Yeah, Ron Unz says he agrees with most of what ambassador Freeman wrote, but he was wildly off on some of it. The current supply chain interconnectedness between China and the USA is not the result of a "comparative advantage" fantasy from economics textbooks but rather the outcome of deliberate political and economic centralization in the USA. This centralization enabled the rise of transnational corporations and mega-finance firms that consolidated markets and designed production and distribution networks based on their own needs, creating a planetary division of labor. These firms, empowered by the USA's de-democratized political economy, planned global supply chains to maximize profits, often at the expense of national and regional economic self-sufficiency and resilience, and to the detriment of scientific and engineering research ecosystem, local economic activity, economic competition, and arts and culture all across America, and likely across the world as well since it greatly inhibited the development of the so-called "Global South"..
In direct contrast to the "Neoliberal Era" we live now, the USA’s old republic was protectionist without being mercantilist or corporatist. It generated economic development through political and economic decentralization, allowing regional diversity and democratic governance structures to shape policies. Protectionism in this system aimed to use deliberate redundancy and diffusion of economic activity to safeguard local economies, encourage domestic production, create and maintain a great number of more diversified scientific and engineering ecosystems, and prevent monopolistic concentrations of power. The decentralized nature of governance made it so that economic decisions were the product local priorities and interests, resulting in a competitive and diversified economy.
Undoing the current global system and replacing it with cooperative protectionism, where nations retain the ability to protect key industries while coordinating to avoid exploitative trade practices, can restore economic and scientific redundancy. This redundancy, through localized innovation and diverse production systems, ensures resilience against supply chain disruptions and enables widespread economic opportunity. By re-embedding economies within democratic structures and prioritizing regional development, such a system could balance global trade integration with the autonomy necessary for economic growth, scientific progress and more widespread opportunity.
Yeah, Ron Unz says he agrees with most of what ambassador Freeman wrote, but he was wildly off on some of it. The current supply chain interconnectedness between China and the USA is not the result of a "comparative advantage" fantasy from economics textbooks but rather the outcome of deliberate political and economic centralization in the USA. This centralization enabled the rise of transnational corporations and mega-finance firms that consolidated markets and designed production and distribution networks based on their own needs, creating a planetary division of labor. These firms, empowered by the USA's de-democratized political economy, planned global supply chains to maximize profits, often at the expense of national and regional economic self-sufficiency and resilience, and to the detriment of scientific and engineering research ecosystem, local economic activity, economic competition, and arts and culture all across America, and likely across the world as well since it greatly inhibited the development of the so-called "Global South"..
In direct contrast to the "Neoliberal Era" we live now, the USA’s old republic was protectionist without being mercantilist or corporatist. It generated economic development through political and economic decentralization, allowing regional diversity and democratic governance structures to shape policies. Protectionism in this system aimed to use deliberate redundancy and diffusion of economic activity to safeguard local economies, encourage domestic production, create and maintain a great number of more diversified scientific and engineering ecosystems, and prevent monopolistic concentrations of power. The decentralized nature of governance made it so that economic decisions were the product local priorities and interests, resulting in a competitive and diversified economy.
Undoing the current global system and replacing it with cooperative protectionism, where nations retain the ability to protect key industries while coordinating to avoid exploitative trade practices, can restore economic and scientific redundancy. This redundancy, through localized innovation and diverse production systems, ensures resilience against supply chain disruptions and enables widespread economic opportunity. By re-embedding economies within democratic structures and prioritizing regional development, such a system could balance global trade integration with the autonomy necessary for economic growth, scientific progress and more widespread opportunity.
