Edward Scicluna’s face didn’t say the same things as his mouth.

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140715/local/Scicluna-no-concerns-over-soaring-deficit.527734

I am fast reaching the point of intellectual despair. How can anyone have a debate if the experts are illiterate? Maltese “ekonomisti” and “profses” talk about China as if it were a point in a vacuum, and Malta likewise. As if transport were instantaneous, as if cargo were weightless, as if ships and vehicles ran on free energy.

Has anyone in Malta ever looked at an atlas? Perhaps it’s not on the curriculum except for geography students.

China has just signed a trillion-dollar cheque to Russia. It needs Russian gas, because it needs more energy than it extract out of its own sources, because factories run on electricity and electricity, even in oh-so-solar-panel China, is produced by burning hydrocarbons.

China is desperate to rid itself of this energy dependence. Hence the sabre-rattling in the South China Sea. Now, in that typically Chinese in-your-face way, they’re building artificial islands on what were previously submerged reefs, by dumping millions of tonnes of sand and gravel. The ecology can go and get fucked. Because if you have dry land, you can plant a flag and call it your own. Then you own the drilling rights around it.

Meanwhile, our Demokristjani instruct us to welcome “Chinese investment in Malta” (a buzzword. What does it mean? Will they be funding Maltese entrepreneurs? “Investment” can mean everything and nothing. Bloody Gonzian vocab which will haunt us forever.)

Why not Indian investment? India’s population will overtake China within the next 30 years. And for all its faults, it is a democracy. And it is a fellow Commonwealth member. And its people speak English. And the cost of labour is cheap.

So why does it have to be China?

I know why. For the same reason that Malta has to side with the Palestinians. Because some jacked-up lawyer made that his personal hobby, following in the steps of Mintoff, and thus laid down Maltese foreign policy for evermore.

I’m sick of it. It’s always: Indipendenza tajjeb, Libja hbieb, Ewropa tajjeb, Gulf States ghandhom hafna shopping malls mela tajjeb, Cina hbieb u tajjeb, Barrani Abjad bejjed ghajnek minnu.

The Infallibility of Maltese politicians. That’s what this is. Reams of news print just so everyone can approve of that which has already been cast in stone.

Cina mhux bojod, bhalna, heqq allura mhux sewwa naghmlu China-bashing, ghax dawk kienu mjassra u msejkna bhalna.

This is the Maltese Bible of Foreign Policy.

I spit on it.

Queen’s English, it’s a vicious cycle. If half your employable people are out of a job, the phones get to be cheaper.

A global economy disengaged from democracy remains a race to the bottom.

The obstacle, status quo, is the regime’s only card.

You should see the property spike in the States. It’s been calculated over a trillion has been siphoned off only last May.

Of course China prefers to keep its numbers under wraps at the expense of a currency.

When the ‘minister’ of finance declares yes, shadow banking may go belly-up but investors need not worry, this being ‘completely disengaged’ from the real figures, they’re utterly delusional.

Baxxter, thanks for that.

Now imagine going a step further, democratising production, clustering and conjunctively fragmenting facilities, resorting to additive digital manufacturing, which implies setting up facilities inside the city centre, (all those who imagine a factory to be a dark furnace better catch up) and you also get your revitalised urban centres, reduced sprawl and integrated transportation.

Digital manufacture allows for an estimated 90% in material savings and over 75% energy reductions. Europe has the tools to kick off the second industrial revolution. It’s just Labour who as usual, are utterly late.

Or maybe Europe has that one quality which Labour cannot accept, humans at the center of a social eco-system.

Gone are the days when it was most fashionable to go white collar, rediscovered production is where our future is. Reshoring they call it. Production methods beyond our wildest dreams, imagine production facilities which can reproduce themselves to keep up with demand, change lines within seconds and cross-produce.

The worker nothing more than the designer imagining function and form.

When factories can sit alongside a city’s cathedral, extend into universities and require an urban fabric to function, museums, libraries and theatres included, who needs Foxxcon?

All those developers out there, waiting for a bank or a millionaire to buy their real estate, and what they can actually do is build jet turbines. At least that’s what they did in Bologna, a production plant straddling the duomo.

An economy is all about perception, demand dependent on what the future can be.

Muscat’s mittelkless won’t have it, not after they did everything to shirk off the legacy of iron and steel. Throw in an obsession with the pittoresco and you’ll understand it’s a tall order in this place.

In the end, Muscat’s greatest misgiving is doing anything the PN didn’t. And that will be his downfall.

Muscat and his pigs at the trough are on a spending spree, and and il-Profs jara minn fejn ser igib il-flus.

That’s a very interesting point, because studies have been carried out on how product prices would change if production were to be shifted to the US or Europe.

And the most astonishing thing is that the stuff wouldn’t cost to or three times as much, but as little as 25% more. It’s all down to transportation costs.

If you buy your iPhone in Malta, chances are it will have travelled from China westwards, through the Indian Ocean, the Straits of Hormuz and the Suez Canal. That’s halfway across the world, for a start. Container ships run on oil.

Then there’s piracy, which has driven up insurance prices for shipping transiitng through Suez to twice their mid-2000s value.

Add to that the costs of sending quality assurance teams to check on those Foxconn factories, and the amazing 25% all makes sense.

I’ve seen similar articles on papers like The Guardian. The thing is that we say how shocked we are at the conditions of the workers yet we keep demanding cheaper iPhones and similar gadgets. Are we prepared to pay twice or three times the price so that the goods are manufactured in Europe and no Chinese workers suffer? They’d also be out of a job.

“Let the Chinese produce, in their sweatshops and labour camps, and we will take it easy and show off their products.”

Joseph Muscat has found a solution to the prekarjat.

‘Push it back’ to China.

China is a basket case waiting to implode. How else could you explain the exodus of the rich to Australia to the extent that their buying up of real estate has driven up the prices to the extent that the locals are being priced out of the market?