GM & China: The Dirt
THE SHIFT OF GENERAL MOTORS'
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT (R&D)
AND DESIGN TO CHINA
AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE USA
By Gloria Merle Huffman
5/23/2012
1,206 words
I've been watching the general shift of power from the United States of America to China, and the increasing investment of General Motors in China seems to seal our fate.
In a time world, time is king.
FIGHTING DIRT AND WALKING ALL OVER IT
Transportation saves time
Transportation saves time, especially when you can go straight to places of your specific choice. This is a fundamental accelerator of a society's upward progress ... upward from our animal starting point.
Domestic applicances fight grave dirt
Domestic applicances fight grave dirt. For the non-Amish, this takes electricity. The corollary time-saver to electricity is to simply forego hygiene in the home ... a choice compounded by the compelling lure of computers and cell phones. Every day is a battle against the microlife in dust and dirt that chows down on our skin and lungs, requiring us to perpetually remake a personal tunnel through dirt that wants to be our grave.
ABDICATING POWER, CHOOSING POVERTY
Giving our car power to China
Why give our car power to China? I bring up these two things together, dirt at home and General Motors moving key departments of its company to China, because fighting domestic dirt and transporting ourselves across the dirt of the land are so closely intertwined as aids to personal financial progress.
Is it coincidence that the shift of the heart of General Motors to China (Research and Development, and Design) has been accompanied not only by diversionary time-sucking devices like the computer and all the handheld this-and-thats, but also by the "training" of technologically "savvy" citizens to literally fall to the level of third-world domestic life? What good does it do you to have electricity to help you at home if you're not using it because you're on the computer? My brother quipped to me not long ago, "A clean house is a sure sign of a broken computer!"
When we put an American car company into the hands of a different society that doesn't have our best interests at heart, our access to the car can be denied too easily through the pressure of the marketplace: less personal income, higher car and gas prices, no car. Boom. Slave-maker, right there.
The impact of not having a personal car
When we walk or bike or take the bus or train, it exponentially multiplies our daily transportation time. The interplay of personal transportation across the dirt of the land and personal fighting of dirt in the burrow and on the body is one of inverse proportion: the more time it takes you to travel, the less time you have for hygiene and grooming; the less time it takes you to travel, the more time you have for hygiene and grooming. Personal transportation is the key to having the time to look better-groomed and "richer" than your neighbor, more like the manager at work than the managed, which helps you pull even more money in.
From China to Indonesia to the United States presidency - and a U.S. policy choosing poverty
Let's connect this "China Motors" scenario to the Indonesian roots and connections of our current (2008-2012) president, Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.
Our president has stated that Americans need to pay higher gas prices. Why? To discourage travel by car.
Our president has stated that Americans don't need the freedom of cars, that we need to learn to tighten our belts and use public transportation. Why? To cement us into place as worker bees for some other country, not as the upper crust in our own country. It instantly regresses Americans to where we were when railroads were invented.
When we have to rely on public transportation, then our destination choices will be essentially limited to those along the routes of public transportation, and we will be choosing to use transportation only to get us to and from the workplace (working for someone else, perhaps our managers from a different country and culture) and to get us to and from the grocery store.
It's hard to say which is more fundamental to leveraging oneself out of the Stone Age: time-saving electrical appliances in the home, or time-saving transportation to our personal choice of destinations. They're too symbiotic. If you have or take advantage of one but not the other, you are in a precarious position either way.
OUR NEW CHINESE MASTERS
Who are the Chinese with the financial power?
Zero in on our president's connection to China through his Indonesian childhood.
Only about 3% of the highly diverse population of Indonesia is Chinese, yet about 40 families, or 0.1 per cent of the ethnic Chinese population (recent immigrants from China: the totok), control about 80% of the Indonesian economy.(1) The rest of the Indonesian Chinese population (the peranakan) has assimilated and thus lost most of its Chinese identity. They are small shopkeepers, etc., and some are middle class, but most are very poor.
So even in Indonesia we are talking about Chinese from China moving in and taking control of the wealth. The threat to us is not from the rank and file Chinese population anywhere, but from those wealthiest Chinese who have studied finance in Communist China and then moved out into countries they have targeted. They are the Chinese Financial Masters.
"Let's go to the video"
Dan Akerson, CEO of General Motors, looked like a whipped puppy while talking to reporters in Shanghai, China, in February of 2011. He wasn't smiling. He rarely looked up from his notes. He looked grim. He looked like a man who had no options but to capitulate to a foreign aggressor and who had to do so in a gracious manner.
"General Motors Is Becoming China Motors"(2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvl5Gan69Wo
He wasn't acting like a proud American. He didn't say this was going to help America. If you listen closely to his chosen wording, he actually said we are "working for China." He said the heavy investment in China was in order "to ensure our long-term success." By "our," he didn't mean America's success. He meant the success of the company named General Motors. And if General Motors succeeds under Chinese financing, leadership, and eventual outright ownership, that's a success for Communist China but not for a democratic America. To refer to China as the "crown jewel" at GM is not a gesture of appreciation; it is a bow to the crown of the conquering king ... Communist China.
The children of The Greatest Generation have dropped the ball and lost the game.
WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT "CHINA MOTORS?"
We are witnessing a major redistribution of the wealth our parents helped create. When we have too little income and no personal car, we are stripped of our power. We are ripe for the harvesting of our slave labor by other masters.
Our need is clear: we need American cars under American control, now.
Or are cars obsolete? If so, then we need hovercraft or personal flying machines and China can have General Motors. The people with the fastest time accelerators are the winners.