Thank you very much, again---but you give us, readers, SO MUCH homework to do. I've read almost all, but not all, of Ron Unz's article at the link you provided. He covers so much ground detail of continuing timely importance, which I can grasp but have no level of judgment to weigh in with a comment. However, one statement from Freeman's 2019 Stanford speech holds my attention, because U.S.A. as a living country, is still tied in knots about how to get along with others....Freeman, quoted by Unz: "The US-China contention is far broader than that of the Cold War, in part because China, unlike the determinedly autarkic USSR, is part of the same global society as the United States. The battlefields include global governance, geoeconomics, trade, investment, finance, currency usage, supply chain management, technology standards and systems, and scientific collaboration, in addition to the geopolitical and military domains...."
"Unz somehow fails to mention that Robert Kadlec really was highly involved in the Trump 1.0 biowarfare planning."
Actually, Unz talks a lot about Kadlec in his articles. You can see it if you drill down to his other articles on the subject, which he links to. He also, in other articles, talks about Fauci being the head of biowarfare and the Covid response.
In Dr. Scott Atlas Dec. 2021 book, "A Plague Upon our House," he states that Dr. Birx was in charge of every Covid related detail in the White House. All were subordinate to her including Fauci. Jared chaired 3x wkly "Covid Huddle" meetings to enforce her narrative. Atlas said no one knew who hired Birx. Per Brownstone, Who hired Birx? Matt Pottinger, #2 at Trump NSA. ""It does seem odd that Matt would be in charge of appointing a pandemic response coordinator, since public health and epidemiology were not at all part of his experience."...[Birx] "I’ve known him through his wife. I really knew his wife. I worked with her at the CDC. (lines 1507-1509)."..."Matt’s wife, Yen Pottinger, is a friend of yours?"....[Birx] "A former colleague at the CDC and a trusted friend and neighbor (p. 32)."..."So Matt Pottinger was not really a friend, it was his wife you were friends with?"...[Birx] "I had known Matt through her eyes for the last three or four years. (lines 1526-1529).""...8/4/2022, "How Did Deborah Birx Get the Job?"...https://brownstone.org/articles/how-did-deborah-birx-get-the-job/
Thank you for the national security linkage reminder. That connection of overseers of U.S. covid pandemic emergency leadership was reported on by alternative media personages early on, 2020, 2021....DoD, NSA, and Defense Intelligence persons were reported to be keeping open channels of communication before the Wuhan illnesses were made publicly known. Robert Malone wrote and spoke of his phone conversations with a former working colleague in (?) Darpa, DIA, as soon as the mystery virus contagion became news.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas this week revived an emergency application to block the Washington Medical Commission from investigating licensed physicians in the state over their criticism of COVID-19 policies.
"The supply chains now tying the two economies together were forged by market-regulated comparative advantage."
Nice sleight-of-hand there. The first question is "which market?" Not the American labor market.
The second question is "how do you make an assertion like that when the capital migration providing the path for industrial infrastructure export to China was subsidized?"
Then comes the obvious, that the supply chains tying the two economies together were "forged by market-regulated comparative advantage," until they weren't.
Comparative advantage isn't static, particularly where manufacturing is concerned. Resource extraction requires transportation infrastructure, which usually has a lasting benefit. Manufacturing, on the other hand, requires capital investment in plant infrastructure, and destroys the infrastructure that it replaces.
China's totalitarian system operates as state-sponsored mercantilism, which can be very difficult to differentiate from national socialism. The two categories overlap to the point where the line gets so blurry that it becomes well-nigh invisible.
This matters from an efficiency standpoint where comparative advantage comes into play. Regardless of which lens one views it through; national sovereignty, macroeconomic or cultural, comparative advantage is asymmetrical opportunism and the "advantage" does not accrue to the entire entity. This is to say that self-interests are rarely aligned.
One of the questions concerning Covid is why there were only a few places (Qom and Tehran in Iran, northern Italy, New York City and Detroit, for example) with high mortality rates while there was barely a blip elsewhere. This suggests that the death rate in those places may not have been caused by a virus, that something else... a toxin, perhaps, one that caused symptoms similar to a viral outbreak... was released. No, I'm not suggesting that there was no virus, just that one would find the same or similar mortality rates in most locations if those deaths were caused by a virus.
