China overtaking US as global trader

Shin Cheol-soo no longer sees his future in the United States.
The South Korean businessman supplied components to American automakers for a decade. But this year, he uprooted his family from Detroit and moved home to focus on selling to the new economic superpower: China.
In just five years, China has surpassed the United States as a trading partner for much of the world, including U.S. allies such as South Korea and Australia, according to an Associated Press analysis of trade data. As recently as 2006, the U.S. was the larger trading partner for 127 countries, versus just 70 for China. By last year the two had clearly traded places: 124 countries for China, 76 for the U.S.
In the most abrupt global shift of its kind since World War II, the trend is changing the way people live and do business from Africa to Arizona, as farmers plant more soybeans to sell to China and students sign up to learn Mandarin.
The findings show how fast China has ascended to challenge America's century-old status as the globe's dominant trader, a change that is gradually translating into political influence. They highlight how pervasive China's impact has been, spreading from neighboring Asia to Africa and now emerging in Latin America, the traditional U.S. backyard.
Despite China's now-slowing economy, its share of world output and trade is expected to keep rising, with growth forecast at up to 8 percent a year over the next decade, far above U.S. and European levels. This growth could strengthen the hand of a new generation of just-named Chinese leaders, even as it fuels strain with other nations.
Last year, Shin's Ena Industry Co. made half his sales of rubber and plastic parts to U.S. factories. But his plans call for China, which overtook the United States as the biggest auto market in 2009, to rise fivefold to 30 percent of his total by 2015. He and his children are studying Mandarin.
"The United States is a tiger with no power," Shin said in his office, where three walls are lined with books, many about China. "Nobody can deny that China is the one now rising."
Trade is a bit like football — the balance of exports and imports, like the game score, is a neat snapshot of a jumble of moves that make up the economy, and both sides are apt to accuse each other of cheating from time to time. Also, the U.S. and China are both rivals and partners who can't have a match without each other, and a strong performance from both is good for the entire league.
Trade may get less publicity than military affairs or diplomacy, yet it is commerce that generates jobs and raises living standards. Trade can also translate into political power. As shopkeepers say, the customer is always right: Governments listen to countries that buy their goods, and the threat to stop buying is one of the most potent diplomatic weapons.
China has been slow to flex its political muscle on a large scale but is starting to push back in disputes over trade, exchange rates and climate change.
"When a German chancellor or French president goes to China, right at the top of the list, he's trying to sell Airbuses and other products and is being sensitive to China's political concerns, like on human rights," said C. Fred Bergsten, a former U.S. Treasury Department official who heads the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
The United States is still the world's biggest importer, but China is gaining. It was a bigger market than the United States for 77 countries in 2011, up from 20 in 2000, according to the AP analysis.
The AP is using International Monetary Fund data to measure the importance of trade with China for some 180 countries and track how it changes over time. The analysis divides a nation's trade with China by its gross domestic product.
The story that emerges is of China's breakneck rise, rather than of a U.S. decline. In 2002, trade with China was 3 percent of a country's GDP on average, compared with 8.7 percent with the U.S. But China caught up, and surged ahead in 2008. Last year, trade with China averaged 12.4 percent of GDP for other countries, higher than that with America at any time in the last 30 years.
Of course, not all trade is equal. China's trade is mostly low-end goods and commodities, while the U.S. competes at the upper end of the market.
Also, even though Chinese companies invest abroad and employ thousands of foreign workers, they lag behind American industry in building global alliances and in innovation, which is still rewarded in the marketplace. China's competitive edge remains low labor and other costs, while the U.S. is the world's center for innovation in autos, aerospace, computers, medicine, munitions, finance and pharmaceuticals. The Chinese have yet to build a car that will pass U.S. or European emission standards.
And the United States still does more trade overall — but just barely. If the trend continues, China will push past the U.S. this year, a remarkable feat for a country so poor 30 years ago that the average person had never talked on a telephone.
"The center of gravity of the world economy has moved to the east," said Mauricio Cardenas, the finance minister in Colombia. Like most of Latin America, his country is still more closely tied to the U.S., but its trade with China has risen from virtually nothing to 2.5 percent of GDP, a more than tenfold increase since 2001. "I would say that there is nothing comparable in the last 50 years."
