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Title: China's Asian Bank may herald a new world order
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URL Source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/opi ... -new-world-order-30247966.html
Published: Nov 17, 2014
Author: Kalinga Seneviratne
Post Date: 2014-11-17 23:59:55 by A K A Stone
Keywords: None
Views: 1385
Comments: 9
Beijing has drawn in 21 countries so far in an ambitious plan to meet the $8-trillion budget for Asia's development Since the 2008 economic meltdown, Europeans and the Americans have been asking the Chinese to contribute more to the Bretton Wood institutions. But, in turn, the Chinese have been demanding reforms to the hegemonic system of management and voting rights in these institutions that favour the Americans and the Europeans. Both appeals have mainly landed on deaf ears. Now the Chinese have decided rather than using their enormous financial reserves to prop up a world economic order that does not give them a say in its governance procedures, they will set up their own institutions. Many of the emerging nations seem to agree with China. In July this year, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) announced the formation of the BRICS Development Bank with a reserve fund of $100 billion that aims to strengthen the global financial safety net. Last week, at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) meeting in Beijing, China announced the launch of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) with an initial Chinese investment of $50 billion. The Chinese have been working on the idea for over a year and lobbied many of the regional government to join. In spite of heavy US pressure, 20 other Asian and Gulf states signed the MOU on October 24 in Beijing to set up the bank, that will begin to function at the end of 2015. India, which may have buckled to US pressure a year ago, has enthusiastically embraced the new bank under Narendra Modi's leadership and hinted at a substantial contribution to its capital. Staunch US allies Singapore, Philippines, Qatar and Kuwait have joined in. Only South Korea and Australia have caved into US pressure and not signed in, while Japan don't seem to have been invited. Just over a week after taking office, Indonesia's new president Joko Widodo overturned a decision of his predecessor and told the visiting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on November 5 that Indonesia will also sign the MOU. Now Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbot says that his country is also keen to join the new regional bank. The 21 founding members of the AIIB are Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. Indonesia will also join this list. The purpose of the AIIB will be to provide infrastructure development funds to countries in the Asian region that was earlier dominated by the Japan, Australia and US dominated Asian Development Bank (ADB). Estimates have put the infrastructure development needs of the Asian region up to 2020 at $8 trillion with Indonesia alone needing $230 billion. The existing institutions were not supposed to provide this unless China was willing to invest its huge reserves. In a commentary published in the Jakarta Post, Singapore Institute of International Affairs chairman Simon Tay argued that the AIIB proposal runs against the established regional and global order, in which the Americans dominate the World Bank while the Japanese traditionally head the Asian Development Bank. But he added that times have changed, "some will remember how, back during the Asian crisis of 1997-1998, they [the US] persuaded Japan and others not to support calls for an Asian Monetary Fund. However, the reality today is that, given the real needs for infrastructure, a simple No will no longer suffice". Dr Ahmad Rashid Malik, of the Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad, writing in Pakistan's Nation newspaper described the AIIB as an "Asian dream come true". He sees this as a major breakthrough in ending Western financial institutions' hegemony in Asia, which many Asian leaders have fought against for over half a century. "China wants to build new economic corridors in Asia such the Silk Route Belt in Central Asia, China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), and the China-India-Bangladesh-Myanmar (CIBM) Economic Corridor. These are energy and trade corridors mutually beneficial to these countries," he points out. "China would provide a leadership role in building these corridors to uplift the infrastructure in Asia, hitherto neglected for centuries". Sri Lanka's International Monetary Cooperation Minister Dr Sarath Ammunugama also agrees that this bank will have a positive impact on the region's infrastructure development. "This will enable Sri Lanka to obtain loans at a concessionary rate to further boost the expansion and building of infrastructure," he told the Daily News in Colombo. While much of the region's media and economic analysts have welcomed the new bank, most of the Western media have been barking about possible lack of good governance, anti-corruption and human rights procedures in the bank's lending policies. They tend to argue that the ADB and the World Bank have strict criteria in this area, ignoring the fact that the ADB in particular has been criticised for years by