THE RISE OF CHINA'S AUTO INDUSTRY
"In recent years, China has become the world's fastest growing automotive producer," according to a new report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service.
"[China's] annual vehicle output has increased from less than 2 million vehicles in the late 1990s to 9.5 million in 2008. In terms of production volume in 2008, China has surpassed Korea, France, Germany, and the United States, trailing only Japan."
"China’s automobile industry has continued to expand despite the global economic downturn. From January to October 2009, more than 10 million vehicles were sold in China. If such growth continues, China is on its way to becoming world’s largest auto market," the CRS said.
See "The Rise of China's Auto Industry and Its Impact on the U.S. Motor Vehicle Industry," November 16, 2009.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
NEWSWEEK ‘A Global Fault Line’ The retreat of Muslim moderates. Lewis M. Simons
NEWSWEEK
11/16/09
‘A Global Fault Line’
The retreat of Muslim moderates.
Lewis M. Simons
When young Barack Hussein Obama lived with his American mother and Indonesian stepfather in Jakarta nearly 40 years ago, the Muslims of Southeast Asia were renowned for their moderation. Women may have covered their hair with a light scarf, but almost none veiled their faces. It was the rare Muslim man who grew a beard, and many drank with non-Muslim friends.
Today, as Obama prepares to meet with Southeast Asia's leaders in Singapore, all that, and more, is shifting. Moderation is suspect, as many of the region's quarter billion Muslims—more than in the Middle East—turn to the birthplace of Islam to reaffirm their religious identity. Though still a distinct minority, fundamentalists are demanding—and obtaining—a greater role for Sharia, or religious law, in family life and in the life of the nation.
In recent travel, I found signs of the drift throughout the region's five major Islamic centers: Indonesia, Malaysia, the southern Philippines, southern Thailand, and Singapore. Nowhere was it more jarring than Bulukumba, on the orchid-shaped Indonesian island of Sulawesi. With 350,000 people, mostly farmers whose holdings are shrinking as the population booms, Bulukumba is one of the poorest places on the island, and religious rule has supplanted the secular. In 2006 radical clergy, backed by sympathetic local politicians, military, and police officers, imposed Sharia over constitutional law. Today, Bulukumba is just one of more than two dozen such towns in the archipelago. Women are required to wear the jilbab, or headscarf. Wage earners are required to contribute 2.5 percent of their income as zakat, or alms. Children by the age of 7 must prove reading proficiency of the Quran in Arabic to qualify for elementary school. So must couples seeking approval to marry, and civil serv-ants applying for promotion.
Similar changes are happening in Malaysia. When I met with Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, I related this little story: in 1970, during a dinner party, my wife found herself dancing a quadrille with his father, then–prime minister Tun Abdul Razak, and I with his mother. A cloud crossed Najib's face. He peered directly at me over his wire-rim glasses and said nothing. Such behavior, we both understood, would be out of the question in today's Malaysia, now a proudly Islamic fundamentalist state.
Along the border, Muslims and Buddhists in southern Thailand are slaughtering each other. Since 2004, some 3,500 have been killed. The government in Bangkok says the Muslim fighters are common criminals. But in the city of Hat Yai, Monsour Salleh, a counselor to the militant Muslim Youth Association of Thailand, praised them as religious warriors. "The young generation of Muslims believes in jihad," he said. "They are good boys, dignified and committed, who study the Quran. They learn that if they fight to right injustice, they will be rewarded in heaven."
In the small southern Philippines town of Pikit, on the terror-torn island of Basilan, a Roman Catholic priest told me that fundamentalist attitudes were hardening among the Moros, as Muslims in the area are known. "It's an identity crisis," said Father Bert Layson, who is openly sympathetic to the Moros. "And it's been infinitely heightened through globalism by the international Islamic revival. This is leading the Moros back to their old belief that they must live in an Islamic environment in order to truly practice Islam." An estimated 120,000 Muslims and Christians have killed each other in the southern Philippines since 1970.
Singaporeans—obedient, relentlessly middle-class, and overwhelmingly ethnic Chinese—were stunned when, in 2001, the government narrowly averted a sophisticated attack planned by homegrown members of the Jemaah Islamiah terror organization. As on any taut ship, Singapore's captain remains obsessed over a future threat. "We're sitting on a global fault line," Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told me.