In one sense, China's growing presence in trade is just restoring the Middle Kingdom to its historic dominance. China was the biggest economy for centuries until about 1800, when the industrial revolution propelled first Europe and then the U.S. into the lead.
China began its return to the global stage in the 1990s as a manufacturer of low-priced goods, from T-shirts to toys. Factories in other countries slashed costs to meet the "China price" or were pushed out of the market.
As the new millennium dawned, the U.S. remained by far the world's dominant trader, rivaled collectively by Europe but no single nation. However, from 2000 to 2008, China's imports grew 403 percent and exports 474 percent, driven in part by its entrance into the World Trade Organization and its move to higher-value production.
China's imports of oil and raw materials for its factories propelled resource booms in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. China's demand for steel for manufacturing and construction grew so fast that its mills now consume half the world's output of iron ore.
Zambia, a major copper producer, switched to the China column in 2000. Australia, a coal and iron ore exporter, followed in 2005. Chile, another copper supplier, moved in 2009.
Meanwhile, exports surged as Apple, Samsung, Nokia and other electronics giants shifted final assembly to China. Shipments of mobile phones, flat-screen TVs and personal computers have jumped sevenfold over the past decade to nearly $500 billion. That made China a major customer for high-tech components supplied by countries such as South Korea, which swung into China's column in 2003, followed by Malaysia in 2007.
In the U.S., Vermont-based manufacturer SBE Inc. started exporting capacitors — energy-storage devices used in computers, hybrid cars and wind turbines — in 2006. The company now gets 15 to 20 percent of its revenue from China, and has hired 10 employees there.
As China grew richer, its people spent more.
Chinese ate more pork, fried chicken and hamburgers, rapidly sending up the demand for soybeans to make cooking oil and feed for pigs and cows. Some cattle ranchers in Latin America turned grazing land into fields of soy, a crop few in their region consume. Soybean exports helped push Brazil into the China column in 2010, and put China neck and neck with the U.S. as Argentina's top trading partner.
In the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, some 10,000 miles (17,000 kilometers) from Beijing, farmer Agenor Vicente Pelissa and his family raise cattle and soy on 54,300 acres, a farm twice the size of Manhattan. Half their 21,000-ton annual soybean harvest goes to China.
"We've invested more in technology and in better machines and equipment to meet this rising demand," Pelissa said. "If it hadn't been for China, we would not have not modernized our operations, at least not as quickly as we did."
Even in the U.S., better known for manufacturing, farmers are rushing to sell to China. The United States is the largest exporter of soybeans to China, followed by Brazil and Argentina. China's purchases of American soybeans have risen from almost nothing 20 years ago to a quarter of the crop: 24 million tons worth $12.1 billion, America's largest export to China.
The boom is having a profound effect on farming communities, said Grant Kimberley, whose family farm near Des Moines, Iowa, now grows 4,000 acres of soybeans, up from 3,500 eight years ago.
"It's provided more revenue for these farmers than they've ever seen in their lives," said Kimberley, who is also director of market development at the Iowa Soybean Association. He said he sees more young people returning to the farm. "People can see there's an opportunity to make nice livings for their families."
It was the 2008 global crisis that showed the resilience of China's exporters.
The recession set everyone back, but China less so than the U.S. or other major traders such as Germany. China does a bigger share of its trade with developing countries that suffered less and rebounded faster, while the United States sells to rich economies that are struggling. Chinese companies have boosted exports by 7 percent this year despite anemic global demand.
During the recession, Shin, the South Korean auto parts manufacturer, saw his sales fall 50 percent. He shut one of three production lines, and banks stopped lending him money.
But China's auto market was powering ahead. So Shin hired an employee in China, and is now making plans for his first factory there. On a business trip to Germany, clients told him their Chinese factories would be larger than those at home.
Parents like Shin, who work at companies doing business with China, in turn fed enrollment growth at schools such as Teacher Ching, a Chinese-language kindergarten in Seoul.
Nancy Ching, the daughter of immigrants from Taiwan, opened the school with 15 students in 2004, the year after South Korea first moved from the U.S. column to the China column. Today she has 60.
"Mothers who send their kids here believe our children's generation is the China generation," she said in Chinese-accented Korean. "In the future, without learning Chinese, one won't be able to get a job."
