PRESIDENT CLINTON GOES TO CHINA, A COUNTRY THE U.S. NEEDS MORE THAN EVER
n_me...@hotmail.com
BY JONATHAN BRODER | WASHINGTON -- Against the backdrop of a deepening
economic crisis in Asia, and with the specter of a nuclear arms race in the
region, President Clinton goes to China next week, a momentous foreign trip
seriously burdened by domestic controversy over U.S. technology transfers and
illegal campaign donations involving the communist giant.
White House officials say the nine-day visit, the first by a U.S. president
since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, underscores the Clinton
administration's determination to stay engaged with the world's most populous
nation. Despite what these officials acknowledge as "serious and significant
differences" with Beijing over issues ranging from human rights to copyrights,
Clinton and his advisors believe it is more important than ever that the
U.S.-Sino relationship be nurtured.
All eyes will be on the official welcoming ceremony next Thursday in
Tiananmen Square, where Chinese soldiers butchered hundreds of pro-democracy
demonstrators and seared the issue of human and political rights in China
into the American consciousness. Human rights advocates and Clinton critics
-- Republicans and Democrats -- expect him to address what happened there
nine years ago this month -- even if it means offending his Chinese hosts.
National Security Advisor Samuel Berger says Clinton will raise the human
rights issue, although he won't say if that will happen during the Tiananmen
ceremony. Berger was also careful to mention that China's human rights record
had improved somewhat, noting that the administration's continuing engagement
with China had helped bring about the release of dissidents Wei Jinsheng and
Wang Dan earlier this year.
Peter Rodman, a National Security Council member during the Reagan
administration, says Clinton's decision to be welcomed in Tiananmen Square,
with all of its negative symbolism for Americans, only confirms how inept the
administration is when it comes to handling foreign policy. "They're
tone-deaf," says Rodman, now a foreign policy analyst at Georgetown
University's Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The summit, which was arranged months ago, also comes at an awkward moment for
Clinton -- just as Republicans in Congress are investigating his
administration's missile technology transfers to China and the impact of the
transfers on U.S. national security. Congress also is probing the possibility
that those transfers were influenced by illegal Chinese contributions to
Clinton's 1996 presidential campaign -- a charge the administration vehemently
denies. Some critics argue the issue was so serious that Clinton should have
canceled the summit altogether.
White House officials scorned the suggestion, particularly in light of the
strategic and economic developments that have rocked the region recently.
Earlier this month, India and Pakistan detonated nuclear test devices,
plunging the volatile Asian subcontinent into a potential nuclear arms race.
As justification for its tests, India singled out China, accusing it of
helping rival Pakistan develop its own nuclear weapons and the long-range
missiles to deliver them. China denies it played any role in helping Pakistan
develop its nuclear and missile capabilities.
National Security Advisor Berger says Clinton will use the summit to press
Chinese President Jiang Zemin on nuclear nonproliferation and missile control
issues -- not only with regard to Pakistan but also Iran. China reportedly is
still discussing the sale of missile test equipment to Teheran, an act that
would violate pledges the Chinese leader made to Clinton during his visit to
Washington last fall. While noting improvements in China's behavior, Berger
says Clinton will "seek further steps by the Chinese to bring itself wholly
in line with international [arms technology transfer] regimes."
More immediately important is what the U.S. and China can or should do about
Asia's worsening economic crisis, which has now embroiled the giant economy
of Japan. Earlier this week, China demonstrated its clout by warning that
unless action was taken to support the falling Japanese yen -- sending Wall
Street into a tailspin -- Beijing would devalue its own currency, the yuan,
to keep its exports competitive with those of Japan.
According to U.S. Treasury sources, it was China's warnings, which prompted
fears of more economic turmoil in Asia, that convinced Treasury Secretary
Robert Rubin to spend some $2 billion to bolster the falling yen, reversing
his earlier policy of nonintervention. Clinton is expected to ask the Chinese
to refrain from further threats of devaluation at least until after Japan's
July 12 elections, after which U.S. officials hope the Japanese government
will take strong measures to resolve the country's massive banking crisis.
Knowing that it needs China as a bulwark against further economic turmoil in
Asia, the Clinton administration will argue forcefully for another annual
extension of China's Most Favored Nation trade status. While Clinton already
has granted China MFN status, it must pass Congress, where the issue is
particularly contentious this year because of the controversies over the
administration's transfer of missile technology and allegations of Chinese
interference in U.S. elections.
"It's a very sensitive time," Susan Esserman, an official with the U.S. Trade
Representative's Office told a congressional hearing Wednesday. "Revoking MFN
would worsen the Asian financial crisis," she said, warning that such a move
would add 44 percent to the price of Chinese imports for U.S. consumers.
Stanley Roth, the undersecretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs,
told the same hearing that failure to approve MFN will "affect our relations
with China across the board ... eliminating the prospects for future
progress."
That argument resonates with Republicans whose business constituency is
becoming increasingly reliant on China trade. Rep. Bill Archer, R-Tex.,
chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, compared any revocation of
China's trade status to "pouring gasoline on a four-alarm fire." Rep.
Jennifer Dunn, R-Wash., agrees with the administration about China's role as
an economic stabilizer. China trade is increasingly crucial to her
Seattle-area district, and her defense of administration policy reflects the
evolving political dynamic of the China question.
But the GOP is hardly united on the issue. Opponents such as Rep. Gerald
Solomon, R-N.Y., insist China's MFN status be revoked, charging it "has led
directly to the bankruptcy of our proliferation policies." And while
Solomon's remarks echo those Republicans who have been hammering the
administration for compromising national security and violating campaign
finance laws, opposition to renewing China's MFN status is by no means a
partisan affair. Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., whose Northern California
district has a large number of Chinese-Americans, says bluntly: "The Chinese
government is barbaric. They have no desire or intention to change. They
release a few dissidents and put 10 more in jail. They laugh at us and mock
us ... They want us to buy their cheap sneakers and T-shirts."
There are signs that critics of Clinton's China policies are having an
impact. On Thursday, administration officials confirmed a New York Times
report that the White House was "rethinking" a $750 million sale of
communications satellites to China. Clinton approved the sale -- one of the
biggest deals yet between the U.S. and China -- in 1996, but Pentagon and
State Department officials are now questioning it because of the satellites'
possible military application.
Such "rethinking," on top of human rights and weapons proliferation concerns,
could bring a distinct chill to Clinton's summit with Chinese leaders. And
that may be the price he will have to pay for his commerce-driven approach to
U.S.-China relations.
"Every leader has to reexamine certain policies," says Benjamin Schwartz,
professor emeritus of Chinese government and history at Harvard University.
"The fact is there has been too much of an emphasis on economic relations
with China. Clinton has made a cult of business interests, and it has led to
an emphasis on trade over everything else in our relationship. There are
other considerations that have to be taken into account." SALON | June 19,
1998
Jonathan Broder is Salon's Washington bureau chief.
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"Clinton is guilty of more than mere fatuousness, however, in
dealing with the India-Pakistan nuclear arms race. He is guilty
of fueling it. While for years his administration has claimed
deep concern about proliferation, Clinton has shamelessly courted
the world's worst proliferator of weapons of mass destruction: China."
------
For educational purposes only
Clinton's China Grovel
By shamelessly courting the world's worst proliferator,
the president has fueled the South Asian nuclear arms race.
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, June 5, 1998; Page A31
On Friday, May 15, with much fanfare and import, the State
Department sent a "high-level delegation" to persuade Pakistan
not to explode a nuclear bomb. So much for American
persuasiveness.
Perhaps there was nothing we could have done. But after India
exploded its bomb, President Clinton tried to muster
international pressure on India in order to assuage Pakistan and
keep it from responding in kind.
What happened? At the G-8 summit in London, Clinton struck out.
He asked the other leading powers to join him in sanctions
against India. His G-8 friends smiled politely and issued a
statement distinguished in its feebleness. It was no surprise,
given that this president is all entreaty and no enforcement.
After all, at the very same summit he caved on the issue of
sanctions against Iran. And Iran is a really bad actor; India,
after all, does not celebrate "Death to America Day." Yet in
London, Clinton agreed to forgo sanctions against three oil
companies (Russian, French and Malaysian) for concluding a huge
natural gas development deal with Iran. He also weakened the
Cuban boycott in deference to the Europeans, who find Castro more
entertaining and/or admirable than we do.
After Clinton's humiliation on Indian sanctions, Pakistan's
response was foreordained. The Pakistani leadership had to decide
which offered better protection against India's nuclear arsenal:
words of assurance from Strobe Talbott or its own nuclear
deterrent.
Clinton's subsequent criticism of Pakistan showed why the choice
was obvious: "By failing to exercise restraint and responding to
the Indian test, Pakistan lost a truly priceless opportunity to .
. . improve its political standing in the eyes of the world."
What is Pakistan to make of such patent nonsense? That nuclear
vulnerability represented a "priceless opportunity" to look good?
In the eyes of whom? Bill Clinton? India?
Clinton really does live in a fantasy world very much a
reflection of his own political experience. In that world,
courting favor with others trumps everything. But in the real
world inhabited by Pakistan, a nation bordered by a hostile,
populous, heavily armed neighbor, popularity simply doesn't rate
compared with national security.
Clinton is guilty of more than mere fatuousness, however, in
dealing with the India-Pakistan nuclear arms race. He is guilty
of fueling it. While for years his administration has claimed
deep concern about proliferation, Clinton has shamelessly courted
the world's worst proliferator of weapons of mass destruction:
China.
China purveyed nuclear power to Algeria, poison gas to Iran and,
most ominously, nuclear technology to Pakistan. We winked. Why?
Because not since Calvin Coolidge has an American administration
lived more by the credo that the business of America is business.
Clinton's China policy is born of a combination of diplomatic
myopia and political cynicism. The single most important
consideration has been the promotion of trade and exports. Rather
than seeing China as a potential rival, a rising superpower, a
notorious proliferator and a potential destabilizer, Clinton sees
nothing more than a market. For Clinton, it's the economy, stupid
-- always.
