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The WSJ Notable & Quotable has an excellent quote from Rush Limbaugh.
Rush Limbaugh on his radio show, Jan. 20:
The moral code, the moral compass of the state-controlled media is something to behold. Now, some of you may not know the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner hosted a state dinner last night for Hu Jintao of China. Hu Jintao is holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison in China. Not making it up. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner hosted a dinner for the guy holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison, and the media does not get the irony of this at all. They’re too busy running around chasing Sarah Palin and radio talk show hosts over “civility.”
In Contentions, Alana Goodman comments on an anti-American song played at the US state dinner for Chinese President Hu Jintao.
So that lavish state dinner President Obama hosted for Chinese President Hu Jintao last week? Turns out it was an even worse decision than previously thought. Not only did Obama honor a regime of human-rights abusers, but it turns out they weren’t even appreciative. According to the Epoch Times, a pianist at the event played a well-known Chinese propaganda song that’s about defeating the U.S. in a war. And it sounds like the Chinese government may have known the song would be played beforehand…
…The song apparently thrilled hardliners in China, who saw it as a major humiliation of America…
…The whole concept of the Chinese playing an anti-American song during a state dinner in their honor is too petty and childish to even be insulting. The embarrassing part is that Obama-administration officials didn’t bother to find out the background of the songs on the agenda before they were played. In comparison, the Chinese delegation reportedly knew about the song in advance, and may have been the ones who tipped off news outlets in China beforehand…
…Awful. This is worse than Obama’s bow to the Japanese emperor in 2009. The White House better have a serious explanation for why this song was allowed to be played at its own party. And it should also serve as a lesson to Obama for why we don’t throw state dinners in honor of openly anti-American governments.
David Harsanyi believes China’s power is overrated.
…I often hear talk radio hosts and politicians condemn China’s nefarious role as the largest stakeholder in American debt. How is it China’s fault that Washington spends $1 trillion more than it takes in in revenue? Substantial national debt is our concern, but if we’re going to find people to borrow from, having China vested in American success seems like a good enough idea. (Unless China’s dynamic economy is an elaborate ruse to sink us in the end.)
…We can talk about China’s disgusting record on human rights. It can’t be ignored. But the best cure for illiberalism is probably “wealth and economic power.” How long can communist hard-liners thrive in a nation that sees its economy grow 10 percent a year?
Let’s not forget, as well, that China is still a place of deep poverty, stressed infrastructure, and political upheaval; it’s struggling with problems that dwarf our own. We might be overrating its influence. …
Peter Schiff discusses how China’s monetary policy is distorting both Chinese and American economies.
…To a very large extent the distortions are caused by China’s long-standing policy of pegging its currency, the yuan, to the U.S. dollar. But as China’s economy gains strength, and the American economy weakens, the cost and difficulty of maintaining the peg become ever greater, and eventually outweigh the benefits that the policy supposedly delivers to China.
…In order to buy these dollars, the Chinese central bank must print its own currency. In essence, China is adopting the Fed’s expansionary monetary policy. In the U.S. the inflationary impact of such a strategy is mitigated by our ability to export paper dollars in exchange for inexpensive Chinese imports. Although prices are rising here, they are not rising nearly as much as they would if we had to spend all this newly printed money on domestically produced goods. The big problem for China is that, unlike the U.S., the newly printed yuan are not exported, but remain in China bidding up consumer prices. As a result, inflation is becoming China’s dominant political issue.
…This week, Chinese president Hu Jintao arrives for a summit in Washington, where he will get an earful from President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner about the importance of letting the yuan appreciate. On this point, the Administration actually has it right. But they fail, of course, to grasp the full implications of how a falling dollar and a rising yuan will hurt the U.S. economy. If the Chinese stop buying dollars, Americans will face higher prices and higher interest rates. If Geithner thinks we can take such changes in stride, he is in for a rude awakening. …
…For now the old guard in China still holds sway and the status quo remains intact. But new leaders are expected to be in place by 2014. When fresh hands take the wheel, we may finally see some meaningful change in the global monetary system.
Robert Samuelson thinks China is a force to be reckoned with, and the US should be making more of an effort to influence Chinese economic decisions.
…Next, consider technology transfer. Big multinational firms want to be in China, but the cost of doing so is often the loss of important technology through required licensing agreements, mandatory joint ventures, reverse engineering or outright theft. American software companies estimate that 85 to 90 percent of their products in China are pirated.
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Thomas Hout and Pankaj Ghemawat cite China’s high-speed-rail projects. Initially, foreign firms such as Germany’s Siemens got most contracts; in 2009, the government began requiring foreign firms to enter into minority joint ventures with Chinese companies. Having mastered the “core technologies,” Chinese companies have captured 80 percent or more of the local market and compete with foreign firms for exports. The same thing is occurring in commercial aircraft. China is building a competitor to the Boeing 737 and the Airbus 320; General Electric has entered into a joint venture that will supply the avionics, the electronics that guide the aircraft.
