So the sovereign debt of the American government has been downgraded. Not last week by Standard & Poor’s, which merely put it on negative watch. But last November, by Dagong, China’s rating agency, which down-rated it from AA (its highest rating) to A+, and rated its outlook “negative.” Of course, the folks at Dagong had special reasons of their own: The Chinese regime, sitting on $1.2 trillion of U.S. government IOUs, wants to warn that it might stop buying Treasuries if we threaten to pay our debts in depreciated dollars.

But the Chinese regime also used the occasion to take a few swipes at “the serious defects in the US economic and development management model”—those inherent contradictions of capitalism that so disturbed Karl Marx—and to argue that America’s problems cannot be solved by a move by their agreement to allow the renminbi to rise from the undervalued level at which they have been maintaining it—a policy they are reviewing since it is contributing to the inflation that is causing the regime such difficulties.