Hovercraft: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovercraft
Personal Flying Machine: http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130235&page=1
The Inventor, Michael Moshier: http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/2001/Feb/10/business.html
Inventor Michael Moshier and his Personal Flying Machine: he got $5 million from the U.S. Navy to develop his vehicle.
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Footnotes:
(1) Insight Guide Indonesia (APA Publications, part of the Langenscheidt Publishing Group, Singapore, 5th Edition 2001; ISBN 1-58573-372-5) [Indonesia title discontinued after 2001], p. 57
(2) "General Motors Is Becoming China Motors"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvl5Gan69Wo
© 2012 Gloria Merle Huffman
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UNITED STATES COULD BECOME WORLD'S LARGEST EXPORTER OF OIL
By Gloria Merle Huffman
11/26/2012
758 words + 107-word notes
The development of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking has transformed the oil industry worldwide and has enabled the United States to begin exploiting its massive oil stores in the Bakken(1) and Three Forks shale formations in North Dakota and Montana. Production is already so prolific that North Dakota has surpassed Alaska (but not Texas) in crude oil production and special trains are having to transport the oil from the Great Plains to the port area of Tacoma, Washington (the Seattle area), while pipelines are being constructed (the pipelines will take years to complete).(2) The surge in U.S. oil production is forcing the price of crude oil down, and should be reflected in lower gasoline prices.
An Associated Press article on November 12, 2012, proclaimed that the U.S. could become the single leading exporter of oil.(3)
The New York Times said on August 9, 2012, "At a time when the global meme is of America’s inevitable economic decline, the surge in oil supply capacity is an important contrarian indicator."(4)
Why did President Barack Obama allow his prevention of offshore oil drilling in the United States to become a hot potato political issue in 2012 when he already knew about the incredibly huge amounts of oil in North Dakota? Why did the news media not immediately quell the fears of the public with counterbalancing reports of the fact that the U.S. is poised to become the next Saudi Arabia of the oil world, along with Iraq, Canada and Brazil? Why was everyone crying about unemployment, and why was Obama begging people to trust him to create more jobs (if only they would elect him to a second term as President of the U.S.) if he already knew that jobs in the energy sector were set to explode upwards due to the coming oil boom that is already here?
The more important question is, "How fast can people adjust to learning that the old assumption that the world is running out of oil was wrong?" However, if you plan to make a profit in the coming boom, be forewarned that by 2015 there will be a glut of oil, at which point prices will fall or even collapse, so get in and get out.(5)
There are proposals to ship oil from Washington State to West Coast refineries and possibly Asia.(6) Possibly Asia? The huge Asian financial markets? Like China, maybe? The same China that got such critical parts of General Motors, the car manufacturer?
You can sell American cars to China, or you can give the Chinese the means to make their own cars and then sell them the gas (or its precursor, in the form of crude oil) without which the cars can't go anywhere! I knew there had to be a good (and self-interested) reason for the United States to make the deal they made with China on General Motors. The U.S. had to have an ace up its sleeve, and it was a "dirty" ace, after all: United States shale oil, liberated by the same revolutionary technology that is extracting Brazilian presalt oil and oil from Canadian oil sands.(7)
How would North Dakotan oil be shipped to China? By rail over 1,150 miles to Puget Sound in the Seattle area of Washington State and from there in tanker ships across the Pacific Ocean? There is another possible (though longer) route: 625 miles by rail, truck, or pipeline from the COLT (Crude Oil Loading Terminal) Hub(8) in the Bakken and Three Forks shale area (Williston, North Dakota) to waiting oil tanker ships in the Mississipi River port city of Minneapolis (in Minnesota), from there down the Mighty Mississippi (passing another 10 port cities along the river) to New Orleans, Louisiana, out into the Gulf of Mexico (a regular run from the COLT Hub), then straight to the Panama Canal, which is controlled by China, and across the Pacific Ocean to China. China could send its own tanker ships from home to Minneapolis without touching land (i.e., dirt) to get crude oil from North Dakota for its General Motors cars and other energy needs, on a watery route that they themselves control as far as the port of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the Mississippi River delta. (The Panama Canal will figure prominently in future news due to Chinese control of this critical shortcut between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and due to news of its future larger rival in Nicaragua.)(9)(10)
It's all about oil and gas and making things go. And that's the lowdown dirt on GM & China.
____
Footnotes:
(1) "Bakken Oil Shale Map" (NE Montana and NW North Dakota)
http://oilshalegas.com/bakkenshale.html
(2) "Oil boom resonates in South Sound" [11/25/2012]
http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/11/25/2379662/oil-boom-resonates-in-south-sound.html
(3) "U.S. Could Become Leading Exporter of Oil, Natural Gas" [11/12/2012]
http://247wallst.com/2012/11/12/u-s-could-become-leading-exporter-of-oil-natural-gas/
(4) "The Coming Oil Boom" [8/9/2012]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/10/us/10iht-letter10.html
(5) "The Coming Oil Boom," op. cit.
(6) "Plains oil boom impacting Washington refineries, ports" [11/26/2012]
http://www.greatfallstribune.com/viewart/20121126/NEWS01/311260028/Plains-oil-boom-impacting-Washington-refineries-ports
(7) "The Coming Oil Boom," op. cit.
(8) "Oil loading terminal serving ND Bakken Shale begins service" - Oil & Gas Financial Journal [6/11/2012]
http://www.ogfj.com/articles/2012/06/oil-loading-terminal-serving-nd-bakken-shale-begins-service.html
(9) "Is China in Control of the Panama Canal?" [4/5/2000]
http://archive.newsmax.com/articles/?a=2000/4/5/80227
(10) "Nicaragua to Build $30 Billion Waterway to Rival Panama Canal" [6/7/2012]
© 2012 Gloria Merle Huffman
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