News item:
...Unhindered by quotas, China's sales to the United States surged 65%, to $1.4 billion, compared with the same month last year, according to data released this week by the China National Textile and Apparel Council. Shipments to the European Union jumped 46% to $1.5 billion.
Even more stark was the increase in China's exports of cotton knit shirts and trousers, two of its most popular items. In January, China shipped nearly 27 million cotton trousers, up from 1.9 million a year earlier, according to a U.S. industry analysis of Chinese customs data. The Asian country shipped 18 million cotton knit shirts in January, up from 941,000.
Back in the days of yore, back before "everything changed", Naomi Klein wrote a wonderful piece on the globalization / corporatization efforts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade organization (WTO), and similar oligarch-based efforts. Here's a snippet:
If you think about the nature of the complaints raised against the World Trade Organization, it is that governments around the world have embraced an economic model that involves much more than opening borders to goods and services. This is why it is not useful to use the language of anti-globalization. Most people do not really know what globalization is, and the term makes the movement extremely vulnerable to stock dismissals like: ‘If you are against trade and globalization why do you drink coffee?’ Whereas in reality the movement is a rejection of what is being bundled along with trade and so-called globalization—against the set of transformative political policies that every country in the world has been told they must accept in order to make themselves hospitable to investment. I call this package ‘McGovernment’.
Indeed. And with expiration of WTO-imposed quotas, the chickens are now going to come home to roost to McGovernment's around the world.
They knew exactly what they were doing five years ago. Funny how so many cultures can take a long view of ideas, but when U.S. representatives to bodies such as the WTO get involved, they're only looking as far as the next election cycle.
And as a result, China owns you.