China resumed its upward trajectory in the last two years. Even with key Western markets in a slump, exports are up 58 percent since 2009. Imports are up an even sharper 73 percent.
Rising incomes have driven demand for wine and other luxury goods, making China a lifeline for European and American vineyards when the global crisis battered traditional markets.
The Chinese have "helped Bordeaux a lot these past three years," said Florence Cathiard, owner of Chateau Smith Haut Lafitte in the Pessac-Leognan area of France's southwest, home of high-end Bordeaux wine.
France's wine exports to China first surged in 2009, and by last year, China had surpassed the U.S. as a customer by volume. Americans still spend more, because they buy more expensive wines. But China is developing a taste for grand cru wine, the "great growths" that are considered exceptional and command higher prices.
Cathiard acknowledged that she was initially wary of China as a reliable market for her high-end wines. But the turning point for her came around 2008, when she was blown away by the number of people showing up for a master class by her chateau at a wine expo in Hong Kong.
China now accounts for 25 percent of Cathiard's sales, making it her largest market.
The owners of Chateau Haut-Bailly, also in Pessac-Leognan, first traveled to China to test the waters in 2000, and it was too early.
"At the time, they didn't know what a cork or a corkscrew was," said Veronique Sanders, the chateau's general manager.
Chinese sophistication has since advanced rapidly, she said.
"The difference with other emerging markets we've gone into in the past is the size of the country, which means it has an absolutely incredible potential."
The next step in China's trade evolution is to move beyond exporting TVs and lawn furniture to selling services and investing abroad.
The investment trend started with state-owned companies that bought stakes in foreign mines and oil fields. Smaller and private Chinese companies followed, acquiring foreign enterprises to gain a bigger foothold in overseas markets, more access to resources and better technology for their own development.
China is now pushing into construction and engineering, where U.S. and European companies have long dominated.
In Algeria, Chinese state-owned companies pushed aside established French and German rivals to win contracts to build a $12 billion cross-country highway and the $1.3 billion Great Mosque of Algeria. The Chinese have also built highways, dams and other projects in developing countries and are starting to win contracts in the U.S. and Europe.
On a new 50-kilometer (30-mile) highway leading north of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, dark asphalt stretches across six to eight lanes.
The $300 million road was built by three Chinese companies and financed by the African Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China. It has cut a trip that took several hours 18 months ago to 10 minutes, said Joseph Makori, a professional driver.
"When we see the people from America, they say, 'We want to assist Kenya'," said Makori as he looked for work at an interchange about 10 kilometers from downtown. "But I don't see it. China comes and I see one thing: the road."
Chinese companies are starting to win government contracts in Kenya, which has ports that offer access to landlocked Uganda, South Sudan and Rwanda. Governments in Africa are keen to work with China because it does not tie development to human rights or democracy, said Stephen Mutoro, secretary general of the Consumer Federation of Kenya.
"China appears to have a long-term plan based on increasing its commercial interests where governance issues are given a back burner," Mutoro said. The experience of Congo might foreshadow a more complex approach that Beijing envisages for other African nations. In 2008, the two governments signed a $9 billion deal for Chinese companies to build 177 hospitals and health centers, two hydroelectric dams and thousands of miles of railways and roads. In exchange, Congo was to provide 10.6 million tons of copper and 600,000 tons of cobalt.
The deal has since been scaled back to $6 billion under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, which felt Congo was taking on too much debt.
China's outbound investment totaled $67.6 billion last year — just one-sixth of America's nearly $400 billion — but it could reach $2 trillion by 2020, according to a forecast by Rhodium Group, a research firm in New York City.
As a result, Chinese companies are using a new export — jobs.
Employees at Volvo Cars worried after Chinese automaker Geely Holdings bought the money-losing Swedish brand from Ford Motor Co. in 2010. But two years later, instead of moving jobs to China, Geely has expanded Volvo's European workforce of 19,500 to about 21,500.
Majority-owned U.S. affiliates of Chinese companies support about 27,000 American jobs, up from fewer than 10,000 five years ago, according to Rhodium.
In Goodyear, Arizona, Stacey Rassas was laid off in May 2010 after a 16-year career in quality control for aerospace and aluminum manufacturers. By late autumn, she and her husband were worried they might lose their house.
She finally landed a job that December at a new factory that makes solar panels for one of the world's biggest solar manufacturers.
"It was the best day ever," she said.
Her new employer? Suntech Power Holdings Co., a Chinese company.