civil society groups and even government officials for their insensitivity to the plight of the poor in, for example, funding water privatisation schemes, or over land rights or even for cronyism in the choice of consultants. At ADB's 38th governors' meeting in Istanbul in 2005, a consortium of civil society groups accused the bank of pushing development policies that exploit the poor and support private sector. "The ADB's operations in the Asia- Pacific region have been marked by a shocking lack of public accountability, poor governance and massive corruption. Of particular concern, is the ADB's massive support for fossil fuels, specifically coal fired power plants, which has contributed significantly to severe climate impacts in Asia, such as more intense droughts and storms," said a statement issued by the group. Since then the ADB claims that they have put in place a strong anti- corruption and good governance regime. ADB says that its continuing campaign to spread awareness on aid fraud and reporting has been successful in encouraging the public to submit complaints. In 2012, the ADB's annual aid fraud index tallied a peak in corruption complaints. It recorded 240 complaints and 114 new investigations against illicit practices, leading to the debarment of 42 firms and 38 individuals. A big chunk of the complaints involved misrepresentations of qualifications, experience and technical capabilities of consulting firms, contractors and individuals gunning for a chance to do business with ADB. A big challenge for AIIB will be to guard against corruption, especially with an infrastructure-building industry that is rife with corrupt practices across the Asian region. The Western media will be ever ready to pounce on any hints of corruption at the bank to discredit it. In an editorial, the UK's Guardian gave some useful advice to its Western media counterparts in judging the latest developments in Asia: "It is an exaggeration to talk of the pace of reform at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, for there has been almost none to these, the so-called 'Washington institutions' … that is why countries that had hardly any economic profile three-quarters of a century ago but are now giants, such as China, are starting to change it from the outside." It pointed out that the launch of the AIIB with 21 regional countries signed up is a product of this frustration. "It will give China the clout in regional financing that membership of the ADB has not allowed it to wield, in spite being a generous capital provider to it. "China is not withdrawing from the Washington institutions, it is supplementing them" the editorial argued. "Unlike certain other aspects of China's policy, this development is properly seen in the context of the 'peaceful rise', which China's leaders have proclaimed. This is a case for accommodation, not confrontation".
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#1. To: A K A Stone (#0)
Money talks. And the Chinese have more of it than anybody else, thanks to American "free trade" policies that have beggared our own people to maximize profits for a few connected elite exporters, and developed China's economy. The money that we pay China in interest on our national debt allows them to build their navy with which to challenge us.
The money that we pay China in interest on our national debt allows them to build their navy with which to challenge us. It ia partially because in America. We are no longer one culture. We are by in large all in it for ourselves. The people who vote for free trade have no loyalty to America, either that or they are just dumb. We should pay china off in Blue money then cancel it or depreciate it by 90 percent.
We shouldn't aim to hurt China. China won fair and square, by playing the game by the rules. What we need to do is tighten our own belt, impose trade restrictions that restrict our market and provide the incentive for American manufacturers to reopen manufacture in America, to put people back to work. The purpose should not be to "screw" China, or Russia, or the Arabs, or any of our trade partners. It's not about "getting" foreigners. It's about putting our own people first in matters of sovereignty, to get them jobs.
a) We are Balkanzed, divided & conquered from within. b) "Free Trade" = New World Order, Inc. c) Our corrupt "reps" sold us out utterly and completely, including our sovereignty. NO sovereignty, NO nation, NO identity, NO culture, NO language, NO national loyalty. d) Yes, we ARE "dumb." Thanks to Dewey, public school indoctrination, and guilty-white-lib propaganda like, "diversity-is-our-strength."
By keeping their currency artifically low all those years? By limiting what we sell there but we import everything? I didn't sign up for free trade, neither did my kids. We don't owe it. Why should my kids, grandkids pay off the debt of dead people FOR THEIR ENTIRE LIVES destroying their future. I say F China.
As Thomas Jefferson said the earth belongs to the living.
They shouldn't. The solution to that, though, is not to aim at the Chinese. It is to aim at the elements within America who have caused the situation and profited heavily from it. They profited from destroying the country, so get the money back out of them either through taxation, or by cancelling debt repayment to them. Target the people who led us into the box canyon.
