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China, Russia signal new roles in world order
BY HAROLD MEYERSON The Washington Post

    On or about August 8, the world changed. With two very different coming-out parties — the opening ceremonies of the Olympics and the invasion of Georgia — China and Russia put everyone on notice that the power relationships of the past have been reshuffl ed and that formidable new powers are challenging the established order.
    I don’t mean to equate the two events, of course. The invasion of Georgia was a chilling display of Russia’s brute force. The Olympics’ opening ceremonies were a breathtaking display of China’s wealth, power, creativity and vision, one that billions of viewers marveled at and enjoyed. Yet, it was the opening ceremonies, more than the Georgian invasion, that announced the greater challenge to democratic values.
    These events did not occur in a vacuum. Just a few weeks previous, global trade talks collapsed because China and India believed the proposed regulations would imperil their farmers. When these Doha Round deliberations began in 2001, it was inconceivable that they would be derailed by non-Western powers. By the summer of 2008, however, China and India had attained so much economic clout that they were perfectly capable of bringing the negotiations to a halt.
    The summer of ’08, historians will most likely tell us, signaled the rise of a multipower, non-Western-dominated planet. It also was the time when it became clear that the American Century would not lap over from the 20th into the 21st.
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    Russia’s invasion is surely the most shocking of these developments but also the least ground-breaking. It fits perfectly into that most ancient of great-power traditions — asserting semi-sovereignty over its immediate neighbors.
    The United States even has a name for its right to intervene in its neighbors’ affairs: the Monroe Doctrine.
    And just as Russia moved to undermine a militantly pro-American government on its borders, so the United States moved to overthrow Castro at the Bay of Pigs and depose the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and green-lighted an attempted coup against Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in 2002. None of these interventions brought any credit to either the United States or Russia, but neither were they something new under the sun.
    Russia today is a mix of neo-czarist authoritarianism domestically and pan-Slavic belligerence internationally. Its clout resides not in its political beliefs and practices — unlike Leninism, pan-Slavism is not likely to win any non-Slavic adherents — or in its economic model but in its reserves of oil and natural gas, on which Europe in particular is dependent. It is not our protodemocratic buddy, but neither is it the kind of threat that requires ginning up the Cold War again, as John McCain and his neoconservative brethren seem to believe.
    China is something else again. If ever there was a display of affable collectivism, it was filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s opening ceremonies, which in their reduction of humans to a mass precision abstraction seemed to derive in equal measure from Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl. (Much of Berlin’s 1936 Olympics, we should recall, was choreographed by Riefenstahl to fit the fascist aesthetics of her film “Olympiad.”)
    The subject of Zhang’s ceremonies was a celebration of Chinese achievement and power, at all times stressing China’s harmonious relations with the rest of the world. Its masterstroke, however, wasn’t its brilliant design but the decision, during the parade of the athletes, to have Chinese flag-bearer Yao Ming accompanied by an adorable 9-year-old boy who survived the recent catastrophic earthquake that killed many of his classmates, and who returned, after he had extricated himself from the rubble, to save two of his classmates. When asked why he went back, the NBC broadcaster told us, the boy said that he was a hall monitor and that it was his job to take care of his schoolmates.
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    That answer may tell us more than we want to know. He could have gone back because his friends were still inside. Instead, he went back because he was a responsible little part of a well-ordered hierarchy. For all we know, he might well have gone back even if he weren’t a hall monitor, but his answer — whether spontaneously his own or one that some responsible grownup concocted for him — works brilliantly as an advertisement for an authoritarian power bent on convincing the world that its social and political model is as benign as any democracy’s.
    What Russia did on August 8 was appalling, but it ultimately poses no systematic challenge to the world’s democracies. What China did was entrancing, but its cuddly capitalist-Leninism, already much beloved by our major banks and corporations for its low-wage efficiency, poses a genuine economic challenge to the messier, unsynchronized workings of democracies. A nation that can assemble 2,000 perfectly synchronized drummers has clearly staked its claim as the world’s assembly line.

