increases on U.S. corporations with global operations. One would make it more expensive to bring cash from those operations into the U.S. The other would make it expensive (on average 30% more expensive) to pay Americans, rather than citizens of any other country, to perform headquarters administrative jobs such as accounting, IT, or HR. These proposals were supposedly aimed at fulfilling the promise to “end tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas”. While they hurt companies with global operations, it is hard to see how they would do anything other than reduce U.S. jobs.
The President’s problem here, as in other areas, is that in his effort to produce campaign one-liners he misstated the underlying problem. America does not provide tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas. It provides a tax penalty for locating jobs here. That’s a different problem, and it has a different cure.

America is not the powerhouse it used to be, and we need to get used to that fact. Only 28% of the world’s largest 300 corporations are American. Our once formidable advantage in science and engineering has slipped. Now our companies must compete against potent rivals. The foreign operations of those rivals are not taxed at all by their home countries. When the U.S. tries to raise revenue by boosting the current tax on the foreign operations of our companies, we saddle them with a potentially fatal competitive burden. A foreign owned corporation can bring home up to 54% more earnings than its U.S. owned rival from a dollar earned by a factory in a tax favored location. That kind of disadvantage can break a company, destroying headquarters jobs and, in time, even U.S. manufacturing jobs. A company that can’t compete overseas cannot sustain the level of research and development needed to produce the new products it needs to compete here at home. We need to minimize the tax that our companies pay on their foreign factories.

But if tax rates on foreign operations are kept low, that puts U.S. operations at a disadvantage. America saddles its domestic corporate activities with the second highest tax rate in the developed world. Is there a way to reduce this without making corporations even more powerful than they are today, and without aggravating our government deficit or putting an even higher percentage of U.S. income into the hands of the wealthy? Yes there, is, and in fact it’s quite simple.

Corporations could be given a deduction for the dividends they pay to their shareholders. If the corporations didn’t pay out their cash, they would get no tax benefit, so the corporations would not end up with more cash. The revenue loss would be made up at the individual level by taxing the dividends and stock gains the individuals receive. Overall, the individuals would be no worse off than they are today. Why? Because the corporations would have higher earnings due to the deduction, and they would have to pay those earnings out to their shareholders. This increase would exactly match, overall, the tax imposed on the shareholders, so they would come out even. But now there would be no required corporate level tax on U.S. operations. The U.S. would be the best place in the world to put jobs, taxwise. Our companies would be in a position to trounce their foreign-owned rivals. That would eliminate the “tax benefit for shipping jobs overseas” in a way that would make us stronger rather than weaker, with higher employment and higher wages. And guess what – those workers pay taxes on those higher wages, reducing the deficit.

So let’s give the President a re-do on his campaign slogans. Mr. President, you may re-word your promise to “provide deficit reducing incentives to create jobs in America”. We’ll also politely avert our gaze while you retract your budget proposals and replace them with a tax policy that makes more sense. A new Administration is allowed to make mistakes. It just needs to recognize and correct them before permanent damage is done to our economy.

Tune Your Tin Foil Hats, the Bilderbergers Are Meeting

Thu, 14 May 2009 11:28:28 -0700

The Bilderbergers are meeting this weekend in Greece and its always interesting to see the coverage of the secretive confab. Haaretz has turned their top man (internet intern Adam Abrams) loose on the topic:

The individuals at the meeting come from such power houses as Google and the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Senate and European royalty. Governments, the banking industry, big oil, media and even the world of academia are amongst the Bilderberg ranks.

Those reportedly in attendance at last year's conference in Virginia include former U.S. senator Tom Daschle; Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner and his predecessor Henry M. Paulson; former U.S. secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice; Microsoft executive Craig Mundie; senior Wall Street Journal editor Paul Gigot; World Bank President Robert Zoellick and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The UK Guardian is taking a more tongue in cheek approach and the TimesOnline is getting in on the fun too.

Leo Kolivakis cuts the crap at Pension Pulse:

I also agree with my friend Tom Naylor that the Bilderberg Group are nothing but a "bunch of arrogant self-promoters" who think they are powerful.

