Mister BS has drunk the Koolaid
Take me to China and I’m yours.
Pay for Saviour Balzan’s first trip to China in his 50+ years on this planet, and he’s yours. If he were a woman, he’d have probably leaped into bed with you for some after-hours action as well, in excitement and gratitude.
His reports from China are beyond pathetic in any circumstances, but more so when you remember that this is the individual who grinds his several personal axes all over the diminishing pages of his newspaper, laying into his perceived enemies as though his grudges were issues of national importance or major public interest.
But because he’s in China at Muscat’s invitation and with Muscat – or is it China? – picking up the tab, he’s gone all Marquesa de Varela of Hello magazine on us.
I quote from this morning’s offering.
“China is a country with excess liquidity. It has three trillion dollars in reserves. These funds must be invested in the next 15 years. China is dying to invest and we cannot miss out on this opportunity. We are best placed to do this because of our European Union membership, our cultural link to China and our geographical position,” Prime Minister Joseph Muscat has told MaltaToday in a clear outline of his economic vision to trade with the Asian superpower.
“We are doing no different in China than Angela Merkel and David Cameron did, and we have an advantage because of our history. China and its institutions remember that Malta was the fifth nation to recognise it diplomatically. We have rekindled an old friendship.”
This is how Muscat put forward his vision for trade with China as he left the opulent State House in the forests of Guiyang, before leaving for the Chinese capital of Beijing to join his family on a private visit.
Balzan then goes on to repeat Muscat’s justifications as his own, in his column in the same newspaper.
What cultural link to China is this that the prime minister talks about here? Malta has absolutely no cultural link to China, and never has done throughout its 1,000-year recorded history. Having a Maltese Labour prime minister beg China for alms in the 1970s is not a cultural link. The fact that Maltese people like eating ‘Chinese food’ is not a cultural link either: that’s not real Chinese food.
“Our geographical position” – what about it? Geographical positions are 100% redundant in today’s world. One of the photographers I work with gets his pictures edited overnight in India by people he’s never met. They’re in his in-box the following morning. He doesn’t drive to a junior photographer round the corner because of his geographical position.
“We are doing no different in China than Angela Merkel and David Cameron did” – and Mister BS lets that go by unremarked on, and even repeats it elsewhere as his own opinion.
Angela Merkel and David Cameron run mega-economies, not tiny islands with a population of less than half a million. They also operate in very strong democracies with a vocal free press (Germany despite its fascist and communist history) and with an acute sense of accountability to the public and of citizen-scrutiny. They do things behind the back of their electorate at their peril, even if they had any such inclination in the first place.
Their interest in China is the furtherance of British and German interests only. Chinese interests do not even enter the equation. They know that Chinese interests are the business of the Chinese, and not the business of the British or German governments, which are there to look after their own and Europe’s.
China is indebted to Britain and Germany because British and German businesses provide huge numbers of manufacturing jobs for Chinese people in China, and hoover up many of its exports. China is not indebted to Malta. Malta provides no jobs in China and buys up relatively little from that country.
China can swallow Malta whole and has already become a dominant player in controlling our entire power supply. It is not possible for China to do that with Britain and/or Germany.
That is the point.
“We have rekindled an old friendship,” Muscat said. There never was one. A ‘friendship’ between Maoist China of 1972, at the height of the Cold War, and Red Mintoff at his worst (he also befriended Kim Il Sung of North Korea and the Iron Curtain communist dictators of Europe) was entirely due to the context of the times and Malta’s foreign policy of allying itself with communist totalitarianism and bloody dictators of all stripes.
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http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/news/national/41126/muscat_china_is_dying_to_invest_we_shouldnt_miss_out
Angela Merkel and David Cameron have both criticized China’s human rights record loudly and clearly. Merkel did so at Tsinghua univeristy this week, instead of reading out a Chinese propaganda speech like Muscat did.
British media have been vocal in criticising China’s suppression of fundamental freedoms.
Notoriously, the BBC was banned for years and its transmission was blocked in China. Its offence was a video report of ethnic Tibetans being shot as they tried to escape from China by crossing snow covered mountains.
Panorama reporters ran a documentary about press suppression in China, including footage showing them being shadowed by state agents, censored by their state minder, and harassed by local officials.
Comments by a Tian an Men survivor whose legs were amputated were interrupted by their state-approved minder.
Compare that to TVM’s sycophantic interviews with Muscat and Grech this week.
