Author Topic: 19th Century Americans  (Read 3697 times)

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Religious Dick

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19th Century Americans
« on: April 24, 2010, 02:33:20 PM »
19th Century Americans

By Patrick J. Buchanan

?Thank you, Hu Jintao, and thank you, China,? said Hugo Chavez, as he announced a $20 billion loan from Beijing, to be repaid in Venezuelan oil.

The Chinese just threw Chavez a life-preserver. For Venezuela is reeling from 25 percent inflation, government-induced blackouts to cope with energy shortages and an economy that shrank by 3.3 percent in 2009.

Where did China get that $20 billion? From us. From consumers at Wal-Mart. That $20 billion is 1 percent of the $2 trillion in trade surpluses Beijing has run up with the United States over two decades.

Beijing is using its trillions of dollars in reserves, piled up from exports to America, to cut deals to lock up strategic resources for the coming struggle with the United States for hegemony in Asia and the world.

She has struck multibillion-dollar deals with Sudan, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Russia, Iran and Australia to secure a steady supply of oil, gas and vital minerals to maintain the 10-12 percent annual growth China has been racking up since Deng Xiaoping dispensed with Maoism and set his nation out on the capitalist road.

China has dozens of nuclear power plants under construction, has completed the Three Gorges Dam ? the largest power source on earth ? and is tying the nation together with light rail, bullet trains and highways in infrastructure projects unlike any the world has ever seen.

Contrast what China is doing with what we are about. We have declared vast regions of our country, onshore and offshore, off-limits to drilling for oil and gas. We have not built a nuclear power plant in 30 years or a refinery in 25 years. We have declared war on fossil fuels to save the planet from global warming.

Given the power of the environmental lobby to tie up projects in endless litigation, we could never today build our Interstate Highway System, Hoover Dam, the TVA or the Union Pacific Railroad.

Determined to take America?s title as the world?s first manufacturing nation, as she has taken Germany?s title as the world?s leading exporter, China keeps her currency undervalued and demands of those who sell to China that they also produce in China. As America?s share of the world economy steadily falls, China?s share has doubled. This year, China will overtake Japan as the world?s second-largest economy.

Having seen the Soviet Union disintegrate into 15 nations and fearing the ethno-nationalism of Tibetans and Uighurs, Beijing floods her border provinces with Han Chinese. America, declaring racial, ethnic and religious diversity a strength, invites the world to come and swamp its native-born. And mostly poor, unskilled and uneducated, they are coming by the millions.

China puts savings ahead of spending, production ahead of consumption, manufacturing ahead of finance. Embracing free trade, Americans declare that it makes no difference who produces what, where. What?s good for the Global Economy is good for America.

Before the financial collapse, the U.S. savings rate stood at zero percent of family income. In China, it ranged between 35 percent and 50 percent.

Since the Cold War, the United States has been playing empire ? intervening to punish evil-doers and advance democracy in Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan.

We have expanded NATO to include Eastern Europe, the Baltic States and much of the Balkan Peninsula. We have not let a single alliance lapse from the Cold War. And we have fewer friends and more adversaries than at the end of the Cold War. What has all this intervention availed us?

China, having fought no one, has rapidly built up her military power and developed ties to the growing number of nations at odds with America, from Russia to Iran to Sudan to Venezuela.

The Chinese of 2010 call to mind 19th century Americans who shoved aside Mexicans, Indians and Spanish to populate a continent, build a mighty nation, challenge the British Empire ? superpower of the day ? and swiftly move past her in manufacturing to become first nation on earth. Men were as awed by America then as they are by China today.

America seems a declining superpower. She cannot defend her borders, balance her budgets or win her wars. Her educational system at the primary and secondary level is a shambles. In the first decade of the century, she lost one of every three manufacturing jobs. In this second decade, she is looking at trillion-dollar deficits to 2020. The world is losing confidence in her ability to manage her surging national debt.

While we are finally extricating ourselves after seven years from an unnecessary war in Iraq, we are heading deeper into an Afghan war that has lasted a decade, the end of which it is impossible to see.

During the Cold War, China was in the grip of a millenarian ideology that blinded her to her true interests. Today, it is we who are captive to a utopian ideology that is becoming perilous to the republic.

http://buchanan.org/blog/19th-century-americans-3936
I speak of civil, social man under law, and no other.
-Sir Edmund Burke

Plane

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Re: 19th Century Americans
« Reply #1 on: April 24, 2010, 04:45:46 PM »
19th Century Americans

By Patrick J. Buchanan


"...the 10-12 percent annual growth China has been racking up since Deng Xiaoping dispensed with Maoism and set his nation out on the capitalist road....




