CVAX ... When you care enough to steal the very best

Mark Landler and Edward Wong, covering Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping’s trip to the US, in the New York Times, Feb 14, With Edge, U.S. Greets China’s Heir Apparent, wrote,

“On the list of American concerns, Mr. Biden said, were China’s artificially depressed currency and conditions imposed by the Chinese that require foreign companies to turn over technology in return for doing business in China. He raised the issue of jailed Chinese dissidents and … Syria”

In Inflaming Trademark Dispute, Second City in China Halts Sales of the iPad, published in the NY Times, Feb. 14, 2012, Michael Wines wrote:

“The authorities in a second Chinese city have begun seizing iPads from local retailers in an escalating trademark dispute between Apple and Proview Technology. … The seizures follow a ruling in December in which a court in Shenzhen dismissed Apple’s contention that it owned the iPad name in China. … Proview has also made a filing with the General Administration of Customs in China putting Apple on notice that the company could seek to block the export of iPads, should Proview’s ownership claims be upheld. … the seizures and the filing are warnings by Proview of the havoc it could wreak unless Apple agrees to pay a large fee to settle the trademark fight. … Paradoxically, China’s intellectual property laws are so sweeping that they allow the government to ban the worldwide sale of any made-in-China product that is found to violate a Chinese patent, trademark or other protection.”

Remember back during the cold war, when Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev said “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.” ( various quotes by Kruschev).

And later when the American computer company DEC, in response to reverse engineering of VAX computers by Soviet computer scientists inscribed, in Russian,“CVAX, … When you care enough to steal the very best” on the CVAX microprocessors. (Links: TRAILING EDGE.com, CNET, FSU.edu.)

Suppose Khrushchev had called John Kennedy, on the occasion of John Glenn’s orbit in the Friendship 7, February 20, 1962,  here, or Leonid Brezhnev had called Richard Nixon, after Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins returned from the moon in Apollo 11, July 24, 1969, Apollo 11, or Mikhail Gorbachev had answered Ronald Reagan’s call to “tear down this wall,” and said

“Mister President, I have business proposition for you: Let us to build your consumer goods. We have factories with skilled laborers. Our workers are like children, so eager to please. (Ok, they are children.) We can more or less match your quality control. We can deliver on time. And we do this for pennies on the dollar – pennie!

“All we ask is you give us designs for the products, and computer software source code for computers and telecommunications de-wices we assemble. It will be great Soviet / American partnership.”

Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan would have said

“Give you our designs? Our software? That’s our intellectual property? Are you nuts? That would be crazy!”

Premiers Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev might have answered,

“But our labor costs are much lower than yours. We have workers in factories, happy workers in the ‘Worker’s Paradise.’ Why. workers in our factories in Siberia work 7 days a week. And for little more than food and water. Go on strike? Never! (If they did we would shoot them.) You won’t have to pay them union scale or retirement benefits.”

Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan would still have said

“Give you our designs? Our software? Our intellectual property? So you can use children and slave labor to build our consumer goods? That would destroy our middle class. That would be nuts.”

And they would have been right.

So how exactly are the Chinese communists different from the Soviet communists?

We wouldn’t outsource to the Soviet Union. Why are we outsourcing to China?

Does Freedom of Speech imply the responsibility to speak honestly – even when what is not what people want to hear?  John Ehrenfeld, on his blog, in discussing the US Presidential Campaign, noted (here),

“[M]y concerns and consternation at the virtually complete absence of truth from [a GOP debate in New hampshire]. Not only was the truth gone, but the participants appeared almost gleeful about speaking freed from the constraints that truth-telling creates…. I recall an interview with Eric Fehrnstrom, Mitt Romney’s campaign manager, who said, in response to a question about the untruths being uttered by Romney, that this was none of his concern; it was up to the media to provide the facts.”

I addressed this in a wry manner with “Ridin’ the Magic Carpet” on XB Cold Fingers.

Richard Seireeni, on the Chelsea Green site (here), suggests that our biggest challenges, perhaps threats, come from outsoucing manufacturing of American branded consumer goods to China.

And in the New York Times, Paul Krugman explains how America is not a corporation (here).

For one thing, there’s no simple bottom line. For another, the economy is vastly more complex than even the largest private company.

Most relevant…, however, is … giant corporations sell the great bulk of what they produce to other people, not to their own employees — whereas even small countries sell most of what they produce to themselves, and big countries like America are overwhelmingly their own main customers.

Yes, there’s a global economy. But six out of seven American workers are employed in service industries, which are largely insulated from international competition, and even our manufacturers sell much of their production to the domestic market.

And the fact that we mostly sell to ourselves makes an enormous difference when you think about policy.

Consider what happens when a business engages in ruthless cost-cutting. From the point of view of the firm’s owners (though not its workers), the more costs that are cut, the better. Any dollars taken off the cost side of the balance sheet are added to the bottom line.

