A big, tough samurai once went to see a little monk.
“Monk!”
He barked, in a voice accustomed to instant obedience.
“Teach me about heaven and hell!”
The monk looked up at the mighty warrior and replied with utter disdain,
“Teach you about heaven and hell? I couldn’t teach you about anything. You’re dumb. You’re dirty. You’re a disgrace, an embarrassment to the samurai class. Get out of my sight. I can’t stand you.”
The samurai got furious. He shook, red in the face, speechless with rage. He pulled out his sword, and prepared to slay the monk.
Looking straight into the samurai’s eyes, the monk said softly,
“That’s hell.”
The samurai froze, realizing the compassion of the monk who had risked his life to show him hell! He put down his sword and fell to his knees, filled with gratitude.
The monk said softly,
“And that’s heaven.”
Excerpted from Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values.
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Every time I stuck my finger in the box this kitten reacted. Such an angry little kitty, yes, your tiny self is so bad!
‘To get rich is glorious’
It is now 35 years since former leader Deng Xiaoping’s catchy slogan signalled China’s opening to the world and ushered in one of the biggest economic success stories in human history.
Its economy has gone from being rather smaller than Italy’s to the world’s second largest, and is now home to one million US$ millionaires. By the time the new generation of leaders hands over power to the next in 2022, China could be challenging the US for top spot.
This transformation has changed the way the world does business. Cheap Chinese labour has helped dampen prices in the West for everything from moccasins to mops to mobile phones. It is now the biggest investor in Africa, promising to shift the continent’s focus away from Europe and the US for the first time in two centuries. And China is now the biggest foreign holder of US government debt - a threatening stick, or a foolhardy bet?
The key question now is whether the new leaders can keep the economy growing at the same rate as in the past, and help the rest of the world recover. Most Western analysts expect it to slow from 10% a year to a still impressive 6-7%, but argue that deep reforms are needed if China is to become a rich rather than middle-income country.
Growth should help create the world’s biggest middle class, eager to enjoy creature comforts like cars and air conditioning, whatever the environmental cost.
Every feast must have its end
China has been growing so fast it has scarcely stopped to consider the environmental cost.
The results are sobering. Rapid industrialisation and a building boom saw China overtake the US as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in 2007. Seven of the world’s most polluted cities are in China. Each year it causes 500,000 to 750,000 premature deaths.
The damage is not just inside China. Airborne pollution including mercury and lead is carried across borders into neighbouring countries, and across the Pacific where it falls on the US West Coast.
China’s leaders do now appear determined to clean up the worst excesses, but the scale of the task is daunting.
“If you look at the size of the economy and its population, these two factors alone show how complex it’s going to be,” says Edgar Cua of the Asian Development Bank.
It means China will be central to any future agreements on climate change. It has refused to limit its greenhouse gas emissions, preferring to cut “carbon intensity” - the carbon released per unit of economic output - by 40-45% by 2020. But with the economy growing so fast, and China relying on coal for up to 70% of its energy needs, greenhouse gas emissions will still rise by 60% from their present level, even if the carbon intensity target is met.
Teach the kids Mandarin?
China has long fascinated the West, but its emergence as an economic power has seen a new burgeoning of interest in its culture and language.
Thirty years ago, only its inscrutable leaders were recognised in the West. Now people like actress Zhang Ziyi, basketball player Yao Ming and artist Zhang Xiaogang are global figures.
Meanwhile schools across Europe and the US are offering Mandarin classes to children as young as six, and during the Olympics, Chinese script could be seen on adverts on some London buses.
China’s government has sought to capture the zeitgeist, helping set up several hundred Confucius Institutes around the world whose overt goal is teaching Chinese, but which also project soft power.
The number of Mandarin speakers is set to grow strongly, especially in Asia, but is it really able to challenge English as a global language? Not any time soon, most experts argue, pointing to its infuriating tones and a script which takes years to master.
Keep the peace
China adopted the phrase “peaceful rise” to try and assure nervous neighbours that its new-found economic clout would not turn it into a bully.
But territorial disputes with Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam - and simmering tensions with the US - sometimes give the words a hollow ring.
China’s People’s Liberation Army is the world’s largest, at three million strong, and its official budget is rising fast. Its first aircraft carrier has just gone into service and it is believed to be investing heavily in stealth technology, space warfare and cyber security.
