DDP Newsletter November 2019, Vol. XXXV, No. 6
China: Military and Economic Dominance
Celebrating the 70th anniversary of Communist Party rule, advanced Chinese weaponry paraded through Tiananmen Square in October 2019. The message to the world is that Beijing has no intention of ceding military leadership to America or any other country.
High-tech innovations, many stolen from the U.S., include stealth combat aerial drones, unmanned underwater vehicles, hypersonic missiles, and the road-mobile DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), with a 7,500-mile range. The Pentagon has identified hypersonic missiles and systems to defend against them as among its highest priorities, writes Larry Bell. Lockheed Martin expects to test flight its first prototype missiles in 2020. China has reportedly completed seven successful tests (tinyurl.com/rjg5a9o). These “unstoppable” missiles are “igniting a new global arms race,” writes R. Jeffrey Smith (New York Times 6/23/19, https://tinyurl.com/y2nberq2).
The Chinese seek to dominate by other means as well. Under the Obama Administration, China’s state-owned Cosco Shipping Holdings signed a 40-year lease with the City of Long Beach in 2012 for control of America’s second largest and most automated container-handling operation. In 2017, the Trump Administration put a national security hold on Cosco’s acquisition of a former U.S. Navy port facility. As of May 2019, the Communists are no longer in control of the Port of Long Beach (https://tinyurl.com/tpqap9z). Still, China operates six of the world’s ten busiest container ports, and the Chinese government has also funded the construction and operations of 43 ports in 35 countries under its “One Belt and One Road” (OBOR) strategy (https://tinyurl.com/yy7akrb5).
The State of California under Governor Jerry Brown and now Gov. Gavin Newsom is partnering with China on “climate change” research, such as battery storage, despite concerns about intellectual property theft (https://tinyurl.com/r82mzlc).
Capitalism “Reset”
The Financial Times of London has launched a new project with the tagline “Capitalism: Time for a Reset” and a New Agenda (https://tinyurl.com/y2klbwfx). While acknowledging that “liberal capitalism has delivered peace, prosperity and technological progress for the past 50 years, dramatically reducing poverty and raising living standards throughout the world,” that is not enough. We need “profit with a purpose.” David Dodwell points out salient problems in the South China Morning Post: a banking industry no longer focused on supporting the needs of productive companies and savers but on selling exotic financial products to other financial services entities; a passion for mergers and acquisitions that more often destroy capital than create it; “phantom investments” of around $15 trillion or 40% of foreign direct investment, for “tax management” (tinyurl.com/yxon86v9).
The marketing mantra is “ESG”—environmental, social, and governance goals, many related to the UN “climate crisis” or “sustainable development” goals. “You can’t simply go into business to provide value to customers, employees, and shareholders anymore,” writes Simon Black. “Now there has to be some woke purpose that involves diversity, the environment, and whatever else happens to be on the Bolshevik progressive agenda.” He observes that many countries and several U.S. states have passed legislation setting government-determined gender and racial criteria for appointing directors (https://tinyurl.com/tbj66mh).
“Capitalist markets will not be capable of facilitating the required changes,” writes Nafeez Ahmed—to an era of low energy return on investment (EROI) as carbon-based fuels are phased out, and reduced consumption [lowered standards of living]. “Governments will need to step up.” For those who think we can have mass abundance from use of artificial intelligence and the “internet of things,” Ahmed points out that the colossal infrastructure that would be needed would require as much as one-fifth of global electricity by 2025 (https://tinyurl.com/yxqdyg7a).
To deal with a “tragedy of the commons” requires collective action that likely involves “mutual coercion.” As Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651, “a sovereign is needed to tie people ‘by fear of punishment to the performance of their covenants’” (Science 12/4/18). Details of the punishment have yet to be proposed.
FT states that “the Asian century is set to begin” (https://tinyurl.com/wz574qz).
“China and India Will Watch the West Destroy Itself,” writes Todd Royal in Eurasia Review. “Without energy you have nothing,” he explains. “All great nations, including China and India, view energy as a domain of power…. Energy and electricity are at the forefront, of which ideological viewpoint, will win the 21st century.” While China and India are using coal in record amounts and rapidly developing other energy resources, “global warming, abortion, gay marriage, and renewables versus fossil fuels have overtaken realism in all facets of [Western] government, military strategy, economics and countering the global threats from China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea” (tinyurl.com/vl46t6d).
Demography
Human population growth is, many say, one of the most important factors causing environmental degradation, and the “elephant in the room” in the context of sustainable development goal (SDGs). Being politically sensitive, it is not explicitly listed in the SDGs, but progress toward reaching several of the goals could “result in accelerated, strictly voluntary fertility declines that could result in a global peak population around midcentury” in “a politically unproblematic and widely accepted way.” These include universal secondary education of both boys and girls and “assuring reproductive rights” and “reproductive services” (PNAS 12/13/16, https://tinyurl.com/stnstgl).
Population is already declining in much of the world. Japan lost a net 500,000 people in 2019. Outside of Albania, no European nation is replacing its population. Russia’s population may fall from 145 million now to 121 million by 2015 (tinyurl.com/wjjyjyj). The under-18 population in the U.S. has decreased by 1 million since 2010 (tinyurl.com/uww4w48). Pensions and the welfare state are threatened. Add abortion to low fertility—more than 1.2 billion babies have been aborted globally since 1980—and a geopolitical disaster looms. China has averaged 13 million abortions/year between 1978 and the recent end to its one-child policy. It has 30 million excess males, and lacks enough young workers to sustain its economic expansion (tinyurl.com/qmn9tp8).
Extinction of many peoples by the century’s end would have nothing to do with CO2.
38th ANNUAL MEETUNG AUG 14-16 IN LAS VEGAS
Mark your calendars now—watch www.ddponline.org for details. The venue will again be at the South Point Hotel and Casino.