A plausible answer to the variable rate of intensity of the covid virus is put forth by a U. of Pittsburgh research science professor, swiftly suspended from his teaching job by UP. I don't remember his name, but he was live-streaming with fellow researchers on covid discussion podcasts, and showed his analysis of virus potency. Namely, that any virus is strongest at its place of origination, and its early life. Any virus will lose potency the longer it is alive. The place of origin of a virus harbors zillions of living cells of that single virus---and any distance to which those cells travel, by mobile action alone, causes their potency to dissipate. The UP research professor demonstrates the impossibility of covid virus travelling from Wuhan to Qoms, Tehran, Northern Italy, etc. and remaining virulent. He believes that the full intensity covid virus was intentionally released into specific geographic locales, repeatedly. Any person within proximity to the most potent stage of covid viral life would be impacted by the virus. Even then, catching the virus did not mean certain death, because the individual constitution of each person's health would be a determining factor (among others).
Thanks Mark. We were all very much aware of the "cataclysmic" event in northern Italy. Which I personally believe was staged for great effect before the Covid show opened on Broadway. But I forgot all about the mysterious devastation in Iran.
Kind of like exploding pagers, only much smaller.
Thanks again, Mark. I hadn't made it all the way through the Unz article because I was despairing of Freeman's economic analyses based on his cheerful acceptance of the great explanatory power of "comparative advantage" for China's rise.
I suspect the guilty party would have to be, as usual, The One and Only, Universal, Indispensable, Indivisible with Chaos, Death, Destruction, Misery, and above all $$$ for all Empire*.
Yeah, Ron Unz says he agrees with most of what ambassador Freeman wrote, but he was wildly off on some of it. The current supply chain interconnectedness between China and the USA is not the result of a "comparative advantage" fantasy from economics textbooks but rather the outcome of deliberate political and economic centralization in the USA. This centralization enabled the rise of transnational corporations and mega-finance firms that consolidated markets and designed production and distribution networks based on their own needs, creating a planetary division of labor. These firms, empowered by the USA's de-democratized political economy, planned global supply chains to maximize profits, often at the expense of national and regional economic self-sufficiency and resilience, and to the detriment of scientific and engineering research ecosystem, local economic activity, economic competition, and arts and culture all across America, and likely across the world as well since it greatly inhibited the development of the so-called "Global South"..
In direct contrast to the "Neoliberal Era" we live now, the USA’s old republic was protectionist without being mercantilist or corporatist. It generated economic development through political and economic decentralization, allowing regional diversity and democratic governance structures to shape policies. Protectionism in this system aimed to use deliberate redundancy and diffusion of economic activity to safeguard local economies, encourage domestic production, create and maintain a great number of more diversified scientific and engineering ecosystems, and prevent monopolistic concentrations of power. The decentralized nature of governance made it so that economic decisions were the product local priorities and interests, resulting in a competitive and diversified economy.
Undoing the current global system and replacing it with cooperative protectionism, where nations retain the ability to protect key industries while coordinating to avoid exploitative trade practices, can restore economic and scientific redundancy. This redundancy, through localized innovation and diverse production systems, ensures resilience against supply chain disruptions and enables widespread economic opportunity. By re-embedding economies within democratic structures and prioritizing regional development, such a system could balance global trade integration with the autonomy necessary for economic growth, scientific progress and more widespread opportunity.
Yeah, Ron Unz says he agrees with most of what ambassador Freeman wrote, but he was wildly off on some of it. The current supply chain interconnectedness between China and the USA is not the result of a "comparative advantage" fantasy from economics textbooks but rather the outcome of deliberate political and economic centralization in the USA. This centralization enabled the rise of transnational corporations and mega-finance firms that consolidated markets and designed production and distribution networks based on their own needs, creating a planetary division of labor. These firms, empowered by the USA's de-democratized political economy, planned global supply chains to maximize profits, often at the expense of national and regional economic self-sufficiency and resilience, and to the detriment of scientific and engineering research ecosystem, local economic activity, economic competition, and arts and culture all across America, and likely across the world as well since it greatly inhibited the development of the so-called "Global South"..