It may have three trillion in reserves, but lost the equivalent of a full half of that amount only last week.
http://www.ecns.cn/cns-wire/2014/07-10/123506.shtml
The main problem that’s emerging is their ‘astonishingly fast decision making’ leaving every central bank unable to match decisions to that of a regime which does not allow anyone to be a reliable, independent interface.
Indeed, has anyone ever seen China’s central governor?
The other one’s that politicians in the west have finally realised unemployment requires manufacturing jobs to go down.
So true Muscat, now’s the time to attract investment, pity you’re looking the other way.
Now is the time to welcome Chinese investment says Muscat.
Just look at those graphs, the third one, non-performing loans, a pretty valley. Something’s very wrong if they managed to spike their debts following the credit crunch.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-04/china-verge-first-corporate-bond-default-once-more
Whose prime minister is Muscat?
“it us up to me to decide when to divulge the conditions of Sai Mizzi” – Muscat said in his interview with Saviour Balzan in China.
No, it is not up to Muscat to decide when to release that or any other type of information. This isn’t China. Muscat is accountable to the electorate. Balzan knows it, but he let that smart ass remark go by unchallenged.
Malta Today’s request made under the Freedom of Information Act was refused on the grounds that personal data should not be published. So is Muscat saying he’s using the Data Protection Act for his own ends, and will ignore it when he pleases?
Didn’t take Labour long to go back to its vintage.
This is sick.
Mr Balzan was favourably impressed by how advanced a supposedly depressed area of China is.
Did he not notice the anti-suicide nets around the factories in Guiyang?
He wouldn’t have been allowed to see peasants being beaten, stabbed and shot: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-D4PDTrTOaY
Or police shooting protestors: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O_U9gTN3Ecc
Or what life is like for 99% of China’s population: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RMnil9Jxrx8
And another one, this one mentioning specifically those three trillion in reserves, and putting the whole thing in context.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-05/chinese-credit-bubble-full-frontal
‘…..Whereas it is relatively easy to track the progression of the “developed world” deep into the twilight rabbit zone hole (in bizarro metaphore-land speak) of no total debt/GDP return as defined by Reinhart and Rogoff (where anything above 80% sovereign leverage is more or less the game over line for one country, let along the entire Western world) courtesy of day to day updates of total debt in the US (103% debt/GDP) and its comparably indebted peers, when it comes to world’s growth dynamo – China – it is next to impossible to get a sense of just how big the debt hole is for a country whose economic data has been and continues to be one massive goalseeked, G.I.G.O. blackbox. At least that is the case at the sovereign level where the government can and does show whatever data it feels like as the country is excluded from traditional counterparty flow checks which serve as an at least modest buffer for data fabrication for the other globalized countries engaging in international trade. That, and the Ministry of Truth of course, which some have likened recently to an amateur version of the US’ own BLS.
However, while government and consumer debt can be whatever China wants it to be (and when it isn’t, any discharged and non-performing debt is merely masked over with more debt: China doesn’t have $3 trillion in foreign reserves for nothing) corporate debt, in keeping with Western-style reporting requirements, is far more difficult to obfuscate and falsify in recent years. It is here that we get the first glimpse of the true sheer extent of the Chinese credit bubble, which as the chart below shows, is already the largest in the entire world….’
G.I.G.O. that’s garbage in, garbage out, easy when you don’t answer to any criticism.
Again, whose prime minister is Muscat? And just pray Saviour’s over this week’s koolaid.
Saviour Balzan in Malta Today: “We are doing no different in China than Angela Merkel and David Cameron did”.
Oh really? Kemm hu injorant, miskin.
What the w*nker doesn’t know is that Merkel and Cameron went to China to sell yet more Made in UK and Made in Germany goods, and to stop the Chinese from ripping off the patented ideas of British and German manufacturers.
Joey and his little Disneyland entourage, with a panting and salivating Balzan tagging along, went there to get the Chinese to come and buy Malta, take over, bankrupt the country and then fuck off back to communist China. Just like they’re doing in Third World Africa.
We should expect a special edition of Xarabank on the historical ‘deal’ with China.
“The fact that Maltese people like eating ‘Chinese food’ is not a cultural link either: that’s not real Chinese food.”
And if Mr BS wants to compare Malta to other with other countries and states in that regard, why not go with the USA?
It has a longstanding and sizable Chinese community in may of its states; “Chinese food” is often featured as a staple junk food or quick meal in its films, comics and so on.
Does all this make the USA and China the best of friends? Most definitely not.