[lbo-talk] Boycott Japan and China

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 8/10/06, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> Yoshie writes:
>
> >> Everybody wants to sell their products in the US, which harbours the
> world's
> >> largest and freest spending body of consumers.
> >
> > Not everybody, ...I finally got around to reading the NLR article that
> > John Gulick
> > recommended to me offlist, which sketches a triangle relation among
> > Japan, China, and the USA...For many Japanese
> > working-class households, the end of job security has been partly
> > alleviated by waves of cheap Chinese imports of food and clothing.
> ==================================
> Sure, but isn't it still the case that the US has the world's largest pool
> of relatively well off consumers and its most profitable corporations
> which is what draws suppliers of goods and capital to its deep markets?

Yes, but I've been thinking of Moscow and its Middle East policy.
IMHO, Moscow has been more assertive than Beijing in restraining
Washington.  That has several reasons: Moscow has managed to get
closer to bringing the Chechen conflict to an end, which has given it
more freedom of action (if that conflict were still going on at a full
scale, Moscow might feel it wouldn't be able to alienate Washington
too much); oil prices have been high, so the Russian economy has been
better; and Washington's "Color Revolutions" made Moscow rethink its
relation to Washington.  But another reason is that Russia, unlike
China, is economically closer to the EU than to the US.


> China's domestic market is growing rapidly, but its consumers and firms do
> not yet rival the US as "buyer-of-last-resort" in the world trading system.

China's growth, too, is export-led, just like Japan.


> > But this is more a sketch than anything else.  It would be nice if we
> > had an article that fleshes it out with figures, proportions, and
> > historical trends.
>
> Yes, it would be nice to have some hard data to support or refute our
> impressions, but I have'nt had much success googling, and have neither the
> time nor skill to identify and assemble stats on the trend volume of exports
> of goods and services to the US, Japan, and China as a percentage of GDP or
> some other measure.

We also need to look at what and how much Japanese and Chinese
corporations export from Canada and Mexico to the US, too.

On 8/10/06, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> The following article, with its quotations from bigniew Brzezinski gives
> support to Marvin Gandall's argument that Iraq is a neo-con aberration,
> as opposed to my argument that the invasion of the Mideast is consistent
> with, even demanded by, the long-range interests of u.s. imperialism. We
> shall see.

What Washington has been doing about Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran,
etc. sure is consistent with US imperialism, but why is that in the
interests of the Japanese and Chinese ruling classes?
-- 
Yoshie
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