But the story is very different when a government slashes spending in the face of a depressed economy. Look at Greece, Spain, and Ireland, all of which have adopted harsh austerity policies. In each case, unemployment soared, because cuts in government spending mainly hit domestic producers. And, in each case, the reduction in budget deficits was much less than expected, because tax receipts fell as output and employment collapsed.

Ehrenfeld, observing the irony in a GOP Debate on the day of Vaclav Havel’s death, wrote about truth;

Havel’s signature accomplishment [was] pointing out that people have to live in truth or lose their freedom…

Truth, as Havel says, is essential to our existence as a free people at all times, but perhaps even more now as we become ever more aware of the complexity of the world we live in. Ideologies are the epitome of denial of the interconnectedness of this world, where ties grow more in number and strength everyday. Actions here have effect in places and times we do not expect or ignore. Are we really going to bomb away the so-called threat of Iranian nuclear weapons with no other consequences? Will freeing the market from all government oversight and restraints create wealth for everybody when the results of the last few decades show us the exact opposite? Ideologies, either from the left or right, are all dangerous, but our two-party system and the means their leaders communicate with us pushes themes into ideological positions frequently compressed into tiny sound bites or political ads….

There are many, many truths out there that are getting clobbered. If any of these men (no women left) are elected, they will be expected to act in accordance to these statements, ignoring what they find. Obama was faced with a financial crisis and its fallout on the economy as he moved in. He certainly was not the creator of these problems. It is interesting and ironic that the name Bush, on whose watch these problems started to arise, has been barely mentioned during this campaign, and not at all during these recent “debates.” I continue to put quotes around this word as real debates require some depth in discussing issues and solutions. Truthfulness would require putting the current messes into context, a least attempting to do so. I admit that would be difficult because the big messes are all a result of our failures to recognize complexity and act accordingly.

Richard Seireeni on the Chelsea Green site (here) wrote:

In the run up to the Republican Convention, we’ve heard everything and nothing. We’ve heard Newt, Mitt and Ron go on about issues that have little if any impact on jobs and national security, but not a single word about the real reason we have massive and permanent unemployment….In 2010, we imported 364 billion dollars in goods from China while we exported only 91 billion to them. That is nearly a 4 to 1 trade imbalance….

The Chinese people have become admirable competitors, but their hybrid Totalitarian-Capitalist government is not our friend. They don’t share our philosophies on human rights, labor rights, or geo-political issues, like containment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. In fact, China is a major importer of Iranian oil, in opposition to U.S.-sponsored trade restrictions, and has probably received access to our recently downed drone aircraft as a reward.

While GOP candidates are preoccupied with Terrorism and Obamacare, the People’s Liberation Army has been quietly developing a new advanced stealth fighter, Predator-style drones, the first in a planned fleet of blue water aircraft carriers, an advanced rocket and space program, and a growing nuclear arsenal. Those cheap consumer products have turned China into a super power one purchase at a time. Every time an American patriot buys a Made-in-China product at Walmart, he or she is investing in China’s military expansion, which forces us to invest more in our military to counter the threat.

Tweet    Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.

Chinese Spokesman for Foreign Affairs

If, on August 2, 2011, the United States defaults on various debt obligations, then historians may well consider that date as the date on which the United States of America ceases to occupy the position it has held since the end of World War II.  However, August 2, 2011, may be the end of the beginning. If so, it will mark a point of inflection in a curve that maps processes that has been in motion for a long time. The trends in personal debt, bankruptcy, home foreclosures, unemployment, and the disparity of income and assets between the wealthiest 10% of the population and the other 90% have developed over years.

July 14, 2011, Bastille Day in France, may be considered to mark the coming of age of the successor to the United States as the superpower of the 21st Century, and that would be China.  In “China Urges U.S. to Protect Creditors by Raising Debt,” Bettina Wassener in Hong Kong and Matthew Saltmarsh in Paris report in the New York Times, that “Hong Lei, a Chinese foreign affairs spokesman, urged the United States to protect the interests of foreign investors.” As one of the United States’s biggest creditors, China, which holds over $1.0 Trillion in US Treasury bills, “urged American policy makers on Thursday to act to protect investors’ interests, highlighting rising concerns around the globe about the protracted budget talks taking place in Washington.”

These mark gradual processes of waxing and waning of cultures and economies. These did not happen overnight. It did not happen with the election and inauguration of Barack Obama as 44th President of the United States, as spokespeople of the Tea-Republican Party, and News Corp (some of whom are in both) may assert. Nor did it happen in 2000 with the Presidential Election, the Supreme Court decision which decided the election, and the subsequent inauguration of George W. Bush as the 43rd President.

The development of the US as a superpower at the end of World War II was facilitated by the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the office of President in 1932, and his reelections in ’36, ’40, and ’44.  However, it was less President Roosevelt himself than the progressive economic policies of the New Deal that he put in place.  Similarly the descent from superpower status and the crumbling of American infrastructure have been slow processes. Perhaps it began with the conflation of news and entertainment and the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 under President Reagan.