 ...America, declaring racial, ethnic and religious diversity a strength, invites the world to come and swamp its native-born. And mostly poor, unskilled and uneducated, they are coming by the millions...."



Is it better to preserve a ranking of comparison between nations financial success or is it better to have and keep a philosophy that is good for the people?

Religious Dick

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Re: 19th Century Americans
« Reply #2 on: April 24, 2010, 09:07:55 PM »
Is it better to preserve a ranking of comparison between nations financial success or is it better to have and keep a philosophy that is good for the people?

I was under the impression financial success was good for the people.
I speak of civil, social man under law, and no other.
-Sir Edmund Burke

Plane

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Re: 19th Century Americans
« Reply #3 on: April 24, 2010, 10:40:55 PM »
Is it better to preserve a ranking of comparison between nations financial success or is it better to have and keep a philosophy that is good for the people?

I was under the impression financial success was good for the people.

Yes you might say both are "good".

I might even go along with both being "needed".

But between the two , which is worse to have lost?

kimba1

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Re: 19th Century Americans
« Reply #4 on: April 25, 2010, 01:35:39 AM »
I was under the impression financial success was good for the people.


bernie madoff would agree with that statement.

Michael Tee

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Re: 19th Century Americans
« Reply #5 on: April 25, 2010, 10:28:39 AM »
Very well-organized and well-written article.  I am becoming a real fan.

The Venezuelan comments were particularly apt.  The USA for some reason goes waaay out of its way to piss off an important oil supplier and guess who picks up the slack?  The very worst thing about the breakup of the USSR was that it gave free rein to America's hegemonic ambitions.  Well, I guess those days are coming to an end at last.

Looks like the writing is on the wall.  The day when the world's no. 1 bully is going to get its ass kicked is drawing steadily closer.  And maybe faster than I thought, maybe even on a day that I will live to see.  The only thing I took issue with in the entire article was Buchanan's laughable and pathetic attempt to portray America's brutal wars of unprovoked aggression as idealistic and altruistic attempts to spread democracy.

The only tragic aspect of it was that, parallel to America's descent into a crypto-fascist parody of itself, a refinement of its Constitutional promise was also developing - - Miranda warnings, the greatest flowering of freedom of expression ever seen in human history, successful challenges to Jim Crow, Freedom of Information Act openness, campaign finance reform (at least until sandbagged by the conservative SCOTUS) and successful legal challenges to executive-branch infringements on Constitutional rights.  America had been an unprecedented laboratory of human rights and individual liberty developing in a Constitutional framework.  The world has seen nothing like it.  But in the end, greed, lies and demagoguery pulled the plug on the experiment.  I blame capitalism.  Don't look to the Chinese for further development of human rights, or personal freedom.

Plane

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Re: 19th Century Americans
« Reply #6 on: April 25, 2010, 10:25:08 PM »
   Those things you mention as being positive developments, why couldn't China adopt or develop something similuar?

Are they insuficiently capitolistic to support such development?

Michael Tee

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Re: 19th Century Americans
« Reply #7 on: April 25, 2010, 11:20:56 PM »
<<Those things you mention as being positive developments, why couldn't China adopt or develop something similuar?>>

I don't know why they won't develop freedom of expression, or individual rights.  Does it look to you as if they will?

<<Are they insuficiently capitolistic to support such development?>>

Capitalism has nothing to do with it.  Capitalism does fine under fascism, in fact that's why capital will ultimately support fascist movements, to avoid "democracy," which they believe will only lead to communism.

Plane

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Re: 19th Century Americans
« Reply #8 on: April 25, 2010, 11:50:51 PM »
<<Those things you mention as being positive developments, why couldn't China adopt or develop something similuar?>>

I don't know why they won't develop freedom of expression, or individual rights.  Does it look to you as if they will?

<<Are they insuficiently capitolistic to support such development?>>

Capitalism has nothing to do with it.  Capitalism does fine under fascism, in fact that's why capital will ultimately support fascist movements, to avoid "democracy," which they believe will only lead to communism.
Apparently capitolism can also thrive under a communist regime.

The Capitolism is the best for nourishing the people (I know that you don't accept this , it is enough that the Chineese do).

Democracy though is best for provideing for succession and promoteing wisdom amoung the people. But I fear that the Chineese Aristocats do not trust the people at large to produce any wisdom.

Perhaps they will it is experience with Capitolism that teaches one to trust the people to produce wisdom.

