-- Posted Wednesday, 24 March 2010 | Digg This Article
| | Source: GoldSeek.com
Rick’s Picks
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
“Phenomenally accurate forecasts”
All due praise to Google, which has put principle above money by refusing to censor search results in China. We can’t recall the last time an American company publically took the high road, ethically and morally speaking – especially when billions of dollars of potential revenues were at stake as they are in this case. More often, we read about bribery scandals abroad and cynically assume it’s the cost of doing business in the ethical swamps that lie outside of Europe, Canada and Japan. China is much worse than merely corrupt, however, and that’s why it was an ideal place for Google to take a firm and principled stand.
In fact, China is a place where dissenters disappear from their homes in the middle of the night, and whose authoritarian government has embraced a particularly brutal form of genocide to achieve its goals. Since invading Tibet in 1949, imperial China has killed nearly a fifth of the country’s population and destroyed 6,000 monasteries in an attempt to subjugate the country’s ethnic population. Concerning its sway over a supposedly free Taiwan, China has threatened would-be interlopers, including the U.S., in the bluntest terms.
Writing Off the U.S.
And yet, with the singular, praiseworthy exception of Google, corporate America seems to have no qualms about doing business with China. The hope – or excuse, perhaps – is that we stand a better chance of civilizing the country by engaging it in trade rather than by cutting it off. While this calculation may have seemed persuasive ten years ago, it has been weakened by China’s emergence as a dominant economic power. Granted, they have not yet told the U.S. to take a hike. But they are very nearly in a position to do so, since they could easily destroy our economy by, for one, swapping their dollar reserves for gold.
You say they would never do so – at least, not precipitously -- because it would hurt them as badly as it would us? That is true. But they at least know they could recover, while we would not. Anyway, and to be brutally realistic about it, it must be assumed China knows the U.S. is headed into an economic Depression. As such, they undoubtedly have written off the nearly trillion dollars of reserves that they have parked in U.S. Treasurys. That will be quite a blow when it finally happens, as it must, but it will be more our loss than theirs.
In the meantime, it is clear that China no longer kow-tows to U.S. demands. The opposite is true, actually, even if the White House would have us believe otherwise. In the case of Google, the officially sanctioned white lie -- from sources both in China and the U.S. – is that China’s door is open not only to Google, but to investment in general. This cannot possibly be so if China’s door is not also open to the free flow of information. The Chinese know this, and so do we. It is the key question that China will have to confront if it is to emerge from the xenophobic mindset that built the Great Wall. For now, we owe a debt of gratitude to Google for sharpening the ideological boundary line between countries that are truly free and those that are not.
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-- Posted Wednesday, 24 March 2010 | Digg This Article | Source: GoldSeek.com