This view, as with all of Clinton's views, dovetails perfectly
with his political needs. The Chinese market became a giant prize
to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, with proceeds going to
the Democratic National Committee. Clinton contracted out China
policy to Ron Brown, who in turn sold it in pieces to various
political and financial supporters. Coveted seats on his trade
missions to China and everywhere else went to big Democratic
contributors like Bernard Schwartz of Loral Corp.
And when the Justice Department objected to a Loral satellite
launch in China, Clinton himself overrode it. The fact that
Schwartz was the DNC's number-one contributor in the 1996
election cycle (more than $600,000) is, of course, but a
fortunate coincidence. Clinton's China grovel will be most
spectacularly dramatized by his visit to Tiananmen Square later
this month. But it was heralded much earlier, when on April 29
Secretary of State Albright spoke with satisfaction of the
"strategic partnership" the United States was building with
China.
There is nothing quite like a U.S.-China strategic partnership to
put the fear of God in India. This is not to say that there were
no domestic reasons for India and then Pakistan to go nuclear.
But to the extent that Clinton has a foreign policy -- apart from
a trade and political-contribution policy -- it was blind to the
implications of its open embrace of China. We now are reaping the
consequences, even as Clinton scratches his head trying to figure
out why bad things happen to good people.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
n_me...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
>
> Earlier this month, India and Pakistan detonated nuclear test devices,
> plunging the volatile Asian subcontinent into a potential nuclear arms race.
> As justification for its tests, India singled out China, accusing it of
> helping rival Pakistan develop its own nuclear weapons and the long-range
> missiles to deliver them. China denies it played any role in helping Pakistan
> develop its nuclear and missile capabilities.
http://www.nci.org/nci/ib9497.htm
CHINA'S RECORD OF PROLIFERATION MISBEHAVIOR
Nuclear Control Institute Issue Brief
Updated: September 4, 1997
Steven Dolley, Research Director
Overview
The attitude of the People's Republic of China toward nuclear
proliferation has been a national- security concern for the
United States ever since China became a nuclear-weapon state in
1964. A year prior to China's first nuclear explosion, the Peking
Review stated that, "[s]o long as the imperialists refuse to ban
nuclear weapons, the greater the number of socialist countries
possessing them, the better the guarantee of world peace."1
Though China's current public position is that it does not
support the proliferation of nuclear weapons, it was the next-to-
last declared nuclear-weapon state to accede to the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty (NPT), joining in 1992.2 China is still not
a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, nor is it a formal
member of the Missile Technology Control Regime (though it has
pledged to the United States that it will abide by MTCR
guidelines).
According to a recent assessment by the Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency (ACDA), China is still not fully committed to
international non-proliferation regimes:
Problems have arisen primarily in the area of nonproliferation
export controls, where China has failed to adopt an effective
national system and has proven reluctant to embrace completely
the norms established by the multilateral regimes, i.e. the
Australia Group (CBW exports), the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the
Missile Technology Control Regime and the Wassenaar Agreement
(conventional arms exports and related dual-use items).3
These issues are made more urgent by U.S. nuclear-industry
pressure on the Clinton Administration to clear the way for
expanded nuclear-technology trade with China. In order to bring
into force the 1985 U.S.- China nuclear cooperation agreement, a
prerequisite to such trade, the President must provide certain
non- proliferation certifications to Congress. These
certification requirements, enacted by Congress in the joint
resolution approving but suspending implementation of the
agreement,4 and further elaborated in the Tiananmen Square
legislation five years later,5 were intended to ensure that U.S.
nuclear exports to China will not commence until China has
provided real assurances that it is not assisting and will not
assist other nations, directly or indirectly, to acquire the
means to make nuclear weapons.
What follows is a concise summary of nuclear-proliferation
concerns associated with China's domestic and export programs.
China Has Not Implemented Export Controls
China promised then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher in
November 1996 that it would set up an export-control system,6 and
the Clinton Administration has stated that implementation of such
a system will be required if U.S.-Chinese nuclear trade is to
expand.7 Earlier this year, senior Administration officials
expressed concern that China has failed to implement such
controls. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated in April
that "[w]e remain concerned ... about the adequacy of China's
export control system. Difficulties have arisen, for example,
over Chinese exports of arms as well as sensitive goods and
technologies to Iran and Pakistan."8 Samuel Berger, assistant to
the President for national security affairs, echoed these
concerns in June:
... China maintains weapons supply relationships that trouble
us and an inadequate system of export controls to assure that in
a country as large as China, unauthorized sales do not occur.
Last month, we imposed economic penalties against several Chinese
companies for providing assistance to Iran's chemical weapons
program. And we continue to raise with China our concerns about
the possible sale of missile technology to Iran and Pakistan.9
In June, it was reported that implementation of these measures
faced continued resistance from the Chinese nuclear industry.10
On August 1, the Chinese cabinet reportedly approved a 22-
article export control law, including a list of controlled items,
but the law has apparently not been made public, and detailed
information about its provisions is not available.11 As of late
August, it has been reported that, despite the August 1
announcement, China has still not implemented controls for
nuclear materials, components and "dual-use" items (technology
and material that can be used either for peaceful purposes or
weapons).12
China Has Diverted U.S. Exports to Military Use
The 1985 Congressional resolution approving the U.S.-China
nuclear cooperation agreement requires, as a precondition for the
agreements coming into force, that the President certify to
Congress that, inter alia, "verification measures are designed to
be effective in ensuring peaceful uses of U.S. exports..."13
Almost 12 years later, it is not clear whether such measures have
been agreed upon.
Concerns that China might fail to keep promises not to use U.S.-
origin nuclear technology for military purposes are justified by
its misuse of U.S. non-nuclear exports. China has already
diverted certain U.S.- origin non-nuclear "dual-use" technology
to military applications. In 1994, China imported U.S. machine
tools for what it claimed were civilian purposes. In fact, these
tools were diverted to a missile factory. Commerce Department
investigators urged sanctions, but higher level officials
rejected sanctions in favor of continuing a constructive-
engagement approach.14
In June 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright protested
China's illegal diversion of a Sun Microsystems supercomputer to
a facility doing military research.15 A National Security Council
official reported that "there were no formal military or
intelligence investigations" of possible computer technology
diversions by China.16
China Assists Proliferant States
A CIA report concluded that, in the second half of 1996, "China
was the single most important supplier of equipment and
technology for weapons of mass destruction" worldwide.17 This
dubious honor reflects a pattern of Chinese export misbehavior
that has continued for decades. Here is NCI's compilation of some
examples of Chinese assistance provided to nations of
proliferation concern.18
Algeria. In 1990, when Algeria was refusing to join the NPT,
China secretly began construction of a large nuclear research
reactor, capable of producing significant amounts of plutonium.19
China also supplied large hot cells, which can be used to handle
highly radioactive spent fuel to separate plutonium.20 Only years
later, after international pressure was brought to bear on both
nations, was the reactor announced publicly and placed under IAEA
safeguards.
Argentina. In the early 1980s, at a time when Argentina refused
to join the NPT, China supplied that nation with unsafeguarded
highly enriched uranium, uranium hexafluoride, and heavy water.21
China entered into a nuclear cooperation agreement with Argentina
in 1985.22
India. In the 1980s, China covertly sold India 130 to 150 tons
of heavy water, enhancing India's ability to produce plutonium in
CANDU reactors for its nuclear weapons program after Canada and
the United States had cut off supply of heavy water to India.23
Iran. China entered into a nuclear cooperation agreement with
Iran in 1985.24 In September 1995, the Chinese ambassador to Iran
confirmed that China was supplying uranium enrichment and other
nuclear technology to Iran.25 China is Iran's most important
supplier of nuclear technology, exporting over $60 million worth
annually, and 14 Chinese nuclear experts are reportedly working
at Iranian nuclear facilities.26
According to one report, China recently completed construction
of a plant to convert uranium from UF6 gas to metallic form.27
Such a uranium- conversion facility would be useful in a nuclear-
weapons program. IAEA inspectors reported in early 1997 that the
Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center, site of the plant, is
"building up at a rate not justified by Iran's declared nuclear
activities."28 In July, Clinton Administration officials denied
the plant's existence. An ACDA official stated that "[t]hat
report is not accurate," and a senior State Department official
said, "[t]here is no information---negative---showing such a
facility in Iran."29
China has also supplied Iran with a research reactor capable of
producing plutonium and a calutron, a technology that can be used
to enrich uranium to weapons-grade.30 (Calutrons enriched the
uranium in the "Little Boy" bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, and
were at the center of Saddam Hussein's effort to develop an Iraqi
nuclear bomb.)
China has contracted with Iran to construct two nuclear-power
reactors near Bushehr, though it is not clear whether these plans
have been put on hold.31 China also has provided Iran with
nuclear-capable ballistic missiles,32 cruise missiles,33 missile
components, and chemicals useful in making nerve gas.34 China has
reportedly "sold Iran 400 tons of chemical agents, giving it the
largest chemical weapons stockpile of any Third World country."35
Iraq. In 1990, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the
imposition of an international trade embargo, China provided Iraq
with lithium hydride, a chemical compound useful in both boosted-
fission and thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs, as well as ballistic
missile fuel.36 China also reportedly assisted Iraq in the
construction of samarium-cobalt ring magnets for uranium-
enrichment centrifuges.37
North Korea. Several hundred North Korean experts have been
trained in plutonium separation and other nuclear technologies in
China and the Soviet Union since the 1960s.38 China may also have
assisted North Korea's ballistic missile program.39
Pakistan. A CIA report concluded in July that China is
Pakistan's "primary source of nuclear- related equipment and
technology..."40 In the early 1980s, China provided Pakistan with
the design for a nuclear weapon, and probably enough highly
enriched uranium (HEU) for one to two bombs.41 It has also
assisted Pakistan in construction of an unsafeguarded plutonium
production reactor at Khushab,42 and possibly a reprocessing
plant.43 In 1986, China sold Pakistan tritium, an element used in
the trigger of hydrogen bombs as well as to boost the yield of
fission weapons.44
In 1995, China exported 5,000 ring magnets to Pakistan. Such
magnets are integral components of high-speed gas centrifuges of
the type used by Pakistan to enrich uranium to weapons-grade.45
In October 1996, the CIA reported that China had provided
Pakistan with dual-use furnaces and diagnostic equipment.46 It
remains unclear whether these transfers took place before or
after China's May 11, 1996 pledge to the United States not to
provide assistance to unsafeguarded nuclear facilities.