New World Order

Convergence: Globalists Push Russia-EU Merger

New American

Dec 2, 2012

An op-ed column appearing in the November 25, 2012 Gulf News, entitled, “Need for Europe-Russia institutional integration,”  by former Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov is one of the latest globalist paeans to East-West “convergence.”
“Without a fundamental reset,” argues Ivanov, “relations between Russia and Europe will continue to decay, eventually becoming characterised by benign neglect.” To avoid this undesirable situation, Ivanov avers, “Russia and Europe must identify where their interests converge” and work toward “partnership,” “political cooperation,” and “political integration.”
“Convergence” is a key theme of policy elites the world over, especially those associated with the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), World Policy Conference (WPC), Trilateral Commission (TC), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), and Bilderberg Conferences (BC). Mr. Ivanov, who was an apparatchik in the Soviet diplomatic corps and head of the Russian Security Council under Vladimir Putin, has been associated with all of the above-named organizations. He is a member of that growing body of “former” Communists who now unabashedly wear the globalist label and hobnob with billionaire Russian oligarchs, western corporate CEOs, Wall Street bankers, heads of the giant tax exempt foundations, and denizens of the elite think tanks.
Globalists march under a number of banners and code words to identify themselves and the global political-economic transformation they desire: globalism, globalization, global governance, internationalism, and new world order. In moments of candor and/or daring, some globalists unblushingly blurt out their true goal: world government.
Convergence, in the political and economic sense, although not a term familiar to or used by the average citizen, is central to the globalist program of world government and is commonly used in their higher circles to describe their policies. Convergence is the process by which the widespread political, economic, social, and cultural differences among disparate nations are gradually diminished so that they can be more comfortably merged together, first into supranational regional groupings, and then into a global government. All of this must be done by deception, naturally, since most peoples of the world, and Americans in particular, are not keen on being amalgamated into a global gulag presided over by the United Nations or any other worldly entity.
The convergence strategy was, perhaps, most nakedly explained by Ford Foundation President H. Rowan Gaither (a Council on Foreign Relations member), who admitted to congressional investigator Norman Dodd in 1953 that he and others inside and outside of government were working “to so alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.” (The story of the of the Congressional investigations of the tax-exempt foundations and Norman Dodd’s remarkable meeting with Mr. Gaither, is told in detail in William H. McIlhany’s The Tax-Exempt Foundations (Arlington House, 1980).
The Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations were being investigated because it had become inescapably obvious that they were funding numerous groups, individuals, movements, and projects that were politically, socially, economically, and morally subversive. Mr. Gaither’s private admission to Dodd about the foundations’ subversive secret directives merely confirmed what was apparent from the foundations’ grant portfolios.
Before his death in 1987, Mr. Dodd was interviewed by author/film maker G. Edward Griffin for a documentary produced by Congressman Lawrence P. McDonald (R-Georgia) and his Western Goals Foundation. Mr. Dodd’s testimony in that film has gone viral and can now be found on many sites across the Internet (See video at the bottom of this page).
There should be little doubt for the objective observer that in the last seven decades since the Gaither-Dodd conversation, life has indeed been altered to such a degree that we are very nearly ready to be merged with (post-Soviet) Russia. The European Union is, in many respects, even further along in the convergence process. Mr. Ivanov and his fellow globalists in Russia, the United States, and the EU want to hasten that process.
“In the race towards globalisation,” Ivanov says, “the stakes are high for both Russia and Europe.” He continues:
If Europe, for its part, fails to respond to the challenges of the 21st Century, it will face chronic economic stagnation, rising social tension and political instability. Indeed, as industrial production migrates to East Asia and innovation remains in North America, Europe risks losing its position in the most attractive international markets. As a result, the European project itself could be called into question.
To avoid these outcomes, Russia and Europe must identify where their interests converge and work to establish a mutually beneficial partnership in those areas. However, in order to foster such a partnership, they must first alter their negative perceptions of each other.
“Of course, Russia will probably not become a full Nato member in the foreseeable future,” writes Ivanov. “But political integration is feasible.”
According to Comrade Ivanov, integration and convergence are the “only option” for Russia and Europe:
Greater political cooperation would provide a context for discussing issues like the future of Afghanistan, international terrorism and nuclear proliferation, as well as for creating joint initiatives and strategies that address crucial issues affecting both powers.
The institutional integration of Russia into greater Europe will require strong commitment from both sides. But, in this globalised century, it is the only option.
As mentioned above, we found Mr. Ivanov’s op-ed at Gulf News, but it originated at Project Syndicate, a project of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation that has sprouted into a network of nearly 500 newspapers in more than 150 countries with worldwide circulation of over 70 million copies. According to the syndicate’s web site, it is the largest syndication of independent commentators in the world.
Mr. Soros, who is himself a dedicated world-government globalist, writes regular columns for Project Syndicate. He is also a member of (and major financial supporter of) the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as a regular at the TC, WPC, CEIP, and BC confabs that Mr. Ivanov associates with. A typical Soros column from the Project Syndicate oeuvre is his November 9, 2009 piece entitled, “A New World Architecture,” which aimed at greater economic and political convergence, especially between China and the United States, along with expansion and greater empowerment for the United Nations and International Monetary Fund.
Mr. Ivanov, after decades of participating in meetings of the CFR,  writing for the CFR journal Foreign Affairs,  co-chairing the Carnegie Endowment’s Euro-Atlantic Security Initiative (EASI),  sitting on the board of directors of Ted Turner’s United Nations Foundation , addressing the World Economic Forum , and consorting with CFR and RIIA one-worlders, has been thoroughly indoctrinated in the globalist dogmas. So much so that he is now president of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), the Kremlin’s counterpart to the CFR and RIIA.
One of Ivanov’s old pals in the British diplomatic corps is Sir Roderic Lyne, former UK Ambassador to Russia and an avid exponent of East-West convergence, particularly favoring Russia-EU integration. Lyne, who is now Vice Chairman of the RIIA (more commonly known as Chatham House), as well as a board member of the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce and an adviser to JPMorgan Chase, authored an article for Europe’s World in 2006 entitled, “Russia in the EU? We should Never Say Never.” 
“The European Union’s policy since 1991 has been to encourage convergence and to seek to build a much closer relationship with Russia,” Lyne wrote. “That is manifestly in the EU’s interests, and arguably in Russia’s too.”
Lyne was also a co-author — along with Strobe Talbott (CFR) and Koji Watanabe — of the influential Trilateral Commission Report, “Engaging with Russia: The Next Phase,” timed for release to influence the 2006 G8 Summit hosted by Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg. The Trilateral engagement plan pushed more partnership, cooperation, integration, and convergence.
And Putin himself, despite regularly playing the Russian chauvinism card and trash-talking the U.S. and Europe, has said that it is “quite possible” that “one day Russia will be in some joint currency zone with Europe.”
More recently, Russian billionaire oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, owner of the New Jersey Nets NBA franchise , made a similar pitch for a “common global currency based on the euro and the ruble” during his campaign for the Russian presidency.
None of this is surprising to readers familiar with Anatoliy Golitsyn, the top-level KGB defector who has been warning, publicly, for the past four decades of the Kremlin’s long-range deception strategy of cooperation, integration, partnership and convergence. 

