Excellent Excellent Commentary All ............................................................................................... I have a rather selfish viewpoint in that I want to see the US implement what I see as solutions in that I already know that Latin America as old as it is...older than the US....has been given plenty of chances....and Europe....seeing how old it is...has been given plenty of chances....and the US as young as it is ....has done the best job with the assets that it has...better than any other nation .... I know that Latin America is not as likely to change as the US is....and what I do know is ..that if the US is doing great..Latin countries will be better off.... Europe ...I do not think will effect the kind of change that I would like to see happen ...before the US does.....but if the US were to implement what I envision as being possible....more countries would go in this direction... Asia I believe would follow ...not lead the US as well... .................................................................................... As imperfect as the current US status is....it still leads the rest of the world... ..................................................................................... What can change the current debt picture...is to change the system...and thus the changes in valuation of assets that would happen as a result of this change.... What is quite clear is that capitalism creates the highest valuations....higher than the very same assets in a socialist framework... I also know that it is the ever moving mass of hopefuls in small business that create the majority of employment...and this segment must be kept well....as they are the economic estuaries of big business that make possible the distribution of innovations... The very pundits that want to gain office by garnering the less well to do vote....and wants to interfere with productivity with regards to taxation or more legal largesse....are basically turning a dollar into 20 cents...and then spreading it around...Why would one want less to spread around ? I do not believe that a government has to adopt a European style socialism of heavy individual taxation....nor do I believe that a population should support an aristocratic form of government whereby the majority of wealth is held by the few...nor do I believe medicine should be a business.... What if a country was... ............................................................................................... A place where health care is a human right not a business...a place where people who contibute to making their companies great get some ownership of the company...so that even their children will have something....a place where there is no income tax on individuals or companies...just consumption taxes...a place where 1% of the people do not own 80% of the assets...a place where the government is truly controlled by its people via the internet....a place where all children find an equal education...and truly an equal prospective future...a place where the energy comes from an everlasting local source that does not pollute the air and ground....a place where legal largesse is no more whereby small business can thrive....a place where infrastucture and not the military is more important.....a place where opportunity for small business exists in the form of non obligatory loans called stocks that trade on electronic exchanges that take the place of the non producing banks....a place that will work towards a single world currency so that the fiat currency and loan options no longer exist... No countries have this now and could not have had them before because the techology was not available to accomplish these objectives......but the US can now have this....as long as the chosen leadership will cause the legal direction... I hope soon....
jff wrote... Do you see a plan in the wind. ................................................................................................. I wrote this in a previous post.... But when there is an unavoidable debt imbalance ....one has to run...not walk towards efficiency.....or suffer the consequences.... ................................................................................................ A previous poster in another thread stated a very telling phrase....the losses are being socialized...whereas the gains have been capitalized.... ......................................................................................... What is interesting is to point out what went wrong with the current form of American Capitalism.... One cause would be the ineffective form of distribution of wealth... Another cause would be the continued add ons to inefficiency to productivity.... .......................................................................................... Another interesting point is that there are a lot of right things about American capitalism as well.... Assets form their highest wealth on electronic stock exchanges... Whereas it is also true that the very same assets form much lower wealth levels in a socialistic framework.... ............................................................................................. The US economy will have to morph into efficiency mode....This mode must also recognize that globalization is here to stay...in simpler terms ...cheaper labor is elsewhere and will be pursued... .............................................................................................. Thus since labor is but one component of the overall process...then what has to happen to make the collective process more efficient...within the boundaries of the US...to better benefit the US population.. ............................................................................................. First one must look at the basic categorical underpinnings..... Education Medicine Government Taxes Manufacturing Entrepreneurial Small Business Government Legal Currency Nongovernment legal Finance Housing Energy Food Wealth Distribution ............................................................................................... Now that the debt picture is so large ....efficiency in all categories has to be relentlessly pursued...and must be rectified in the shortest time frame possible... ........................................................................................... The package that promotes efficiency would include.. E Government Eliminate IRS...Consumption tax only E Education Non oil non food based energy Eliminate legal largesse Enhance electronic stock exchanges Mandate stock ownership Remove medicine as a business ........................................................................................ Socializing the losses...and making sure that the 1% of Americans retain ownership of more than 80% of total assets...is a sure path to failure... Even Gates and Buffett have made recent remarks about how American style capitalism has to change..... If it does not.....well....look at where it is going....
