As I was saying
Angela Merkel, Cancelarul Germaniei, a ţinut un discurs în Aachen, unde a expus câteva idei cu privire la oportunitatea extraordinară prezentată de criza economică pentru a pune pe picioare Statele Unite ale Europei, preferabil fără acordul populaţiei:
Euro crisis could help boost political union-Merkel
BERLIN, May 13 (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday the euro's troubles offered a chance for the EU to strengthen its economic and political union, not just its common currency.
Speaking at a ceremony in Aachen where Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was awarded the Charlemagne Prize for furthering European unity, Merkel said the future of the EU was at stake in the challenges to its monetary amalgamation.
"If the euro fails, not only the currency fails. Europe fails too, and the idea of European unification. We have a common currency, but no common political and economic union. And this is exactly what we must change. To achieve this -- therein lies the opportunity of this crisis."
In a speech broadcast live on WDR television, Merkel said the crisis over the euro's future was "not just any crisis, it is the strongest test Europe has faced since 1990, if not in the 53 years since the treaties of Rome."
"This test is existential -- it must be passed. If it does not manage to (do that), the consequences for Europe and beyond are unforeseeable," the conservative Christian Democrat said.
Greece's debt emergency and a worsening deficit crunch in Spain, Portugal and Ireland have eroded the euro's strength.
But Merkel held off on backing a 110-billion-euro ($139.7 billion) bailout for Greece until it was clear contagion was starting to afflict the euro zone, dismaying France over the delay. Germany and France had long been the twin engines of EU integration.
Situaţia din Afganistan e puţin cam complicată
O diagramă a dinamicii stabilităţii şi operaţiunilor de contra-insurgenţă din Afganistan. E puţin cam complicat, dar perfect fezabil.
În caz că vă e ruşine că sunteţi români…
... vi-l prezint pe Congressman Hank Johnson, membru al partidului Democrat, reprezentant al Districtului al Patrulea din statul Georgia. În clipul video de mai jos, Congressman Johnson îi spune unui Amiralului Willard că suplimentarea numărului de trupe S.U.A. pe insula Guam ar putea provoca... răsturnarea şi scufundarea insulei. Hell, yeah!
Johnson: "My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize."
Willard: "We don't anticipate that".
Din meşteri am devenit roboţi
Rochelle Gurstein scrie în numărul din martie al revistei online Guernica despre muncă şi despre modul în care munca complexă a meşterilor şi artizanilor a fost spartă în părţile sale componente şi transformată într-o serie de sarcini repetitive pentru a deveni compatibilă cu modul de lucru construit în jurul liniilor de asamblare ale uzinelor Ford.
De la stilul vechi de a munci
In the mid-sixteenth century, a book described ninety different crafts, including jewelers, metalsmiths, goldsmiths, coiners, tapestry makers, printers, musical instrument makers, dyers, potters, tanners, weavers, carpenters, bakers, and millers. Two centuries later, Diderot’s Encyclopedia counted two hundred and fifty. By the middle of the nineteenth century, in a medium-sized town in England, over fifty crafts were still being practiced.
care presupunea o ucenicie îndelungată şi un act în care se îmbinau imaginaţia şi măiestria unui artizan, s-a trecut la un stil de lucru pe care muncitorii îl găseau revoltător:
By 1910, these once-independent craftsmen refused to accept what they experienced as the mind-numbing and degrading division of their labor and began to walk off the job. During the next few years, Ford took even more extreme measures to step up production, instituting the endless-chain conveyor system; car assemblies now moved past fixed stations where men carried out ever more simple, repetitive operations. Again, these men registered their revulsion at this systematic destruction of their knowledge and skill by walking off the job, this time in droves. “It was apparent,” writes Keith Sward in his The Legend of Henry Ford, “that the Ford Motor Co. had reached the point of owning a great factory without having enough workers to keep it humming.” For the year 1913 alone, the employee turnover rate reached 380 percent. “So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system,” Sward reports, “that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.”
Din nefericire, pe măsură ce sistemul de muncă bazat pe linia de asamblare a început să se extindă, artizanii au fost împinşi din ce în ce mai mult către periferia societăţii de tip nou, în care o mare parte a membrilor săi nu au habar să facă nimic dincolo de cele câteva sarcini repetitive pentru care s-au pregătit.
Instead of putting forward, as so many of our elected officials, policy analysts, pundits, and journalists predictably do, a picture of our world that is essentially the same, except that it is somehow “green” and somehow peopled with college-educated or better “trained” workers, we need to focus our attention on the more pressing and more basic question of what kinds of work people should be expected to devote their lives to doing. The last time this question—the question of meaningful, satisfying, dignified labor—got a public hearing was in the nineteen sixties and seventies, with Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital being the intellectual high-water mark. What Braverman convincingly demonstrated is that there is nothing natural or inevitable about our system of labor; that it came about through conscious decisions made by industrial capitalists in the name of profit for them alone; and, so long as there were living alternatives to it, that assembly line work was forcefully resisted by skilled craftsmen who walked off the job rather than submit to work that they felt demeaned them. William Morris spoke for those men when he declared the new factory work “worthless; it is slaves’ work—mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil.”