In direct contrast to the "Neoliberal Era" we live now, the USA’s old republic was protectionist without being mercantilist or corporatist. It generated economic development through political and economic decentralization, allowing regional diversity and democratic governance structures to shape policies. Protectionism in this system aimed to use deliberate redundancy and diffusion of economic activity to safeguard local economies, encourage domestic production, create and maintain a great number of more diversified scientific and engineering ecosystems, and prevent monopolistic concentrations of power. The decentralized nature of governance made it so that economic decisions were the product local priorities and interests, resulting in a competitive and diversified economy.
Undoing the current global system and replacing it with cooperative protectionism, where nations retain the ability to protect key industries while coordinating to avoid exploitative trade practices, can restore economic and scientific redundancy. This redundancy, through localized innovation and diverse production systems, ensures resilience against supply chain disruptions and enables widespread economic opportunity. By re-embedding economies within democratic structures and prioritizing regional development, such a system could balance global trade integration with the autonomy necessary for economic growth, scientific progress and more widespread opportunity.
Yes!
Thank you very much, again---but you give us, readers, SO MUCH homework to do. I've read almost all, but not all, of Ron Unz's article at the link you provided. He covers so much ground detail of continuing timely importance, which I can grasp but have no level of judgment to weigh in with a comment. However, one statement from Freeman's 2019 Stanford speech holds my attention, because U.S.A. as a living country, is still tied in knots about how to get along with others....Freeman, quoted by Unz: "The US-China contention is far broader than that of the Cold War, in part because China, unlike the determinedly autarkic USSR, is part of the same global society as the United States. The battlefields include global governance, geoeconomics, trade, investment, finance, currency usage, supply chain management, technology standards and systems, and scientific collaboration, in addition to the geopolitical and military domains...."
"Unz somehow fails to mention that Robert Kadlec really was highly involved in the Trump 1.0 biowarfare planning."
Actually, Unz talks a lot about Kadlec in his articles. You can see it if you drill down to his other articles on the subject, which he links to. He also, in other articles, talks about Fauci being the head of biowarfare and the Covid response.
Thanks! I was puzzled, but I get it. The problem is finding the time, since his articles are always very long.
In Dr. Scott Atlas Dec. 2021 book, "A Plague Upon our House," he states that Dr. Birx was in charge of every Covid related detail in the White House. All were subordinate to her including Fauci. Jared chaired 3x wkly "Covid Huddle" meetings to enforce her narrative. Atlas said no one knew who hired Birx. Per Brownstone, Who hired Birx? Matt Pottinger, #2 at Trump NSA. ""It does seem odd that Matt would be in charge of appointing a pandemic response coordinator, since public health and epidemiology were not at all part of his experience."...[Birx] "I’ve known him through his wife. I really knew his wife. I worked with her at the CDC. (lines 1507-1509)."..."Matt’s wife, Yen Pottinger, is a friend of yours?"....[Birx] "A former colleague at the CDC and a trusted friend and neighbor (p. 32)."..."So Matt Pottinger was not really a friend, it was his wife you were friends with?"...[Birx] "I had known Matt through her eyes for the last three or four years. (lines 1526-1529).""...8/4/2022, "How Did Deborah Birx Get the Job?"...https://brownstone.org/articles/how-did-deborah-birx-get-the-job/
Thank you for the national security linkage reminder. That connection of overseers of U.S. covid pandemic emergency leadership was reported on by alternative media personages early on, 2020, 2021....DoD, NSA, and Defense Intelligence persons were reported to be keeping open channels of communication before the Wuhan illnesses were made publicly known. Robert Malone wrote and spoke of his phone conversations with a former working colleague in (?) Darpa, DIA, as soon as the mystery virus contagion became news.
“Trump officials had regarded China as America’s most formidable geopolitical adversary.”