chinese and indians are also going back in small numbers. these are highly educated business people who see the possibility of making billions not millions back home. as america veers to the left and heads toward economic calamity more ambitious immigrants will move back. the reverse brain drain exists in the US going towards Asia and Eastern Europe.
What a crap!!! What's the purpose to lie? http://www.gcr.weforum.org/ Second, regarding standard of living based on PPP. Do you want to tell me that real average Swiss income is double of that in the U.S.? You are an idiot to think somebody is gonna believe that. Can you tell me what's the purpose to making up lies in order to make a point? How fucking stupid!
What details do you want ? Just sober up and look around. You are deep in mortgage shit, you owe the whole world a great deal of money and lenders doubt you can pay out debts, your jobs are going to other countries, the unemployment rate is rising, recession is looming. At the same time, BRIC countries grow their GDP by 6-10%. USA is fucked up and losing its steam. Your predecessors worked hard and built exellent contry and economy, achived a lot. But their children became fat and lazy, wanted to do nothing and have everything. They hired chinese to produce goods, russins to teach them in universities, indians to write computer programs. They printed a lot of dollars to pay for work. And a judgment day has come. Dollars worth not more than cut paper and foreiners still want to be paid. It's time to buy america for debts, rebuild it and sell for profit I am afraid that my country follows american way, adopting all the worst. Take a lot of debt, buy a car or house "for free" and don't worry. Also our local morons put a lot of money to rotten ameriacan economy instead of financing internal projects. Fuck Putin and his friends. Greetings from Russia. Nothing personal just biz.
the4xczar, Mate, the US need only do one thing - slash the $500 billion military budget by 80% - close their international bases and stop the wars. Everyone know that that cash can be better spent - national debt, health care, education, bio-fuels, tackling greenhouse emissions ... And you don't have to choose - $400 billion could cover all of those causes. It is pretty simple. pneuma
The most depressing book since Bambi (America's sad state of knowledge) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- On Sept. 11, 2001, New York author and historian Susan Jacoby headed home, not unreasonably stopping at a bar first, where she overheard a conversation between two men in suits: "It's just like Pearl Harbor," one of the men said. "What's Pearl Harbor?" the other one asked. "That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbour, and it started the Vietnam War," the first man replied. That was when Jacoby decided to write her stunningly sad new book, The Age of American Unreason, on the anti-intellectualism of her nation. It's the type of worthy, timely book that consolidates information rather than uncovering it, and stunning only in the sense that it is asteroid-like when it hits the reader. Just when Americans, led by the young, were getting their courage back and demanding a return to sanity â with the rest of us cheering them on â Jacoby delivers a harsh verdict. Here was I, expecting and rejoicing in great things from a stricken country â President Obama, money wasted on Iraq to be spent on education in slums and Arkansas, and maybe a new novel from Jonathan Franzen. The Age of American Unreason obliterates all hope and leaves a steaming black pit. It's the most depressing book since Bambi, and I was six when I read that. Bambi's mother isn't coming back and neither is the American drive towards rationalism, self-improvement, respect for measurable scientific truth and ability to understand sentences with clauses. Anti-intellectualism has always existed but it didn't always run the American show, Jacoby says. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter weren't embarrassed to take speed-reading classes in the White House, part of the same grand tradition of self-taught intellect that fuelled the almost unschooled Abraham Lincoln into the building. But the era of the autodidact is dead. The accepted stance now is to assert that one cannot be improved upon. Here's the puzzle Jacoby presents: it isn't that the poor are shut out of an education, it's that everyone is. Learning is aggressively undervalued. Evolution is officially considered a theory, Bush aides refer sneeringly to the "reality-based community," and, as Bill Moyers put it, "the delusional is no longer marginal." Adults are not expected to have a common literacy or prior body of knowledge, and this one has pained me personally for years. When I write a column, should I have to identify all the proper names of intellectuals I mention? Can I assume that readers are already familiar with John Kenneth Galbraith or Donald Rumsfeld? I say yes, Canadian newspaper editors gently say no, American editors angrily say no, and â here's the glory of writing online â my CBC.ca editor says yes, and anyway, readers curious about Moyers will simply Google his name and return to this page. Mainstream editors assume that readers don't know who anyone is. And this is Jacoby's point. It's not that her fellow Americans know nothing â that would be fixable in a better world â but that they are expected to know nothing. This extends into the Ivy League, media, academia and science. The New York Times recently ran an article on young immigrant students drawing classroom lessons from reading The Great Gatsby. They yearned for Gatsby's wealth; they saw him as a glorious "striver." But no one, not the sweet-natured teacher, the students or the reporter seemed to grasp that Gatsby's green light was a delusion, that the novel ends in tragedy and that Gatsby was a bootlegger, a 1920s version of a drug dealer. The article was written with the literalism and gassy sentimental wonder that is the hallmark of a Times feature. I am always awed by journalists' ability to see glamour where there is none. Wiser readers wrote to complain about the misreading, but they sounded ⦠lonely. Lawrence Summers of Harvard had no evidence for saying women were bad at science; he simply felt it to be true. News reports on NBC are short because viewers are assumed to have a child's attention span. It is scientists hungry for research grants who are responsible for the laughable "health" stories that clog our landscape. Take, for example, "post-abortion syndrome," or the recent study that claimed pot smokers were more likely than cigarette smokers to get lung cancer, based on chats with 10 smokers in Melbourne. It's junk science, but people are innumerate, scientifically illiterate and credulous â three things educated people are not supposed to be. As for last week's headline, Female G-spot can be detected, all I can say is "Yes, if you work at it," and if you're an enthusiastic male Italian PhD with 20 women to be probed at leisure, you will find it, but it's not science. Jacoby traces the historical paths of anti-intellectualism. She studies the devastation caused by the U.S. system of locally controlled education, which dooms the poor and rural; the way the South for centuries ran a blockade against good schoolteachers; the primacy of religion; and, most tragically, the decline of the middlebrow. Middlebrow culture began with the early 19th century adult-education lyceums, and continued with the postwar GI Bill that gave Second World War soldiers a free education, as well as a 1950s attempt by the middle class to improve themselves with such things as the Book-of-the-Month Club. But TV destroyed middlebrow. And highbrow dumbed down, Jacoby says, thanks to timid academics who allowed the core curriculum to drift into trendiness, killing off the study of the Dead White Males and anything that could be called an agreed-on central culture that all Americans should share. Now Americans, including the president, live in a lowbrow world. I cannot square this with evidence of America's geniuses â there are plenty of them â but she would say that the exception proves the rule. And she's no happier saying it than I am reading about it. American unreason is why a white-collar New Yorker conflates the Vietnam War with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. What half-remembered whispers of fact rustled in this man's mind? He regards history as a series of generic anti-American explosions, but then, he probably never took a high school history class. He is normal; Jacoby is the odd one out. In the U.S. today, literate thoughtful people are regarded as freaks. De Toqueville described all this in 1835 in Democracy in America. But he was describing a nation in transition. Jacoby isn't. "It is possible that nothing will help," she concludes. "The nation's memory and attention span may already have sustained so much damage that they cannot be revived by the best efforts of America's best minds." ----------------------------------------- Article from cbc.ca/news ----------------------------------------- My disclosure as per your request: Born and raised in Europe, since 1995. proud to be Canadian.