These are natural developments for a country of its size and influence, China argues, and do not signal it has changed tack.
“Every country has to defend its security and territorial interests, but it doesn’t mean we have to become aggressive, that way you can alienate even your friends,” said Wu Jianmin, former ambassador to France.
But the real question is how China’s new leaders pitch policy towards the US. They are younger and have more experience of the outside world, so can they set aside the entrenched suspicions among their rival militaries? History suggests the inevitable frictions between a superpower and its upstart challenger will lead to more tensions than detente.
Next person on the moon to be Chinese?
China’s Communist Party paints the century before it came to power in 1949 as one of humiliation by the West. So China’s successful space programme is lauded as proof their country has regained its international standing.
But the huge cost is controversial given that 150m Chinese still live on $1 a day or less.
Having already sent an unmanned craft to orbit the moon, China has said it will send its first probe to land there in 2013. It has also spoken of preliminary plans to put humans on the moon, though no date has been set.
If the mission goes ahead, TV pictures beamed into the world’s living rooms will also be flagging up China’s challenge to the world’s predominant space power, the US.
The end for elephants, rhinos, manta rays, pigs…
Newly-wealthy Chinese are blamed for fuelling the poaching of endangered species for use as aphrodisiacs, ornaments or to put in their soup.
Thousands of African elephants are killed each year for their ivory, which Chinese carvers prize, and China’s government has been criticised for not properly policing its ivory trade.
The problem is that economic reforms which have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty have also created voracious consumers.
Pork consumption gives a good idea of the impact. China now consumes five times more pork than in 1979, and is now home to 460m pigs, half the world’s total.
But feeding them is impossible given the shortage of land. So farmers have resorted to importing up to 60% of the world’s soyabean exports, pushing up prices for everyone else, and raising real fears over the industry’s environmental impact.
In future, the pressures are likely to intensify as China seeks to feed 21% of the world’s population with only 9% of its cultivated land. Some experts believe we will all have to get used to higher food prices, and to Chinese farmers buying up more and more overseas land.
Better to travel than read 10,000 books
As recently as 1995, applying for a passport to leave China was a six-month endurance test of bureaucracy, and most applicants were officials.
Now it can be done in a few days, and millions of Chinese are taking advantage of their government’s new openness to travel overseas as tourists or students.
China’s tourists are now the world’s third biggest spenders, behind those from Germany and the US, and 70m Chinese travelled overseas in 2011, compared to 4.5m in 1995. Most stay close to home, in places like Hong Kong, Macau and Thailand. But increasing numbers are heading for the US or France, as well as less obvious destinations like Trier, the birthplace of Karl Marx. On Paris’ Bateaux Mouches river cruises, as the sights are picked out in one language after another, Mandarin now comes ahead of Japanese.
Each year about 300,000 Chinese students are also heading abroad, especially to universities in the US and Australia. They want the kudos of a foreign education to get a better job when they return home. Some also see it as a way to dodge the exhausting entry test for China’s own universities.
Buying up the planet
The wealth that has been created inside China has surged around the world.
Chinese demand has caused spikes in prices for commodities like copper - needed to cable up rapidly growing cities and infrastructure. It has reinvigorated Europe’s luxury goods makers like Louis Vuitton and Hermes, whose products are de rigueur in China’s status-obsessed and gift-giving culture. And it is transforming prestige wine sales - China now buys more Bordeaux than Germany.
Perhaps the most spectacular impact, some would call it a bubble, is on Chinese art. Three of the 10 most expensive paintings sold in 2011 were by Chinese artists, including the most expensive, a $57.2m work by Qi Baishi.
The next phase is likely to see China’s industrial giants starting to look overseas for new markets and new expertise.
That will be controversial because most of them are controlled by the Communist Party. In areas like telecommunications and energy, they could threaten trade rows with the West.”
-Angus Foster, BBC News, Beijing. 14 October 2012.
(Source: BBC)
A recent study conducted jointly by the law schools at Stanford University and New York University found that drones used by the US in Pakistan essentially operate as instruments of terror in civilian communities, killing unnecessarily large numbers of innocent people. America’s culture of intellectual freedom in its universities, which enables such a report to be produced, disseminated, and discussed, is to be lauded. In contrast, the human rights culture in the US or globally is constitutionally incapable of providing a basis for questioning the US, Barack Obama, or Leon Panetta about their moral culpability for the deaths of Pakistani civilians by drones.
