US seeks lead in crafting Asia trade vision

© AFP/Getty Images Joe Raedle

AFP

BIG SKY, Montana (AFP) - The United States is looking to forge a new vision on free trade that boosts its role in Asia while assuaging public concerns as officials from the Pacific Rim prepare to meet at a mountain resort.

Trade representatives from the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum gather Wednesday in Big Sky, Montana -- near sprawling Yellowstone National Park -- to help lay out an agenda for a wide-ranging trade pact.

President Barack Obama has set an ambitious goal of doubling US exports to boost the uncertain economy. He also hopes trade can serve as a tangible tool to increase US influence around Asia, where the rise of China is looming large.

US to press China on financial reform: Geithner

© AFP/Getty Images/File Justin Sullivan

AFP
  
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States will press China to make progress on financial reform at high-level bilateral talks next week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has said.

The US is going "to put a little more attention this time on expanding our discussion to the next stage of financial reform in China," he told a US-China Business Council forum in Washington.

"If China's going to be successful in moving the economy away from exports to a more domestic-demand economy, it's going to have to increase the return to savers in China and dismantle the set of protections that are now designed to lower the cost of capital to state-owned enterprises."

America’s Fate Under Chinese Hegemony

A Review of Eamonn Fingleton’s Jaws of the Dragon

Ian Fletcher 
Activist Post 

The news has recently hit the press that China’s economy, measured on the purchasing-power basis that adjusts for price differences between nations, may surpass the U.S. in only another five years or so.  Surprisingly, China has still shown no signs of morphing into the cuddly liberal and democratic nation, devoted to American ways from Coca-Cola to democracy, whose eventual appearance has been assumed by American policy for thirty years now.    

Our policy during this period has, after all, enthusiastically cooperated with China’s efforts to build up its economic power—which entails, of course, every other kind of power, including the military kind.  So our assumption of a benign China had better be right, or else we have been abetting the creation of a monster.  A hostile China will be arguably even worse than the USSR, because it will not do us the favor of sabotaging its economy by adhering to a dysfunctional economic ideology.

The above realities are the subject of Eamonn Fingleton’s book In The Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate Under Chinese Hegemony.  Fingleton is a Tokyo-based Irish journalist who has lived in East Asia for over 25 years, and he has a long and distinguished record of telling truths about the region’s politics and economics that the establishment (on both sides of the Pacific!) would rather the public did not learn.  This is one of those books that one wishes the President would read.

China Firing Back in New Cold War

But which side should the public be on? 

James Corbett, Contributing Writer  
Activist Post 

Now that ground forces have already been deployed in Libya, and now that the leaders of the NATO war machine have finally admitted that their end goal is nothing less than regime change, the mainstream media is finally daring to ask about the geostrategic consequences of this third American war front. 

The spectre of the overthrow of the Iranian government is being bandied about once again, Lieberman is lobbying for intervention in Syria, and even John McCain is sending not-so-veiled threats to Moscow and Beijing that this wave of destabilization—a wave that is now fully admitted to be an invention of US and globalist-controlled NGOs—will be crashing on their shores soon. The long-term game plan of the globalist forces is now increasingly clear: overthrow Assad in Syria, isolate Iran, get rid of Ahmedinejad, and encircle China and Russia. 

The Cold War is Underway…and the West is Losing 

I appeared on RT yesterday to discuss how Beijing is one of the real targets of this Libyan intervention.

The question of why China would let the Libyan resolution pass through the UN Security Council without exercising its veto is a good one, and one that I didn’t answer adequately in that short segment. The full answer involves an understanding that the “war” in “cold war” is more analogous than literal.

The Chinese are not stupid, and they understand that the fall of the Soviet Union was not due to a grand military confrontation but an economic collapse. That collapse, in hindsight, was inevitable: the Soviet economy was broken and pathetic, and a greater and greater percentage of that economy was being shunted off into the unwinnable, never-ending war in Afghanistan The people were tired of decades of repression and deprivation and they cheered on the overthrow of the Soviet empire.