Jonathan Nitzan reminded me that the power elite do not need to meet in Athens or anywhere else in the world. "They continuously talk to each other, go to the same clubs, talk the same economic lingo and they've already screwed up the world for a very long time."

For all of their pooh-poohing however, they all run at least this quote (Kolivakis runs much more) by conspiracy maven Daniel Estulin:

According to the pre-meeting booklet sent out to attendees, Bilderberg is looking at two options -- either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty — or an intense but shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.

Like the proverbial broken clock that's right twice a day (this analogy only works with analog clocks of course) Estulin is boiling the current economic dilemma down pretty well, his error is attributing mastery to those gathering in Greece. SouthPark's diagnosis of the conspiracy neurosis is still the best out there: a deep-seated need to believe that someone is in charge, even if their agenda is deeply evil.

Personally I prefer to put my faith in the blind idiot god Azathoth.

Chung King Mansions

Thu, 07 May 2009 02:06:58 -0700

A fascinating place that provides 90% of cell phone to sub-Saharan Africa?

Wikipedia

Oil Drum-"Peak Oil" or "Limits To Growth"?

Sat, 02 May 2009 19:51:05 -0700

There is a good deal of evidence that we are now a little past "peak oil". Many of us find it doesn't feel quite like we had imagined.

A lot of us had expected that peak oil would be basically a liquids fuels crisis, caused by geological limits. We expected that the solutions of the Department of Energy's Hirsch Report would be sufficient to forestall a crisis, especially if we had started 20 years ago, instead of now. These solutions included things like more oil from tar sands, improving automobile efficiency, and electrification of transport.

Now, when we seem to be at peak oil, we find the current situation feels a lot more like a "box" caused by limits to growth, rather than a liquid fuels crisis. The limits are of many forms--not just geological limits relating to oil--but other resource limits as well, such as fresh water, and concerns about climate change and the environment. The financial system is even behaving strangely.

The fact that the financial system is also in distress is a surprise to many people. There is good theoretical reason to expect that once growth in underlying resources slows, a financial system based on compound growth will run into difficulty. This was predicted by M. King Hubbert and many others. The connection is not easy to see, though, and it is understandable that many would believe that the financial system would have had problems, even apart from limits to growth.

The fact that so many limits are involved makes it difficult to substitute one resource, such as biofuels, for another, such as petroleum products.

The fact that so many limits are involved also means that it is not just liquid fuels that are being constrained by the limits to growth box. In the diagram above, I show electricity, the credit system, the industrial system, and the agricultural system as being fenced in by limits, in addition to liquid fuels. I could probably have included many other systems as well, such as the international trade system, governmental systems, and long term promises, such as pensions and social security systems.

The world is finite, so it should not come as a great surprise that the various limits are being reached, to varying degrees, simultaneously. Systems such as the electrical system, the credit system, and the agricultural system all depend on availability of finite resources, so are affected as we start reaching limits of various kinds.

[snip]

To me, the most vulnerable system is the international monetary system. As long as countries trust each other, trade will continue as usual. Once this starts breaking down, it seems likely that countries will need real goods to barter, rather than relying on promises to pay. A breakdown in the international monetary system could cause a major interruption to trade and start a downward spiral. It seems like this could happen at any time.

Whether or not there is a crash, and the timing of such a crash, really depend on how all of the systems work together. Any kind of destabilization, such as new upward price pressures on fossil fuels, could telegraph through the system. Financial disruptions are especially likely.

It is my view that because of this networking, all systems will eventually fail together. A person cannot expect that one system, such as the electrical system, will greatly outlast the other systems. If either the electrical system or the financial system fails, other systems are likely to fail as well.

I see collapse as being stepwise--things may look good for a while, and then there will be a sudden step down. This may happen several times. We are on a step right now.

article

Recession reveals how closely U.S. and China are linked economically

Fri, 01 May 2009 07:04:32 -0700

Scott Canon | Apr 30

Kansas City Star - The warehouse at Top Innovations on Troost Avenue is stocked from ceiling to floor with boxes of infomercial wonders of steam.

Gadgets for cleaning and shining and making wrinkles disappear just like that. And each shiny metal and plastic gadget is made in China.

