From an Obama speech, speaking about China:

“Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business you’re starting to think, “Beijing looks like a pretty good option. Why aren’t we doing the same thing?”

Well, Mr. Amateur, here is why:

from Thomas Lifson

“Of course, the secret to China’s success in building infrastructure quickly is the lack of little details like property rights for residents who get in the way, environmental impact statements, unions, and other trappings of a free society.”

from the Economist:

In all this activity it greatly helps to have a secretive planning bureaucracy and a government that brooks little dissent. In Britain, as Mr Majidi points out, it took as long to conduct a public inquiry into the proposed construction of Heathrow’s Terminal Five as it took to build Beijing’s new airport terminal from scratch.

There was no consultation with the public on the terminal. Nor was there any public debate about the construction of Beijing’s third runway, notwithstanding the noise pollution already suffered by thousands of nearby residents. Beijing is now planning a second airport (even with Mr Majidi’s terminal, the current airport is expected to exceed its designed capacity of 60m passengers this year, seven years before schedule). The location is being considered in secret. Xu Li, an official at the Ministry of Communications’ transport research institute, agrees that China’s infrastructure expansion is not as restrained by rules as it is in America. Once a plan is made, it is executed. “Democracy”, she says, “sacrifices efficiency.”

An often heavy-handed approach to land appropriation also helps. For Beijing’s airport expansion, 15 villages were flattened and their more than 10,000 residents resettled nearby. But several of the former farmers told your correspondent that they were still barred from the unemployment benefits and other welfare privileges of city dwellers even though their farmland had been grabbed from them. One elderly man said that officials had threatened them with violence if they refused to leave their villages.

James Lewis writes further of the Chinese infrastructure Obama admires so much:

“… The Daily Telegraph is reporting that China’s industrial heartland is facing crippling power shortages, with more than a dozen provinces already rationing electricity. The country is suffering from its biggest power crisis since 2004, when a 40-gigawatt shortfall left three quarters of China in the dark.

The proximate cause is a shortage of coal … More to the point, the actual cause is a highly regulated internal market which caps the prices of coal and electricity, making it difficult for companies to invest in new capacity – on top of a creaking infrastructure, leaving a shortage of rail transport to deliver coal where it is needed.

Anyhow, so serious has the situation become in China now that, in order to keep the lights burning in Peking, and the television cameras rolling, that other areas are being starved of power.”

Jeff Jacoby writes in The Boston Globe:

(excerpts)
Well, the Games have certainly had a lasting effect on one part of Chinese society – the 1.5 million men, women, and children expelled from their homes in Beijing to make room for the construction of Olympic facilities and urban beautification projects. To clear them out, the Geneva-based Center on Housing Rights and Evictions found, Chinese authorities resorted to “harassment, repression, imprisonment, and even violence.” Demolitions and evictions frequently occurred without due process. Many dispossessed residents were not compensated; those who were usually received a fraction of the amount needed to make them whole.

All told, at least 77 people filed applications to demonstrate during the Games. Not one was approved.

A million and a half residents expelled. Free speech strangled. Elderly women jailed. That’s what it means when a police state like China hosts the Olympics. That’s what you get when the IOC and its corporate supersponsors care more about television ratings and market share than about the values of the Olympic movement. That’s what happens when the free world cons itself into believing that China’s Communist rulers, who sustain genocide in Sudan and torture nuns in Tibet, will refrain from doing whatever it takes to turn the Olympics into a vehicle for totalitarian self-glorification.

HKO comments-
Obama seems to admire the heavy hand of a government unrestrained by democratic principles. It should lead one to question his own governing principles or his level of commitment to them. Or because of his incredible inexperience he could just be truly ignorant of how the world works.

The more he talks the the more amazed I am that he is considered a serious candidate.

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