That's right. But who did this to us? China, by keeping their currency low? Or the economic elite in America who control the Congress and White House, who opened the borders to free trade and illegals, and who offshored the jobs, and who set up a tax code that falls most heavily on the middle and working classes? The latter. The Alphas structured a trade system, tax code, immigration law (and lack of enforcement), government contracting system and general labor code to advance its interests. It has made them very rich too. When Jimmy Carter was President, the top 10% of the country owned about 55% of the nation's wealth. Today, the top 5% own 85% of it. Through control of the political processes and laws, domestic and foreign policy, the economic elites have turned America into a fief and run the table, amassing great fortunes in their own pockets while beggaring the rest of America. Republican propaganda is always aimed at crushing out that message and diverting attention from that reality, but the reality remains, and things will only get worse and worse until it is addressed. It will not be addressed by electing Republicans, and the Republican Alphas have far too much money and power to ever lose control of that party. What has to happen is the excessive wealth that the Alpha Elites have amassed through crony capitalism has to be redistributed through taxation, labor and trade codes back to the working and middle classes. The poor are being provided for adequately now: they have housing and food and medical care - it's threadbare and bleak, but nobody is starving. But the Middle and Working class are being knocked down into the ranks of the poor, because they can't get jobs, because the table has been run by the crony capitalist alphas. They've been pigs, and they've concentrated too much of the national wealth in their hands. The Republicans are going to keep it that way. The Democrats, to their credit, have been the ones to put safety nets in place: Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, etc., without which there would have been starvation in the country and probably revolution. But the answer is not to turn everybody into a ward of the state. The answer is to redistribute the excessive concentration of wealth at the top back down into the middle and working classes, to REVERSE the damage done by aggressively corrupt economic policies put into place by crony capitalists for their own benefit. In this endeavor, the Republicans will always be the enemy, because they are bought and paid for. Democrats can always be depended upon to kill babies so one cannot permanently ally with them; also, the Democrat solution is to create a socialist state. The PROPER solution is to rejigger the tax and regulatory codes to recapture the excessive gains of the top few percentage, gained through corrupt political control, and redistribute that in the form of wages and benefits to working people. That will, in turn, increase employment, bringing marginal people off of welfare. Of course, if we don't control the Border, it will simply trigger more illegal immigration, so we have to do that as well. There are two ways to go about redistributing the excessive wealth concentrated at the top. One is taxation and regulation. The other is selective default and allowing the restructuring of student and housing debt in bankruptcy. All of these are Republican no-go zones: they are the part of the crony capitalists and will never accept ANY redistribution of their ill-gotten gains. And Democrats would be all too eager to confiscate everything and hand it over to the government. That's why we need a Christian Democratic Party, to bring in Christian values of charity and honesty but with the moral control to stop themselves from going over into wholesale class warfare.
Don't worry, Stoney. The Rothchilds are calling the shots in china, and they'd never allow those godless heathens to harm us. Who else would protect the banker's scurvy zionist hides if not american christians? Certainly not the atheist chinese.
#2. To: Vicomte13 (#1)
Money talks. And the Chinese have more of it than anybody else, thanks to American "free trade" policies that have beggared our own people to maximize profits for a few connected elite exporters, and developed China's economy.
#3. To: A K A Stone (#2)
We should pay china off in Blue money then cancel it or depreciate it by 90 percent.
#4. To: A K A Stone (#2)
(Edited)
We are no longer one culture. ...The people who vote for free trade have no loyalty to America, either that or they are just dumb.
#5. To: Vicomte13 (#3)
We shouldn't aim to hurt China. China won fair and square, by playing the game by the rules.
#6. To: Vicomte13 (#3)
#7. To: A K A Stone (#5)
Why should my kids, grandkids pay off the debt of dead people FOR THEIR ENTIRE LIVES destroying their future.
#8. To: A K A Stone (#6)
As Thomas Jefferson said the earth belongs to the living.
#9. To: A K A Stone (#2)
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