America and China, Joined at the HipBy DAVE LINDORFF
SNIP
The convergence of Chinese and US political-economic systems is going on in other ways too. Both governments are using massive computer systems (made in America) to monitor the Internet, with China making use of equipment and techniques developed for them by US companies like Google, Yahoo and Cisco Systems, and with the National Security Agency then drawing on those techniques for use back here in America.
As we saw at the two national party conventions last month, the US is also learning and applying the crowd-control techniques of the Chinese government to the US where the default tactic wherever public protest is planned is now to have police adopt a paramilitary approach that features aggressive use of tear gas, concussion bombs, assault rifles, house raids and preventive detention.
Another point of convergence is the concentration of power in a secretive executive body. China, of course, has a national congress. It meets once a year and passes carefully vetted resolutions. In recent years, its members have occasionally raised a controversial issue, like concerns about the environmental and human consequences of the Three Gorges Dam, or about the role of shoddy construction in the deaths of so many school children in the last earthquake. But it has no power and plays no role in controlling the decisions of the true leaders of the country.
Likewise in the US, there is a Congress, but over the last eight years, it has ceded virtually all oversight power to the executive branch, which treats any effort by its members to investigate or to constrain its action with utter contempt.
Both countries promote widespread, worshipful display of the national flag, and ritual oath-taking, as well as unquestioning patriotism and worship of militarism.
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