The recent China International Import Expo (CIIE) in Shanghai attracted little attention in the Western press but it is one more reminder that China is an economic and trading powerhouse that has surpassed the US. That is right, the word is “surpassed.” The CIIE also serves to remind us that China’s economic power now stands on four mighty pillars.
There’s a problem with America’s favorite statistic: GDP. It avoids pretty much everything that’s actually, truly, really good for society, including the importance of robust ecology. Still, it’s the biggest measure of what’s happening with the economy and used around the world, even though horribly flawed.
According to some forward thinkers, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the monetary value of all finished goods and services, is a distortion that needs fixing.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called Paul Volcker “the most effective chairman in the history of the Federal Reserve.” But while Volcker, who passed away December 8 at age 92, probably did have the greatest historical impact of any Fed chairman, his legacy is, at best, controversial.
Nick Hanauer, a self-professed capitalist billionaire, spoke at a TED conference only recently. He exposed neoliberalism’s brand of capitalism getting away with murder in plain sight.
Mr. Hanauer described himself:
The west has colonized, exploited, ravaged and assassinated the people of the Global South for hundreds of years.
Up to the mid-20th Century Europe has occupied Africa, and large parts of Asia.
It is very popular these days to talk and write about the “trade war” between the United States and China. But is there really one raging? Or is what we are witnessing simply a clash of political and ideological systems: one being extremely successful and optimistic, the other depressing, full of dark cynicism and nihilism?
“You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.”
— Michael Crawford, writer
One might think a profile of a former Oceanlake school, Taft elementary youth and a teen who dropped out of Taft High School (Lincoln City, Oregon) who now, 21 years later, works hard as a carpenter might not be the stuff of legends.
In fact, speaking with 37-year-old Justin Marical is like a breath of fresh air along with bursts of déjà vu.
There are liars in the world and then there’s Donald Trump. A first rate unapologetic gaslighting manipulator of language who takes deception to the heights of hypocrisy. Bending and looping definitions at will where words themselves start to lack all meaning. It’s not surprising that the world is in its present state when a bucket of highly condensed lies is splashed onto the public by every sycophantic corporate media outlet and the rebuttals, like this one you’re reading now, are given little if any coverage.
