White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Rare Earths Problem: A U.S. Solution

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Rare earth elements – there are 17 of them – have the world’s manufacturing by the throat. They are, as John Kutsch, director of the Thorium Energy Alliance, says, “the great multipliers.” They make metals stronger, generators more efficient, cell phones smaller, television sets sharper, and laptops lighter. They are, in their way, as important to modern manufacturing as energy.

At one time, the United States was a major supplier of rare earths — with supplemental supplies coming from countries around the world, including Australia and Brazil. Today, 90 percent of the rare earths the world uses come from China.

The use of rare earths is as important in lasers and jet engines as it is in aiming cruise missiles, which means the United States, and the rest of the world, has a huge vulnerability: China controls the supply of new war-fighting material. All U.S. defense manufacturers – including giants Boeing, General Electric and Lockheed Martin — are dependent on China. Now China is demanding that U.S. companies do more of their manufacturing there: China wants to control the whole chain.

Yet, as the rare earth elements industry is quick to assert, rare earths are not rare; they are scattered generously throughout the world. So why China’s dominance?

China has three main advantages. The first is that in 1984, leader Deng Xiaoping adopted a major initiative, the so called 863 Program, to move China from being a simple supplier of raw materials and products, enhanced by cheap labor, to being an industrial powerhouse and scientific giant. Rare earths were one of the areas singled out in the program.

The second advantage is that the Chinese ignored – and, to a large extent, still do — the environmental costs of rare earths’ extraction. The environmental damage is described by those who have been to one of two major Chinese sites, which have a combined population of 17 million, as catastrophic, with mountains bathed in acid to remove the sought-after rare earths, resulting in lakes of acid.

China’s third advantage is a natural one: It has a lot of ionic clay, which contains rare earths without the associated uranium and thorium.

About the time China was ramping up its plans to dominate the world rare earths market, the United States, in conjunction with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, began to regulate so called source materials. These are materials which, at least in theory, could be fashioned into weapons. In reality, those associated with rare earths are not in sufficient quantity to interest potential proliferators.

But the regulations are there. Many in the rare earths elements industry believe that it was these regulations — particularly as affecting thorium — that crippled production around the world and essentially closed down the U.S. industry, just as demand was escalating.

There is a commercial market for uranium. While hardly any thorium is used nowadays, it was once used in some scientific instruments and mantles for lighting. Thorium is akin to uranium in atomic weight, and it is a fertile nuclear material. That means that it can be used in a nuclear reactor, but it has to be ignited by a fissile material, such as enriched uranium or plutonium.

Thorium is radioactive, but mildly so. It is an alpha emitter, which means it can be shielded with tissue paper and will not penetrate the skin. However, it has a half-life of 1.5 billion years.

The answer, according to James Kennedy, a science consultant and rare earths expert, is to develop a reactor using thorium instead of uranium. This reactor, called a molten salt reactor, is inherently safe, say its passionate advocates, and would be a better all-around nuclear future. The technology was pioneered by one of the giants of the early nuclear age, Alvin Weinberg, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but abandoned under pressure from enthusiasts for light water reactors, the kind we have today.

The Thorium Energy Alliance believes that the United States and other countries should develop a cooperative to source rare earths from the existing mining of phosphates and metals and store the thorium until it becomes a useful fuel. A bill to do this is making its way through Congress, but its chances are slim. Short of putting a value on thorium and isolating it, the chances of a rare earth elements industry reawakening in the United States, or elsewhere, is rare. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Nuclear Teetering on the Economic Precipice

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This will be a bleak Christmas for the small Vermont community of Vernon. It is losing its economic mainstay. The owner of its proud, midsize nuclear plant, which has sustained the community for 42 years, Entergy, is closing the plant. Next year the only people working at the plant will be those shuttering it, taking out its fuel, securing it and beginning the process of turning it into a kind of tomb, a burial place for the hopes of a small town.

What may be a tragedy for Vernon may also be a harbinger of a larger, multilayered tragedy for the United States.