Company president Benny Lee’s trip to five Chinese cities last month revealed the recession on full display. Half-empty hotels. Shuttered factories. An exodus of workers from coastal manufacturing hubs.

“You can feel it,” he said. “They have too much of everything” — raw materials, production capacity, people seeking wages — “and having too much of something is usually a problem.”

The old cliche: When the U.S. economy catches cold, the rest of the world comes down with pneumonia.

The wheezing from America and China — the world’s largest economy and its largest work force, respectively — shows just how contagious globalization has made our economic ills:

•Low mortgage rates here are possible in part because China still buys U.S. debt.

•As construction faltered across the United States and the rest of world, Chinese steel exports were halved.

•China Southern Airlines delayed taking two 777 freighters, so Boeing Co. may not get its money until next year.

•The last quarter of 2008, worst ever for U.S. toy sales, hurt deeply in China, where 4,000 toy plants are closed.

•Beijing’s purchases of U.S. Treasuries give Washington the cash for its expensive economic Band-Aids — which could make America a healthy buyer of Chinese goods again.

“The idea that global economies are somehow immune from what’s going in other parts of the world — that’s over,” said Gus Faucher at Moody’s Economy.com.

Jim Rogers-Center shifting to Asia

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:24:16 -0700

Do you think this crisis is just going to solidify the advantages of China and these other Asian and Southeast Asian economies?

Well, again, throughout history, the center of the world has shifted to where the capital is, where the assets are. You don't see any period in history where things are shifting to the debtors, and America's the largest debtor nation in the history of the world. Unless something's different this time, unless the world's changed very very dramatically, the center of the influence, the center of power, the center of the earth, the center of the globe, is going to be shifting towards Asia, because that's where all the money is. Have you ever heard of anybody saying, "Let's go to where all of the debtors are"? It just doesn't happen that way.

article

[Rogers has relocated to Singapore and his children are learning Mandarin.]

Jeffrey Sachs Addresses Economic and Environmental Crises in Inaugural Lecture for Social Justice

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:14:05 -0700

...Sachs stressed that the economy means more than simple dollars and cents: “It’s the life-and-death struggle of the poor, and the plight of the planet. ” He compared the current economic crisis to a slot machine turning up three lemons, and defined the economy by three “uns”: It is unstable, unfair, and unsustainable.

The instability comes as a result of what Sachs calls an “odd period” in American society, an era that began in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan’s statement “The government is not the solution but the problem. ” Deregulation became the norm, as the cutting back of government services, the lowering of taxes, and the capping of public expenditures were seen as routes to economic prosperity.

Sachs assailed the term “free-market economy. ” “There is only one such economy, and it’s in your introductory textbooks, because they are bad textbooks, ” he said. “They portray an economy which doesn’t exist. ” The danger of free-market economics, he said, is the false idea that a market economy is a self-organizing system. “We’ve spent 30 years living a fantasy. ”

Also contributing to the current instability, according to Sachs, is the fact that for 20 years the Central Bank was led by one person, Alan Greenspan. “It’s bad to have a government institution governed for 20 years by anyone, ” he said....

article with full video of Sachs's talk at Haverford College

Rabbit Holes

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 13:16:15 -0700

I reside here but I don't belong to anybody. The left blogs discount anything I say by pointing out my "sources" are mere right wing delusionals and or anti-(insert anything here). The right wing blogs, well that is just a back patting society. So what if I have a fixation for the Scully-Muldar X-file types. It works for me far better than Octomom, Loohan or actually any of the more offensive lamestream media from the "What To Think Network". This is what both political parties do, tell you what to think.

This story on Dailykos and other places generated a stream of lame comments.
http://www.docudharma.com/diary/12874/thermite-explosive-cutting-agent-found-in-911-wtc-catastrophe-dust-samples

Personally I have grown tired of 911 stuff and have moved on to the real history of America as told by hundreds of people just living their lives making blogs, websites and youtube videos. It does appear that New World Order, that "flaky conspiracy" of tin foil hatters is now being used by Time Magazine, CNN and the Financial Times in Europe. Government doesn't listen to us now, can you imagine how bad it will be on a global level.