Din păcate, alternativele au cam dispărut. În ziua de astăzi oamenii visează să meargă la ţară sau să devină entrepreneurs, metode indirecte de a recâştiga ceea ce s-a pierdut şi de a scăpa de plictiseala incredibilă a muncii repetitive.
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Sursa:
Rochelle Gurstein, Labor Pains
China şi S.U.A. îşi arată muşchii
R.P. Chineză şi S.U.A. au decis că o serie de întâlniri şi evenimente care au ieşit prost merită să fie urmate de o altă serie de lovituri la picioare, coate în burtă şi bătăi cu fularele. Cam ca la şcoală.
U.S. sells weapons to Taiwan, angering China
Saturday, January 30, 2010
The Obama administration announced the sale Friday of $6 billion worth of Patriot anti-missile systems, helicopters, mine-sweeping ships and communications equipment to Taiwan in a long-expected move that sparked an angry protest from China.
The sale, formally announced by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, is expected to prompt China to slow or even break military relations with the United States and cancel a visit by President Hu Jintao to Washington in April. Chinese officials have threatened other actions, including sanctions on the U.S. companies supplying the equipment or on businesses in the districts of congressional lawmakers known to be backers of Taiwan.
Its vice minister of foreign affairs, He Yafei, said China was "strongly indignant" about the arms sales to Taiwan and warned that they would have a "serious negative impact" on U.S.-China cooperation.
China, evident, a decis să răspundă:
China Dumps US Asset Backeds and Corporates
February 9th, 2010
By David GoldmanDollar-denominated risk assets, including asset-backed securities and corporates, are no longer wanted at the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), nor at China’s large commercial banks. The Chinese government has ordered its reserve managers to divest itself of riskier securities and hold only Treasuries and US agency debt with an implicit or explicit government guarantee. This already has been communicated to American securities dealers, according to market participants with direct knowledge of the events.
It is not clear whether China’s motive is simple risk aversion in the wake of a sharp widening of corporate and mortgage spreads during the past two weeks, or whether there also is a political dimension. With the expected termination of the Federal Reserve’s special facility to purchase mortgage-backed securities next month, some asset-backed spreads already have blown out, and the Chinese institutions may simply be trying to get out of the way of a widening. There is some speculation that China’s action has to do with the recent deterioration of US-Chinese relations over arm sales to Taiwan and other issues. That would be an unusual action for the Chinese to take–Beijing does not mix investment and strategic policy–and would be hard to substantiate in any event.
And kept going:
First it was pirates. Now it’s Yemen.
February 8th, 2010
I‘ve early written that Somalia‘s pirates may be the accidental spark for greater Chinese military intervention in the region. Here‘s another spark. This article from China Energy Web worries that unrest in Yemen may threaten China‘s oil imports from the region.
The author says “The United States recognizes Yemen‘s geographic ability to choke China‘s oil import life lines“. He then hints that the United States may bring the war on terror to Yemen, and “strangle China‘s oil imports and strangle China‘s economy“. The rest of the article carries on in a similar tone.
Now, the author is a reporter, not an official. But the fact that he is considering Yemen in this manner raises the possibility that officials are as well. China certainly has strong commercial interests in Yemen, as I‘ve written about here and here. Many of its top Arabic-speaking diplomats have also served in the country.
Sub presiunea S.U.A. şi UE de a înceta raportarea monedei naţionale la dollar şi a permite aprecierea ei şi, ca rezultat, scăderea competitivităţii produselor chinezeşti, China a decis să mărească salariile la nivel naţional:
Higher labor costs would cut Chinese export competitiveness while boosting domestic spending power and sustaining economic growth, according to the bank. Premier Wen Jiabao’s government has been pressed by U.S. and European officials to end a 19- month yuan peg to the dollar to help diminish trade and investment imbalances that contributed to the credit crisis.
“Wage increases are a better option because they largely benefit Chinese workers,” Tao Dong, a Credit Suisse economist in Hong Kong who has covered the Chinese and Asian economies for more than 15 years, said in an interview yesterday. “Currency appreciation will only result in Chinese exporters losing out to competitors in countries such as Malaysia and Mexico.”
The strategy may limit gains in the yuan to 3 percent this year, according to Tao. This month’s 13 percent increase in minimum wage in eastern China’s Jiangsu province indicates that higher pay will play an important role in officials’ efforts to rebalance growth in the fastest-growing major economy, Tao said.
The wage decision “argues against a large one-off yuan revaluation,” Ben Simpfendorfer, an economist with Royal Bank of Scotland in Hong Kong, wrote in a note this week.
Şi distracţia nu s-a terminat încă. Rămâne să vedem răspunsul S.U.A.
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Surse:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/29/AR2010012904113.html
http://blog.atimes.net/?p=1352
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/china-dumping-begins-reserve-managers-notified-any-non-usg-guaranteed-securities-must-be-div
http://www.silkroadeconomy.com/2010/02/08/first-it-was-pirates-now-its-yemen/?utm_source=subscriber&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss