Today I read about how true that statement really is. Chinese President Hu Jintao’s first visit to the U.S. will not be to Washington D.C., but instead to the state of Washington. C-net is reporting that he will be attending a dinner at Bill Gates’ house, along with other top pacific economic players.

This comes on the heels of the Chineese government requiring all PC makers to ship their product with a “licensed” operating system. Someone should tell them that Linux is both free and licensed.

So… when do you think Microsoft will get a seat at the U.N.?

I’m still reading the BBC’s articles on this topic, which are great, but what I have issue with is the tone of the comment on the Passport blog. To quote:

Seven tenths of a percent of America is behind bars. That doesn’t sound like much, right? Well, that is actually more than 2 million people. And get this: prisoners in China are only .118 percent of the total population, while Brazil locks up only .183 percent of its citizens.

The implication is that there are a LOT of people in US prisons. While it may be true that perhaps there are too many people in US prisons, I’d like to take a moment to clarify the disparity between US and, say, Chinese prisons.

We like to think of the Chinese government as having an iron-clad grip on its citizens, but this is a half-truth. First off, China has 1.3 billion people, and most live in rural areas. Families and communities take care of crime, not a legislature and police force, and one can imagine that crimes like stealing and rape are handled much differently than in a large city.

Other factors, such as the “disappearance” of enemies of the state, China’s extradition policy, their execution policy, as well as corruption within law enforcement all influence this statistic. Be careful when comparing things, prison rates in Brazil or China are very different from those in most developed countries for many reasons.

Not that I don’t think that we may be a bit over-zealous with our drug possession policy

The notes are also amusing, and underline the difficulties that map-makers run into, even if they are demonstrating a proof-of-concept relational map. “How do we represent Palestine or Taiwan” are obvious problems, but less obvious ones include “do we count Greenland when representing Denmark’s population density?”

Vladimir Putin will be played by Phil Collins

Jacques Chirac played by James Garner

Acting Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Olmert played by Abe Vigoda

IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei played by Mr Spaceley

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad played by Ringo Starr

John Bolton played by a walrus

Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei played by ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons

Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing played by Gilbert Godfrey

Condoleeza Rice played by James Brown

Donald Rumsfeld played by Skeletor

George W. Bush played by Kevin Federline

Conan himself will also be starring in the movie, playing Finnish President Tarja Halonen.
What she has to do with the Iranian Crisis I have yet to discover…

I must say, it’s rather discouraging. The guy seems to be a rather rabidly liberal, believing that the sole reason why U.S. government was concerned about Iran’s nuclear program is so that they can invade and userp control of Iran’s oil. He also, rather pompously, brags that his conversations with his ‘contacts’ in Israel are worthey of being recorded by the FBI, and that said contracts were reporting that Israel was mobalizing it’s forces to invade Iran. He then goes on to say that this is inevitable, because without such a war Israel’s economic situation would deteriorate. Since this was recorded prior to Jan 27th, 2005, obviously not.

Wow. Where do I begin? I am by no means a supporter of Bush or his war on Iraq, but this professor is completely ignoring basic IR principles with his statements. The interview seems to be with the “voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran”, which (with such a title) is understandably biased against the US and Israel. But the Professor goes out of his way to promote propagandist ideas which seem to me to be just as bad as the ones promoted by Bush or Rice.

I heard that this guy was a bit off, but man, it’s going to be a long semester… Here’s a response someone else had on Rob’s Blog

Cheers for the blog. I went to SFSU and I took this guys class. It might not suprise you that this is one of his lectures. He espouses this stuff all the time, and if you disagree then you get an F…no foolin’. I took issue with a comment of his once and he stared me down in front of 35 students and a guest speaker. Cant believe he’s on international radio…..

Oh boy…

Obviously some are blatantly exploiting the free services of IKEA, such as parents who drop off their children at the store’s day care facility, and then take off to run errands elsewhere. The part that I found intriguing, though, was how IKEA’s relatively inexpensive food made it a meeting place for the working poor, truckers, and elderly.

A lot of poorer individuals have some money, but find the experience of going to a soup kitchen rather humiliating. For just a couple euros, they can grab baked salmon or something rather tasty at IKEA, while being surrounded by middle-class and well-to-do shoppers. Thus, the damage to ones self image is averted.

This makes me wonder how the economics of the IKEA cafeteria work out. Obviously providing good and cheap food to it’s shoppers is something that encourages people to spend more hours shopping, but does the cafeteria actually make a profit? Or instead, does the income of futon, sofa, and light fixtures simply offset the costs of the restaurant? Clearly there’s a demand for good, cheap food in a friendly cafeteria-style environment, so why hasn’t this niche been filled before?

If the IKEA restaurant does indeed have positive cash flow, but the economics are such that it could never be a standalone store, then it’s possible that the mega-giant has found a way to semi-privatize feeding the poor while also accomplishing their other goals (selling funny-looking furniture). The article tends to support this idea, since it seems IKEA is feeding so many people in Europe that it would be insane to take a loss on the food.

It’s difficult for me to imagine other stores adopting this same model, but I’m sure if there were $4 or $5 salmon plates at Wal-Mart, shoppers may be more inclined to eat there than at the in-store McDonalds.

