Re: Who will be #1? And when?
I guess Greater China (mainland + Taiwan) will rise to the top after the second American Civil War.... Let's just remember that corporate America achieved his world supremacy feeding off/catering to a domestic market of merely 230 million consumers (US population as of the 1960s?). Corporate China, for its part, is accumulating profits and revenues from a domestic market of 1.3 Billion consumers. Size matters. Of course, China's ideological and mythological appeal to world opinion has yet a long way to go.... Today most frustrated European (or Asian, South American,...) entrepreneurs think of the US as the #1 destination to start a new --and successful-- life. Young computer graduates dream of Silicon Valley, not of Shanghai... yet. Things and perceptions, however, can change rapidly if the world realizes that New Orleans, somehow, portends America's future --what I used to call "the Israelization of America". A mostly white, Judeo-Protestant elite thriving in the best neighborhoods, educated in the best universities, managing all the resources (space, clean air, water, energy,...) to the best of its advantage YET surrounded and assailed by minority ghettos --Palestinian/Arab in Israel, "wetback"/non-white in the US. Israel's Jewish residents can't travel beyond their newly erected "Separation Wall" without an Uzi gun slung over their shoulder. Likewise, white Americans dare not venture outside their gated Disneyesque resorts without a gun. And, as I told you, the police state has worsened and morphed into a Disneyesque Gulag --Patriot Act(s), Shoot-to-Kill policy, Torture as a legal way to extract information, etc. From now on, what used to be seen as urban violence, drug-related crimes, and immigration problems, will be redefined as "terrorism" --there aren't drug kingpins, minority misfits, illegals-turned-criminals, pimps, and molls anymore... only TERRORISTS!!!(*)
So, my point is that, if China --and, more broadly, East Asia-- can offer the world's best and brightest a more humane, more peaceful, non-Judeofascist, environment and future then... well, the so-called American Dream (or is it a nightmare?) will be history....
Gus
(*) From you antiwar article:
Foolishly, many Americans believe this power can only be used against terrorists. Americans don't realize that the government can declare anyone to be a terrorist suspect. As no evidence is required, it is entirely up to the government to decide who is a terrorist. Thus, the power is unaccountable. Unaccountable power is the source of tyranny.
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