Nuclear – Big Green – is one of the most potent tools we have in our battle to clean the air and arrest or ameliorate climate change over time. I've named it Big Green because that is what it is: Nuclear power plants produce huge quantities of absolutely carbon-free electricity.

But many nuclear plants are in danger of being closed. Next year, for the first time in decades, there will be fewer than 100 making electricity. The principal culprit: cheap natural gas.

In today’s market, nuclear is not always the lowest-cost producer. Electricity was deregulated in much of the country in the 1990s, and today electricity is sold at the lowest cost, unless it is designated as “renewable” — effectively wind and solar, whose use is often mandated by a “renewable portfolio standard,” which varies from state to state.

Nuclear falls into the crevasse, which bedevils so much planning in markets, that favors the short term over the long term.

Today’s nuclear power plants operate with extraordinary efficiency, day in day out for decades, for 60 or more years with license extensions and with outages only for refueling. They were built for a market where long-lived, fixed-cost supplies were rolled in with those of variable cost. Social utility was a factor.

For 20 years nuclear might be the cheapest electricity. Then for another 20 years, coal or some other fuel might win the price war. But that old paradigm is shattered and nuclear, in some markets, is no longer the cheapest fuel — and it may be quite few years before it is again.

Markets are great equalizers, but they're also cruel exterminators. Nuclear power plants need to run full-out all the time. They can’t be revved up for peak load in the afternoon and idled in the night. Nuclear plants make power 24/7.

Nowadays, solar makes power at given times of day and wind, by its very nature, varies in its ability to make power. Natural gas is cheap and for now abundant, and its turbines can follow electric demand. It will probably have a price edge for 20 years until supply tightens. The American Petroleum Institute won't give a calculation of future supply, saying that the supply depends on future technology and government regulation.

Natural gas burns cleaner than coal, and is favored over coal for that reason. But it still pumps greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, though just about half of the assault on the atmosphere of coal.

The fate of nuclear depends on whether the supporters of Big Green can convince politicians that it has enough social value to mitigate its temporary price disadvantage against gas.

China and India are very mindful of the environmental superiority of nuclear. China has 22 power plants operating, 26 under construction, and more about to start construction. If there is validity to the recent agreement between Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Barack Obama, it is because China is worried about its own choking pollution and a fear of climate change on its long coastline, as well as its ever-increasing need for electricity.

Five nuclear power plants, if you count Vermont Yankee, will have closed this year, and five more are under construction in Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia. After that the new plant pipeline is empty, but the number of plants in danger is growing. Even the mighty Exelon, the largest nuclear operator, is talking about closing three plants, and pessimists say as many as 15 plants could go in the next few years.

I'd note that the decisions now being made on nuclear closures are being made on economic grounds, not any of the controversies that have attended nuclear over the years. 

Current and temporary market conditions are dictating environmental and energy policy. Money is more important than climate, for now. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Vietnam Welcomes America with Open Arms

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No grunt slogging through the jungles of Vietnam could imagine that in 2014, 41 years after the end of the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese would be welcoming back Americans as investors, tourists, advisers and protectors.

Next year is a big year in Vietnam. It is the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, on April 30, 1975. It is also the 20th anniversary of the normalization of U.S. relations with Vietnam, a country where so much American and Vietnamese blood was spilled.

The Vietnam War started in the Eisenhower Administration, dragged down Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, and was ended in the Nixon Administration amid controversy that tore America apart and has informed its foreign policy ever since.

It will be remembered in the annals of war for the limits it revealed on mechanized fighting, and the challenge of asymmetrical fighting and wrong-headiness. But it also deserves mention in the annals of peace for the surprising speed in which the war has been put aside, especially in Vietnam, where the gory past has been buried and the future embraced.

Today’s Vietnam is a place where the United States is admired and emulated. And the Vietnamese want nothing so much as to be closer to Americans.

Twenty years ago when I traveled from Hanoi, south along the spine of the country, to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, I was astounded by the way the war had been willfully forgotten: people I met did not want to talk about it.

Da Nang still was set about with hardened bunkers, Hue, which had been the national capital until 1945, was a sad ruin, but people were determinedly forward-looking. They wanted to know three things: how could they get American goods, how could sell their goods in the U.S. market, and what was the United States going to do about China?