Maybe that’s hoping for too much though. After all, IKEA is from the rather socialist Sweden, and Wal-Mart has much different origins…

The concept of moving production from an expensive country, such as the US or Western Europe, to another more efficient or cost-effective region is not new. For decades, industries ranging from textiles to electronic equipment and cars have been seeking cheaper forms of labor in China and South America. The outsourcing of services, such as technical support or programming, is a more recent development thanks to advancements in communication and other technologies. This has resulted in a boom in countries like India and the Philippines. We tend to think of both these forms of outsourcing as being limited to occurring in Western countries, but recent reports have shown that the outward flow of jobs is not limited to rich nations.

A recent NYT article outlines how Infosys, a huge services company in India, is expanding it’s business into China. American and other rich countries choose Infosys and their cheap Indian labor when they are looking to reduce costs in their home countries. ‘Reduce costs’, of course, generally means the layoff of American workers. The huge boom, which has resulted in Indian cities like Hyderabad, has led to high wages (by Indian standards) and also a high employee turnover rate. To stem the rising costs, companies like Infosys are looking at alternatives, such as China.

From the article: ”Today, options for people are increasing in India so rapidly,” Mr. Shamanna said, ”that hiring has become a matter of who’s willing to overpay the most. When you look at the numbers of engineering graduates coming out of the Chinese universities, this becomes a very attractive place for us.”

The result is double-outsourcing which, in addition to allowing even more Western jobs to migrate away, also results in lower wages for Indian employees. Indians are truly going to get a dose of their own medicine.

This twice-removed phenomenon is not limited to services, but also involves the manufacturing sector. The Washington Post reports that this is also occurring in the aforementioned China. We tend to think of Chinese manufacturing as being the absolute bottom of the scale when it comes to costs; but in China, where the economy is rapidly heating up, businessmen are finding that the arena is too competitive. Increased wages for factory workers, coupled with the Chinese governments inability to keep the lights on during the boom, are influencing business owners to find alternatives. More and more are choosing Vietnam.

From the article: “It’s a bit like the United States and Mexico,” said Deng Weiwen, general manager of TCL (Vietnam) Corp., the local arm of the giant Chinese television maker, which established a factory outside Ho Chi Minh City in 1999. “China and Vietnam complement each other.”

Complementary may be one way to describe it; exploitative may be another. A Chinese businessman whose company outsourced their motorcycle factory to Vietnam said “Here, the workers can really accept hardship [...] whatever requirements you set out for them in a day, they meet.” (WP article). While the lower minimum wage in Vietnam is one advantage, another attractive feature is the absence of safety and environmental standards (both of which the Chinese government is becoming more strict about).

So what does this all mean? Is this the “race to the bottom” which Pearlstein mentioned in his article A New Politics Born of Globalization? It certainly could be perceived that way. In the US-India-China example, services are being outsourced in a search for the lowest cost of labor. MNC’s like Intel and Microsoft are driving companies like Infopath to curtail the growing (yet still very low) salaries of Indian employees by outsourcing even further. China, who hardly receives praise for it’s safety and wage standards, faces competition from neighboring Vietnam. Astonishingly, the environmental spillover costs of certain industries (considered too high in China!) are acceptable in Vietnam. The resulting effect of these migrations is that MNC’s force the world to find the absolute rock-bottom price of labor.

When “race to the bottom” finishes, will the result be a universally poor society? Probably not. Globalization is hardly over so it’s difficult to predict the future, but we can take examples from Western countries to find an answer. Industrialized countries, while resistant to the outsourcing of jobs, usually prosper when less-desired manufacturing jobs move abroad, and instead base their economies on more ‘cushy’ services jobs. It’s yet to be seen if this kind of prosperity will happen when said services jobs leave also. So the question isn’t “is there a bottom?” in this race, but instead “is there a top?”. Will countries and citizens continue to innovate and benefit when MNC’s move jobs abroad? Or, instead, will all this prosperity end when the MNC’s can’t find any more countries whose citizens are willing to work for $18 a month?

We’ll have to wait and see…

McCain should be applauded for going agaist the grain, even when the “grain” are Senators from his party, his party in general, or the President himself. It’s somewhat disheartening that I’m applauding a representative for sticking to their values as opposed to towing the party line, which is something all Senators should be expected to do. Sadly, these individuals are few and far between in politics, so they must be recognized.

Yes, but what’s all this have to do with IR? Well recently McCain introduced legislation to ban the use of torture by interrogators, and ammended it to the defence spending bill. This move was genious, in my opinion, because it is something that the President would find very diffucult to veto (unless he’d like to end the Iraq war a bit sooner than expected). The President maintains that “We do not torture”, but this seems contradictory to yesterday’s promise to veto any legislation that includes the ban.

There are many arguments both for and against the torture ban, the former more sensical and coherant that the latter, but the overwhelming argument to me is how this affects our image to the rest of the world. Our number one goal should be to salvage our image, since it is the predomanent thing which will prevent future acts of terrorism and improve relations with peoples and states worldwide. People will tolerate a progressive and forward-thinking world hegemon, but a bulley who doesn’t abide by it’s own rules will quickly be conspired against and attacked from all sides.

Even if this is defeated, the fact that this ammendment was overwhelmingly supported by members of the President’s own party should serve as a message to the rest of the world that Americans are concerned about the idea of torture, and about how our image is portrayed in general.