Home » Posts tagged 'marshall plan'
Tag Archives: marshall plan
Seeing the Big Picture: Russia-China Economic Cooperation, the SCO and Global Climate Change
Seeing the Big Picture: Russia-China Economic Cooperation, the SCO and Global Climate Change
This year’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok was as usual the subject of dismissive coverage – if any in the mainstream US and UK media. Viewed through the feverish and unregulated speculative bubbles that have defined what passes for 21st century global finance in New York and London, the slow but steady and enormous moves towards industrial and resource consolidation and cooperation between Beijing and Moscow are occurring at too slow a rate to grab Western imaginations shaped by Attention Deficit Disorders.
This failure to grasp the scale of what is going on is like Aesop’s Fable of the Tortoise and the Hare. Western leaders, strategists and financiers think in 24 hour news cycles and soundbites. Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China are thinking in terms of decades and generations.
Western leaders and commentators believe Russian-Chinese economic cooperation has already failed and can never succeed be because it is moving slowly. They fail to grasp that it is moving consistently and steadily in the same direction.
What Russia and China are doing, as perceptive contributors to the Strategic Culture Foundation such as Federico Pieraccini have pointed out is to integrate the strategic security dimension of the highly successful and now well-established Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with the economic investment dimension of China’s Road and Belt Initiative.
A comparison could be with the much touted success of the combined Marshall Plan and NATO Alliance initiatives produced by the United States in the late 1940s to integrate all of Western Europe under US leadership and control.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Corruption U.S.A.
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Corruption U.S.A.
I recently took a little trip into the past and deep into America’s distant war zones to write a piece I called “It’s a $cam.” It was, for me, an eye-opening journey into those long-gone years of American “nation-building” and “reconstruction” in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mind you, I still remembered some of what had been reported at the time like the “urine-soaked” police academy built in Baghdad by an American private contractor with taxpayer dollars. But it was the cumulative effect of it all that now struck me — one damning report after another that made it clear Washington was incapable of building or rebuilding anything whatsoever. There were all those poorly constructed or unfinished military barracks, police stations, and outposts for the new national security forces the U.S. military was so eagerly “standing up” in both countries. There were the unfinished or miserably constructed schools, training centers, and “roads to nowhere.” There were those local militaries and police forces whose ranks were heavily populated by “ghost soldiers.” There was that shiny new U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan that cost $25 million and no one wanted or would ever use. It was, in short, a litany of fiascoes and disasters that never seemed to end.
Financially, Washington had invested sums in both countries that far exceeded the Marshall Plan, which so successfully put Western Europe back on its feet after World War II. Yet Iraq and Afghanistan were left on their knees amid a carnival of corruption and misspent taxpayer money. What made revisiting this spectacle so stunning wasn’t just the inability of the U.S. military, the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and a crew of crony warrior corporations raking in the big bucks to do anything right, but that this was the United States of America.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
China’s ‘Marshall Plan’ Will Not Solve Overcapacity in China’s Economy
China’s ‘Marshall Plan’ Will Not Solve Overcapacity in China’s Economy
The majority of industries in China face severe overcapacity, which seriously threatens the smooth functioning of China’s economy.
Despite China’s high hopes, “the road map for launching an Asian Investment Bank” remained only a plan at the APEC summit this year. In addition, the Mexican government decided to cancel a $3.7 billion Chinese bid for a hi-speed railway project. China’s “Marshall Plan”—to export its overcapacity—is thus off to a bad start, and Beijing will still need to find ways to deal with this “nuclear threat” to China’s economy.
Phasing out overcapacity would result in huge layoffs, which would destabilize society and contradict the government objective of stability maintenance.
Why China Wants to Implement a “Marshall Plan”
Most comments made in China regarding the country’s “Marshall Plan” focus on overseas investments. And while some mention the term “export capacity,” they deliberately omit the key modifier for the word capacity: over.
China seeks to establish an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and, with that bank as the core, to materialize its plan for a “one belt and one road,” i.e., a “Silk Road Economic Belt” and a “Maritime Silk Road of the 21st Century.” Through this “one belt and one road,” China would be able to export its unwanted excess capacity. Commentators have dubbed this “China’s Marshall Plan.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