New World Order

Seismic Evidence Implies Controlled Demolition on 9/11

Washington’s Blog Dec 2, 2012

André Rousseau is a Doctor of Geophysics and Geology, a former researcher in the French National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), who has published 50 papers on the relationships between the characteristics of progressive mechanical waves and geology.
Dr. Rousseau is an expert on measurement of acoustic waves.
Rousseau says that the seismic waves measured on September 11th proves that the 3 buildings were brought down by controlled demolition. Specifically, in a new scientific article published by the Journal of 9/11 Studies, Rosseau writes:

The seismic signals propagating from New York on September 11, 2001, recorded at Palisades (34 km) and published by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University (LDEO), have here been subjected to a new critical study concerning their sources. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the nature of the waves, their velocities, frequencies, and magnitudes invalidate the official explanations which imply as sources the percussion of the twin towers by planes and the collapses of the three buildings, WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7.
***
First of all, we show the contradictions in the official explanation between the seismic data and the timing of the events. Then we point out that it is strange that identical events (percussions of identical towers on the one hand, and collapses of identical towers on the other hand) at the same location would have generated seismic sources of different magnitudes. We demonstrate that only strong explosives could be the cause of such seismic waves, in accordance with the observed low frequencies. According to the nature of the recorded waves (body and surface waves), we can propose a location of each explosive source. According to the presence of shear waves or the presence of Rayleigh waves only, we hypothesize a subterranean … explosion.
***
Near the times of the planes’ impacts into the Twin Towers and during their collapses, as well as during the collapse of WTC7, seismic waves were generated. To the degree that (1) seismic waves are created only by brief impulses and (2) low frequencies are associated with energy of a magnitude that is comparable to a seismic event, the waves recorded at Palisades and analyzed by LDEO undeniably have an explosive origin.Even if the planes’ impacts and the fall of the debris from the Towers onto the ground could have generated seismic waves, their magnitude would have been insufficient to be recorded 34 km away and should have been very similar in the two cases to one another.
As we have shown, they were not.
***
We can only conclude that the wave sources were independently detonated explosives ….
***
Controlled demolition of the three towers, suggested by the visual and audio witness testimony as well as by observations of video recordings of their collapses, is thus confirmed and demonstrated by analysis of the seismic waves emitted near the time of the plane impacts and at the moments of the collapses.

This seismic analysis is just one of multiple lines of scientific evidence implying that 3 buildings were brought down by controlled demolition:
Watch 9/11: Explosive Evidence – Experts Speak Out on PBS.

New World Order