China has provided assistance with a number of Pakistan's
nuclear reactors. China is constructing a safeguarded nuclear-
power plant at Chasma47 and supplying it with an advanced-
computer control system.48 China also supplies heavy water to the
safeguarded Kanupp reactor (originally supplied by Canada), and
has provided assistance in the construction of an unsafeguarded
plutonium-production reactor near Khushab.49
The situation with regard to the Kanupp and Khushab reactors is
particularly troubling. A shortage of heavy water is apparently
the principal obstacle to start-up of the nearly completed,
unsafeguarded Khushab reactor, which Pakistan has built with
Chinese assistance. Recent reports indicate that China is
supplying heavy water to the safeguarded Kanupp reactor at a rate
to make up heavy-water losses of two to four percent a year.50
Although the Kanupp reactor had large reported losses of heavy
water in its early years of operation, the facility was recently
upgraded to bring the reactor into conformity with industry
standards, and reduce the heavy-water loss rate to about one
percent annually. Thus, China may now be supplying Pakistan with
up to nearly four metric tons more heavy water per year than it
needs for its safeguarded power reactor, leaving open the
possibility of diversion of surplus heavy water to Khushab, which
needs only five tons of heavy water to start up and 15 tons to
operate at full power. These questions have yet to be resolved.
According to the CIA, China provided Pakistan with 30 ready-to-
launch M-11 ballistic missiles, capable of delivering nuclear
warheads, to Pakistan.51 China also reportedly helped Pakistan
build a missile production factory, which will be ready to
operate in 1997, and U.S. intelligence reports frequent trips by
Chinese missile technicians to Pakistan.52
South Africa. In the early 1990s, when South Africa's apartheid
government was not a member of the NPT and was secretly building
nuclear bombs, China supplied Pretoria with 60 tons of
unsafeguarded enriched uranium.53 This enriched uranium may have
enabled South Africa to triple weapons-grade uranium output at
the Valindaba facility.54
Syria. According to U.S. intelligence sources, China has
provided ballistic missile technology to Syria,55 including the
nuclear-capable M-9 missile,56 and guidance technology for M-11
missiles, in violation of the MTCR.57
End Notes
1. Peking Review, August 16, 1963, cited in statement of Senator
William Proxmire to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations,
October 9, 1985. Back to document
2. China joined the NPT March 9, 1992; France joined the treaty
on August 3, 1992. Back to document
3. ACDA, 1996 Annual Report, "Regional Arms Control: China."
Back to document
4. P.L. 99-183 (December 16, 1985). Back to document
5. P.L. 101-246, Title IX, Sections 901 and 902 (February 16,
1990). Back to document
6 . "Ban on Nuke Tech to China to be Partially Lifted," Dow
Jones newswire, December 10, 1996. Back to document
7. Mark Hibbs, "Move to Block China Certification Doesn't
Concern Administration," Nucleonics Week, August 7, 1997, p. 11.
Back to document
8 . Madeleine Albright, speech at the U.S. Naval Academy,
Annapolis, Maryland, April 15, 1997. Back to document
9 . Samuel Berger, speech at the Council on Foreign Relations,
New York, June 6, 1997. Back to document
10 . Mark Hibbs, "Chinese Industry Resists Nuclear Export
Controls," Nucleonics Week, June 5, 1997, p. 3. Back to document
11. Mark Hibbs, "Move to Block China Certification," op. cit,
citing an August 1 report by the official Chinese news agency
Xinhua. Back to document
12 . Steven Erlanger, "China Considers U.S. Suggestions for
Summit Harmony," New York Times, August 18, 1997, p. A6. Back to
document
13 . Warren Donnelly, Congressional Research Service,
"Implementation of the U.S.-China Agreement for Nuclear
Cooperation," CRS Issue Brief, November 17, 1988, p. 3. This
verification requirement applies specifically to dedicated
nuclear technology exports under the terms of the cooperation
agreement, rather than "dual-use" technologies with nuclear
applications. Back to document
14 . Gary Milhollin, "China Cheats (What a Surprise!)," New York
Times, April 24, 1997, p. A35. Back to document
15 . Robert Greenberger, "Albright Says China Broke Export Rules
by Using U.S. Computer at Military Site," Wall Street Journal,
July 1, 1997. p. A16. Back to document
16. Gary Samore, senior director for nonproliferation and export
control, NSC, cited in Robert Greenberger, ibid. Back to document
17 . Mark Hibbs, "DOD, ACDA Want China Accord Link to Other
Weapons Export Limits," Nucleonics Week, August 21, 1997, p. 2.
See also Tim Weiner, "China is Top Supplier to Nations Seeking
Powerful, Banned Arms," New York Times, July 3, 1997, p. A10.
Back to document
18. Research for this paper was assisted by the CNS computer
databases compiled by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies,
Monterey Institute for International Affairs. Back to document
19. Elaine Sciolino, "Algerian Reactor: A Chinese Export," New
York Times, November 15, l991, p. l; Yan Kong and Tim McCarthy,
"The Proliferation Risks of the PRC-Supplied Algerian Nuclear
Reactor," Eye on Supply, Emerging Nuclear Suppliers Project,
Monterey Institute for International Studies,
4, Spring 1991, pp. 71 -73. Back to document
20. Mark Hibbs, "Move to Block China Certification," op. cit.
Back to document
21. Judith Miller, "U.S. is Holding up Peking Atom Talks," New
York Times, September 19, 1982; Michael Brenner, "People's
Republic of China," in International Nuclear Trade and
Nonproliferation, Ed. William Potter, 1990, p. 253. Back to
document
22. Daniel Shultz, "The PRC's Nuclear Cooperation Agreements,"
Eye on Supply,
4, Spring 1991, pp. 78- 79. Back to document
23. Judith Miller, "U.S. is Holding up Peking Atom Talks," op.
cit.; Gary Milhollin and Gerard White, "A New China Syndrome:
Beijing's Atomic Bazaar," Washington Post, May 12, 1991, p. C4.
Back to document
24. Daniel Shultz, "The PRC's Nuclear Cooperation Agreements,"
Eye on Supply,
4, Spring 1991, pp. 78- 79. Back to document
25. Martin Walker, "US Fears Beijing May Be Split Over Mending
Fences," Guardian, September 25, 1995. Back to document
26. Con Coughlin, "U.S. Sounds Alarm Over Iran Nuclear Threat,"
Sunday Telegraph (London), February 23, 1997, p. 24. Back to
document
27. "EU Leaks Report on Nuclear Program," Iran Brief, July 3,
1997, p. 5. Back to document
28. Mark Hibbs, "Iran Agrees to Monitoring Under 93+2, Part I
Safeguards," Nuclear Fuel, January 13, 1997, pa 3. Back to
document
29. Mark Hibbs & Michael Knapik, "U.S. Aims for China
Certification Timed with Fall Visit by Jiang," NuclearFuel, July
28, 1997, p. 3. Back to document
30. Marie Colvin, "Secret Iranian Plans for a Nuclear Bomb,"
Sunday Times (London), July 28, 1991; Russell Watson, "Merchants
of Death," Newsweek, November 18, 1991, p. 38. Back to document
31. In August, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after
meeting with Chinese Vice Premier Li Lanqing, stated that "I was
told that China ... reached an important decision not to provide
the means for building an atomic reactor which Iran asked China
to supply." "Netanyahu Says Received China Assurances on Iran,"
Reuters wire story, August 24, 1997. However, the Chinese
Government refused to confirm or comment on this statement.
"China Silent on Whether Iran Nuclear Sale Shelved," Reuters wire
story, August 26, 1997. Chinese ambiguity on its commitment to
the Iran reactor project has continued for some time.
"China/lran: Reactor Plans Shelved-Again?," Nucleonics Week,
January 11, 1996, p. 9. Back to document
32. Representative Tom Lantos, "Chinese Ballistic Missile
Sales," Statement before the Subcommittee on International
Security, International Organizations, and Human Rights, House
Foreign Affairs Committee, May 20, 1993, p. 4. Back to document
33. Robert Einhorn, deputy assistant secretary of state for
nonproliferation, testimony before the Senate Governmental
Affairs Committee, Subcommittee on International Security,
reported in "State Dept. Revises Report on China's Arms Sales to
Iran," Washington Times, April 15, 1997, p. A3. Back to document
34. Robert Einhorn, ibid.; Bill Gertz, "China Sold Iran Missile
Technology," Washington Times, November 21, 1996, p. At. Back to
document
35. Mark Yost, "China's Deadly Trade in the Mideast," Wall
Street Journal, December 4, 1996, p. A18, citing "U.S. Navy
sources." Back to document
36. Tim Kelsey, "Chinese Arms Dealers Flaunt U.N. Embargo-China
Ships Vital Nuclear Cargo to Iraq," London Sunday Independent,
September 30, 1990, reprinted in Congressional Record, October
18, 1990, p. H10531. Back to document
37. "Iraq and the Bomb," MidEast Markets, December 11, 1989, p.
130. Back to document
38. Mark Hibbs, "No U.S. Agency Consensus on DPRK Nuclear
Progress," Nucleonics Week, January 6, 1994, p. 10. Back to
document
39. Spector et al., p. 49. Back to document
40. Tim Weiner, "China is Top Supplier," op. cit. Back to
document
41. Leslie Gelb, "Pakistan Link Perils U.S.-China Nuclear Pact,"
New York Times, June 22, 1984, p. Al; Leonard Spector et al.,
Tracking Nuclear Proliferation, Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, 1995, p. 49. Back to document
42. Ibid Back to document
43 . 43 Bill Gertz, "China Aids Pakistani Plutonium Plant,"
Washington Times, April 3, 1996, p. A4. Back to document
44. Milhollin and White, p. C4. Back to document
45. Tim Weiner, "Atom Arms Parts Sold to Pakistan by China, U.S.
Says," New York Times, February 8, 1996, p. Al. Back to document
46. Mark Hibbs, "U.S.-China Cooperation Closer as China Scales
Back Pakistan Aid," Nucleonics Week, October 17, 1996, p. 11.
