BRENDA ROSSER

Focussing on economic history this week…

China’s trade policy was not an economic one

Kissinger: Their interest is 100 percent political. There was no emphasis at all on the economic side. Even as we arrived at the airport, one of them commented to me,”We are being overwhelmed with your businessmen. In due time we’ll do business, but in our own time.”

Remember, these are men of ideological purity. Chou En-lai joined the Communist Party in France in 1920, long before there was a Chinese Communist Party. This generation didn’t fight for 50 years and go on the Long March for trade.

Mr shultz: In Marxist theory, economics is paramount and all else is superstructure.

Kissinger: In Marxist practice, politics is paramount.

Mr Shultz: Then this is ideological impurity.
…..
Kissinger: What I am saying is that they are not interested in trade for trade’s sake. I am not saying they are not interested in getting things done.

Another thin struck me: When you have read the formalism of old China, it is remarkable to see the absence of hierarchy, for example, in the personal relationship between Chou and his interpreter. There was an easy personal relationship unlike what you would see in any Western official counterpart.
…..They ae concerned with the Soviet military buildup on their border……

Whenever I mentioned chinese history to them,they emphasised what was new. But we were given a special tour of the Forbidden City by their chief archaeologist. Their grace and style did not give you a sense of an enormous break in continuity. At the same time, you get a mystical sense of their revolution as a tremendous emotional experience. Mao is right. It is hard to see how the next generation will feel and act the same way.
….

Mr Peterson: Well,Henry, it’s good to have a reason to contratulate you for something other than your presumed sexual exploits.

Kissinger: You know I believe in the linkage theory!

White House Memorandum. 19th July 1971
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB66/ch-41.pdf

The scaffold of 1974

This week I found myself collecting together some memorabilia from 1974 to provide as a gift to a friend born in that year. I found evidence of the scaffold that swayed our future.

Wernher Von Braun (founder of modern rocket science and former vice president of Fairchild Industries) told Dr Carol Rosin (former corporate manager of Fairchild Industries 1974-1977) that the reasons for space-based weaponry were all based on a lie. He said that the strategy was to use scare tactics – that first the Russians, then the terrorists are going to be considered the enemy…. “I was at a meeting in Fairchild Industries in the War Room. The conversation [was] about how they were going to antagonize these enemies and at some point, there was going to be a Gulf War….” [1]

The ex-ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James E. Akins… argued [around 1980] that Kissinger acquiesced in the Shah-led oil price hikes beginning in 1974 to provide Iran with the finances to help out ailing Northrup, McDonnell Douglas, General Dynamics, Boeing, Grumman and Litton Industries. In 1974, as oil prices spiralled upward, the Shah launched what, if completed, would have been the most ambitious nuclear program in the Third World: 20 power plants to generate 23,000 megawatts of nuclear capacity by 1994. The Shah and his small industrial elite were in large part motivated by the huge kickbacks to be gained in the negotiations of each reactor contract. The, corporate vendors, on the other side, were reacting to dwindling sales at home and were often backed by substantial export credit offerings from the home governments.[2]

1974 – ‘The Khemlani Affair’ in Australia. Australian oligopoly media barons ran the most intensive campaign of attack against the Federal Labor (Whitlam) Government when it tried to borrow large sums of money directly from Middle East nations instead of through the (more expensive) US Morgan-Stanley Wall Street monopoly. [3]

The beginning of the ‘supply-side economics’. How a deranged cult hijacked economics. A meeting in Washington in 1974 between Arthur Laffer, an economist, Jude Wanniski, an editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal and Dick Cheney, then deputy assistant to President Ford. “Notions that would have been laughed at a generation ago … are now so pervasive, they barely attract any notice.” [4]

1974 –Prediction of the global consolidation of corporate giants. “Their bookkeeping will be the real story of international relations.”

“The world influence of the major corporations grows by the year as the multinational organizations overlaps political frontiers and undercuts the authority of nation states. Professor Howard Perlmutter has predicted a degree of global consolidation among the corporate giants that will, by 1985, place the bulk of the world’s economic power in the hands of two hundred multinational firms, possibly by then incorporated under the United Nations or World Bank. Many of these firms will be tied into “trans-ideological mergers” with socialist governments – like the recent agreement of the Soviet state insurance agency to underwrite American investments in the third world against the risk of expropriation or the much rumoured Russian-American-Japanese venture to exploit Siberian oil – and so will have more to do with the shape of world affairs than the official foreign ministries. Their bookkeeping will be the real story of international relations.” [5]

Who you think need war
Who own the oil
Who do no toil
Who own the soil
Who is not a nigger
Who is so great ain’t nobody bigger
Who own this city
Who own the air
Who own the water [6]

BRENDA ROSSER

[1] Testimony of Dr Carol Rosin
December 2000
From Duncan Roads
[email protected]
http://www.mayanmajix.com/art742.html
and
Imagine
by Carol Sue Rosin
http://www.west.net/~crosin/imagine.html
and
Carol Rosin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Rosin

[2] The Multinational Monitor
DECEMBER 1980 – VOLUME 1 – NUMBER 11
I R A N
Business In the Shah’s Iran
by John Cavanagh
http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1980/12/cavanagh.html

[3] ‘Oil in troubled waters’ by Jim Cairns (former Deputy Prime Minister in the Labor Whitlam Government in Australia)

[4] How a cult hijacked American politics. Flight of the Wingnuts
by Jonathan Chait. Post date: 09.03.07. Issue date: 09.10.07
http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070910&s=chait091007

[5] ‘Where the Wasteland Ends – Politics and Transcendence in Post Industrial Society’ by Theodore Roszak. ISBN 0571 10581 5. 1972. Faber and Faber Limited, London.

[6] Somebody blew up America. AMIRI B 10/01

The Decline and Fall of Work

The Latin word labor means ‘suffering’. We are unwise to forget this origin of the words ‘travail’ and ‘labour’. At least the nobility never forgot their own dignity and the indignity which marked their bondsmen. The aristocratic contempt for work reflected the master’s contempt fo the dominated classes; work was the exploitation to which they were condemned for all eternity by the divine decree which had willed them, for impenetrable reasons, to be inferior. Work took its place among the sanctions of Providence as the punishment for poverty, and, because it was the means to a future salvation, such a punishment could take on the attributes of pleasure. Basically, though, work was less important than submission.

The bourgeoisie does not dominate, it exploits. It does not need to be master, it prefers to use. Why has nobody seen that the principle of productivity simply replaced the principle of feudal authority? Why has nobody wanted to understand this?
*

* ‘The Revolution of Everyday Life’ Chapter 5. ‘The decline and fall of work’.
by Raoul Vaneigem. A translation from French of ‘Traite de savoir-vivre a l’usage des jeunes generations’ which was first published in 1967. Page 53