A generation later, Vietnam is more passionate in its desire to get close to the United States. The government of Vietnam is making a new push for American investment, particularly in the privatization of infrastructure, which is still government-controlled and beset by inefficiency and corruption.

Vietnam Report, a business and data service, has just released a comprehensive white paper, prepared by Corr Analytics, a New York-based risk management consultancy, that paints an agreeable picture of investment opportunities, particularly in those industries that the Vietnamese government is anxious to hive off to the private sector. Of 432 projects identified by the government, Corr has honed in on what it believes to be the 31 best-investment targets. These range from opportunities — from a few million dollars to over $7 billion — in finance, infrastructure, manufacturing and petroleum.

The backstory is that Vietnam needs more than U.S. investment. As it struggles against China in the South China Sea, over territorial claims on small island groups that are thought to contain large hydrocarbon reserves, Vietnam wants the United States to be a visible friend.

There is even talk that the United States, might establish a naval base at Cam Rahn Bay, its legendary base and deep-water port during the Vietnam War. This, the argument goes, would compensate for the loss of the naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines. Come back, Yanks.

Several analysts have told me that they believe Vietnam to be an excellent investment opportunity, but there are concerns. The government is nominally communist and there is only one party: the Communist Party. It is avowedly pro-business but faces human-rights issues, press-freedom issues, and the impartiality of the judiciary is questionable. Corruption is widespread and debilitating.

Yet Forbes magazine is looking to Vietnam as the new Asian investment haven. In the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business rankings, according to Corr Analytics, Vietnam is ahead of major investment destinations such as China, India and Brazil. Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has made it clear that his country is open for business – particularly American business.

Tourism is growing, especially at Vietnam’s superb beaches. Lauren Graham, who stars in the NBC drama “Parenthood,” has taken a bicycle trip with her father, a Washington lobbyist and fluent Vietnamese speaker.

Some who fought in Vietnam have joined the ranks of its boosters, like Tom Patterson, the famed Harvard professor, who is helping to develop a high-technology village near Nha Trang and Cam Rhan Bay, where he was once stationed.

The generational change also has made a difference. Much of the Vietnamese population was not born during the war. A new generation of Americans has been shaped by war in the Middle East not in Asia. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

How to Steal the Sea, Chinese Style

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In history, countries have sought to increase their territory by bribery, chicanery, coercion and outright force of arms. But while many have sought to dominate the seas, from the Greek city states to the mighty British Empire, none has ever, in effect, tried to take over an ocean or a sea as its own.
But that is what China is actively doing in the ocean south of the mainland: the South China Sea. Bit by bit, it is establishing hegemony over this most important sea where the littoral states — China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam — have territorial claims.
The importance of the South China Sea is hard to overestimate. Some of the most vital international sea lanes traverse it; it is one of the great fishing areas; and the ocean bed, near land, has large reserves of oil and gas. No wonder everyone wants a piece of it — and China wants all of it.
Historically China has laid claim to a majority of the sea and adheres to a map or line — known as the nine-dash map, the U-shape line or the nine-dotted line — that cedes most of the ocean area and all of the island land to it. The nine-dash map is a provocation at best and a blueprint for annexation at worst.
The mechanism for China’s filching of one of the great seas of the world is control of the three island archipelagos, the Paracel, Spratly and Pratas islands, and several other smaller outcroppings, as well as the seamounts, called the Macclesfield Bank and the Scarborough Shoal. Between them, they consist of about 250 small islands, atolls, keys, shoals, sandbars and reefs. Very few of these are habitable or have indigenous people. Some are permanently submerged, and many are only exposed at low tide.
Yet if China can claim title to them, it can use them to extend its hegemony into the area around them. First, it can claim the standard 12 miles of territorial waters around each land mass and it also can claim an economic zone of influence of 200 miles from the most dubious “island.” Ergo, China can connect the dots and grab a large chunk of the South China Sea.
China is reclaiming land – actually building a new artificial island — in the disputed Spratly Islands. The two-mile-long island will have an airfield that, China’s foreign ministry claims, will be used for air-sea operations. The other claimants, think otherwise, especially Vietnam. The United States has called for China to halt the island project.
China has been both stealthy and obvious about its strategy. It has increased its trade with the claimants; and in some cases has made generous contributions to their infrastructure development, but not in the South China Sea. In its maritime provocations, China has been careful to use its coast guard, not its navy, as it extends its grasp on the archipelagos, and inches forward to total domination of anything that looks like land in the waters off its southern coast.
The Philippines has sought international legal redress under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a treaty which the United States has not ratified, limiting its legal maneuvering, according to Barry Nolan of the Boston Forum, a policy analysis group that has studied the South China Sea crisis this year. China denies the legitimacy of international law in what is says is an internal matter.
To my mind, we are seeing is a new kind of imperialism from China, a gradual annexation of whatever it wants; quiet aggression, just short of war but relentless. This is China’s modus operandi in Southeast Asia, Africa and other places. It squeezes gently and then with greater strength, like a lethal constrictor snake.
Southeast Asian countries are arming, but China’s naval forces are growing faster. Also, it has the cash and the people to do what it wants. The U.S. “pivot to Asia” has done little to reassure China’s neighbors. Their nervousness is compounded by the ease with which Russia was able to annex Crimea and is proceeding into Eastern Ukraine unchecked. What’s to stop China grabbing some useless islands, and then a whole sea?
The ancient concept of oceans as commons is under threat. The Chinese dragon walks and swims. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Real Investment Africa Needs Is in Its Women