Back to document
47. Spector et al., p. 97. The plant supposedly will be subject
to IAEA inspections. Back to document
48. "Pakistan to get Chinese Computer," Wall Street Journal,
August 22, 1997, p. A10. Back to document
49. Mark Hibbs, "China May Continue D20 Reactor Exports to
Pakistan After U.S. Certification," NuclearFuel, August 11, 1997,
p. 1. Back to document
50. Ibid Back to document
51. "India Says China has sent Missiles to Pakistan," Reuters
wire story, August 7, 1997. See also Jeffrey Smith and David
Ottaway, "Spy Photos Suggest China Missile Trade," Washinaton
Post, July 3, 1995, p. Al. Back to document
52. Gary Milhollin, "China Cheats," op. cit. Back to document
53. Leonard Spector, Nuclear Ambitions, 1990, p. 274. Back to
document
54. Michael Brenner, "The People's Republic of China," op. cit.,
p. 253. Back to document
55. Bill Gertz, "China Sold Iran Missile Technology," Washington
Times, November 21, 1996, p. Al; Spector et al., p. 49. Back to
document
56. Milhollin and White, p. C4; Lantos, p. 5. Back to document
57. Mark Yost, "China's Deadly Trade," op. cit. Back to document
j...@inxpress.net
Joshua Halpern wrote:
>
> In alt.politics.usa.republican n_me...@hotmail.com wrote:
> : BY JONATHAN BRODER | WASHINGTON -- Against the backdrop of a deepening
> SNIP....
> : According to U.S. Treasury sources, it was China's warnings, which prompted
> : fears of more economic turmoil in Asia, that convinced Treasury Secretary
> : Robert Rubin to spend some $2 billion to bolster the falling yen, reversing
> : his earlier policy of nonintervention.
>
> a good day's profit for anyone. Rubin took the short sellers to the
> cleaners.
>
> josh halpern
Rubin manipulated the market, and his friends benefitted.
j...@inxpress.net
A brainless, shameless gerbil wrote:
> >
> >Rubin manipulated the market, and his friends benefitted.
>
> Isn't this what a good capitalist is supposed to do?
>
According to communists, it is. If the shoe fits, gerbil, ....
Joshua Halpern
In alt.politics.usa.republican n_me...@hotmail.com wrote:
: BY JONATHAN BRODER | WASHINGTON -- Against the backdrop of a deepening
SNIP....
: According to U.S. Treasury sources, it was China's warnings, which prompted
: fears of more economic turmoil in Asia, that convinced Treasury Secretary
: Robert Rubin to spend some $2 billion to bolster the falling yen, reversing
: his earlier policy of nonintervention.
Spend? We bought at 145 yen/$ and now the market is at 135 yen/$. That's
Gary Weasel
On Fri, 19 Jun 1998 21:33:47 -0500, j...@inxpress.net wrote:
>Joshua Halpern wrote:
>>
>> In alt.politics.usa.republican n_me...@hotmail.com wrote:
>> : BY JONATHAN BRODER | WASHINGTON -- Against the backdrop of a deepening
>> SNIP....
>> : According to U.S. Treasury sources, it was China's warnings, which prompted
>> : fears of more economic turmoil in Asia, that convinced Treasury Secretary
>> : Robert Rubin to spend some $2 billion to bolster the falling yen, reversing
>> : his earlier policy of nonintervention.
>>
>> Spend? We bought at 145 yen/$ and now the market is at 135 yen/$. That's
>> a good day's profit for anyone. Rubin took the short sellers to the
>> cleaners.
>>
>> josh halpern
>
>
>Rubin manipulated the market, and his friends benefitted.
Isn't this what a good capitalist is supposed to do?
Are you some kind of commie, JQ Dumbass?
Gary
http://www.efn.org/~gfrazier
Lumber Cartel Unit #294 (TINLC)
Fight Spam! Join CAUCE! http://www.cauce.org
Gary Weasel
On Fri, 19 Jun 1998 22:58:30 -0500, j...@inxpress.net wrote:
>A brainless, shameless gerbil wrote:
>
>> >
>> >Rubin manipulated the market, and his friends benefitted.
>>
>> Isn't this what a good capitalist is supposed to do?
>>
>
>According to communists, it is. If the shoe fits, gerbil, ....
John Q Public Disgrace and Dumbass strikes again with the total
non-sequiter.
We've come to expect this from a mental defective like him.
Move along, people. Nothing to see here but the looney.
Kelvin Mok
On Fri, 19 Jun 1998 09:27:04 -0500, j...@inxpress.net wrote:
>"Clinton is guilty of more than mere fatuousness, however, in
>dealing with the India-Pakistan nuclear arms race. He is guilty
>of fueling it. While for years his administration has claimed
>deep concern about proliferation, Clinton has shamelessly courted
>the world's worst proliferator of weapons of mass destruction: China.
(snip one mighty long post)
Phew, couldn't read the whole post but the content is fairly clear if
repetitious.
A few points to be cleared first.
There is nothing secret or high tech about nuclear weapons. The
theoretical groundwork for nuclear reactions were already known and
published before WWII. For all the books on the importance of spies
in revealing nuclear weapons secrets to communist Russia their real
role was actually quite insignificant. Atmospheric analysis of the
radio- isotope byproducts from US above-ground atomic bomb tests told
Russian scientist all they needed to know about the process. The spy
reports merely corroborated their calculations. This assessment is
provided by high level technical committees in the US (a detailed
summary was published in the IEEE Spectrum not too many issues ago).
If the US showed a working nuclear bomb could be built so could Russia
and they succeeded within a short few years. Every nation that had
set up to build a bomb had succeeded if they were willing to devote
enough resources to do it. Its strictly money and engineering. If a
small country like Israel can do it what is so remarkable about
Pakistan and India doing it too. Saddam goofed by making a grab at
Kuiwait before he had the bomb. I am not talking about morality, just
the technical feasibility.
The Allies had every good reason to drop the A-bombs in Japan and they
actually killed far less people than by a single firebombing raid (and
there were many) that were carried out by the fleets of B-29 then.
True some of the survivors had horrendous injuries but so did
conventional bomb victims. All those horror stories about radiation
induced mutations and cancers have not been borne out after 50+ years
of medical data. (go look up SCIENCE or Scientific American for hard
data). Seen any two headed or green skinned Japs running around? The
incidence of cancer Hiroshima and Nagasaki is no different from other
populations.
Before you attack my position please quote your published sources so
that I can refute them by quoting my sources (I am trying to make a
point not writing a thesis but I will back up my position if need be).
For any country to make a nuclear bomb is their decision alone, not
for another country to give or to hold back. Now Clinton is a
politician and he has to make the right political noises just as
Canada's or the Europeans. Notice they are all white western
nations. Having made those noises (deeply deplore, with regret, etc)
the other political leaders know well enough not elaborate as its
really not in their power to do anything. There is nothing
inconsistent in President Clinton saying something "feel good" against
nuclear proliferation and let it go at that. But Clinton has this
pack of dogs constantly snapping at his heels. Back off and go piss
on some other fire plug.
What has nuclear bombs brought. For one it maintained peace between
the big powers in the 50+ years since the end of WWII as any actual
use of the A-Bomb assures mutual destruction. This hasn't stopped
numerous vicious small wars but military adventures to invade
neighbors to add territory is no longer possible. For what it is
worth international borders, a cause of many wars in the past, are now
secure. and can be changed only through internal disintegration - the
former USSR, the Caucasus for example or by mutual agreement - the EU,
Eastern Europe. The chances are now that both India and Pakistan have
nuclear bombs their borders will be frozen and secure. The only real
point of contention is Kashmir and if the big guys cannot go to war
over that issue then the locals will have to sort it out themselves
which isn't such a bad thing at all.
Kelvin Mok
kl...@NOSPAM.shaw.wave.ca
Remove 'NOSPAM'from e-mail address to reply
j...@inxpress.net
Gary Weasel wrote:
>
> On Fri, 19 Jun 1998 22:58:30 -0500, j...@inxpress.net wrote:
>
> >A brainless, shameless gerbil wrote:
> >
> >> >
> >> >Rubin manipulated the market, and his friends benefitted.
> >>
> >> Isn't this what a good capitalist is supposed to do?
> >>
> >
> >According to communists, it is. If the shoe fits, gerbil, ....
>
> John Q Public Disgrace and Dumbass strikes again with the total
> non-sequiter.
It's "non sequitor", except that this isn't one.
You're too stupid to play here, gerbil.
Karl Auerbach
Actually, it's "non sequitur" with a "u".
Karl
--
"If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the
government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those
guarantees."
-- President Bill Clinton, August 12, 1993
Approved by the Right Wing Impeachment Committee, a wholly owned subsidiary
of the VRWC (tm).
j...@inxpress.net
Karl Auerbach wrote:
>
> In article <358BBF...@inxpress.net>, j...@inxpress.net wrote:
>
> > Gary Weasel wrote:
> > >
> > > On Fri, 19 Jun 1998 22:58:30 -0500, j...@inxpress.net wrote:
> > >
> > > >A brainless, shameless gerbil wrote:
> > > >
> > > >> >
> > > >> >Rubin manipulated the market, and his friends benefitted.
> > > >>
> > > >> Isn't this what a good capitalist is supposed to do?
> > > >>
> > > >
> > > >According to communists, it is. If the shoe fits, gerbil, ....
> > >
> > > John Q Public Disgrace and Dumbass strikes again with the total
> > > non-sequiter.
> >
> >
> > It's "non sequitor", except that this isn't one.
>
> Actually, it's "non sequitur" with a "u".
>
OK, OK.
But it still isn't one.
Kelvin Mok
On Sat, 20 Jun 1998 09:12:49 -0700, kaue...@relia.net (Karl
> "If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the
>government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those
>guarantees."
>
> -- President Bill Clinton, August 12, 1993
>
>Approved by the Right Wing Impeachment Committee, a wholly owned subsidiary
>of the VRWC (tm).
You mean someone actually believes, much less remember, anything Pres.
