The China Syndrome

No, this isn’t a digression on Jane Fonda or her lackluster film career (though her appearance in Barbarella can still elicit smiles and prurient fantasies), but rather a brief discussion of while we have it bad, those poor saps in China are sitting on a powderkeg that makes ours look like a firecracker.

In a sense, the political leaders in China are now sitting in a position roughly akin to Brother Flounder in this scene of “Animal House”. This scene and the whole movie is just steeped in delicious irony and too-easy metaphors related to the current meltdown. Paulson as Belushi? Flounder as Hu Jintao? Geithner as D-Day? Who shall we cast as Otter?

China trusted that the West knew what they were talking about when the west sold Deng Xiao Peng the idea that capitalism and working with the capitalists would make China rich. But the black cat of capitalism did not catch mice, rather, it seems to have been trained to hand the key of the Chinese house to its old owner, the West.

Now with the banking Ponzi scheme collapsing around our ears, the export based economy that raised the expectations of the Chinese Proletariat is coming crashing around their ears. Factories are being idled, grain harvests are looking real bad, drought is going in a big way, things are looking like a serious shitheap in Beijing.

While we have the same worries as everyone else on the planet (Global Warming, Peak Oil, Credit Crisis, greedy and incompetent elites), China has these AND massive overpopulation, a seriously degraded environment, and a population that is fairly sick of getting shit on in a way we here in the west cannot even imagine.

So now we are in a place and time where the idiots that led us down a path to the possible fall of the West are trying to figure out a way to make everyone happy. China is also making some threats about how they want their loans guaranteed. Sorry boys, that ain’t gonna work. We can only save China by paupering ourselves and actually pay them back what we owe them.

We all know that isn’t going to play in Peoria.