Despite this they relied on Chinese genetic sequencing, while Russia used Astrazenica as a supplier for its own vaccine.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas this week revived an emergency application to block the Washington Medical Commission from investigating licensed physicians in the state over their criticism of COVID-19 policies.
"The supply chains now tying the two economies together were forged by market-regulated comparative advantage."
Nice sleight-of-hand there. The first question is "which market?" Not the American labor market.
The second question is "how do you make an assertion like that when the capital migration providing the path for industrial infrastructure export to China was subsidized?"
Then comes the obvious, that the supply chains tying the two economies together were "forged by market-regulated comparative advantage," until they weren't.
Comparative advantage isn't static, particularly where manufacturing is concerned. Resource extraction requires transportation infrastructure, which usually has a lasting benefit. Manufacturing, on the other hand, requires capital investment in plant infrastructure, and destroys the infrastructure that it replaces.
China's totalitarian system operates as state-sponsored mercantilism, which can be very difficult to differentiate from national socialism. The two categories overlap to the point where the line gets so blurry that it becomes well-nigh invisible.
This matters from an efficiency standpoint where comparative advantage comes into play. Regardless of which lens one views it through; national sovereignty, macroeconomic or cultural, comparative advantage is asymmetrical opportunism and the "advantage" does not accrue to the entire entity. This is to say that self-interests are rarely aligned.
Follow the money; always follow the money.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/issues-in-chinas-wto-accession/
Bingo!
https://x.com/goddeketal/status/1866543404286611919
One of the questions concerning Covid is why there were only a few places (Qom and Tehran in Iran, northern Italy, New York City and Detroit, for example) with high mortality rates while there was barely a blip elsewhere. This suggests that the death rate in those places may not have been caused by a virus, that something else... a toxin, perhaps, one that caused symptoms similar to a viral outbreak... was released. No, I'm not suggesting that there was no virus, just that one would find the same or similar mortality rates in most locations if those deaths were caused by a virus.
A plausible answer to the variable rate of intensity of the covid virus is put forth by a U. of Pittsburgh research science professor, swiftly suspended from his teaching job by UP. I don't remember his name, but he was live-streaming with fellow researchers on covid discussion podcasts, and showed his analysis of virus potency. Namely, that any virus is strongest at its place of origination, and its early life. Any virus will lose potency the longer it is alive. The place of origin of a virus harbors zillions of living cells of that single virus---and any distance to which those cells travel, by mobile action alone, causes their potency to dissipate. The UP research professor demonstrates the impossibility of covid virus travelling from Wuhan to Qoms, Tehran, Northern Italy, etc. and remaining virulent. He believes that the full intensity covid virus was intentionally released into specific geographic locales, repeatedly. Any person within proximity to the most potent stage of covid viral life would be impacted by the virus. Even then, catching the virus did not mean certain death, because the individual constitution of each person's health would be a determining factor (among others).
His name is J. Jay Couey, and that is one of his theories, which seems plausible to me. He also suggested toxins as a possibility, as well as clones.
Thank you, V. Dominique! That's his name. I hope that other research scientists are exploring his theory.
Thanks Mark. We were all very much aware of the "cataclysmic" event in northern Italy. Which I personally believe was staged for great effect before the Covid show opened on Broadway. But I forgot all about the mysterious devastation in Iran.
Kind of like exploding pagers, only much smaller.
Thanks again, Mark. I hadn't made it all the way through the Unz article because I was despairing of Freeman's economic analyses based on his cheerful acceptance of the great explanatory power of "comparative advantage" for China's rise.
I really like your way with words! Thanks for speaking it.
In fact, within the past week I saw an article arguing for exactly the "staging" in Northern Italy that you mention.
I suspect the guilty party would have to be, as usual, The One and Only, Universal, Indispensable, Indivisible with Chaos, Death, Destruction, Misery, and above all $$$ for all Empire*.
*CDDM$$$ Empire