Clinton said. A quote from 1993! Amazing.
Due to a number of factors, none of which have anything to do with
Pres. Clinton's numerous aborted initiatives, the US economy is
humming along just fine. You can put another clown in the Presidency
today and so long as he doesn't actually believe that he has any power
to direct the economy the US will do OK.
In spite of all those bimbo gaffes ever consider why both parties try
ever so hard to keep Clinton in the Presidency. Imagine the horror if
America actually gets a President who can get things done his way.
BTW where do these lame duck (one wing types) organizations come
from? What does VRWC stand for?
Karl Auerbach
In article <358dff27...@news.edm.shaw.wave.ca>,
kl...@NOSPAM.shaw.wave.ca wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Jun 1998 09:12:49 -0700, kaue...@relia.net (Karl
> >--
> > "If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the
> >government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those
> >guarantees."
> >
> > -- President Bill Clinton, August 12, 1993
> >
> >Approved by the Right Wing Impeachment Committee, a wholly owned subsidiary
> >of the VRWC (tm).
>
> You mean someone actually believes, much less remember, anything Pres.
> Clinton said. A quote from 1993! Amazing.
Depends on which side you're on. If you're a Clinton supporter, it works
out best to forget almost everything he has said and promised. If you 're
not a Clinton supporter, you tend to remember these... faux pas.
>
> Due to a number of factors, none of which have anything to do with
> Pres. Clinton's numerous aborted initiatives, the US economy is
> humming along just fine. You can put another clown in the Presidency
> today and so long as he doesn't actually believe that he has any power
> to direct the economy the US will do OK.
Understood. The ability of the American people to actually believe one man
can have that much influence on the economy never ceases to amaze me. It's
easy, but it's wrong.
>
> In spite of all those bimbo gaffes ever consider why both parties try
> ever so hard to keep Clinton in the Presidency.
Uh, cause there ain't no real difference between the two?
> Imagine the horror if
> America actually gets a President who can get things done his way.
Run away! 8^)
>
> BTW where do these lame duck (one wing types) organizations come
> from? What does VRWC stand for?
It's based on ann accusation by Her Hillaryness that there is a "...vast
right wing conspiriciy..." behind any and all activities that are, or
might appear to be, agasint the Clinton's (imperial) presidency. So, to do
her honor, many of us have formalized the Vast Right Wing Conspiricy (VRWC)
just so she KNOWS someone is out to get her. Paranoia can be so lonely...
Oh, and the Right Wing Impeachment Committee was something I pulled out of
an article poking fun at the conspiricy theory.
Karl
Michael Rivero
In article <358dff27...@news.edm.shaw.wave.ca>,
Kelvin Mok <kl...@NOSPAM.shaw.wave.ca> wrote:
>On Sat, 20 Jun 1998 09:12:49 -0700, kaue...@relia.net (Karl
>>--
>> "If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the
>>government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those
>>guarantees."
>>
>> -- President Bill Clinton, August 12, 1993
>>
>>Approved by the Right Wing Impeachment Committee, a wholly owned subsidiary
>>of the VRWC (tm).
>
>You mean someone actually believes, much less remember, anything Pres.
>Clinton said. A quote from 1993! Amazing.
>
>Pres. Clinton's numerous aborted initiatives, the US economy is
>humming along just fine. You can put another clown in the Presidency
>today and so long as he doesn't actually believe that he has any power
>to direct the economy the US will do OK.
>
>America actually gets a President who can get things done his way.
>
>from? What does VRWC stand for?
>
VRWC stands for "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, a term invented by Hillary
Clinton to explain away the fact that a large number of people don't like
Bill Clinton. According to Hillary, it's not a simple grass-roots rejection
of the man, it's all a PLOT! Hillary is getting paranoid these days.
The fact is the economy is doing well only for the 20% richest Americans;
for everyone else, real wages and living standards are in decline. A greater
percentage of Americans live below the poverty line today than when Bill
Clinton took office.
No economy 6 trillion in debt (and sinking further every day) has any
business claiming it's doing well.
In fact, the only part of the economy that's reeally doing well are
the drug runners. Cocaine usage has doubled by our children in the
last 6 years. No fortune 500 company can claim such growth.
Strategic INvrestment hasd uncovered signs of covert manipulation of the
stock market (using the taxes of the poor to make the rich people's
stocks worth more).
And last week, John Crudele pointed out that the unemployment figures
are being adjusted up and down in blocks of an even 250,000, which any
auditor will tell you is the sure sign that the books are being "fudged".
I can tell you this, around here the only work available for most folks is
minimum wage. All the high paying high tech and manufacturing jobs have
left for other nations via NAFTA and GATT. The word on the streets is
that it's a good thing there are lots of jobs, because it takes three of
them to make ends meet.
Government protected stock profits, and cheap labor. This doesn't
sound like a good economy for anyone but the rich.
That's why so many Democrats have quit the party.
--
Mike & Claire - The Rancho Runnamukka http://www.accessone.com/~rivero/
http://www.accessone.com/~rivero/POLITICS/FOSTER_COVERUP/foster.html
Awarded a Lycos "Top 5%" of the web!
Billy Beck
kl...@NOSPAM.shaw.wave.ca (Kelvin Mok) wrote:
>What does VRWC stand for?
"Turtles On Fence-Posts"
See the "turtle" ("no fingerprints") on the "fence-post" at Ft.
Marcy Park (the Colt .38) for a salient example.
Billy
VRWC fronteer - sigdiv
http://www.mindspring.com/~wjb3/free/essays.html
David Goldman
Are there any openings in the Politburo in Beijing for Slick and Mrs.?
Maybe we could contribute to a fund for him to study Chinese and buy
some property on the Yangzi River.....
Alan Furman
Back in the days of scientific ignorance, people used to believe
that one man, the high priest, determined the harvest.
Whereas in our present times of economic ignorance...
In article <kauerbach-ya024080...@news.relia.net>,
Karl Auerbach <kaue...@relia.net> wrote:
>[...]
>Understood. The ability of the American people to actually believe one man
>can have that much influence on the economy never ceases to amaze me. It's
>easy, but it's wrong.
--
====al...@aimnet.com * LPC * LPUSA * ISIL * IOS * KoX * Netscab Squealer====
LEGALIZE FREEDOM >>>> http://www.lp.org * UBI LIBERTAS IBI PATRIA
When you say "Bill Clinton," you've said a mouthful.
Docky Wocky
"No economy 6 trillion in debt (and sinking further every day) has any
________
What about the unfunded federal debt for pensions, guarantees by the
government, etc.?
Billy Beck
al...@aimnet.com (Alan Furman) wrote:
>Back in the days of scientific ignorance, people used to believe
>that one man, the high priest, determined the harvest.
>
>Whereas in our present times of economic ignorance...
>
>In article <kauerbach-ya024080...@news.relia.net>,
>Karl Auerbach <kaue...@relia.net> wrote:
>
>>[...]
>>Understood. The ability of the American people to actually believe one man
>>can have that much influence on the economy never ceases to amaze me. It's
>>easy, but it's wrong.
(not for commercial distribution)
It's (Not) the Economy, Stupid
by Charles R. Morris
The Atlantic Monthly
July 1993
Bill Clinton was elected on an untenable premise: that it is the job
of the President to manage the economy. Yes, that is what we have come
to expect of Presidents; but this expectation, the author argues, is
punishingly at variance with anything any President can credibly
deliver
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As all the world knows, "the economy" was the overriding issue in the
1992 presidential election. President George Bush "mishandled" the
economy. He lost. Bill Clinton promised to handle it more skillfully.
He won. I will argue that he won on a false issue, and that the main
criterion on which our presidential elections have come to be
decided--managing the economy--is a sham.
The assumption that the President manages the economy is the core of
prevailing political wisdom, dinned into the public mind by a
generation of pundits, a convention of discourse endlessly repeated
but rarely examined. The fact is, presidential elections have become
referenda on the business cycle, whose fortuitous turnings are
personified in the President--thus the "Bush recession" yields to the
"Clinton recovery." This is not economics, it is anthropology--an
exercise in collective magic. Presidents are properly accountable for
their executive and legislative performance, and there is no question
that federal actions can affect the economy, sometimes profoundly.
Eliminating the budget deficit in four years, for example, might
create a nasty recession or a runaway boom--economists, as always,
disagree. But the effects would almost certainly be substantial,
however unpredictable. Modern political campaigns, however, are fought
on the premise that Presidents can manage the economy, that they can
take detailed actions that have a precise result--such as raising
productivity, reducing unemployment, or increasing investment. In that
sense, how much control do Presidents really have over the economy?
The answer is, very, very little.
Mind Over Matter
The "economy" itself is really just a metaphor for the enormously
complex stew of daily personal and commercial transactions among some
250 million Americans. The deceptively precise numbers that purport to
measure "savings" or "growth" or "income" are crude approximations
compounded from a slag heap of samples, surveys, estimates,
interpolations, seasonal adjustments, and plain guesses. It takes
months, even years, for economists to sort through the numbers and
figure out what really happened--if they ever do. There is still no
consensus on what caused the Great Depression. The most recent returns
on the U.S. economy show signs of respectable growth. But economists
are arguing fiercely over whether it is too little or too much, the
morning lark of a solid long term recovery or just a dead-cat bounce.
And, of course, they disagree even more fiercely on the policy
prescriptions that flow from their prejudices: "Do something or things
will get worse!" Or, "IF you do something, things will get worse!"
Clinton's ill-fated economic-stimulus program exemplifies the
confusion. Certainly it was small: at $16 billion, hardly more than
the rounding error in the national accounts. And no one could argue
with a straight face that a porridge of new playgrounds, vaccination
programs, and Headstart dollars would visibly improve the economy. But
while the Nobel laureate economists James Tobin and Robert Solow
warned that the stimulus was too small, Wall Street worried that the
President would spook the bond market. If bondholders decided that the
economy was growing too fast, or the government was borrowing too
much, and inflation was heading up, interest rates would rise and
undercut the recovery--the last thing Clinton wanted.