Now, on Obama's first trip to Southeast Asia as president, the region's leaders are pressing him to reengage with a part of the world the U.S. has largely ignored. He would be wise to accede. For even as fundamentalism advances among them, the Muslims of Southeast Asia want Americans—in sandals and sneakers, not combat boots—to return and work with them as Peace Corps volunteers, teachers, agriculturalists, and entrepreneurs. This may be the best chance the United States will have to launch a "preemptive peace," a chance to set things right with Muslims everywhere.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Lewis M. Simons is co-author, with Senator Christopher S. Bond, of The Next Front: Southeast Asia and the Road to Global Peace with Islam and of a related essay in the current issue ofForeign Affairs.
11/16/09
‘A Global Fault Line’
The retreat of Muslim moderates.
Lewis M. Simons
When young Barack Hussein Obama lived with his American mother and Indonesian stepfather in Jakarta nearly 40 years ago, the Muslims of Southeast Asia were renowned for their moderation. Women may have covered their hair with a light scarf, but almost none veiled their faces. It was the rare Muslim man who grew a beard, and many drank with non-Muslim friends.
Today, as Obama prepares to meet with Southeast Asia's leaders in Singapore, all that, and more, is shifting. Moderation is suspect, as many of the region's quarter billion Muslims—more than in the Middle East—turn to the birthplace of Islam to reaffirm their religious identity. Though still a distinct minority, fundamentalists are demanding—and obtaining—a greater role for Sharia, or religious law, in family life and in the life of the nation.
In recent travel, I found signs of the drift throughout the region's five major Islamic centers: Indonesia, Malaysia, the southern Philippines, southern Thailand, and Singapore. Nowhere was it more jarring than Bulukumba, on the orchid-shaped Indonesian island of Sulawesi. With 350,000 people, mostly farmers whose holdings are shrinking as the population booms, Bulukumba is one of the poorest places on the island, and religious rule has supplanted the secular. In 2006 radical clergy, backed by sympathetic local politicians, military, and police officers, imposed Sharia over constitutional law. Today, Bulukumba is just one of more than two dozen such towns in the archipelago. Women are required to wear the jilbab, or headscarf. Wage earners are required to contribute 2.5 percent of their income as zakat, or alms. Children by the age of 7 must prove reading proficiency of the Quran in Arabic to qualify for elementary school. So must couples seeking approval to marry, and civil serv-ants applying for promotion.
Similar changes are happening in Malaysia. When I met with Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, I related this little story: in 1970, during a dinner party, my wife found herself dancing a quadrille with his father, then–prime minister Tun Abdul Razak, and I with his mother. A cloud crossed Najib's face. He peered directly at me over his wire-rim glasses and said nothing. Such behavior, we both understood, would be out of the question in today's Malaysia, now a proudly Islamic fundamentalist state.
Along the border, Muslims and Buddhists in southern Thailand are slaughtering each other. Since 2004, some 3,500 have been killed. The government in Bangkok says the Muslim fighters are common criminals. But in the city of Hat Yai, Monsour Salleh, a counselor to the militant Muslim Youth Association of Thailand, praised them as religious warriors. "The young generation of Muslims believes in jihad," he said. "They are good boys, dignified and committed, who study the Quran. They learn that if they fight to right injustice, they will be rewarded in heaven."
In the small southern Philippines town of Pikit, on the terror-torn island of Basilan, a Roman Catholic priest told me that fundamentalist attitudes were hardening among the Moros, as Muslims in the area are known. "It's an identity crisis," said Father Bert Layson, who is openly sympathetic to the Moros. "And it's been infinitely heightened through globalism by the international Islamic revival. This is leading the Moros back to their old belief that they must live in an Islamic environment in order to truly practice Islam." An estimated 120,000 Muslims and Christians have killed each other in the southern Philippines since 1970.
Singaporeans—obedient, relentlessly middle-class, and overwhelmingly ethnic Chinese—were stunned when, in 2001, the government narrowly averted a sophisticated attack planned by homegrown members of the Jemaah Islamiah terror organization. As on any taut ship, Singapore's captain remains obsessed over a future threat. "We're sitting on a global fault line," Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told me.