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GE expects China sales to double by year 2010
BY JOE MCDONALD The Associated Press

    BEIJING — General Electric Co. expects its business in China to double by 2010 to $10 billion a year, Chairman Jeff Immelt said Monday, in a bright spot for GE after the U.S. credit crisis forced it to cut this year’s earnings forecast.
    GE expects China’s efforts to improve energy efficiency and clean up its environment to drive 15 to 20 percent annual sales growth for GE’s clean-energy technology, Immelt said. He said GE also should benefit from heavy spending on other infrastructure for fast-expanding Chinese cities.
    “We’ve seen great growth in China,” Immelt said in an interview at GE’s pavilion at the Beijing Olympics, of which the company is a top sponsor. “I think the whole focus on water and the environment, that’s going to offer, we think, big opportunities for us as time goes on.”
    GE says it has generated $1.7 billion in revenues from the Olympics — $700 million in sales of power and other equipment for sports venues and $700 million in advertising for its NBC television network, the U.S. broadcaster for the games.
    Immelt said GE is sticking with its forecast of zero to 5 percent earnings growth this year. GE cut its forecast in April after reporting disappointing first-quarter results due to the U.S. credit crisis. Immelt said earnings at its financial services unit, which supplies 45 percent of GE profits, are expected to be down as much as 10 percent this year.
    “It impacts us, but I think we’ve kind of managed our way through it pretty well. We haven’t had any big write-offs,” he said.
    Immelt said Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE expects to see some “great deals” on acquisitions due to depressed asset prices.
    “Some of the best opportunities we’ve seen in the last 10 years we’re seeing right now. Assets are cheap,” he said. “In financial services, sometimes bad news is good news. You’ll see some great deals done in this cycle, and we’ll do some of them.”
    Immelt said a reorganization announced in July is aimed at simplifying GE’s structure and focusing on its finance and infrastructure businesses.
    “It’s another natural evolution for the company,” he said. “It’s another way to simplify the company and run it better.”
    GE has 12,100 employees in China and one of its four global research-and-development centers is in Shanghai. The others are in the United States, Germany and India.
    GE says it plans to spin off its lighting and appliance units, but Immelt said the company is still open to offers to buy them.     

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Drop in demand for soda ash is blamed on China
BY MATT JOYCE The Associated Press

    GREEN RIVER, Wyo. — Beneath the arid sagebrush flats of southwest Wyoming, miners work around the clock to grind out millions of tons of trona rock that’s hoisted to the surface and processed into a key ingredient for everything from baking soda and detergent to glass and paper.
    Four of the United States’ fi ve soda ash producers are located above Wyoming’s vast trona reserves, which were formed by an evaporating lake 50 million years ago. Soda ash, or sodium carbonate, has been an anchor of the region since the 1940s, but these days, the industry is facing a confluence of difficult challenges.
    The economic recession, including weak demand for glass in the auto and construction sectors, contributed to a 24 percent drop in U.S. soda ash production between the last three months of 2008 and the first quarter of this year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
    On top of that, American producers say their competitors in China have flooded the international market with help from a Chinese government export incentive. Chinese soda ash exports grew 40 percent in the first three months of 2009 versus the same period last year, according to industry figures.
    “They’re exporting quite a bit more, and what they’re doing in the process is lowering the sales price on the export market, which then makes it very difficult for the United States to compete,” said Dennis Kostick, a senior minerals commodities specialist with the USGS.
    The four soda ash producers in Wyoming’s Green River Basin — FMC Corp., General Chemical, OCI Chemical Corp. and Solvay Chemicals — account for 92 percent of the U.S. industry. Searles Valley Minerals in California is the nation’s only other producer.
    Wyoming’s soda ash companies employ roughly 2,400 people in the Green River Basin, most of whom live in Green River, Rock Springs or the towns of the Bridger Valley. With wages starting above $25 per hour, jobs in the industry are considered good, steady employment.
    In the mines, 1,600 feet underground, employees work in noisy, dimly lit conditions amid clouds of musky trona dust. On the surface, plant workers operate the heated, noisy machines that process the yellow trona into powdery soda ash.
    Monte Morlock, president of the United Steelworkers Local 13214 at FMC’s Green River facility, said production has slowed but there haven’t been any layoffs at FMC and he hasn’t heard about any at the area’s other plants.
    “The soda ash plants out here play a very important role in this community,” Morlock said. “It’s the type of job that you can raise a family and you can stay in the area. You don’t have to be gone for days on end.”
    The United States produced a record 11.3 million metric tons of soda ash in 2008 and exported about 47.6 percent of that, according to the USGS.
    “The U.S. had really been sold out [of soda ash] for five years up through 2008,” said Bill Breunig, director of sales and marketing for Philadelphia-based FMC. “Both the U.S. and the export business really began to slow up in the December time frame and into the first quarter. Basically, as things atrophied, the Chinese were very aggressive on gearing up exports.”
    Breunig said after a slowdown in the first half of 2009, the industry expects business to pick up and operate at about 95 percent of capacity for the year.
    The latest figures available from the USGS show that domestic soda ash production in May was 780,000 metric tons, down almost 27 percent from 987,000 metric tons in May 2008. April’s production of fi gure of 664,000 metric tons was the lowest monthly production figure since at least 1994.
    Meanwhile, trona production in Wyoming for the January-May period was down more than 13 percent from the previous year, according to the USGS.
    As soda ash producers wait for domestic and global demand to pick up, they’re lobbying for the federal government’s help in fighting the Chinese government’s new export incentive.
    China overtook the United States as the world’s top soda ash producer in 2003. The Chinese currently produce about 18 million metric tons of soda ash per year, the USGS’s Kostick said.
    In April, the Chinese government introduced a 9 percent rebate on its 17 percent value-added tax on soda ash exports. American producers say the action gave Chinese producers an unfair advantage in the global marketplace and drove down prices for American exports.
    “So during this period of plummeting demand, including a 14 percent drop of demand in China in the first quarter of 2009, here you have the Chinese essentially trying to export their way out of a recession and keep jobs in China by increasing exports,” said John McDermid, president of IBC Inc., a Washington company that consults for soda ash distributor American Natural Soda Ash Corp.
    Wyoming’s congressional delegation recently sent letters to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton trying to influence the Obama administration’s trade discussions with the Chinese. ........................>>>>....................>>>>...........http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....amp;EntityId=Ar00700

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China becomes first country to pass U.S. as biggest automobile market
BY ELAINE KURTENBACH AND DEE-ANN DURBIN
The Associated Press

    SHANGHAI — China has overtaken the U.S. as the world’s biggest market for automobiles, the fi rst time any other country has bought more vehicles than the nation that produced Henry Ford, the Cadillac and the minivan.
    Now that the Chinese buy more cars and trucks than Americans, the shift could produce ripples for the environment, gas prices and even the kinds of cars automakers design.
    More than 12.7 million cars and trucks will be sold in China this year, up 44 percent from the previous year and surpassing the 10.3 million forecast in the U.S., according to J.D. Power and Associates.
    China has long been expected to overtake the U.S. since its population of 1.3 billion is more than quadruple that of the United States. But the increase in sales happened much faster than anyone expected because of China’s tax cuts, its stimulus program and a depressed American market.
    Two years ago, J.D. Power predicted China would pass the U.S. in 2025. Earlier this year, it forecast 2009 sales of just 9 million vehicles for China.
    After a sharp slowdown in auto sales late last year, the Chinese government cut taxes on small cars and spent $730 million on subsidies to encourage sales of SUVs, pickups and minivans. A big stimulus program also boosted truck sales by pumping money into construction.
    Auto sales were expected to rise with China’s stimulus, but they have far exceeded expectations, said Jeff Schuster, J.D. Power’s executive director of automotive forecasting.
    Most experts think the top-sales title will shift back and forth between China and the United States for the next several years, with China ultimately prevailing.
    Improving sales of autos and other big-ticket items is key to Beijing’s strategy to promote stronger domestic consumption and lower dependence on exports.
    “The government has sent a very clear message that they will not let the auto industry weaken, especially in 2010,” say Jia Xinguang, chief analyst at China National Automotive Industry Consulting & Developing Corp.
    Meanwhile, U.S. sales hit a 26-year low in early 2009 and remain well below the 17 million average from earlier this decade.
    China’s growing auto market is sure to affect the industry worldwide. Some key factors are: ....................>>>>.............................>>>>............http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....r00601&AppName=1

Quoted from bumblethru

Our government has made it almost impossible to find things made in the USA! They have over environmentalized, over penalized andover taxed our businesses in this country.