At one point Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, a key designer of the
Clinton economic strategy, argued that the "psychological impact" of
the stimulus program was what really counted. The emphasis on changing
people's minds about the economy sounded a little like official
explanations of American policy in Vietnam--bombing just enough to
discourage the enemy. The resemblance, in fact, is no accident, for
both the image of the President as button-pusher in the economic
engine room and the heavily psychologized tactics in Vietnam are
squarely in a peculiarly American tradition of thinking about society
and the economy.
Pulling Levers
Pan the camera back almost a hundred years: there stands an aging
Henry Adams, the historian and descendant of Presidents, agape before
a giant electrical dynamo at the Great Paris Exposition of 1900, ready
to fall on his knees, "bewildered and helpless, as in the fourth
century, a priest of Isis before the Cross of Christ." Transported by
this Damascene vision, Adams set out to construct a "dynamic theory of
history," seeking the fundamental laws, like those of electricity or
magnetism or the kinetic theory of gases, that govern the affairs of
men.
Adams's search for a scientific history was tempered by self-mocking
irony. But to minds less steeped in the past, America's leap into the
Machine Age and the mighty transformations of American social and
industrial relations opened entirely new intellectual vistas. The new
"scientific" outlook was thoroughly positivist (nothing existed, or at
least was worth talking about, if it could not be measured); it was
atomistic (all things were condensed from identical particles); and it
was statistical (the intricate but predictable dance of countless
freely colliding molecules of gas was choreographed by a few simple,
immutable laws). In a series of easy stages the same logic was applied
to virtually the entire field of human endeavor.
To begin with, the mapping from a mechanistic physics to the
burgeoning science of economics seemed entirely natural, precise, and
complete: correct prices, for instance, arose from the statistical
interaction of countless atomized market participants obeying the
simple canons of rational self-interest. Around the turn of the
century American universities developed a defense of American liberal
capitalism as the regime most consistent with a scientific outlook,
and the economist's style of thinking rapidly colonized the rest of
the social sciences. Franklin Giddings, at Columbia; Edward A. Ross,
at the University of Wisconsin; and Charles Horton Cooley, at the
University of Michigan, pushed the still-nascent study of sociology
toward statistics and measurement. (Ross and Cooley started their
careers as economists.) The program of the American Sociological
Society, organized in 1905, was entirely "scientific," seeking the
basic forces, or "sympathy," that bound society together, trying to
discover a praxis of "social control" for a liberal society, teasing
out the rules of the "social equilibrating-apparatus." By the 1920s
all of political science was being recast into a study of the market
behavior of utility-maximizing individuals. The same behaviorist faith
inspired John Dewey's confidence that schools could be organized like
"great factories," to turn out self reliant citizens who would people
Dewey's vision of a liberal democracy.
After a period of eclipse during the Depression, the scientific
pretensions of American economics and its sister social studies were
powerfully reinforced by the sweeping triumph of Keynesianism.
Ignoring Keynes's own warnings about the waywardness of real markets,
American academics forged a rigidly mechanistic vision of the economic
apparatus: pull this lever and investment rises, turn this flywheel
and consumption goes up--all the pieces clicking smoothly into place
like stainless-steel tumblers. Faith in a deus in machina prompted
John Kennedy's wildly unprescient declaration in 1962 that there were
no ideological issues left to solve; the country faced only "technical
problems...administrative problems."
The economist's vision of the rational actor was formalized in John
von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic
Behavior (1944). Game theory supplied a metaphysics for the arms race,
and led Robert McNamara in his will-o'-the-wisp pursuit of a precise
equilibrium of "mutual assured destruction" with the Soviets, as if
nuclear arms were a problem of tariffs and quotas, like trade. Since
rational actors in rational games reach mutually beneficial
accommodations through signaling, it was forever a puzzlement to the
civilian theorists in the Pentagon that Ho Chi Minh obdurately
persisted in misinterpreting their carefully calibrated bombing
campaigns.
Even American ethics has become hardly more than a branch of
economics. Dewey always struggled, if not very successfully, against
the economist's equation of values with mere wants, although it seemed
an obvious implication of his pragmatist teachings. There is no such
struggle in John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, the most discussed
ethical work of the past generation. Rawls proceeds by constructing a
system of goods-maximizing choices by highly rational atomized
individuals who lack any history or social ties. The same economistic
bias also explains much of the American obsession with personal rights
and legalistic procedure: if all wants are theoretically equal, there
is nothing left for moralists to do but tinker with process.
Economists, after all, care only that the corn auction works; whatever
price emerges will ipso facto be the right one.
The interventionist bias of the early Keynesians has created a leftish
aura around the more "scientific" social theories. But the same
empiricist, atomistic view of society, the insistence on equating
choices with values, is a major theme of American conservatism, from
Milton Friedman's willingness to legalize drugs to the current "school
choice" movement. Thomas Sowell and Robert Nozick take issue with
Rawls using exactly the same microeconomic tools that Rawls uses--they
just wind up with diametrically different results. The philosophic
differences between the left and the right in America, that is, most
often reduce to a barren instrumentalism: Should government pull the
levers, or do the levers move themselves?
The reach and power of the economic paradigm in America is impressive
enough; but what makes it all the more remarkable is that there is
almost no compelling reason to believe that it works any better in
economics than it did in guerrilla warfare, let alone in sociology,
politics, or morals.
Economics in the Real World
Financial-market professionals often take for granted the practical
uselessness of economists. Recently, for example, Robert Beckwitt, a
bond manager at Fidelity Investments, the big mutual-funds company,
tracked the success of Wall Street's economists in forecasting
interest rates. Bond values depend critically on interest rates, and
bond traders basically make bets on whether interest rates will rise
or fall when they buy and sell bonds. One of a Wall Street economist's
most important tasks, therefore, is to forecast rate trends, and many
hours of analytic energy and vast amounts of computer power are
lavished on the problem. According to Beckwitt's data, however, the
best bond-investment strategy over the past decade would have been to
do exactly the opposite of what the consensus recommended: when the
economists said "Sell," the wise investor bought--and achieved, in
fact, quite outstanding returns. Charles Wolf, at the Rand
Corporation, once compiled a box score for the major economic
forecasters; the fit between most forecasts and actual outcomes was
approximately random. A running joke at The Wall Street Journal is a
regular feature that pits top stock pickers against a portfolio
compiled by throwing darts at a wall: year after year the dart board
is neck and neck with the analysts.
Forecasting in economics is not the same as plotting the path of a
planet. Fundamental axioms in economics have a disturbing tendency to
flip upside down with little warning, as if gravity suddenly made
objects float. For many years it was received wisdom in economics
textbooks that if the Federal Reserve increased the money supply (by
loosening the credit reins), interest rates would fall. In theory,
money is a commodity like any other, and if there is more of it, its
price, or the rate of interest, should fall. For years, in the main,
the theory held true. Then, at some elusive moment in the 1970s,
investors decided that loose credit caused inflation, which was also
arguably true. The Ford and Carter Administrations had greatly
expanded credit to help cushion the 1970s oil price shocks, and
inflation was rising rapidly. If lenders expect inflation, they will
insist on higher interest rates to protect the value of their money.
Almost overnight the financial headlines executed an about-face: if
the Federal Reserve loosened credit, it was thenceforth taken for
granted that interest rates would rise, not fall. The earth, having
been round, was now flat, and the economic astrolabes were adjusted
accordingly.
Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, was recently
lectured by a Senate committee for not pushing interest rates down
faster to spur an economic expansion. (Lower interest rates presumably
induce greater borrowing and therefore greater economic activity.) In
fact Greenspan had been pushing interest rates down very aggressively
for more than a year. But the Federal Reserve controls only short-term
rates, primarily through its overnight lending to member banks. So
while short term rates fell very rapidly during 1992, longer-term
rates--the ones investors mainly care about--hardly budged. Investors
didn't know which law applied. Would Greenspan's aggressive loosening
make money plentiful and lower rates? Or would it trigger inflation
and raise rates? The result was a kind of paralysis: short-term rates
went down and long-term rates stayed up. The beneficiaries were the
banks, who could suddenly borrow very cheaply from the government and
lend the money right back at much higher interest, by buying
longer-term government bonds. The whole point of the exercise, of
course, had been to increase bank lending to business; but since banks
could make so much money playing the Treasury market, lending to
business actually dropped.
There is no escaping the pervasive influence of the federal behemoth.
About one out of every four dollars spent in the land is spent by, or
put in the pocket of the spender by, the federal government. If the
government lurches left or yaws right, a big chunk of the economy
lurches or yaws with it. But it is hardly a surgical policy
instrument; there are few obvious levers to pull. At bottom the
government engages in four kinds of economic activity. Half a trillion
dollars or so is passed out to citizens each year, either directly, as
in Social Security payments, or in the form of medical services. Some
$300 billion finances the global sprawl of the U.S. military. Another
$300 billion pays for the three-million-strong army of federal civil
servants and a ragout of federal programs, from Headstart ($2.7
billion) to dusty relics like the Rural Electrification Administration
($1.2 billion). Finally, the government borrows some $300 billion each
year from banks, insurance companies, and pension funds and then
cycles most of it back as interest on the debt--a majestically
rotating wheel of money.
Any economic actor as big as the federal government can, like John
Steinbeck's Lennie, clearly do some Very Important Bad Things, whether
it intends to or not. In 1982, for example, Congress and the Reagan
Administration chickened out on a $10 billion savings-and-loan crisis.
Instead of paying the tab and closing down the industry, they covered
it up with phony accounting and looser rules, and turned it into a
$150 billion problem just a few years later--managing along the way to
create a vast supply of unusable commercial real estate, and to roil
all the world's financial markets by unleashing a great flood of
federal borrowing for the sake of unlucky depositors. By the same
token, a complicated but very different series of policy decisions in
Japan during the 1980s has created an almost identical American-scale
S&L-style crisis there. Once in a while, on the other hand, an
opportunity arises to do a Very Important Good Thing. Actually fixing
the U.S. health-care system, so that costs were brought under control,
the uninsured received minimal benefits, and workers could change jobs
without fear of losing coverage (if all that is indeed possible),
would be just such an Important Good Thing.