Now, on Obama's first trip to Southeast Asia as president, the region's leaders are pressing him to reengage with a part of the world the U.S. has largely ignored. He would be wise to accede. For even as fundamentalism advances among them, the Muslims of Southeast Asia want Americans—in sandals and sneakers, not combat boots—to return and work with them as Peace Corps volunteers, teachers, agriculturalists, and entrepreneurs. This may be the best chance the United States will have to launch a "preemptive peace," a chance to set things right with Muslims everywhere.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Lewis M. Simons is co-author, with Senator Christopher S. Bond, of The Next Front: Southeast Asia and the Road to Global Peace with Islam and of a related essay in the current issue ofForeign Affairs.
Cocaine-Dealing Rabbi Points the Way Forward in Middle East Peace Process
http://gawker.com/5408467/cocaine+dealing-rabbi-points-the-way-forward-in-middle-east-peace-process
Cocaine-Dealing Rabbi Points the Way Forward in Middle East Peace Process
Rabbi Baruch Chalomish is on trial in England for operating what prosecutors call a "commercial cocaine-supply operation" and paying prostitutes with coke. That's the bad news. The good news is that his partner in crime is named Nasir Abbas.
Peace is possible, people. If Jews and Arabs can work together to sell cocaine and service hookers, what can't they accomplish?
Cocaine-Dealing Rabbi Points the Way Forward in Middle East Peace Process
Rabbi Baruch Chalomish is on trial in England for operating what prosecutors call a "commercial cocaine-supply operation" and paying prostitutes with coke. That's the bad news. The good news is that his partner in crime is named Nasir Abbas.
Peace is possible, people. If Jews and Arabs can work together to sell cocaine and service hookers, what can't they accomplish?
Commentary: Piece of cake? By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/2009/11/19/Commentary-Piece-of-cake/UPI-32171258647169/
Commentary: Piece of cake?
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
UPI Editor at Large
WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 (UPI) -- "It will be just like Syria," said the strategic scholar just back from Israel and speculating about the much-debated question of whether Israel will eventually bomb Iran's nuclear installations.
It was a private conversation, and the erudite Middle Eastern expert was referring to Israel's Sept. 6, 2007, bombing of a suspected nuclear site in Syria that had been secretly erected in a remote part of the country with the help of North Korean experts. The Israeli air force "can drop their guided missiles down a smokestack, and their submarine-launched cruise missiles can single out any building, and the Iranians, like the Syrians, will keep quiet about it."
And why would Iran's leaders keep quiet instead of issuing a general call to arms to all Muslims? Because, he reasoned, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has bragged publicly that Iran's anti-aircraft defenses are "impenetrable." Unmentioned is the distinct possibility that Ahmadinejad and some ayatollahs would welcome Israeli bombs as a way of uniting both Shiite and Sunni wings of the global ummah against Israel and the United States.
For an armchair strategist to be that far removed from reality is a little frightening. Syria's nuclear site was located in a deserted part of the country near the Turkish border. Iran's targets are deliberately implanted among heavily populated areas. A single bomb, however accurate, would translate into pictures and TV footage of dead women and children -- and worldwide condemnation.
The U.S. brass is unanimously opposed to any Israeli and/or U.S. attack against any of Iran's 27 known nuclear installations. Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen and the four service chiefs can see the Strait of Hormuz -- through which 25 percent of the world's oil transits -- mined and supertankers sunk, and vital oil installations up and down the Persian Gulf swept up in the maelstrom.
Three former CENTCOM commanders have said that learning to live with an Iranian nuclear weapon should be no more of a brain-teaser than it was when China's Mao Zedong predicted a coming nuclear war in which hundreds of millions would perish -- and China (with 800 million at the time) would win if only by numbers surviving. The United States also accommodated Stalin when the Soviet Union shattered America's atomic and then nuclear monopoly.
Gen. Chuck Wald, the retired EUCOM commander and a FAC pilot in the Vietnam War, is the only recent four star who has openly advocated a joint U.S.-Israeli raid against Iran's nuclear sites if the ayatollahs don't come clean. Iran's ceaseless denials that it has nuclear weapons ambitions are threadbare. A recently revealed underground nuclear enrichment plant, tunneled into the side of a mountain near the holy city of Qom, convinced International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors there is a yet-to-be-discovered honeycomb of nuclear facilities under provincial cities.
But more important than Iran's "almost there" nuclear status is the growing opposition movement in the streets of Tehran. It is comparable in many ways to what happened in the Lenin shipyards in the Polish port of Gdansk in 1978, led by Lech Walesa, an embryonic anti-communist movement that led to the collapse of the Soviet empire 11 years later.
An Israeli air attack on Iran's nuclear installations would quickly still opposition voices and rally public opinion to the hard-line clerical regime against U.S. interests throughout the Middle East. Iran's most critical installations are scattered and buried deeply. At most, Iran's nuclear effort could be set back a few years. But any country so attacked would redouble its efforts to deter another attack in the future.
Iran's dilatory tactics included an offer to ship part of its nuclear fuel to Russia or France temporarily, where it would be processed and returned harmless for medical purposes. But obfuscation soon followed with a laundry list of caveats before it was withdrawn.
Tough, coercive sanctions by Western powers and Russia and China are unlikely to reach consensus. Russia told Iran it would have to delay for the Nth time bringing the nuclear power plant it built in Bushehr online. No surprise or pain for Iran. China would like tougher sanctions -- but not the kind that would make an ayatollah cry Farsi for uncle. Threatening Iran merely reinforces the arguments of the ayatollahs who want a nuke NOW.
President Obama hopes to put relations with Iran on a new trajectory to supersede the diplomatic travail of a bygone era. For Iran's hard-line clerics, this can only mean a U.S. attempt to sideline their nuclear ambitions. Like French President de Gaulle in the late 1950s and '60s, these aging ayatollahs and their front man Ahmadinejad are convinced nuclear weaponization would give their regime legitimacy, respectability and protection.
It's also scaring their Sunni Arab neighbors from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates (but excluding Oman, across the Hormuz Strait, which takes comfort in a mutual admiration relationship). Many of the ruling sheiks say privately they would welcome anything that neutralizes Iran's nuclear agenda, but they are terrified at the idea of an Iran-led bloody backlash up and down the Persian Gulf. Iran's revolutionary maritime guards in their small speedboats can sow enough mines to close the strait long enough to drive oil up to $300 or $400 per barrel. And Iran's covert assets can trigger mayhem throughout the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia is already fighting Yemeni insurgents who have been armed with Iranian weapons shipped up the Red Sea to their common border. Forcing the Saudis to divert military assets from the Gulf to the Red Sea appears to be Iran's objective.
Commentary: Piece of cake?
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
UPI Editor at Large
WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 (UPI) -- "It will be just like Syria," said the strategic scholar just back from Israel and speculating about the much-debated question of whether Israel will eventually bomb Iran's nuclear installations.
It was a private conversation, and the erudite Middle Eastern expert was referring to Israel's Sept. 6, 2007, bombing of a suspected nuclear site in Syria that had been secretly erected in a remote part of the country with the help of North Korean experts. The Israeli air force "can drop their guided missiles down a smokestack, and their submarine-launched cruise missiles can single out any building, and the Iranians, like the Syrians, will keep quiet about it."
And why would Iran's leaders keep quiet instead of issuing a general call to arms to all Muslims? Because, he reasoned, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has bragged publicly that Iran's anti-aircraft defenses are "impenetrable." Unmentioned is the distinct possibility that Ahmadinejad and some ayatollahs would welcome Israeli bombs as a way of uniting both Shiite and Sunni wings of the global ummah against Israel and the United States.
For an armchair strategist to be that far removed from reality is a little frightening. Syria's nuclear site was located in a deserted part of the country near the Turkish border. Iran's targets are deliberately implanted among heavily populated areas. A single bomb, however accurate, would translate into pictures and TV footage of dead women and children -- and worldwide condemnation.
The U.S. brass is unanimously opposed to any Israeli and/or U.S. attack against any of Iran's 27 known nuclear installations. Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen and the four service chiefs can see the Strait of Hormuz -- through which 25 percent of the world's oil transits -- mined and supertankers sunk, and vital oil installations up and down the Persian Gulf swept up in the maelstrom.
Three former CENTCOM commanders have said that learning to live with an Iranian nuclear weapon should be no more of a brain-teaser than it was when China's Mao Zedong predicted a coming nuclear war in which hundreds of millions would perish -- and China (with 800 million at the time) would win if only by numbers surviving. The United States also accommodated Stalin when the Soviet Union shattered America's atomic and then nuclear monopoly.
Gen. Chuck Wald, the retired EUCOM commander and a FAC pilot in the Vietnam War, is the only recent four star who has openly advocated a joint U.S.-Israeli raid against Iran's nuclear sites if the ayatollahs don't come clean. Iran's ceaseless denials that it has nuclear weapons ambitions are threadbare. A recently revealed underground nuclear enrichment plant, tunneled into the side of a mountain near the holy city of Qom, convinced International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors there is a yet-to-be-discovered honeycomb of nuclear facilities under provincial cities.