So we are left to by the 'junk' from other countries.

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Main Entry: 1val·ue
Pronunciation: \ˈval-(ˌ)yü\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, worth, high quality, from Anglo-French, from Vulgar Latin *valuta, from feminine of *valutus, past participle of Latin valēre to be of worth, be strong — more at wield
Date: 14th century
1 : a fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged
2 : the monetary worth of something : market price
3 : relative worth, utility, or importance
4 : a numerical quantity that is assigned or is determined by calculation or measurement
5 : the relative duration of a musical note
6 a : relative lightness or darkness of a color : luminosity b : the relation of one part in a picture to another with respect to lightness and darkness
7 : something (as a principle or quality) intrinsically valuable or desirable
8 : denomination 2
— val·ue·less  \-(ˌ)yü-ləs, -yə-\ adjective

— val·ue·less·ness noun

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US manufacturing crown slips
By Peter Marsh
Published: June 20 2010 17:43 | Last updated: June 20 2010 17:43

The US remained the world’s biggest manufacturing nation by output last year, but is poised to relinquish this slot in 2011 to China – thus ending a 110-year run as the number one country in factory production.

The figures are revealed in a league table being published on Monday by IHS Global Insight, a US-based economics consultancy.

China is set to become the world's biggest manufacturer next year

Last year, the US created 19.9 per cent of world manufacturing output, compared with 18.6 per cent for China, with the US staying ahead despite a steep fall in factory production due to the global recession.

That the US is still top comes as a surprise, since in 2008 – before the slump of the past two years took hold – IHS predicted it would lose pole position in 2009.

However, a relatively resilient US performance kept China in second place, says IHS, which predicts that faster growth in China will deny the US the top spot next year..................>>>>...........>>>>..............http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af2219cc-7c86-11df-8b74-00144feabdc0.html

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China's economy poised to overtake Japan's
China closes in on U.S. GDP, but has a ways to go to improve income levels

Ng Han Guan / AP

updated 8/1/2010 12:42:20 PM ET

BEIJING — China is set to overtake Japan as the world's second-largest economy in a resurgence that is changing everything from the global balance of military and financial power to how cars are designed.
By some measures it has already moved to second place after the U.S. in total economic output — a milestone that would underline a pre-eminence not seen since the 18th century, when the Middle Kingdom last served as Asia's military, technological and cultural power.
China is already the biggest exporter, auto buyer and steel producer, and its worldwide influence is growing. The fortunes of companies from Detroit automakers to Brazilian iron miners depend on spending by China's consumers and corporations. And rising wealth brings political presence: Chinese pressure helped to win developing countries a bigger voice in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
"Japan was the powerhouse driving the rest of Asia," said Rob Subbaraman, chief Asia economist for Nomura Securities. "Now the tide is turning and China is becoming a powerful influence on the rest of Asia, including Japan."
China's rise has produced glaring contradictions. The wealth gap between an elite who profited most from three decades of reform and its poor majority is so extreme that China has dozens of billionaires while average income for the rest of its 1.3 billion people is among the world's lowest. Beijing has launched two manned space missions and is talking about exporting high-speed trains to California and Europe while families in remote areas live in cave houses cut into hillsides.
Japan's people still are among the world's richest, with a per capita income of $37,800 last year, compared with China's $3,600. So are Americans at $42,240, their economy still by far the biggest. But Japan is trapped in a two-decade-old economic slump, the U.S. is wrestling with a financial crisis, and China's sheer economic size and the lure of its vast consumer market adds to its clout abroad.................>>>>..................>>>>.................http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38490073/ns/business-world_business/

Quoted from TippyCanoe

we will be humbled in the next 30 years

unless we as a nation, change our habits