But for the most part the federal apparatus trundles irresistibly
ahead, a vast, splay-footed creature moving pretty much under its own
power. A web of laws, regulations, long-term procurement contracts,
treaties, jealously guarded congressional prerogatives, and deference
to hallowed practice collectively overbear the occasional deflecting
obstacle. Gentle nudges, pluckings at the coat sleeves are of no avail
against such tremendous inertial force; a minor initiative like the
Clinton stimulus program is simply lost underfoot. Only very
occasionally an utterly determined and utterly resourceful President,
as Richard Nixon was, can bend the machinery to his will. Fearing for
his re-election in 1972, with the economy slowing and inflation
rising, Nixon and his Treasury Secretary, John Connally, engaged in a
bravura performance of economic browbeating. They slapped on wage and
price controls, broke the link between the dollar and gold, gunned up
the money supply, and managed to wring out a year of strong growth
with low inflation just before the election--at the price of
triggering a huge recession during Nixon's short lived second term.
The economy, that is, can be managed over the short term, but only by
relentless and violent clubbing, not by pushing buttons, and not by
Presidents who are queasy about their methods or care about the
consequences.
Truly important economic decisions, as often as not, zip by unnoticed
by the public, probably by the President, because their consequences
can take such a long time to become clear. For example, housing prices
rose strongly through most of the 1980s, partly in response to severe
supply problems in the early part of the decade. The housing shortage
is usually attributed to the Baby Boomers' entering adulthood. The
population entering retirement, however, was almost as big, and their
housing behavior was something new in history. In 1973 Nixon and the
Democratic Congress had sharply increased Social Security payments and
indexed them to rise faster than inflation. For the first time, a
retiring population had the wherewithal to keep their homes, and by
and large they did so, instead of moving in with their children as
previous generations had done. A substantial share of the nation's
housing stock was thus withdrawn from the normal inventory-refreshment
cycle, precipitating a boom in housing construction a decade later.
The new independence of the elderly, in fact, has had a long list of
profound consequences: the growth of retirement villages, the boom in
states like Florida and Arizona, new nursing-care patterns for the
failing aged (the proverbial youngest daughter now typically lives in
another city), and much more. Many of these changes, of course,
represent progress. The point is merely that putting a greater share
of national income in the hands of oldsters has had powerful effects
far beyond the simple shifting of relative poverty indices among age
cohorts.
Such examples are numerous. The country's economic structure has been
profoundly affected by three decades of federal, state, and insurance
company policies aimed at expanding third-party coverage of health
services. Last year the number of U.S. hospital workers increased by
about as many people as are employed by all American computer makers.
The Pentagon's aggressive search for miniaturized weapons technologies
in the 1950s and early 1960s funded a host of unconventional
electronics geniuses, helped create California's Silicon Valley and,
by extension, the American venture-capital industry, and is still the
source of much of the U.S. edge in advanced computer technologies.
Economic models, by and large, just skate by issues like these.
They're messy and unpredictable, and they involve tremendous effects
from seemingly small actions--wars won or lost because of a missing
horseshoe. And they are, depressingly enough for the traditional
"scientific" economists, the way the real world works.
Complexity
The beauty of machines lies in regularity and order--the predictable
harmonies of the Newtonian solar system, the eternal canons of a
clockmaker God. Specify the initial conditions of any system--say, a
table of billiard balls. Introduce a force--the moving cue ball--into
the system and calculate the angles and forces of the subsequent
collisions, and you will have specified the future position of the
balls. That is the fundamental premise of the modern study of
economics. But billiard balls don't work like that.
The celestial machine of Newtonian physics is a simple system, a small
number of bodies revolving around a single massive body. But systems
with many interacting elements, "complex" systems, do not behave like
simple systems. You may specify the initial position of the billiard
balls to any arbitrary level of precision--the sphericity of the
balls, the smoothness of the surface, the trueness of the bumpers. But
there will be some level of imprecision remaining, some element of the
unknown, some fleeting shadow of randomness. If you strike successive
"identical" tables of balls identically, their final positions will
vary widely after only a very small number of collisions. Very tiny
degrees of randomness, fed through a very small number of collisions,
will lead to radically varying outcomes. If God removed an electron
from the end of the universe, it would change the collision pattern of
the air molecules in my room. A few days later there might be a storm
in a neighboring state.
The real world is messily complex. Water flows in turbulent patterns;
tiny variations in the flow quickly build up to big
structures--eddies, riptides, vortices--that merge, expand, disappear.
Molecules in a cell accrete tiny electrical variations and patterns of
connections with other molecules. Suddenly a threshold is crossed and
huge events are triggered--the cell divides, or pours forth viruses,
or becomes cancerous, or dies. Mutations build up invisibly in the
fossil record, and suddenly there is an enormous florescence of new
species and life forms; the face of the earth changes. Real financial
transactions are rarely structured like the rational two person game
so beloved of economic theorists: add just one more player and create
a modest range of choices, and the computer simulations spin out a
rich new world of shifting combinations and coalitions. Chess is a
game between only two players, with only moderately complex rules, but
it quickly spirals into an infinity of outcomes. Scientists are just
now developing the super-computers and the mathematical tools needed
for problems like these. Even planetary orbits, it turns out, are much
less stable and predictable than was once assumed.
Is the economy a complex system? Put even more radically, is the
economy "computable"? That is, is it hopeless even to try to model it?
The center of thinking about such issues is a small think tank in the
foothills of the Rockies--the Santa Fe Institute, devoted to exploring
the new understanding of complexity. Since the mid-1980s it has
facilitated a remarkable dialogue between scholars such as the Nobel
Prize-winning scientists Murray Gell-Man and Philip Anderson and the
economist Kenneth Arrow, a Nobel laureate and perhaps the country's
finest mathematical economist. W. Brian Arthur, a professor of
economics at Stanford, and John Holland, of the University of
Michigan, who was trained as a computer scientist, both Santa Fe
fellows, are intensely involved in re-evaluating conventional
economics in the light of complexity theory.
Both Holland and Arthur are interested in the local microformations in
the economy, the vortices in the turbulent stream. Arthur points to
the "QWERTY" typewriter keyboard, originally designed to slow typists
down so that mechanical keys wouldn't jam. There are many more
efficient configurations, but QWERTY is now the unassailable standard,
just as the Netherlands, a northern country with a short growing
season, is the world's tulip center. Any economic system, that is, may
have a very large number of possible equilibrium points, which flies
in the face of traditional theory. Worse, raw chance may play a major
role in the final equilibrium. "Economic data," Arthur says, "give an
illusion of a stable, long-term trend line, but underneath that
apparent stability is a constant turnover of structures. Some regions
become rich, some stay poor, and often there's no obvious reason why.
We need to understand those processes, how they work in the real
world, from the ground up." (The idea of looking at smaller structures
has immediate relevance. Recent national economic reports have been
significantly influenced by recessionary conditions in a few states,
such as New York and California. Politically distributed national
stimulus programs are, at the very least, an inefficient response.)
Holland points out that the economy is an adaptive system, which
increases its unpredictability. Unlike the molecules in a gas,
economic agents learn from experience. There is indeed a kind of
Heisenberg principle of economic management. If the federal government
starts focusing on, say, the money supply as a tool for controlling
the economy, the relationship between the money supply and the rest of
the economy will surely change, vitiating the original policy
assumptions. Biological systems, Holland suggests, are better than
Newtonian mechanics as analogues for an economy. "The amount of
biomass and its complexity seem to have been increasing at a steady,
slow rate, for an extremely long period of time, although there is
enormous variation in the successful life forms in any particular
period. Economies may work that way. But there may also be some stable
solutions; fish, porpoises, and ichthyosaurs at different times
developed the same solution--hydrodynamic bodies." Arthur cautions,
however, that there are nine or ten solutions to the problem of
evolving an eye--pinholes, lens arrays, and the like--and that
decidedly unhydrodynamic mollusks and crabs have been very successful
colonizers of the seas.
The notion that economies are complex systems--more biological than
Newtonian--has powerful intuitive appeal. But it will be a long time
before complexity theory will be of much help to policy makers. One
frustrating problem is a lack of data. Physicists are used to working
with thousands, even tens of thousands, of observations.
Industrialized countries have been collecting reasonably consistent
economic statistics for only about fifty years; their quality is often
poor, and their content changes subtly over the years.
Financial-market data are somewhat better, and there is some
tantalizing but inconclusive evidence that market behavior may mirror
that of complex natural systems. Drop grains of sand, one after
another, on the same spot; they will form a pile with a regular shape.
Every so often a single grain will start an avalanche; most of the
avalanches will be small, but once in a while, and quite
unpredictably, one will be catastrophically large, wiping out whole
sections of the pile. The market movements of most interest to Wall
Street may be just avalanches in a sand pile. For the moment, however,
the value of complexity theory in economics and finance is primarily
as a cautionary metaphor, a pinprick to the pretensions of pundits, a
warning that, at least occasionally, well-intended policies could, as
the physicist David Ruelle put it, lead to "wild...fluctuations" with
"possibly quite disastrous effects."
Economic Discourses
There is no escaping economic policy. The federal government is too
large a presence in the American living room to be ignored, too
insistent a claimant when the pie is divided. A President who feigned
not having an economic policy would be engaging in as empty, and as
damaging, a pretense as the most enthusiastic economic micromanager.
The element of unpredictability in economic systems counsels caution,
not nihilism, humility rather than despair.
The problem is one of domains of discourse. At least since John
Kennedy's 1960 campaign to get "America moving again," Presidents have
been obliged to adopt the pose of day-to-day managers. Day-to-day
responsibilities imply day-to-day results; the press demands them, and
the voters are trained to expect them. But let's face it, all the
factory whistle-stops in a campaign notwithstanding, Presidents can't
do much to create new jobs for machinists in Topeka. Rather than admit
that, Presidents and press exchange cant, and voters sink into
cynicism.
Discourse needs to shift toward "stewardship" and away from
"management." We are a grown-up nation, with an educated,
sophisticated press corps. It should be possible, although it will
certainly not be easy, to set reasonable goals for political
stewardship of the economy, and develop some reasonable scorecard on
the important issues. Guidelines for sound stewardship might include,
for instance, a list like the following.