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The great African summit in Washington last week was largely theater; necessary and important, but still a work of fiction.
If you knew nothing about the subject, you might think that U.S. business, in an extraordinary historical oversight, has overlooked opportunity-rich Africa. Actually, America's trade with Africa has been in free-fall since 2008. China’s trade with Africa is reaching new heights every year, including this one. It more than doubles ours now.

For a decade, Africa — nearly all of its 54 countries — has looked east, and China has seized the opening. Yet the Chinese presence in Africa hasn't helped its underlying problems. Instead, it has put money in the pockets of the ruling elites and has turned a blind eye to the excesses of those elites.

China's interest in Africa, brilliantly and cynically exploited, has been in raw materials. A theme at last week's Washington summit was that there was something wrong with exploiting raw materials, and that value-added manufacturing — which creates real wealth and real jobs — could just be wished into being with more investment dollars.

China has flooded the continent with its lowest-quality exports – goods that wouldn’t make it onto the shelves of Walmart — and has even cheated the Africans out of the best jobs that its raw materials-hungry policy has created by bringing in Chinese workers.

The Africans get even less out of the Chinese colonization, by another name, than it did out of the European version in the “scramble for Africa” in the last decades of the 19th century. But the elites are allowed a free hand with their kleptocracy, their human rights violations, and their indifference to the condition of their own people. This sets up an asymmetrical competition with Western laws against bribery, fair trade practices, and the fact that American and international companies cannot be directed to serve a political purpose by their home governments.

President Obama made a good, even a great start, before the summit when he called for an end to the bad old ways of Africa. But his words weren't echoed by the delegates.

The long-term future of Africa lies in fundamental reforms within its social and political structures — and one in particular: its attitude toward women. If you spend any time there, two things are apparent: women have a raw deal, yet they — not the oil or the chrome or the copper, but the used and abused women of Africa — are its future.

Women hold Africa together and suffer in silence. They are the ones bent over with primitive implements in the fields, inevitably with their latest infant strapped to their backs. They are the ones who must endure marriage during puberty, bear children before their bodies are fully formed, and face the world’s highest rates of death during childbirth.

In shiny office buildings in Accra or Lusaka, it is the women who are moving the work forward. If you need something done, from a permit to an airline reservation, seek out a woman in an office. However, very few women make it to those jobs.

On the farms in Africa, it is the women who have managed small cooperatives, mastered micro-credit and provide family life. But they still must bend over their budzas with their youngest child strapped to their backs. The budza is a kind of hoe used for weeding, tilling and sowing. In its way, it is also a symbol of female enslavement; light enough for a woman to use all day long.

