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Oct. 29th, 2015
[LINK] "China and the coming crisis"
Oct. 29th, 2015 12:50 pmAt Open Democrqacy, Minqi Li predicts that the coming economic storm in China will have global repercussions.
In response to the last structural crisis, global capitalism adopted ‘neoliberalism', a set of policies and institutions designed to defeat the working classes in the core and semi-peripheral countries. But the global balance of power was not turned decisively to the favour of the capitalist classes until China undertook ‘reform and openness'. China’s capitalist transition provided several hundreds of millions of capable workers with wage rates at a small fraction of those prevailing in the core countries. The incorporation of such a massive cheap labour force undermined the bargaining power of the western working classes decisively.
Since then, China’s social structure has been fundamentally transformed. A large militant working class has emerged. According to my estimate, China’s wage-earning working class expanded from about 230 million in 1990 to 370 million in 2012. When the more privileged urban ‘middle class’ (professional and technical workers) are included, the total of urban and rural wage workers grew from about 250 million in 1990 to 420 million in 2012. Currently, about 100,000 ‘mass incidents’ (mass protests) happen annually. About 10 million people are involved in these ‘mass incidents’ every year.
After sharp declines in the 1990s and stabilisation in the early 2000s, labour income as a share of China’s GDP began to rise after 2010, reflecting the growing strength of the Chinese working class. The squeeze on capitalist profit has led to the rapid decline of China’s economy-wide profit rate. In the early 2000s, China’s economy-wide profit rate was about twice as high as the US level. Since 2007, China’s profit rate has fallen precipitously. Under the current trend, China’s profit rate could, in a few years, fall towards levels that were last seen in the US during the Great Depression.
As several mainstream institutions have predicted, a major crisis of the Chinese economy could plunge the global capitalist economy into a crisis that will prove to be more destructive than the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008-2009. The question is whether global capitalism can survive the coming crisis, and whether favourable conditions required for global capital accumulation can be restored
In a photo essay at National Geographic, writer Meghan Collins Sullivan and photographer Ciril Jazbec look at the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on a small unprepared border town in Slovenia.
Rigonce, Slovenia was a quiet, bucolic town on the border with Croatia where farmers tended crops and neighbors greeted each other warmly in the street. That changed last week.
Overnight, the sounds of cows mooing, hens clucking, and tractors turning over the land gave way to the roar of military tanks, the buzz of bullhorns blaring commands in Arabic, and the endless whirring of helicopter blades.
Thousands of migrants—mostly refugees fleeing war and violence in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq—crossed over a bridge from Croatia into the town on their way to Germany and Austria. They had already spent months traveling by boat, train, and foot before reaching this spot. They’re weeks behind a flood of others who had passed through Serbia and Hungary. But when Hungary closed its border with Serbia, these later migrants changed their path, leading them to Rigonce, a town of 176 residents, most of them Catholic. Town officials estimate more than 70,000 migrants have passed through the village.
“This is a catastrophe,” said villager Janja Hribar, 19. “Our cows ran away.”
When they first started to arrive, the migrants streamed down Rigonce’s dusty main street, which is barely wide enough for two cars to pass. It is lined with about 20 houses and a few small gardens of lettuce and cabbage. The migrants discarded trash along the way, leaving the country road littered with plastic bottles, crumpled paper, blankets, and coats. This is a town that’s been a contestant for tidiest village in the county.
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Bloomberg's Pooi Koon Chong notes concern in Malaysia at deteriorating English standards.
Malaysia is encouraging schools to teach more classes in English and will offer free lessons to the masses as manufacturers and company chiefs say a deteriorating command of the language is hurting the country’s competitiveness.
Over 90 percent of the 190,000 respondents in an online poll this month said there should be an option to take more subjects in the language, Idris Jala, head of the government’s Performance Management and Delivery Unit, said in an interview on Monday. Prime Minister Najib Razak introduced a dual-language program during his budget speech last week, and the New Straits Times said Thursday the government will organize English communication lessons at no charge from next year.
The poll highlights the challenges for Malaysia even as the World Bank’s annual Doing Business report showed the country is making progress on becoming more investor-friendly, having made it easier and less costly for companies to pay taxes.
“Malaysia has lost its competitiveness due to our standards in English going down,” AirAsia Bhd. co-founder Tony Fernandes wrote on Twitter this month. It’s a critical time "to reverse decades of decline in English,” he said. “Our children have suffered.”
Bloomberg's Alex Morales reports on the extent to which Indonesia's foresty fires are a global disaster.
Indonesia’s forest fires have catapulted the southeast Asian nation to the top of the rankings of the world’s worst global warming offenders, with daily emissions exceeding those of China on at least 14 days in the past two months.
The nation’s total daily carbon dioxide emissions, including from power generation, transport and industry, exceeded those of the U.S. on 47 of the 74 days through Oct. 28, according to Bloomberg analysis of national emissions data from the World Resources Institute in Washington and Indonesian fire-emissions data from VU University in Amsterdam.
Smog caused by the fires has generated headlines and a diplomatic flare-up between Indonesia and its neighbors in southeast Asia. It’s a threat to human health and has disrupted flights in the region. At the same time, burning trees and peatlands are pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere at a time when more than 190 nations are gearing up to sign a new agreement to stem global warming in Paris in December.