In order, therefore, for the United States to continue to be a superpower, we need to return to the progressive economic policies that build infrastructure and finance infrastructure projects by taxes, rather than by mortgaging our children’s futures to potentially unfriendly foreign powers such as Communist China.

The wisest, but least easy course would be to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire and increase taxes. Everyone should pay their fair share.

Finally,

If we increase the debt ceiling, will China continue to buy U.S. Treasury Bills?

China holds over $1 trillion of US Treasury Bills, about 7.5% of our debt.  Is that in our national interest?

Google announced that it believes that China is responsible for cyber attacks on Google China. Google is now unwilling to censor search results in China (The Guardian).

Google China. by Phillipe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, about to begin a tour of Asia, said “We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation.” (The Guardian / NY Times).On their blog (here), in a post entitled “A New Approach to China” Google said:

“In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.”

“At least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted.

“we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.”

“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

China responded on Danwei.org by claiming that Baidu.com was hacked by a group calling itself the “Iranian Cyber Army” (here).  It appears that search engines are hacked all the time in China and like free speech, computer security doesn’t exist in China.

I’m beginning to think that Copenhagen was what it had to be, what it could only be. It fulfilled its Buddha-nature. Thus, I don’t consider it a failure. Nor do I consider it a success. It was what it was, what it could have been, what it had to be:

A gathering of emissaries from the 64 corners of the earth.

Earth From Space, Copyright NASA

Isaac Asimov observed in Foundation (ISBN: 978-0553293357) that “diplomacy, is the art of speaking for a long time without saying anything.” Most of the diplomats in Copenhagen had multiple agendas. Unfortunately for billions of the world’s poorest, the public agendas of sustainability and the abstract “Gaia Hypothesis” were distant fourth and fifth behind the private agendas of power, money, and influence.

The inconvenient truth is that much of Bangla Desh, California, Louisiana, Southern Florida will disappear, submerged, like the mythical Atlantis. China will continue to build 2 coal plants per week. And people will die.

But disregarding this notion, a Chinese diplomat said, “You’re having dinner, you’ve invited us to dessert, and you expect us to pay the entire bill.” As I’ve said elsewhere, (click) this metaphor is not apt. It’s more realistic to say “We’re in in an opium den. We’re stoned out of our minds. We’re one toke from a fatal overdose. And China is banging on the door trying to get in while there’s some dope left to smoke – and they want to mainline it into the carotid artery.”

The Marxist East is as materialistic as the Capitalist West.  Marx, after all, argued against Capitalism, not Materialism.

China demonstrated this with acquisition of the Hummer brand by Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery (CNN Money / NY Times).  India, with purchase of Jaguar and Land Rover by Tata Motors, is focused on proving their power to England: Oedipus writ large. India has embraced colonialism. Like the US and Canada, they have shaken off the shackles of colonial subjugation. However, they have embraced their colonial past, and embraced the culture of Empire. Their role now, and China’s: to lend us money so we can buy their shoddy merchandise.

And their role in Copenhagen: To prevent agreement.

Monty Python. Stock Photo

And now, as Monty Python used to say, “for something, completely different.” Consider the East Anglia College e-mail security breach. Elizabeth May, Leader of Canada’s Green Party did (click here) noted that the break-in and consequent publication and distribution of private emails occurred immediately prior to the Copenhagen conference, the hue and cry was about a quote taken out of context, misrepresenting a discussion on how to present the data. What was lost in this was, the fact that an email server was hacked. “Who,” she asked, “broke into the computer? Who paid the perpetrator? Who benefits from the crimes?”

What does this mean for you and me, for the nascent sustainability community? For students in the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at UVM (click), The Marlboro College MBA in Managing for Sustainability (click), the Presidio MBA in Sustainable Management (click), The Fowler Center for Sustainability at Case Western Reserve (click)?

The obvious answer is “it is not just some Americans who have their heads in the sand, but the Chinese and the Indians as well. The science is in (click here and here). People in New Delhi, Beijing, and Washington are fiddling while Rome – and the rest of the world – is burning. We have our work cut out for us.”

Stay tuned.

In China, 407 Coal Miners Died THIS YEAR

mine. 528 miners were underground at the time of the explosion – in which 19.7% of the miners were killed! China Mine Disaster

How many miners die each year per ton of coal mined in the US? China? Elsewhere? What is the Percentage of Coal Miners who die in mining accidents each year?

I suppose a number of maintenance workers will die in accidents on solar and wind projects, however, the conditions are not inherently and fundamentally dangerous as in coal mines.

Andrews S. Revkin reports on Dot Earth that Chinese energy use has declined more or less following economic activity.

Good news or bad? Depends on what’s happening with Chinese energy infrastructure while its economy contracts. Our guess – and it’s a guess – is that high energy prices provide an incentive to switch to clean, sustainable energy. Air quality, of course, is inversely proportional to the use of fossil fuels and nuclear power. 

The Dot Earth Project (at our hometown paper) – and Mr. Revkin’s work- are supported in part by the John Simon Guggenheim Project. We’ll try to keep up with it.