Why President Obama Went To China

Mr. Obama's visit to China is one like no other U.S. President has ever made. It is of a huge out of control debtor trying to assure his biggest creditor of his financial sanity and pleading for more money.

It's like you having run up your debts to a frightful level and going to your banker to assure this person you can pay back those debts and that you are qualified to borrow more money and by the way, you need some more of it immediately.

If posing for pictures, you would both smile at the cameras and say nice things about each other. But in private, you would plead your case and not discuss that person's politics or suggest he or she could lose some weight.

This is the position Mr. Obama is in. He might like to discuss China's civil rights but he can only go downhill in attacking its treatment of what it calls "criminals" and it in turn could criticize the U.S.'s treatment of what it calls "terrorists."

Mr. Obama would hopefully want to discuss Darfur, in Sudan for China has a huge trading relationship and considerable influence with the Sudanese government. Two million people from Darfur have fled their homes, most of them to squalid refugee camps. The United Nations estimates 300,000 have died from violence or disease. All of this at the hands of the Sudanese government.

President Obama might want to discuss environmental issues [both nations have a great deal of room for improvement here] and product safety issues.

But reality is the focus will be on the already mountainous and rapidly growing U.S. deficits, the printing of money out of thin air to cover some of those deficits and the sliding of the dollar's value, potentially into eventual collapse.

China is afraid its investments in U.S. debt will become worthless and that the U.S. flooding the world with dollars is already causing wild speculation in stocks and real estate, setting up an even bigger global economic collapse.

From China's perspective, if we haven't secured Social Security, Medicare and other vital programs, that's our problem, not theirs. They fear we will go broke.

China wants the U.S. to slash its spending, raise its interest rates rather than give away virtually free money to lenders and other speculators and to get its financial house in order now. We too want that to happen for the crash they fear will impact all of us everywhere.

It is not too late for us to act. Please raise your voice and call for fiscal sanity such as an end to huge wasteful spending on weapons, wars and bailouts and an end to our printing money out of thin air. We can have a great future but like prior generations, we must unite and pay the price necessary to attain it.

Dick