When Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping formally embraced Neoliberalism in the late 70s it was the final victory for the right-wing within the party. What followed was an opening up of China to Western business for the presumed benefit of all. In reality, China would invert the Maoist principles of the cultural revolution to restructure the country under a system of State Capitalism. The Chinese State, organized and operated by the Communist Party of China, would run the country for its own profit with the Chinese people becoming the State’s property, slaves in effect.

They’ll deny global warming as long as politically possible…and then they will copy this gentleman’s style: If there’s a need, a Chinese entrepreneur will find a way. The foul smog swallowing much of China has inspired one such man to launch a humorous campaign to focus on environmental issues — by selling canned fresh air. [...]

The conflict began last summer when Wang Shishu, a 52-year-old WalMart store employee and outspoken labor activist, helped lead a campaign against plans to cut pay and slash benefits. When a small strike involving about forty workers broke out, the management cracked down.

Eighty-eight journalists and forty-seven citizen journalists were killed in 2012, according to a report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). The press freedom group noted this was the deadliest year since it began keeping track of journalist deaths in 1995.

Despite the occasional factory fire or sweatshop media expose, American consumers have largely inured themselves to the status quo of exploiting the Global South as our overseas workshop for cheap clothes, toys and gadgets. With the holiday shopping season in full swing, consumers have affixed even more tightly the corporate blinders, rendering the workers in Santa’s Workshop comfortably invisible.

But some of the factories churning out hot toys have recently been exposed as bastions of labor abuse.

In the not-so-distant past China was a country that struggled to feed its own people. An estimated 20 to 45 million Chinese died of starvation between 1958 and 1962. China’s population today is over 1.3 billion, more than four times the population of the United States. The challenges China faces in moving from a developing to a developed nation are unique and daunting, made even more difficult under the scrutiny of a globally connected modern world.

The Treasury Department once again declined to label China a currency manipulator, despite arguing that the yuan “remains significantly undervalued” and should rise further. They basically patted themselves on the back and tried to show that their policy of engagement with China has worked to this point.

We constantly hear Mitt Romney talk about the “war on coal,” and to the extent that exists, it’s being waged by chap natural gas which crowds out the profitability of coal extraction. However, this doesn’t mean that coal employment has decreased in the United States: in fact, West Virginia coal jobs have increased under Obama, as has coal employment nationwide.

How can this be true?

Economic analysts are giddy about a recent spate of positive consumer-based indicators, on not only housing starts but consumer confidence, retail sales, auto sales and even unemployment. At the same time, in the same economy, the numbers run completely the other way when it comes to the corporate sector. Joe Weisenthal runs down the numbers. Some of them are sentiment-based, which I view with similar skepticism around a national election as I do with things like consumer confidence. But there are hard numbers around capital expenditures, and export growth, and corporate hiring plans, and even corporate profits, that have all turned negative.

So what’s going on?

The way in which the hedge fund syndicate secured these taxpayers dollars for Delphi sounds pretty much like blackmail. For example, according to Steven Rattner, the auto czar, Delphi demanded an immediate cash infusion of $350 million or they would stop supplying to GM. Oh, and Delphi promptly fired all the unionized workers at Delphi, cut health care for all their nonunion pensioners, and took the production jobs to China. Delphi employs less then 5,000 US workers, from a high of 25,000.

How do the Romneys figure into this? They have at least $1 million invested in Paul Singer’s Elliott Management, per their 2011 and 2012 financial disclosure. Based on that investment, they made at least $15.3 million on the deal, which involved ripping off the US taxpayer, shedding US jobs in favor of China, and using leverage created by the auto bailout to do it. Most of these profits have been kept offshore to avoid US taxes, of course. The Romneys protest that these investments are all held in a blind trust, but the executor of their blind trust is Romney’s personal lawyer.

Just another day in the life of a vulture capitalist, I guess.