The women of Africa need to be told often and in every way they are special. They need to know that they have value beyond sex and work; that they are not an inferior gender, that they are the future.

The summit touched, in passing, on the talent and the plight women, as the male leaders talked the talk of international good intentions. But the women of Africa need recognition. Give them the tools of education and opportunity and they will do the job.

The budza needs to be retired, as does the culture of female enslavement of which it is the symbol. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Shame of Biomedical Research in the U.S.

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When the dark shadow of incurable disease settles across a life, it is brightened only by the hope that science is on the job: The cavalry will come.
Horribly the cavalry — researchers in the big pharmaceutical companies and the government-run National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control — may not even have mounted.
 
New drug development is a murky business governed by huge risks, inertia, bureaucracy and politics.
 
I've been looking at the role of biomedical research and the development of new therapies and drugs through the lens of one disease, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. But it is symptomatic of the whole struggle for cures, which means funds. It is a peephole into a system in chaos; where good intentions, economic reality, public pressure, politics and bureaucratic apathy play a role in where the research dollars go.
 
I've been writing about CFS for several years now, so I understand the dilemmas those who are in charge of biomedical research in government and private industry face. It is a disease of the the immune system, like AIDS, but it is mostly a medical enigma. It is hard to diagnose because there are no normal markers in blood or urine. It prostrates its victims essentially for life. In its severest form, patients lie in bed in darkened rooms, often feeling that their bones are going to explode. It cries out for more research, as do many other little understood diseases.
 
A very small coterie of physicians — maybe not many more than 50 in the United States — specialize in CFS and have developed private clinics for research into alleviating therapies. None of them are set up to do major drug research in the way that pharmaceutical companies do.
 
Big Pharma — as the drug behemoths are known collectively — is at the heart of new drug development, aided by preceding biomedical research that takes place through government grants to researchers in universities, teaching hospitals and private clinics. It is a complex matrix.
 
A new drug can cost over $1.2 billion to develop. It is a very high-risk undertaking — maybe the riskiest investment decision made in the private sector is developing a new drug. It is also a tortuous undertaking.
 
First a target has to be selected where there is a large enough patient cohort to establish a market. Then the science begins. Diseases that are straightforward, in medical terms, edge out those where the causes may be multiple and the resolution may require a cocktail of drugs. Understandably, a rifle shot is more appealing than a shotgun blast. Eight out of 10 drugs fail and are abandoned at some point. The winners have to pay for the losers.
 
If, after years of research, a compound that may work is discovered, the laborious business of testing it on animals must precede human trials with control groups and years of analysis. Finally the drug must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration which looks for efficacy, safety, risk benefit and manufacturing stability.
 
Into this already difficult world of new drug development, enter the politicians.
 
Some believe private enterprise will shoulder all the risks and is the right place for research. Others don't understand the vital role that government research grants — administered by NIH and CDC — play in the development of biomedical knowledge: the essential precursor to new drugs and therapies. Its funding is on a see-saw; it was down under sequestration and funding is restored but not boosted under the new budget deals. It tops out at $29.9 billion, a decline of 25 percent since 2003, according to The Atlantic magazine.
 
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome — which has 1 million Americans suffering hopelessly every day — gets about $6 million a year from NIH. What's wrong with that largesse? Well, remember, it costs $1.2 billion to develop a new drug once the biomedical case is made. As they say, you do the math – and don't expect the cavalry to ride to the rescue anytime soon.
 
Across the board, researchers are dependent on government funds augmented by foundations and charitable giving. Yet biomedical research pays as a national investment. American drugs are an export commodity, the cost of healthcare is contained and, yes, the suffering is reduced even as life is extended. China, by the way, has said it will surpass the United States in actual biomedical research dollars in five years. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Put the Kettle on, Sarah Palin

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Sarah m’dear, it’s not about the party. It’s about the tea.

For those of us of the British persuasion, tea is black tea. It was the tea on which the British built the empire.

It was also, I might add, the tea that Margaret Thatcher served at No. 10 Downing Street. I enjoyed some with her there. A Conservative traditionalist, she served it with milk for certain and sugar as an option.

