Some updates.

js_imperialism_favorites.md

@@ -18,3 +18,15 @@ In other words, **cost savings resulting from outsourcing are shared with worker
 Perhaps the most in-depth research into this effect was conducted by two Chicago professors, Christian Broda and John Romalis, who established a “concordance” between two giant databases, one tracking the quantities and price movements between 1994 and 2005 of hundreds of thousands of different goods consumed by 55,000 U.S. households, the other of imports classified into 16,800 different product categories. Their central conclusion: “While the expansion of trade with low wage countries triggers a fall in relative wages for the unskilled in the United States, it also leads to a fall in the price of goods that are heavily consumed by the poor. We show that this beneficial price effect can potentially more than offset the standard negative relative wage effect.” They calculate that China by itself accounted for four-fifths of the total inflation-lowering effect of cheap imports, its share of total U.S. imports having risen during the decade from 6 to 17 percent, and that **“the rise of Chinese trade … alone can offset around a third of the rise in official [US] inequality we have seen over this period.”**
 
 [...]The increasingly global character of the social relations of production and the increasing interdependence between workers in different countries and continents objectively strengthens the international working class and hastens its emergence as a class “for itself” as well as “in itself,” struggling to establish its supremacy; yet, to counter this, capitalists increasingly lean on and utilize imperialist divisions to practice divide-and-rule, to force workers in imperialist countries into increasingly direct competition with workers in low-wage countries, while using the cheap imports produced by super-exploited Southern labor to encourage selfishness and consumerism and to undermine solidarity.
+
+## Coffee
+
+Our picture is completed by the addition of a third iconic global commodity—the cup of coffee. Perhaps you have one clasped in your hand—don’t spill any on your T-shirt or your smartphone as you read this! Coffee is unique among major internationally traded agricultural commodities in that none of it, apart from small quantities grown in Hawaii, is grown in imperialist countries, and for this reason it has not been subject to trade-distorting agricultural subsidies such as those affecting cotton and sugar. Yet the world’s coffee farmers have fared as badly if not worse than other primary commodity producers. Most of the world’s coffee is grown on small family farms, providing employment worldwide to 25 million coffee farmers and their families, while two U.S. and two European firms, Sara Lee and Kraft, Nestlé and Procter & Gamble, dominate the global coffee trade.
+
+In common with other global commodities, the portion of the final price of a bag or a cup of coffee that is counted as value-added within the coffee-drinking countries has steadily risen over time. According to the International Coffee Organization, the markup on the world market price of coffee for nine imperialist nations that account for more than two-thirds of global imports averaged 235 percent between 1975 and 1989, 382 percent between 1990 and 1999, and 429 percent between 2000 and 2009.72 As this report points out, these impressive figures significantly underestimate both the magnitude of the markup and also the pace of its increase, since it is based on the assumption that all imported coffee is sold to consumers at market prices, whereas an increasing percentage of coffee consumption takes place in local cafés, where the markup is considerably higher. How much higher can be estimated by considering that a barista typically obtains 60 shots of espresso per pound bag of coffee, that is, approximately 15¢ per shot. Adding another 15¢ for milk, sugar, and a disposable cup, the $3 retail price represents a 900 percent markup over the cost of its ingredients.73
+
+Coffee differs from the T-shirt and the iPhone in one important respect: unlike the other members of this profane trinity, coffee does not arrive in the consuming nations as a finished good, already bagged and labeled and ready for sale. Part of the gross value-added captured by coffee retailers within the imperialist countries production therefore corresponds to the roasting and grinding of the dry cherries, and also, in the case of coffee consumed in cafés, the production labor of the barista. Yet this does not change the overall picture. Roasting and grinding coffee beans, in contrast to their cultivation, is not labor-intensive, one reason why the imperialist monopolies that dominate the global coffee economy have not been tempted to outsource this production task. Another reason is to ensure that monopoly power remains concentrated in their hands: the big markups and juiciest profits are in the processing of the raw beans, unlike in the clothing industry, where the big markups are obtained from the retailing of finished garments, or smartphones, where Apple’s fat profits arise from patented technology as well as branding and retailing. Those who cultivate and harvest the coffee receive less than 3 percent of its final retail price.78 In 2009, according to the International Coffee Organization, the roasting, marketing, and sale of coffee added $31bn to the GDP of the nine most important coffee-importing nations, more than twice as much as all coffee-producing nations earned from growing and exporting it—and, as noted above, this does not include the value-added captured by cafés and restaurants.
+
+Just as, according to the economists and accountants, not one cent of Apple’s profits comes from Chinese workers and just as H&M’s bottom line owes nothing to super-exploited Bangladeshi workers, so do all of Starbucks’ and London-based Caffè Nero’s profits appear to arise from their own marketing, branding, and retailing genius, and not a penny can be traced to the impoverished coffee farmers who hand-pick the fresh cherries. In all of our three archetypical global commodities, gross profits, that is, the difference between their cost of production and their retail price, are far in excess of 50 percent, flattering not only Northern firms’ profits but also their nations’ GDP.79
+
+Squeezing wages allows markups to increase. Thus UNCTAD reports that “clothing, footwear, textiles, furniture, miscellaneous manufacturers (which includes toys) and chemicals all experienced import price declines (relative to U.S. consumer prices) over two decades of more than 1 percent per year on average, or 40 percent over the period 1986–2006.”80

socialism_faq.md

@@ -454,7 +454,7 @@
   * [Who runs China? Makeup of the national people's congress.](https://news.cgtn.com/event/2019/whorunschina/index.html)
   * [US policy-makers are misjudging popular support China's Government.](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-numbers-show-just-how-much-the-lives-of-everyday-chinese-have-improved-in-recent-decades-2019-10-02)
   * [The american dream is alive... in China.](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html)
-* Some stats
+* Some stats: 
   * [The real wage (IE the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it's the most populous country on the planet. The US real wage by comparison is lower in 2019 than it was in 1973.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI)
   * [US Life expectancy peaked in 2015, is on the decline, and is now lower than in China.](https://www.businessinsider.com/china-boasts-that-its-healthy-life-expectancy-beats-the-us-is-correct-2018-5) [2](http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-09/07/c_138372963.htm) 
     * How [healthcare works in China (refuting a fearmongering NYT video about health care in China)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvpo2jv5eqI).
@@ -471,6 +471,7 @@
 
 - [Debunking the claim that "China is Imperialist"](https://medium.com/@rainershea612/catagorically-debunking-the-claim-that-china-is-imperialist-a9ae7b280a44)
 - [Yanis Varoufakis on China's foreign policy dealings with Greece and Africa](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBgbYQ5QAM0).
+- [The Belt and Road Initiative: the antithesis of Colonialism.](https://qutnyti.wordpress.com/2018/07/16/belt-road-initiative-an-anti-thesis-of-colonialism/)
 - [China has forgiven over $10B in debt, over half to Cuba](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2019/05/29/china-has-forgiven-nearly-10-billion-in-debt-cuba-accounts-for-over-half/#7a4116c3615b), but also including > 20 African nations, Pakistan, and Cambodia.
 - [China forgives over $78M in Cameroon debt](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/04/china/cameroon-china-debt-relief-intl/index.html).
 - [China writes off $36m Mozambican debt](https://furtherafrica.com/2017/10/26/china-writes-off-36m-mozambican-debt/).