Yu Yongding
Project Syndicate

China’s per capita income, at $3,800, has now surpassed the threshold for a middle-income country.

But, even as economists and strategists busily extrapolate China’s future growth path to predict when it will catch up to the United States, the mood inside China became somber and subdued in 2010. Indeed, Premier Wen Jiabao sees China’s growth as “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and ultimately unsustainable.”

Economic growth, of course, has never been linear in any country. Throughout history, there are countless examples of middle-income countries becoming stuck in that category for decades and/or eventually falling back to low-income status. The Nobel laureate economist Michael Spence has pointed out that after WWII, only a handful of countries were able to grow to a fully-industrialized level of development.

China’s progress over the past three decades is a successful variation on the East Asian growth model that stems from the initial conditions bequeathed by a planned socialist economy. That growth model has now almost exhausted its potential. So China has reached a crucial juncture: without painful structural adjustment, its economic-growth momentum can suddenly be lost.

China’s rapid growth has been achieved at extremely high cost. Only future generations will know the true price. The country’s investment rate now stands at more than 50% – a clear reflection of China’s low capital efficiency. There are two worrying aspects of this high rate. First, local governments influence a large proportion of investment decisions. Second, investment in real-estate development accounts for nearly one-quarter of the total.

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Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine

The former Fatah strongman, Muhammed Dahlan, is due to appear before a Fatah court in Ramallah to face charges pertaining to corruption, including embezzlement, bribery, graft, nepotism, and breach of trust.

Prior to the conclusion of the Oslo Accords, Dahlan was a petty Fatah activist, suffering nearly abject poverty. According to a neighbor, he didn't have enough money to buy a pack of cigarettes.

Now, the man the Americans once picked and provided with the wherewithal to repress, topple and even decapitate Hamas, is probably one of the richest people in occupied Palestine.

How he has been able to amass all these millions is a question awaiting a satisfactory and honest answer.

It is not Dahlan's credibility that is at stake, for he probably has none. After all, the man seemed to have utilized his membership in Fatah and especially proximity to Yasser Arafat to expedite his own ambitions, amass obscene wealth and build a business fiefdom of his own.

What is at stake is Fatah's credibility, and in order for the movement to preserve that credibility, it will have to cut off Dahlan's numerous tentacles since he is not going to surrender easily and soon.

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Stephen Lendman

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." ~ Honoré de Balzac.

On October 25, 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky (MK) was arrested for tax evasion and corruption, dating from when the Soviet Union dissolved and state privatizations followed.

Billionaire Russian oligarchs, like MK, illegitimately amassed great fortunes, avoiding prosecution during Boris Yeltsin's tenure (1991 - 1999).

Beginning in 1991, various socio-economic measures were implemented without public discussion or parliamentary approval. Most important were Yeltsin's personal directives, creating a billionaire aristocracy handed the economy's most important, profitable sectors, free of charge - literally a license to loot.

Changes began slowly under Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, though not easily. The rot is so widespread and deep. Oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky fled to London, Moscow2, taking with them great fortunes. Others staying behind wish they'd after Medvedev announced during an October 2008 Council to Combat Corruption session that:

"Corruption in our nation has not simply become wide-scale. It has become a common, everyday phenomenon which characterizes the very life of our society. We are not simply talking about commonplace bribery. We are talking about a severe illness which is corroding the economy and corrupting all society."

As a result, prosecutions followed. Some 2009 examples against bureaucrats included:

● Nevelsk Mayor Vladimir Pak's suspension and charge of embezzling 56 million rubles ($1.5 million);
● two Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) Main Directorate officers detained on suspicion of accepting over $100,000 in bribes; and
● MVD Lt. Col. Dmitry Luzgin charged with extorting $1 million from Russian Real Estate House management.

According to MVD figures, annual Russian corruption ranges from $20 - $40 billion. In 2006, Alexander Buksman, deputy general prosecutor first deputy, estimated annual corruption at $240 billion, involving business and bureaucrats. However, a combination of legal loopholes and close private-public alliances lets most offenses go unpunished.

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Paul Mitchell and Chris Marsden
WSWS

[This Kosovo Serbian family, here in the picture, was hacked to death by the US/NATO sponsored Islamist Nazi KLA in the summer of 1998. The woman in the picture was five months pregnant; the Islamist Nazi Albanians (KLA-UCK) after raping her, literally cut the baby (fetus) out of her womb with a butcher-knife. The man in the right hand corner (her husband) had his legs chopped off with an axe at his knees, so before he died he was helplessly watching what the Albanian KLA Islamist Nazi savages were doing to his wife. (4international)]

Revelations of fascistic crimes carried out by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) prior to, during and after NATO’s war against the former Yugoslavia should provide a salutary lesson whenever Washington again cites humanitarian concerns to justify its predatory war aims.

A report by the Council of Europe describes Kosovo today as a country subject to “mafia-like structures of organised crime”. It accuses KLA commander and current prime minister, Hachim Thaci, of heading a criminal network involved in murder, prostitution and drug trafficking.

This may come as no surprise to those who have witnessed his rise from terrorist thug to head of the newly “independent” state. But what will be a shock to many is the grotesque way in the KLA helped finance its operations—by removing and selling body organs from kidnapped Serb and Kosovan Albanian civilian prisoners. The practice recalls the barbaric human experiments carried out by the Nazi “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The KLA’s crimes only came to light at all because of the unravelling of an ongoing cover-up by the US, the United Nations and other major powers. Information about KLA detention facilities in Kosovo and across the border in Albania first reached the International Centre for the Red Cross in 2000, after KLA fighters reported that Serb civilians were taken there in 1999 and their organs removed and sold abroad for transplant operations. The allegations surfaced once again in a BBC investigation in April last year and in the publication of the memoirs of International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, revealing that a 2008 investigation into the “organ harvesting” had been dropped because it was supposedly “impossible to conduct.”

Any prosecution of the KLA was made “impossible” by Washington, which has been its main sponsor since at least 1998. Following the Bosnian war of 1995, the KLA, seeking to capitalise on popular resentment among Kosovan Albanians against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, pursued a strategy of destabilising Kosovo by acts of terrorism in the hope of provoking Western intervention.

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