Thatcher did not ask her guests, as bad hotels do now, what kind of tea they would like. Tea to Thatcher was black tea, sometimes known as Indian tea, though it might have been grown in Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe or Sri Lanka. It was neither flavored nor some herbal muck masquerading as tea.

The former prime minister knew that good tea is made in the kitchen, where stove-boiled water is poured from a kettle onto tea in a pot, not tepid water poured from a pot on a table into a cup with a tea bag.

Boiling water in a kettle, or pot, on the stove is important in making good tea. In a microwave, the water doesn’t bubble. Tea needs the bubbles.

While the Chinese drank green tea hundreds of years before Christ, the British developed their tea-drinking habit in the 17th century. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted permission for the charter of the British East India Company, establishing the trade in spice and silk that lead to the formal annexation of India and the establishment of the Raj.

Initially, tea was a sideline but it became increasingly important and started to define the British. The coffee shops–like the one that launched the insurer Lloyds of London around 1688–continued, but at all levels of society tea was becoming the British obsession.

By the 18th century, tea drinking was classless in Britain. Duchesses and workmen enjoyed it alike.

Tea was the fuel of the empire: the war drink, the social drink, the comfort drink and the consolation drink. Coffee had an upmarket connotation. It wasn’t widely available and the British didn’t make it very well.

Also as coffee was well established on the continent, it had to be shunned. To this day the British are divided about continental Europe and what they see as the emblems of Euro-depravity: coffee, garlic, scents and bidets.

Although tea is standardized, the British play their class games over the tea packers. For three centuries, most tea has been shipped in bulk to various packing houses throughout the British Isles. But the posh prefer Twinings to Lipton.

Offering tea with fancy cakes, clotted cream and fine jams separates the workers from the ruling classes. One of Queen Victoria’s ladies in waiting, Anna Maria Stanhope, known as the Duchess of Bedford, is credited as the creator of afternoon tea time; which the hotels turned into formal, expensive afternoon “teas.” The Ritz in London is famous for them.

The British believe that tea sustained them through many wars. “Let’s have a nice cup of tea. Things will get better.” I’ve always believed that America’s revenge against the British crown was to ice their beloved tea. Toss it into Boston Harbor, but don’t ice it. If you should have the good fortune to be asked to tea at No. 10, or at Buckingham Palace, don’t expect it to be iced.

Incidentally tea bags are fine, and it’s now just pretentious to serve loose tea with a strainer. Of course, if you want to read the political tea leaves you’ll have to use loose tea.

If you’re serving tea to the thousands at your tea parties, Sarah, remember that unlike politics, tea is very forgiving. It can be revived just with more boiling water.  –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Tea Parties: Add Sympathy

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Let’s pour the tea, and see who’s come to the party. More, let’s see why they came.

What binds these good citizens together in a ramshackle and loud fraternity known as the Tea Party movement? The focal point may be the Democratic health care legislation; but there is, as always with popular movements, a back story that is more complex and more compelling.

Could it be, to use Winston Churchill’s phrase, the sum of all their fears?

Indubitably. These are days of change, massive and irreversible change. Change that is undermining but difficult to characterize, and disturbing to experience.

The nation’s first African-American president, Barack Obama, is the symbol of that change more than he’s its author,

The Tea Party Patriots are people who feel that their lives and their nation is being swept forward to a place they don’t wish to go. They blame Obama and the Democrats for taking them there.

But the administration and the Democratic majorities in Congress have little to do with the buffeting the American image is taking.

Consider these facts:

 

✔ The United States has gone from the richest nation in the world to the biggest debtor.

✔ Our competitor, China, has grown rich in our market. Now China lends us money to cement the entanglement, while it becomes increasingly obstreperous.

✔ We have the largest and most lethal military machine on earth, but we can’t subdue insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, banish pirates in international waters, or prevail in sanctioning Iran.

✔ Our infrastructure, once the envy of the world, crumbles. European trains hurtle at 220 miles an hour; ours crawl at less than a third of that speed.

