…new Cold War
If Time Magazine can ask, “Can the US win the new Cold War?”, your Eyewitness guesses the sky won’t fall if he talks about the new Cold War that’s upon us – even as a very hot one’s playing out in Europe. This new Cold War, we’re told, is between the US – plus its “Western allies” – and the rampant China out in the East. And while the “West is west, and the East is east”, it sho does look like the twain are meeting in several theatres – hot and cold!!
Now, this is the weirdest Cold War ever!! The first one was between the US/West and the USSR, wherein the latter presented an in-your-face challenge after WWII to the former on all fronts – militarily, ideologically, politically, economically, and every other “ally” you can think about!! We natives in the colonies, during that Cold War, were used as proxies to fight most of the “hot” encounters. Our riots of the sixties, that have split us apart to this day, are a grim reminder that when the elephants fight, the grass gets crushed!!
Now, this Cold War’s weird, ‘cause, up to the seventies, China was wallowing in poverty like the rest of us that they call the “Third World”. The USSR and her satellites in Eastern Europe were the “Second World”. But it was President Nixon of the US who flew to China in 1972 and brought them out of the cold and into the UN system of nations. But more than that, the US allowed their industrial companies to set up shop in China, to “exploit” China’s cheap labour. And before you could say “chowmein”, China had become the “factory” of America and the West!!
And since China was shipping oodles more goods to the US than the US to China, the Chinese in a jiffy had trillions of dollars in credit (represented by their currencies as “foreign reserves”) sloshing around in their pockets! So, rather than taking on the West in a military hot war – like they did in 1950 in the Korean War – China launched a Cold War on the economic front with something called the “Belt and Road Initiative”!! And the irony is that the US and EU allowed their factories to rust away so Walmart and Amazon can stock their shelves and warehouses with goods from China!!
So, even as they try to pummel their old adversary Russia in Europe in a hot war, the West just fired a salvo at China in the Cold War — US President Joe Biden’s major new tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, advanced batteries, solar cells, steel, aluminum and medical equipment. And imagine, the US claim they are pushing the world to “go green”.
So, the US is exempted??
…anti-corruption battle
In the Bible, the Head Honcho, His Heir and His prophets assure us: “the poor will always be with us”. And they’re just as grim about corruption. Right there in the first book, the Big Guy “…observed all this corruption in the world, for everyone on earth was corrupt.” And to make sure we understood corruption was a hydra-headed monster, in Timothy, there’s a pretty graphic description: “People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, unfeeling, uncooperative, slanderous, degenerate, brutal, hateful of what is good, traitors, reckless, conceited, and lovers of pleasure.” Whew!!
But we can’t ever give in, can we?? Just as they’re fighting poverty, our govt took on corruption: “We in this Government believe very strongly, and we are fully committed to, the importance of the fight against corruption in all of its forms, and we believe equally …the most effective instruments in the fight against corruption (are) openness, transparency and accountability…”
La luta continua!!
…currency takeover?
So, China wants to replace the US greenback as a reserve currency?? Well, they’ll hafta run massive, sustained trade deficits (like the US does) to get their currency held widely abroad. That means exporting jobs.
Nah…didn’t think so!!