(Source: mehreenkasana, via azspot)
First Paul Ryan barges into a soup kitchen unannounced and unwanted to wash clean dishes for an ill-fated photo-op.
Now Romney “replaces” his campaign stops with can drives in OHIO for Hurricane Sandy, even though disaster agencies have repeatedly stated that they don’t want them, that they REALLY need money and volunteers. And not to mention, he actually purchased many of the goods himself to hand out to people to give back to the drive.
If you’re going to fake caring about people, at least do it right.
(via bulletinaweave)
Actually most fantastic and inspirational advice from a female character geared towards children that I have ever seen.
(via lipstick-feminists)
(via stfuconservatives)
(Source: hakkar, via smellslike-hollywood)
Mitt Romney’s $250 million fortune is largely a black hole: Aside from the meager and vague disclosures he has filed under federal and Massachusetts laws, and the two years of partial tax returns (one filed and another provisional) he has released, there is almost no data on precisely what his vast holdings consist of, or what vehicles he has used to escape taxes on his income. Gawker has obtained a massive cache of confidential financial documents that shed a great deal of light on those finances, and on the tax-dodging tricks available to the hyper-rich that he has used to keep his effective tax rate at roughly 13% over the last decade.
Today, we are publishing more than 950 pages of internal audits, financial statements, and private investor letters for 21 cryptically named entities in which Romney had invested—at minimum—more than $10 million as of 2011 (that number is based on the low end of ranges he has disclosed—the true number is almost certainly significantly higher). Almost all of them are affiliated with Bain Capital, the secretive private equity firm Romney co-founded in 1984 and ran until his departure in 1999 (or 2002, depending on whom you ask). Many of them are offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands. Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy that benefit him, the unlikely (for a right-wing religious Mormon) places that his money has ended up, and the deeply hypocritical distance between his own criticisms of Obama’s fiscal approach and his money managers’ embrace of those same policies. They also show that some of the investments that Romney has always described as part of his retirement package at Bain weren’t made until years after he left the company.
Bain isn’t a company so much as an intricate suite of steadily proliferating inter-related holding companies and limited partnerships, some based in Delaware and others in the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and elsewhere, designed to collectively house roughly $66 billion in wealth in its many crevices and chambers. When Romney left in 1999, he and his wife retained significant investments in many of those Bain vehicles—he claims they are “passive investments” and that they are managed in a blind trust (though the trustee isn’t blind enough to meet federal standards of independence). But aside from disparate snippets of information contained in his federal and Massachusetts financial disclosure forms, his 2010 tax returns, and SEC filings, the nature of those investments has been obfuscated by design.
When he disclosed his finances to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics in 2007, Romney took care to publish the underlying holdings of many funds he invested with—after disclosing his $1 million-plus stake in “GS 2002 Exchange Place Fund LP,” for instance, he listed six pages of individual equities the fund held, from Panera Bread Co. to Tribune Co. But when it came to the Bain investments, he simply listed the value of his investments in odd-sounding entities like “Sankaty High Yield Partners II LP” with no indication of what was inside. In an accompanying note, he claimed that he had tried and failed to get the information: “The filer has requested information about the underlying holdings of these funds and values and income amounts for these underlying holdings. However, the fund managers have informed the filer in writing that this information is confidential and proprietary, and has declined to provide such information.”
That information—for Sankaty and 20 other funds—is now available here, in the form of 48 documents totaling more than 950 pages. They consist predominantly of confidential internal audited financial statements from 2008, 2009, and 2010, as well as investor letters from the same period, for Bain entities that Romney has previously disclosed owning an interest it. Owing to the timeframe—during and after the catastrophic economic meltdown of 2008—some of the investments show substantial losses. One limited partnership had even entered into liquidation as of October 2008 after failing to meet certain payments owed to partners. Others show astronomical gains.
The documents are exceedingly complicated. We don’t pretend to be qualified to decode them in full, which is why we are posting them here for readers to help evaluate—please leave your thoughts in the discussion below. We asked an attorney who specializes in complex offshore corporate transactions, including ones involving Cayman Island entities, to review them and help us understand them. (We also asked the Romney campaign. It hasn’t responded yet.) The full set can be read here.
(Source: azspot)