✔ Broadband in the United States is many times slower than it is in Europe. This is cruel: We invent, they perfect.

✔ More than 10 percent, and possibly nearly double that, are out of work with no chance of employment for years. And new technology has made the skills of many of the unemployed obsolete.

✔ The United States is an English-speaking nation where a second language, Spanish, is creeping towards full recognition. Banks, phone companies and state governments have gone bilingual.

✔ Immigrants, legal and illegal, are changing the culture.

After 43 white, male presidents, there is a black man in the White House and a first family that reminds middle-class white tea partiers that huge changes are afoot.

A general anxiety has crystallized into a particular rage.

In memory, the 1950s have been sanctified as a time when all was well in America–if you were white and not serving in Korea. The United States was strong, the land was fertile and fear was concentrated on the Soviet threat.

As it had been in World War II, the good guys were us and the bad guys were them. The European empires were disappearing and we were the city upon a hill. Tea Party Patriots’ nostalgia for the 1950s is as pretty and disingenuous as a Saturday Evening Post cover.

The tea partiers may not be interested in the new demographics and new realities of the 21st century, but their anger won’t banish reality.

Trouble is the only political home these genuinely worried people can find is on the right: the overstated, overwrought and over-simplistic right. The right of Mark Levin and Glenn Beck.

These polemicists have concentrated the anxiety of tea partiers into a fear of socialism. It’s the undefined dark at the top of the stairs, the threat to liberty, to gun ownership and to private enterprise, according to the fear merchants of the right. Yet, there is precious little government left in the world that can be described as socialist.

The old socialism, with the nationalization of the means of production at its core is dead, sent to its eternal rest in Europe. Only a few leaders. like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, still espouse it.

Already extremists of the right–with death threats and property damage–are undoing the legitimacy of the entire Tea Party movement, and its unlikely members–the well-heeled, well-fed, well-insured but very sympathetic and very fearful activists.

Their fears deserve a hearing individually and in sum. Instead, they’re being exploited and in time they’ll be marginalized, discredited by the company they keep. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Britain and China: Echoes of the Opium Wars

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As though there had not been trouble enough in 2009, the year ended with a nasty spat between Britain and China. A spat that might portend more trouble ahead as the world comes to terms with China’s new assertiveness.

The proximate cause of rift was the execution in China of a Briton, Akmal Shaikh, for smuggling heroin into China. The family of the 53-year-old father of three say he was mentally unstable and was duped into carrying a suitcase stuffed with heroin.

According to Shaikh’s family, he traveled to China because he was told he could become a rock star there.

The British government pled for clemency; and made 27 representations to China, after it failed to have the man examined by psychiatrists. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown condemned the execution.

China responded by accusing Britain of interfering in its judicial affairs. The Chinese also referred to the two Opium Wars that Britain fought with China in the mid-19th century to protect the opium trade conducted by British merchants. The Chinese embassy in London said the Shaikh case brought back “bitter memories of history.”

The opium was grown and processed in India. Then it was shipped to China, where addiction was encouraged by British merchants. Those merchants included Jardine Matheson, which is still a power in Asian business.

The Chinese government tried to ban the opium from entering China. But the British would have none of it, and went to war in one of the most shameful of imperial adventures. The British argument was that the Chinese were willing buyers and opium was not illegal in Europe.

At the heart of this lethal trade was an imbalance as familiar now as it was then: There was high demand in Europe for Chinese goods– porcelain, tea and silk–and low demand in China for European goods. Although always technically illegal, the opium trade grew so large that it became an important source of revenue for the British administration of India.

The two wars, 1839-43 and 1856-60, humiliated the Chinese and undermined the Quin Dynasty. Now China says Britain is up to its old tricks: supporting illegal drug dealers and undermining Chinese law.

If China were not so self-confident in its new role as a world power, the latest dispute would have been papered over by China agreeing to the reasonable British demand that the executed man be examined for mental competence. But not so. And not so on many fronts.

Last year China consolidated its grip on Africa, where it signed scientific cooperative agreements with 47 countries and entered natural resource tie-ups with as many. It also has natural resources tie-ups in Latin America.