Finally, there’s finance. China’s foreign exchange reserves – earned mainly through massive export surpluses – approached $2.9 trillion at year-end 2010. These vast holdings (which increase by hundreds of billions annually) enable China to expand its influence by sprinkling low-cost loans around the world or making strategic investments in raw materials and companies. The Financial Times recently reported that China – through the China Export-Import Bank and the China Development Bank – has “lent more money to other developing countries over the past two years than the World Bank.” …
Christopher Hitchens tells us more about Tunisia.
…One found the political atmosphere constipated and conformist rather than outright terrifying. Perhaps one reason the Tunisian crowds were able to mobilize so swiftly and to such immediate result—splitting the army leadership from the police in a matter of a few days—was simply that they knew they could. There was scant likelihood of the sort of all-out repression and bloodshed that was met by, say, the protesters against the Iranian mullahs. Thus, and sadly, it’s probably premature to say that the events in Tunis are harbingers of grass-roots movements in other states of the region. (Still, Qaddafi’s own deranged response to the rebellion, ranting about the horrible prospect of a “Bolshevik or American revolution,” was truly heartening. Just to know that he is sweating …)
…When the ancient El Ghriba synagogue there was truck-bombed by al-Qaida in April 2002, the government rushed to express solidarity and to undertake rebuilding, and the Tunisian parliament was unusual in the region for having a Jewish senator. Along the boulevards, young couples in jeans held hands without awkwardness, and I seldom saw a headscarf, let alone a veil or burqa.
I was interested to see an interview last week with a young female protester who described herself and her friends as “children of Bourguiba.” The first president of the country, and the tenacious leader of its independence movement, Habib Bourguiba, was strongly influenced by the ideas of the French Enlightenment. His contribution was to cement, in many minds, secularism as a part of self-government. He publicly broke the Ramadan fast, saying that such a long religious holiday was debilitating to the aspirations of a modern economy. He referred with contempt to face-covering and sponsored a series of laws entrenching the rights of women. During the 1967 war, he took a firm position preventing reprisals against the country’s Jewish community, avoiding the disgraceful scenes that took place that year in other Arab capitals. Long before many other Arab regimes, Tunisia took an active interest in a serious peace agreement with Israel (as well as playing host to the PLO after its expulsion from Beirut in 1982). …
Another ObamaSkeptic emerges writing on the supposed push for deregulation. Jeff Jacoby has thoughts.
…It was only last spring, after all, that The New York Times — in a story headlined “With Obama, Regulations Are Back in Fashion’’ — was reporting on “the surge in rule-making’’ and how the administration “has pressed forward on hundreds of new mandates.’’ In October, a Heritage Foundation report on “Obama’s torrent of new regulation’’ concluded that the federal regulatory burden was increasing at an unprecedented rate: In fiscal 2010 alone, the administration had adopted 43 major new regulations, at an estimated annual cost to the economy of $26.5 billion, a record.
And even as Obama promises to throttle back the regulatory overdrive, the White House says that ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank — the massive new laws overhauling health care and the financial industry, which will create scores of new agencies and generate hundreds of new regulations — will not be affected. You don’t have to be an Obama-wary conservative to assume that the impact of the president’s order, as the Times put it last week, “is likely to be more political than substantive.’’…
Fred Barnes gives an example of how big government can bring out the worst in big business. We are reminded of an article we featured on March 10th, 2010, where Daniel Henninger reviewed historian Burton Fulsom’s book The Myth of Robber Barons. Henninger explains the premise: market entrepreneurs revolutionize markets and create products that benefit people, while political entrepreneurs work the system for their own benefit.
In General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, President Obama may not have picked the worst possible corporate executive to head his new panel on job creation. But Immelt is pretty close.
Immelt is a classic example of a rent-seeking CEO who may know what’s good for his own company but not what produces economic growth and private sector job creation. He supported Obama on the economic stimulus, Obamacare, and cap and trade – policies either unlikely to stir growth and jobs or likely to impede faster growth and hiring.
…Immelt is a big player in Washington, having been a member of the president’s earlier Economic Recovery Advisory Board. The new panel he’ll head is the president’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
Immelt’s support for cap-and-trade was pure rent-seeking. The measure was certain to drive up energy costs and weaken the economy, but GE was expected to benefit enormously. …
He said some people argue for a simple tax on carbon. “But I just think cap and trade is the more practical approach.” Cap-and-trade would let Washington impose a national ceiling on carbon emissions, and companies could buy or sell emission rights. GE, by gaining rights in a windfall as a result of the legislation, would have many rights to sell. …