Skepticism about one's own cleverness is usually a good policy
starting point. In America, at least, markets mostly work, after their
fashion. That is, although they almost never produce optimum results,
and often take an uncomfortably long time to work, market outcomes are
usually more nuanced, more subtly adapted to underlying complexities,
than a priori designs. When Presidents Carter and Reagan decontrolled
oil prices at the outset of the 1980s, supply, demand, and prices all
came into a fair degree of balance with surprising speed after almost
a decade of administrative floundering. Therefore a good initial bias
is perpetually raised eyebrows toward complicated nonmarket solutions.
Pandering produces bad policy. There is an emerging consensus, even
among quite conservative economists, that only the federal government
can solve the health-care conundrum; indeed, it may be the
Administration's single most important economic issue, affecting
business and consumers alike. Solving the problem will be enormously
difficult, requiring some measure of pain all around. The temptation
to opt for politically expedient solutions with severely damaging
long-term consequences may be overwhelming. The democratic principle
presumes that the public will listen to arguments, consistently and
persistently delivered, in favor of doing the right thing. Perhaps it
is just a long time since an Administration has tried.
All important policies are long-term. The quandary facing elected
officials is that anything important takes more than four years. Even
successful health-care reform would not pay visible dividends sooner
than the end of the decade. The benefits from careful deficit
reduction will never be quantified. Even an Administration resolved to
do the right thing over the long term, as the Clinton Administration
seems to be, will be cruelly torn between its own decent instincts and
the clamor of political advisers for short-term results.
And finally, Presidents should trust their instincts over models.
Arguments against deficit spending are almost always cast in
instrumentalist terms--its effects on interest rates, inflation, and
investment. The truth is that none of these effects can be
consistently demonstrated. Deficits, for example, have been rising
steadily for ten years, and interest rates and inflation have been
falling just as steadily: ten-year and thirty-year bonds have recently
been at two-decade lows. A recent Goldman Sachs study found no
relation between deficits and interest rates in most industrial
countries, and only a weak, and fading, relation in England and
America. There is no question that large deficits have economic
consequences; it's just hard to prove what they are. It's an example
of the complexity problem. The background noise--the effects of
recessions, technology cycles, global capital flows, savings rates,
monetary policy, commodity shortages, political
disruptions--overwhelms our ability to trace the consequences of
change in a single variable.
The clashes of economists on the meaning of deficits, unfortunately,
obscure the truly important, if "unscientific," reason why they should
be eliminated. Deficits are moral hazards. They are fundamentally
antidemocratic; they allow government to increase spending without the
implicit referendum of a tax increase. It has long been a settled
principle of Western civil government that state borrowing leads to
profligacy and irresponsibility. If revenues cannot constrain
spending, government itself will be unrestrained. We need to eliminate
deficit spending not because someone's computer says it will create
more investment in 1996, or whenever, but to restore the integrity of
our political system.
To President Clinton's great credit, his first economic speeches,
stripped of the patina of economistic jargon, really do seem to have
been appeals to citizens to do the right thing--to endure some pain in
order to bring the appetites of government back into line with its
resources, to forgo some personal benefits for a greater good. And
judging from the first polls, people have reacted very positively,
just as one might hope. But by so baldly appealing to principle,
Clinton has assumed a heavy burden of faith keeping. If taxes go up
and the deficit does not go down, it will be a breach of trust not
likely to be forgiven or forgotten, and the backwash of voter cynicism
could poison the political system for years. Unfortunately, as the
specifics of the Clinton program become clearer, the danger of
precisely such a result seems very real.
The public and its elected politicians need to reinforce each others'
best instincts, not their worst ones. Presidents will perform up to
the standard the public sets for them. Dropping our insistence that
our Presidents spout cant and pretend to be daily miracle workers,
shifting the focus to the long term, and helping to search out the
right principles of action are the least we owe our Presidents, and
ourselves.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles R. Morris is the author of several books, including, with
Charles H. Ferguson, Computer Wars: How the West Can Win in a Post-IBM
World (1993).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kelvin Mok
On 22 Jun 1998 10:18:07 -0700, riv...@accessone.com (Michael Rivero)
wrote:
> >BTW where do these lame duck (one wing types) organizations come
> >from? What does VRWC stand for?
> >
>
> (recent hire)
>
> VRWC stands for "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, a term invented by Hillary
>Clinton to explain away the fact that a large number of people don't like
>Bill Clinton. According to Hillary, it's not a simple grass-roots rejection
>of the man, it's all a PLOT! Hillary is getting paranoid these days.
Hey Karl, Mike. If you guys will acept an applicant from the Great
White North I'm it. How can anyone resist a road show like that.
I'll even work for Bill's re-election to a third term if there's such
a thing. Just think how much poorer the world's political landscape
will be if dour Gore takes over. On the other hand if Newt does get
the push we'll get one whole new ball game.
I caught Karl's original post on "talk.politics.china". Now you guys
are using the wrong tactics to attack China's political scene - human
rights, democracy, freedom - the usual Carter era feel-good stuff and
you know what happend to Carter. What we really need is Clintonesque
Chinese leaders. The US and China will then have leaders who
understand each other perfectly and the rest of us will have a really
good time. Let the politicians think they are doing something and
leave the rest of us to do the real work. Peace and prospertiy in the
universe. Work on it.
>
> The fact is the economy is doing well only for the 20% richest Americans;
>for everyone else, real wages and living standards are in decline. A greater
>percentage of Americans live below the poverty line today than when Bill
>Clinton took office.
>
> No economy 6 trillion in debt (and sinking further every day) has any
>business claiming it's doing well.
>
> In fact, the only part of the economy that's reeally doing well are
>the drug runners. Cocaine usage has doubled by our children in the
>last 6 years. No fortune 500 company can claim such growth.
>
> Strategic INvrestment hasd uncovered signs of covert manipulation of the
>stock market (using the taxes of the poor to make the rich people's
>stocks worth more).
>
> And last week, John Crudele pointed out that the unemployment figures
>are being adjusted up and down in blocks of an even 250,000, which any
>auditor will tell you is the sure sign that the books are being "fudged".
>
> I can tell you this, around here the only work available for most folks is
>minimum wage. All the high paying high tech and manufacturing jobs have
>left for other nations via NAFTA and GATT. The word on the streets is
>that it's a good thing there are lots of jobs, because it takes three of
>them to make ends meet.
>
> Government protected stock profits, and cheap labor. This doesn't
>sound like a good economy for anyone but the rich.
All you have said above is true. But from the perspective of every
other country that is buffetted by the strong US$, your overwhelming
multi-national corporate juggernauts and real US GNP growth we wish
we have your problems rather than what we have.
On the broad picture its easier to make do social engineering and
economic policy adjustments if you have the money. Many countries,
especially those with over generous public assistance-labor policies,
will have to make wrenching adjustments to get back in line with real
costs. Twice in our century, economic imbalances led to world wars.
We hope that the lesson has been learned.
What we see in the US where CEOs, who are nominally answerable to
shareholders, making obscene money while slashing employment of
those least able to find alternative employment, carry out their slash
and burn philosophy to the rest of the world. And when straight
business competition is not enough these same people seek to subvert
the political and cultural institutions of other countries to suit
their ends, the "Why can't they be more like Americans and let us make
a honest buck?" attitude. We live in a global economy in more ways
than one and extreme imbalances will demand equilibrium be restored
somehow whether within the US or internationally. The task is for
those in power to reconise that there is an imbalance then seek ways
to mitigate it.
>
> That's why so many Democrats have quit the party.
>
>
>--
>Mike & Claire - The Rancho Runnamukka http://www.accessone.com/~rivero/
>http://www.accessone.com/~rivero/POLITICS/FOSTER_COVERUP/foster.html
>Awarded a Lycos "Top 5%" of the web!
Kelvin Mok
Karl Auerbach
In article <6mmd7e$6...@shell1.aimnet.com>, al...@aimnet.com (Alan Furman)
wrote:
> Back in the days of scientific ignorance, people used to believe
> that one man, the high priest, determined the harvest.
>
> Whereas in our present times of economic ignorance...
>
> In article <kauerbach-ya024080...@news.relia.net>,
> Karl Auerbach <kaue...@relia.net> wrote:
>
> >[...]
> >Understood. The ability of the American people to actually believe one man
> >can have that much influence on the economy never ceases to amaze me. It's
> >easy, but it's wrong.
"I got my Mojo working...."
8^)
Karl
Karl Auerbach
In article <358f72d7....@news.edm.shaw.wave.ca>,
kl...@NOSPAM.shaw.wave.ca wrote:
> On 22 Jun 1998 10:18:07 -0700, riv...@accessone.com (Michael Rivero)
> wrote:
>
> > >BTW where do these lame duck (one wing types) organizations come
> > >from? What does VRWC stand for?
> > >
> >
> > (recent hire)
>
> >
> > VRWC stands for "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, a term invented by Hillary
> >Clinton to explain away the fact that a large number of people don't like
> >Bill Clinton. According to Hillary, it's not a simple grass-roots rejection
> >of the man, it's all a PLOT! Hillary is getting paranoid these days.
>
> Hey Karl, Mike. If you guys will acept an applicant from the Great
> White North I'm it. How can anyone resist a road show like that.
> I'll even work for Bill's re-election to a third term if there's such
> a thing. Just think how much poorer the world's political landscape
> will be if dour Gore takes over. On the other hand if Newt does get
> the push we'll get one whole new ball game.
Well, Bill can't run again this time, unless we completely throw away the
Cponstitution and just "elect" (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more) the
good-old-boy-who-has-eliminated-the-deficits-all-by-himself-for-the-kids to
a lifetime term. Maybe an executive order, or something like that.
No, were stuck with Al. But don't think just becasue he's wooden he can't
entertain! Just look what the man can do in a Bhuddist temple!
>
> I caught Karl's original post on "talk.politics.china". Now you guys
> are using the wrong tactics to attack China's political scene - human
> rights, democracy, freedom - the usual Carter era feel-good stuff and
> you know what happend to Carter.
Oh, but it's the irony of hitting Bill on these feel-good points that is so
rewarding! For the kids, Bill! As long as they were never near
Tienanmin....