Let me start with some of the more mainstream of hatter places and then I shall get to the more extreme. Most alarming is that some of these more extreme make far more logical sense.

http://www.projectcensored.org/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/
http://www.augustreview.com/

Want more rabbit hole? Free, clean energy, deep underground military bases, supressed cancer cures, 57 known races of extra-terrestrial beings? Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh, My.
After hours of watching some of these videos however I am hooked. I will never be entertained by anything on TV again.

Health news with a different slant.
http://www.naturalnews.com/
Water. Are pharmacuticals getting into the watershed? Making fish sterile?
http://www.life-enthusiast.com/twilight/research_emoto.htm

This one however is the launching pad, one of them anyway.
http://www.projectcamelot.org/
From there a former insider tells all. Or is this just another one full of crap.
http://www.clayandiron.com/
Bill though makes sense. I identify with him because of a 22 year engineering career at a major global company in research and development.

A must read backgrounder on the New Great Game

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 06:19:23 -0700

Asia Times - March 26
"Liquid War: Welcome to Pipelineistan"
By Pepe Escobar

What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of Eurasia will provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order, also known as the New Great Game.

Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "global war on terror", which the Pentagon has slyly rebranded "the Long War", sports a far more important, if half-hidden, twin - a global energy war. I like to think of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet. Put another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days is the Caspian Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. Think of it, geographically, as Pipelineistan.

All geopolitical junkies need a fix. Since the second half of the 1990s, I've been hooked on pipelines. I've crossed the Caspian in an Azeri cargo ship just to follow the $4 billion Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, better known in this chess game by its acronym, BTC, through the Caucasus. (Oh, by the way, the map of Pipelineistan is chicken-scratched with acronyms, so get used to them!)

I've also trekked various of the overlapping modern Silk Roads, or perhaps Silk Pipelines, of possible future energy flows from Shanghai to Istanbul, annotating my own do-it-yourself routes for LNG (liquefied natural gas). I used to avidly follow the adventures of that once-but-not-future Sun-King of Central Asia, the now deceased Turkmenbashi or "leader of the Turkmen", Saparmurat Niyazov, head of the immensely gas-rich Republic of Turkmenistan, as if he were a Conradian hero.

Read on at Asia Times

Office staff warned of confrontation as City braces for mass G20 protests

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:59:04 -0700

David Smith & Richard Rogers | Mar 22

The Observer - Office workers face chaos next week with swaths of London in security lockdown for the G20 summit and warnings that bankers will be targeted in a series of protests aimed at causing maximum disruption.

Staff in the City are being advised to dress down and postpone non-essential meetings amid fears that they will be forced to run the gauntlet of protesters. Thousands of G20 Meltdown campaign posters show a mannequin wearing a suit being hanged, while an anarchist website has the slogan: "Burn a banker!"

Details of direct action, gleaned from chatter on anarchist websites and meetings attended by the Observer, include a rumoured plan to block the Blackwall Tunnel and cause a security scare on the London Underground by leaving bags unattended on trains. There is also speculation that protesters will drive a tank to the ExCeL conference centre in London's Docklands, where the G20 are meeting, and attempt to harass politicians with wake-up calls to their hotels in the middle of the night. None of the organisers of the peaceful demonstrations say they are aware of any such tactics.

Indian steel for pipeline angers laid-off U.S. steelworkers

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 01:50:50 -0700

Maria Baran | Mar 21

Belleville News Democrat - Lawmakers in Illinois are calling foreign steel being used to construct a pipeline a slap in the face to U.S. workers.

Steel pipes painted with a "Made in India" logo are being shipped through Granite City, Ill., right in front of a steel mill where more than 2,800 steelworkers have been laid off.

"This is a perfect example of how our trade laws are failing our workers. At a time when thousands of local steelworkers are laid off, shipping steel from India for a project in our area is unacceptable and outrageous," said U.S. Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Ill. "It is precisely why I support strong 'Buy America' provisions and have voted against trade agreements. We can and should make that steel in the U.S. and I will continue to work for fair trade policies that support good-paying jobs here at home."

Construction began recently on the 2,148-mile oil pipeline joint-venture between ConocoPhillips and Calgary, Alberta-based TransCanada.