“The problem that we see in Indonesia with essentially unrestrained deforestation going on is a bad message for the world,” Bill Hare, chief executive officer of Potsdam, Germany-based policy researcher Climate Analytics, said in a phone interview. “If we can’t really control deforestation in this region, who’s going to be next? It would be a signal that countries can get away with this kind of deforestation without any real constraint.”
In "Why Luanda’s residents are asking: where did all the oil riches go?", doctoral student Claudia Gastrow notes the vulnerability of the established order in oil-rich Angola after the drop in global oil prices.
After the oil price crash Luandans are left wondering what was actually achieved. Between 2004 and 2014 Angola failed to diversify its economy significantly. Foreign reserves are drying up and inflation hit a three-year high of 10.4% in July this year.
This has been partially driven by a fuel price increase imposed after the fuel subsidy was slashed as a means of decreasing spending. This has led to a rise in food and consumer goods prices, negatively affecting even the small gains that the urban poor made during the boom years.
Ever stronger evidence is emerging of financial mismanagement and large scale corruption in the administration of oil funds. A 2011 IMF report identified that public funds of US$32 billion linked to the state oil company, Sonangol, were unaccounted for. Although it later found that $US27.2 billion was due to unrecorded expenditure by Sonangol on behalf of the Angolan government, this left open the question of what had happened to the outstanding amount.
China has also launched investigations into allegations of corruption involving its economic deals in Angola. This has led to the arrest of Su Shulin, former head of Sinopec, the Chinese state oil company responsible for oil investment in Angola, and of Sam Pa, the kingpin of the Queensway Group, who brokered many of the agreements between Angola and Chinese business.
While Angola is now searching for new sources of financing, seen in its issuing of $US1.5 billion of Eurobonds, the general feeling is that its economic problems are set to continue.
The Toronto Star's Tess Kalinowski reports on the inevitable TTC lawsuit against laggard Bombardier.
The TTC board will sue Bombardier. But it’s not ready to excise the Quebec-based manufacturer from its list of suppliers, despite its repeated failure to deliver Toronto’s $1.25-billion order for new low-floor streetcars.
“We don’t think barring them as a supplier right now will get the streetcars on the street any sooner. In fact, it may do the opposite,” said Councillor Josh Colle, who chairs the TTC board.
And while the TTC will go after Bombardier for $50 million, its priority is to get the new streetcars in service. “We need them for our riders. We can’t continue to put out old vehicles on the street,” he said.
Among seven actions approved by the TTC board on Wednesday is a request that the CEO of Bombardier appear in Toronto next month to explain the company’s failure.
The TTC will also claim $50 million in liquidated damages and other compensation, for which additional streetcars could be substituted. The TTC has already looked at adding 60 more cars to the original 204-car order.
Author Sean Munger goes to great, and successful lengths to deconstruct the myth that Mark Hamill suffered a particularly disfiguring car crash in the mid-1970s. This was interested for me to read--I'd heard of the rumours, but it had seemed to me that the damage wasn't so severe as to be distinguishable from normal aging.
That, of course, is Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker from the Star Wars movies, photographed in the late 1970s. (The image composite is by me; the photo on the left is by Allen Light, the photo on the right a publicity still from Star Wars). Almost every Star Wars geek, and a fair number of other people, have heard the legend of Mr. Hamill’s horrible car crash in the late 1970s. It was one of the first things I ever learned about the actor. Supposedly he had a terrible car wreck that somehow injured his face, but beyond that fact, exactly what happened–and how bad the accident was–seems to change depending on who and when you ask.
The legend repeated most often in my childhood was that Mr. Hamill’s wreck–invariably said to be a sports car, usually a Corvette–did such damage to his face that doctors had to rebuild his nose using cartilage from his ear. It is also often stated that Luke’s encounter with the ice monster at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back was intended, in part, to explain the facial scarring that he shows early in that film (or, alternately, to explain why he looks “different” in Empire than he did in Star Wars). I also read somewhere on the Internet that the accident occurred shortly before the filming of the Star Wars Holiday Special, and the injuries accounted for his strange appearance during that truly awful show (and/or the painkillers given to him account for his woozy, phoning-it-in performance).
I’ve had “Mark Hamill’s car crash” on my list of potential blog topics for months now. After doing some research on this, it appears that the actual truth of the episode is somewhat difficult to pin down. Let’s take it step by step.
[BLOG] Some Thursday links
Oct. 29th, 2015 03:07 pm- blogTO explains why there is no Terminal 2 at Pearson.
- Crooked Timber notes the very strong case against coal and new coal mines.
- The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper speculating that the solar system had five large planets.
- The Dragon's Tales notes the Russian war in Syria, updates readers on the Ukrainian war, and suggests Russia is starting to run out of money.
- Joe. My. God. notes Wil Wheaton's refusal to let the Huffington Post use his material for free.
- Language Log notes the complexities of Chinese language stop signs in Hong Kong.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how elements of climate change like water shortages can make things worse.
- Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw, among other things, notes that Australia's approach to asylum cannot work in Europe.
- The Planetary Society Blog notes new proposals for exploring the Jovian system.
- Spacing Toronto looks at an old murder on the Toronto Islands in the Second World War.
- Supernova Condensate shares a Tumblr image set noting the need to not discourage women from being interested in science.
- Window on Eurasia notes the awkward position of Crimean Tatar institutions and notes some Belarusians want a Russian military base because they want the income.
I've a post up at Demography Matters looking at last week's election. The extent to which barriers old and new were transcended by the Liberal victory is noteworthy to me.