Seems a solid pick on the Fed chairman
Thomas Barnett
¦"Bush Names a Top Adviser To Be Chairman of the Fed: Bernanke Pledges to Continue Greenspan's Policies—Economists Laud Choice," by Edmund L. Andrews, New York Times, 25 October 2005, p. A1.
Bush, unable to afford another Miers, picks another Roberts instead to replace Greenspan. Arguably, this is the single most important nomination of his entire presidency.
I honestly mean that. Pick a Supreme and we're talking one of nine whose impact will be limited largely to the United States.
But the Fed chairman is arguably the single most important economic player in the global economy. How that person steers our monetary policy influences the entire economic and trade agenda of the Core and--by extension--the Gap.
The key attributes summed up:
A former professor of economics at Princeton University and a former Fed governor, Mr. Bernanke is a leading authority on monetary policy but a comparative outsider in partisan politics and ideological warfare.
He's written loads on classic money issues but has shied away from stuff like tax cuts and Social Security--, a real John Roberts.
The early praise for the choice indicates he will be approved with no hassles.
And the world breathes a whole lot easier. Great choice.
New Core sets the New Rules on guns?
¦"Gun-Happy Brazil Is Hotly Debating a Nationwide Ban: Referendum Is Set To Settle the Matter," by Larry Rohter, New York Times, 20 October 2005, p. A3.
Clipped this one last week. A fascinating story that should already have played out (vote was 23 October, or Sunday).
Brazil is the only country in the world where you're more likely to get killed by a gun than the United States (see, I keep telling you we've got more in common with New Core pillars than old ones, and my bit on being more like Brazil than gun-careful Canada only drives the point home!). 40k killed by firearms each year, with a total population of only 180m. We're 280 and have roughly ¼ that amount (and yet we kill so many more people than that using things other than guns, but if we didn't, then "CSI" wouldn't be such a hit!).
So the government's plan to ban guns in Brazil is up for national referendum, and in Brazil, if you no vote, you pay fine, so people turn out (a new rule we should adopt).
Natch, all this killing reflects Brazil's regional role as gun merchant extraordinaire (again, just like us!), as nearly 80% of the guns they make they send abroad (which is why Latin America is such a safe place—no wars, mind you, just unsafe on an individual basis).
There will be more and more attempts in the New Core to ban guns, and across the world in efforts lead by New Core pillars. Count on it.
Calcutta or Kolkata: it's connecting baby!
¦"Bengal tiger: Calcutta is transformed from Marxist redoubt into India's latest hotspot," by Jo Johnson, Financial Times, 20 October 2005, p. 11.
Too interesting not to clip, because I mention how Calcutta, or what the Indians now call Kolkata, is becoming a new high-tech magnet center in India in Blueprint for Action.
This para captures it all pretty well:
The first capital of the British Raj, with its slums and its floods, is still a far cry from Shanghai. But under the rule of this highly pragmatic politician, known as Buddha [Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee], from the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Calcutta increasingly aspires to be seen as a little piece of China in India, a place where money has no ideology and foreign investment is welcome. What Beijing thinks today, the saying goes, Buddha thinks tomorrow.
Way cool on so many levels: the pragmatic Marxist (hmmm, I almost would like that title for myself!), the focus on FDI, the lead goose effect of China, that NAME!
Q: What did Buddha say to the hot dog vendor?
A: "Make me one with everything!"
Well, Buddha makes Kolkata (isn't it cute how the Brits can't give up their colonial names for former holdings?) "one with everything" by keying on three things: 1) an educational differential that sees local university producing a lot of humanities grads that are great for call centers and engineers good for software development; 2) more room for IT parks with less traffic congestion (an oldie but goodie); and 3) the "commies" love to make foreign investors feel comfortable (why not in this post-ideological world?).
I would love to go back to India. Someone over there invite me!
Rumsfeld calling the kettle black in China
¦"Rumsfeld Chides China for 'Mixed Signals,'" by Philip P. Pan, Washington Post, 20 October 2005, p. A16.
¦"Gingerly, U.S. and China Plan To Strengthen Military Ties: Wary friends have diverging views of China's role in Asia," by Thom Shanker, New York Times, 20 October 2005, p. A6.
Rumsfeld wonders why China's reticent to cooperate with a U.S. whose national security establishment plots war against it in the Taiwan Straits, measures it's R&D against it as the inevitable "near-peer competitor," asks Japan to join its defense guaranteer on Taiwan, and plans a missile shield that will put it on the wrong side with North Korea.
Hmmmm, that is strange.
I mean, who could see mixed signals in the U.S. asking for mil-mil exchanges while it publishes a report every year chronicling China's military developments. Do we have such reports for any other Core power? No. Any power in the Gap? No.
Just China.
Yes, says Rummy, "We see mixed signals" from the Chinese, and "we seek clarification."
And we wonder about their role in regional stability!
Enough bashing, though. Rummy does the right thing and so do the Chinese, and so the cooperation grows a bit more, seeming to bypass all the idiotic and frantic reviving and hyping of the Chinese threat this summer by elements in the U.S. military who felt they'd lose out in the Quadrennial Defense Review without it.
And when Bush visits China next month, things could get even a bit more better.
Rummy also got to the speak at the Central Party School, where I delivered a talk last year as well.
Not bad for the old Cold War hawk, not bad.
Rummy, I mean.
Four more data points on locating China in history
¦"Christie's Going, Going to China to Hold Auctions," by Carol Vogel, New York Times, 20 October 2005, p. B1.
¦"China Builds Its Dreams and Some Fear a Bubble," by David Barboza, New York Times, 18 October 2005, p. A1.
¦"South Korea Becoming a Big Asian Investor," by James Brooke, New York Times, 20 October 2005, p. C1.
¦"China puts forward its definition of democracy," by Mure Dickie, Financial Times, 20 October 2005, p. 3.
I write this in Blueprint for Action (BFA): when you join the Core it suddenly rediscovers your history, like you were lost for a while and now are found again. This is happening big time in China, and nowhere is that process seen more than in China's art and antiques (even antiquities) scene.
So Nixon goes to China thirty years ago and Christie's goes now. The usual deal: to get around Chinese gov regs, Christie's must partner with local dealer.
So China's growing up all right, right through the sky. Four-thousand skyscrapers in Shanghai alone. In BFA I wrote something I wasn't sure was true until I read this piece: I said that China's skylines routinely rival anything we have here, and even surpass our biggest ones (like NY). Well, NYC has about 2k skyscrapers.
China's building boom is like our 1920s. This year they lay a world-record 4.7 billion square feet of construction. Experts say no country has ever built so much so fast, like a mall twice the size of the Mall of America (take that Minnesota with your hated Vikings!).
Key line:
The building boom is a principal reason that China is searching around the world for energy and natural resources: it needs the raw materials to build new cities, and the energy to power them. That is helping drive up world commodity prices and threatening global environmental damage.
New Core, new rules, new everything. Old China is being destroyed like crazy, and preservationists decry it, but with mortgage rates at 5%, there's no stopping the crush—and I do mean crush.
Seventy-five million farmers will move from the rural areas to the cities in the next five years, the biggest migration ever witnessed on the planet. It's one of the six simultaneous revolutions I cite in BFA.
Obviously, China can't finance all that building on its own, so South Korea, maturing quite nicely itself with true pluralistic politics, becomes what many estimate is the largest single foreign investor now in China, to the tune of $6B more or so a year. The 11th largest global economy got that way by declaring it way patriotic to invest only at home. Now it says it's patriotic to do so abroad ("Ask not what you can finance in your country, ask what your country can finance abroad," their version of a JFK might say).
So South Korea has a mere 650 FDI projects in China in 2002, and now it has almost 5,000. Investing in one another has always been an Asian thing. It becomes a New Core thing as well over time (China, Brazil, India, and Russia all investing in one another).
So China is rocketing through time, in all dimensions but what we would call representative democracy on a national scale. China becomes increasingly democratic, in a direct voting sense, throughout the countryside (where tiny villages of . . . oh, several hundred thousand, get to vote for their leaders directly), but China the grand conglomeration of states-within-states remains a dictatorial union, and that's unlikely to change for a while.
No, as I say in BFA, the internal integration process in China will dwarf the country's external integration with the global economy.
When that integration process moves from building nets to running them, then watch the private sector demand more and more from the center—in effect slowly pluralizing it over time.
Seriously, China will look an awful lot like South Korea politically in 20 years.
Hard to believe?
Hell, South Korea was a pretty dictatorial one-party state 20 years ago too. Now it's the number-one foreign investor in one several times its size.
I speak not of possibilities, but inevitabilities.
Don't piss off the Canadians!
¦"Canada's Smiles for Camera Mask Chill in Ties With U.S.," by Joel Brinkley, New York Times, 25 October 2005, p. A8.
Canada is still super-pissed about those tariffs we laid on their soft lumber. It was stupid for the Bush administration to do, and even stupider of them to not respond to the NAFTA panel's judgment that we need to pay it all back pronto.
Meanwhile, as noted earlier, Canada talks openly of shifting its energy exports from the U.S. to China.
Yes, yes, do whatever the House of Saud says, but be my guest and piss off the world's second largest holder of oil reserves (when you count shale and sands).
Condi needs to tend to her garden, and talk to the Iranians, and lock in China, and . . . oh the list is too long to name and too much to hope for now that we'll soon have a lame-duck president crippled by scandals (that makes four in a row for two-termers: Nixon with Watergate, Reagan with Irangate, Clinton with Monicagate, and now Bush with whatever we're calling this latest one).
The brain drain does not cause poverty in the Gap, and the only cure is connectedness
¦"Study Finds Small Developing Lands Hit Hardest by 'Brain Drain,'" by Celia W. Dugger, New York Times, 25 October 2005, p. A9.
The brain drain happens to states where there is no economic opportunity to keep people home. These places don't have to be rich, just full of real opportunities. China and India and Indonesia and Brazil, all big teaming New Core pillars (Indonesia right on the verge), they don't suffer this even as all suffer big chunks of their population still mired in extreme poverty.
The brain drain is not a cause of poverty but a symptom. Establish enough vibrant economic connectivity with the global economy and your people stay home. Everyone really wants to stay home.
Greenland will be green in 5005! (No, really)
¦"No Escape: Thaw Gains Momentum," by Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times, 25 October 2005, p. F1.
The unfolding story (and it will unfold, inevitably, over the many years and decades ahead) of the melting of the Arctic ice cap will--as I've noted before--trigger a host of new rules among the states bordering this area, as well as open up a portion of the world to transportation and resource exploitation that's been, up to now, pretty much off limits.
What it does to the planet, of course, is even more profound. But again, this is all already a fait accompli. Nothing will stop this now, not even stopping all CO2 production. This train has left the station, and so we'll adjust, over the course of this century we'll end up seeing the emergence of a completely ice-free Arctic ocean in summertime.
But here's the kicker: visit Greenland now because by 5005, virtually all the ice will be gone there--just like that! Of course, 60% of it will still be there for another 600 years, so you've got a bit before it's all gone for good. Still, you say you're going do it and you promise you're going do it and all of a sudden, you're five-thousand years old and you just don't have that get-up-and-go anymore.
I tried to put a reminder in my Treo, but it only goes up to 2031 (try it and see).
As a futurist, that pretty much pissed me off . . .."
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