China is beginning to throw its considerable weight around–just enough to remind the world that it is too big and too important to be seriously challenged.

Consider that China refuses to revalue its currency; won’t sanction Iran; undermined the climate change conference in Copenhagen; and makes outlandish territorial claims on the South China Sea and the outer continental shelves of its neighbors. Also, China coddles pariah states North Korea and Sudan.

One cannot blame China for succeeding, but one can blame the international business community for fleeing to Chinese manufacturing. Americans can blame budget deficits for China’s holding of more than $2 trillion in U.S. debt. We put ourselves willingly in the noose. In criticizing, as it has done, the buildup in the U.S. deficit, China reminds that it can tighten the noose at any time.

It looks as though 2009 was the year when we began to pay the high price of cheap sneakers at Walmart.

 

The Chopstick Invasion of Africa Continues Apace

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Even the celebrated 19th-century scramble for Africa seems to pale compared to the huge and growing Chinese presence, which is roiling the continent.

For a decade, China has been buying its way into Africa to secure the fuel and raw materials it believes it will need for its economic expansion.

These Chinese moves in Africa are breathtaking in their scope. Whereas the European grab for Africa and its treasures in the l9th century was haphazard, and fed by rivalry in Europe as much as interests in Africa, the Chinese neo-imperialism has a thoroughness and a planning that no European power — not even Britain — ever aspired to.

China is reported to be active in 48 countries out of the roughly 53 real state entities on the continent, or on its offshore islands. The Chinese formula is simple: Buy your way in with soft loans and generous arms deals but, above all, a preparedness to overlook the excesses of dictators. No wonder Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe lavishes praise on his new best friends.

The same is true in many other African countries. All that is needed for Beijing’s embrace is a supply of raw materials — and especially oil.

From Cape Town to Cairo, China is on the march. From South Africa it buys iron ore, among other minerals; from Zambia, copper; and from Zimbabwe chrome, gold and iron ore.

In Zambia, the Chinese have promised $3.2 billion to revive the copper industry — an interesting development because Western mining companies pulled out, unable to deal with the wholesale and destructive corruption.

At a meeting of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation at Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt earlier this month, the Chinese pledged $10 billion in aid to Africa. Quietly, they also forgave a tranche of maturing loans.

But government-to-government loans are the least of the Chinese investment in Africa. Most of the investments, such as that in Zambia, are made by Chinese corporations — all state-sanctioned and some state-owned. It is a concerted effort.

While oil producers like Angola, Chad, Libya, Nigeria and Sudan are prime targets of the Chinese investment, the rapacious Chinese economic imperialism also extends to lumber and agriculture.

The ruling elites of Africa are ecstatic. The Chinese presence is, for them, heaven-sent. Polling, albeit rudimentary, reveals about 80-percent approval of China’s African role by Africa’s elites.

At the street level, these findings are reversed. The Chinese are roundly resented. They have no experience in the world outside of China; no curiosity about these strange African lands and their people; and a morbid indifference to Africa’s long-term future. Most Chinese workers, as opposed to executives, brought to Africa are poorly educated and ill-equipped to live in different cultures.

A study by Loro Horta, a visiting fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, found deep unhappiness in a study conducted in many African countries.

First and foremost, Horta found, China does not employ local labor, preferring to import Chinese workers and to house them in “Chinatowns.”

Second, the indifference of Chinese enterprises to environmental damage is of concern.

And third, China is accused of dumping inferior goods and medicines on the African markets. Africa’s fragile but important textile industries are being killed off by a flood of cheap Chinese manufactures.

More, Chinese merchants are flooding in and displacing local traders.

Horta quotes a school teacher in Mozambique, “They (the government) say China is a great power, just like America. But what kind of great power sends thousands of people to a poor country like ours to sell cakes on the street, and take the jobs of our own street-sellers, who are already so poor?”

Then there is the Chinese language push. The Chinese government has set up schools in many places to teach Chinese to reluctant people who would prefer to improve their English and French skills, legacies of the last scramble for Africa.

But while China buys off Africa’s elites, and provides them with weapons to suppress their own people, the rape of Africa will continue. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate