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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (68181)	1/15/2010 11:56:38 AM
From: ChinuSFO	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

I am posting this because of the comments made about the US becoming more dependent on China (I have bolded the paragraphs) ============================ Google missed the chance to take a stand 10:06a ET January 15, 2010 (MarketWatch) BOSTON (MarketWatch) -- Let's cut the "heroes" routine at Google Inc. The time for the Google boys to take a stand for freedom in China was four years ago, when they first went into the country. Instead, with renminbi signs in their eyes, they cut a deal in order to get into the lucrative, fast-growing Chinese market. (It's possible the Google executives were guilty of hubris more than greed. It doesn't really matter. They cut a deal). And they had a second chance just two years ago, when a motion was proposed to the annual Google stockholders meeting that would have marked a ringing endorsement of freedom. It was put forward by New York City Comptroller Bill Thompson (later the rival candidate for the mayor's office against Mike Bloomberg.) Thompson was acting on behalf of New York's pension funds, which had a substantial stake in Google. His motion was hardly over the top. On the subject of censorship, it would merely have required the company to take all legal steps to resist demands, and to make public where it had been required to censor. But Thompson's motion might also have helped protect the kinds of civil rights activists who were just subject to cyber-attack in China. "Data that can identify individual users," the motion said, "should not be hosted in Internet restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system." It wasn't, overall, too much to expect of an American company. But Google's board, led by Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, went after it nonetheless. They urged other stockholders to vote it down. And to the shame of the mutual fund industry, most big fund companies, including American Funds, Vanguard Group, T. Rowe Price Group and others sided with management. In the end Thompson's motion won support from just 3.5% of the votes cast. You probably didn't read much about it at the time. If I remember, this took place around that time that Don Imus made a bad joke. Oh, and American Idol was probably on the air. So we had much more important matters to discuss. So Google has finally, belatedly, threatened to stand up to the Chinese government. The company is even threatening to pull out. Big deal. So what? China doesn't need Google anyway. Local rival Baidu Inc. has cleaned its clock. Baidu has about 75% of the Chinese-language search business. Google, in China, is sort of like Microsoft Corp.'s Bing over here. Some cynics even suggest Google's move is a face-saving way of withdrawing from China. That's a little cynical, even by my standards. Baidu's revenues have more than doubled annually over the past four years. Its net income has more than trebled annually. Its stock has quadrupled in the last year as the company mops up the Chinese market. It's boomed more than $60 in the past few days in response to this affair. The biggest winner is someone you've probably never heard of: Robin Yanhong Li, the young founder and chief executive of Baidu. He and his wife have made another $450 million, or so, on their Baidu stock just in the last few days. Their fortune is now more than $3 billion. Meanwhile, does Beijing really care what the White House, or indeed the American public, might say about this? Unless we are prepared to pay much higher taxes, we're going to have to keep borrowing from them to pay our bills. That means they can do exactly what they like. Once we exported our values and our products. Now we export Treasury bills. And our clout is hardly growing. China's economy is quickly catching up to the U.S. Not long ago ours was about four times as large, in real, purchasing-power terms. Within a decade they're forecast to be about the same. Few people realize how quickly China is catching up. This is because GDP figures are often viewed in U.S. dollar terms. But China deliberately underprices its currency drastically, as part of its policy of economic nationalism. Welcome to the new world order. You'd better get used to it. Brett Arends is the author of "Storm Proof Your Money."