Michael Tee

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Re: 19th Century Americans
« Reply #9 on: April 26, 2010, 09:07:27 AM »
<<Apparently capitolism can also thrive under a communist regime.>>

Does anyone know exactly what it is that is "thriving" under the communist regime of China?  Do Chinese entrepreneurs enjoy title to the means of production that they utilize to manufacture the cheap stuff they sell in the West or are they making stuff in factories licensed to them by the state?  Do foreign firms have the right to manufacture in China on their own or only in minority partnership with Chinese government partners?  What exactly are the characteristics of the "capitalism" that plane claims is flourishing in China today?

<<The Capitolism is the best for nourishing the people (I know that you don't accept this , it is enough that the Chineese do).>>

I think first of all we should establish what it is that the Chinese have accepted.

<<Democracy though is best for provideing for succession and promoteing wisdom amoung the people. >>

If America is any example, "Democracy" has finally come to mean sham "elections" between carefully pre-selected candidates, either one of whom will continue the projects of the ZioNazi Lobby and the Military-Industrial Complex without any serious deviations.  You may call this "succession" but it looks to me more like continuity.

As for promoting "wisdom" among the people, I think 98% of the American people are like a bunch of mushrooms, best raised in the dark and pissed on or shit on from time to time for nourishment.  Not my words, but those of an elderly Pentagon planner that a friend of mine recently met by chance.  When the Pentagon plays its war games, they apparently don't spend a hell of a lot of time worrying about the "mushrooms"  or their reaction to announced events.  The "mushrooms" are managed.  Period.  So much for democracy AND the "wisdom" of the people.

<<But I fear that the Chineese Aristocats do not trust the people at large to produce any wisdom.>>

How very American of them.

<<Perhaps they will it is experience with Capitolism that teaches one to trust the people to produce wisdom.>>

Yep.  The wisdom of the people.  See it in action all about you.  War in Afghanistan, American-sponsored ethnic cleansing on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, War in Iraq, Homeland Security, families blown to shit in Pakistan, trillion-dollar handouts to Wall Street and its bankers and "10%" unemployment, record foreclosures and defaults.  Think how bad it could be were the people NOT so wise.

Xavier_Onassis

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Re: 19th Century Americans
« Reply #10 on: April 26, 2010, 10:16:40 AM »
Chinese culture is far less interested in individual liberties than Western cultures are. China has had a huge population for centuries, and long before Communism, there was a collectivist mentality there. This is why China has been more successful with Communism than the USSR: it is far less diverse in every way.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

kimba1

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Re: 19th Century Americans
« Reply #11 on: April 26, 2010, 11:09:14 AM »
 it is far less diverse in every way.

not sure about that , the language itself varies to such a degree that some dialects are not understandable. ex. taishan

but the collective mentality is deliberate by the government.

Michael Tee

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Re: 19th Century Americans
« Reply #12 on: April 26, 2010, 12:10:46 PM »
<<but the collective mentality is deliberate by the government.>>

XO says the collective mentality was part of the Chinese way of thinking for a long time, i.e., from before the current Chinese Communist government.

I don't know much about the subject historically, but weren't rich landlords always a part of their civilization?  Some Chinese had land, others didn't.  The ones without lived on the landlord's property and worked in his fields.  There were noblemen, scholars, artisans and common working people.  Merchants for sure, also sing-song girls, who might have been like Japanese geishas.  And of course huge armies. Sounds like a class-based society rather than a collectivist society but I stand to be corrected.

Plane

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Re: 19th Century Americans
« Reply #13 on: April 26, 2010, 03:35:59 PM »
<<Perhaps they will it is experience with Capitolism that teaches one to trust the people to produce wisdom.>>

Yep.  The wisdom of the people.  See it in action all about you.  War in Afghanistan, American-sponsored ethnic cleansing on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, War in Iraq, Homeland Security, families blown to shit in Pakistan, trillion-dollar handouts to Wall Street and its bankers and "10%" unemployment, record foreclosures and defaults.  Think how bad it could be were the people NOT so wise.


So you think some of these problems would benefit from LESS democracy than the bit we already have?

Plane

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Re: 19th Century Americans
« Reply #14 on: April 26, 2010, 03:48:34 PM »
<<The Capitolism is the best for nourishing the people (I know that you don't accept this , it is enough that the Chineese do).>>

I think first of all we should establish what it is that the Chinese have accepted.


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http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0706/feature4/text4.html
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0403/feature4/


http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=374&catid=9&subcatid=58
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« Last Edit: April 26, 2010, 03:53:09 PM by Plane »