But more important than Iran's "almost there" nuclear status is the growing opposition movement in the streets of Tehran. It is comparable in many ways to what happened in the Lenin shipyards in the Polish port of Gdansk in 1978, led by Lech Walesa, an embryonic anti-communist movement that led to the collapse of the Soviet empire 11 years later.
An Israeli air attack on Iran's nuclear installations would quickly still opposition voices and rally public opinion to the hard-line clerical regime against U.S. interests throughout the Middle East. Iran's most critical installations are scattered and buried deeply. At most, Iran's nuclear effort could be set back a few years. But any country so attacked would redouble its efforts to deter another attack in the future.
Iran's dilatory tactics included an offer to ship part of its nuclear fuel to Russia or France temporarily, where it would be processed and returned harmless for medical purposes. But obfuscation soon followed with a laundry list of caveats before it was withdrawn.
Tough, coercive sanctions by Western powers and Russia and China are unlikely to reach consensus. Russia told Iran it would have to delay for the Nth time bringing the nuclear power plant it built in Bushehr online. No surprise or pain for Iran. China would like tougher sanctions -- but not the kind that would make an ayatollah cry Farsi for uncle. Threatening Iran merely reinforces the arguments of the ayatollahs who want a nuke NOW.
President Obama hopes to put relations with Iran on a new trajectory to supersede the diplomatic travail of a bygone era. For Iran's hard-line clerics, this can only mean a U.S. attempt to sideline their nuclear ambitions. Like French President de Gaulle in the late 1950s and '60s, these aging ayatollahs and their front man Ahmadinejad are convinced nuclear weaponization would give their regime legitimacy, respectability and protection.
It's also scaring their Sunni Arab neighbors from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates (but excluding Oman, across the Hormuz Strait, which takes comfort in a mutual admiration relationship). Many of the ruling sheiks say privately they would welcome anything that neutralizes Iran's nuclear agenda, but they are terrified at the idea of an Iran-led bloody backlash up and down the Persian Gulf. Iran's revolutionary maritime guards in their small speedboats can sow enough mines to close the strait long enough to drive oil up to $300 or $400 per barrel. And Iran's covert assets can trigger mayhem throughout the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia is already fighting Yemeni insurgents who have been armed with Iranian weapons shipped up the Red Sea to their common border. Forcing the Saudis to divert military assets from the Gulf to the Red Sea appears to be Iran's objective.
Global Warfare U.S. Military Operations in All Major Regions of the World By Rick_Rozoff
Global Warfare
U.S. Military Operations in All Major Regions of the World
By Rick_Rozoff
Not only does one country account for the overwhelming plurality of world military expenditures, but that nation also has troops and bases on all six habitable continents (as well as a 54-year military mission in Antarctica, Operation Deep Freeze) and eleven aircraft carrier strike groups and six navy fleets that roam the world's oceans and seas at will. It is also expanding a global interceptor missile system on land, on sea, in the air and into space that will leave it invulnerable to retaliation. Continue
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24002.htm
U.S. Military Operations in All Major Regions of the World
By Rick_Rozoff
Not only does one country account for the overwhelming plurality of world military expenditures, but that nation also has troops and bases on all six habitable continents (as well as a 54-year military mission in Antarctica, Operation Deep Freeze) and eleven aircraft carrier strike groups and six navy fleets that roam the world's oceans and seas at will. It is also expanding a global interceptor missile system on land, on sea, in the air and into space that will leave it invulnerable to retaliation. Continue
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24002.htm
Shamus Cooke A Fraudulent Jobs Summit
Shamus Cooke
A Fraudulent Jobs Summit
http://www.counterpunch.org/cooke11192009.html
A Fraudulent Jobs Summit
http://www.counterpunch.org/cooke11192009.html
# Iran Began Preparing for U.S. Bombing in 2002 Gareth Porter
# Iran Began Preparing for U.S. Bombing in 2002
Gareth Porter / 11/18/2009
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/11/iran-began-preparing-for-u-s-bombing-in-2002/
Gareth Porter / 11/18/2009
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/11/iran-began-preparing-for-u-s-bombing-in-2002/
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