Thanks to the 35 million Chinese workers each saving three dollars a day ..

Dannyboy83 wrote: »

Assuming the USA doesn't grind to an immediate stand still/enter a time freeze, I can't really see how China can overtake all that development and technology in the West within our lifetime, but as he said himself, nobody believed the British Empire would collapse 100 years ago, and it happened.

simple, they will buy them with Americans own money, that what they are doing now, acquiring raw resources

the only thing safe would be anything defense related

as for technology, the dont respect IP laws so they quite literary take/steal as much know how and IP as possible

the rest can be leapfrogged by making few strategic investments

notice how sizable amount of US academia and students is composed of Chinese

Dannyboy83 wrote: »

but as he said himself, nobody believed the British Empire would collapse 100 years ago, and it happened.

If McWilliams said this, then as usual he's talking equal parts hype and exaggeration, and presenting commonplace ideas as unique personal insight.

For example:

. . . Admiral Fisher, later First Sea Lord, in a 1901 letter. In a 1917 letter, reprinted in his Memories (1919), an (unnamed) Privy Councillor wrote to Fisher: 'I remembered your old saying "Some day the Empire will go down because it is Buggins's turn."'

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Buggins's_turn

Or, more classically,

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'

The chinese are taking over and there is nothing we can do about it. So what we if we don't recognise their degrees over here or any other western countries (which i am pretty sure is not the case), it doesn't matter especially for skilled qualification i.e. engineers, scientists, medics, accountants.

The US is 19trillion dollars in debt and increasing. China has been making extremely smart and coy investments around the world, buying mines, huge amounts of gold and silver, opening up trading realtions with differetn governements. They have been patient and are smart as hell adn are going to make their move soon. The main issue with the US and perhaps somebody could tell me if it was mentioned in the programme, is the devalueing of the dollar. The Fed is printing out fiat money like there is no tomorrow and the world is coming aware of this. Russia, China and a few other big countries were out there only the other week lobbying for a new world currency to replace the dollar. If the dollar contiues to weaken and gold continues to surge, the dollar will become so devalued that it will collapse. If the dollar collapses, the days of America being the superpower of the world are over.

I'm not saying i want this, its just as it is.

Thirdfox wrote: »

Oh and as a side-note to those who didn't know, there are elections in China at the local level. All candidates are from the CCP but there are certainly "factions" within the CCP that have their left/right wing interests (within the general framework of the CCP). Some people seem to have the impression that the CCP is one giant body that thinks and acts as one...this is quite untrue - the political manoeuvrings/backstabbing/grooming that takes place within, say, Fine Fail or Fianna Gael are present in the CCP too...behind closed doors (or are open secrets). This is the main beacon of hope I have that the CCP will expand on as it experiments with further democratisation of its political process.

Good point.
The difference in local candidates in China is probably similar the difference between local republican and democrat candidates in the USA, or the local FF and FG candidates here in Ireland.

Sad but true.

China is one of the countries making sense and among others have been making ever stronger noises about moving away from the dollar as the worlds reserve currency. It's no surprise that Stiglitz is in support of an IMF bond based on a basket of 30 currencies and gold, since he wrote a great book all about how Keynes tried to establish exactly that at Bretton Woods but his plan for global economic equilibrium was shot down by the Americans in favour of the dog eat dog model. A summary.

That the USA has a sole veto in the IMF may explain why their is some prevarication on the part of G20 countries who agreed to fund the SDR's, and why independant moves are afoot.

Wall St. are a bunch of cowboys and Washington are in their pockets, Europe is a mixed bag with Ireland a banana republic as the Boomtown Rats sang. All countries and trading blocs have their agendas, the jury is out on the EU, support for nama sounds discouraging but I suspect as the only plan presented there was little choice but to green light it for the sake of market confidence.

The supreme spectacle in this pump and dump of the global economy is that the only lesson many 'leaders' seem to have learned is that banks are too big to fail and must be bailed out (we're slaves to private interests), markets need regulation, and we must tighten our belts to regain competitiveness.

That's re-arranging the deckchairs on the titanic, we need a radical rethink because resources are dwindling as population growth and globalisation drive consumption and pollution ever higher, every major ecosystem has been in accelerating decline since at least the 1970's. Climate change is another potential threat.

Co-operation is the only thing that can deliver an ethically defensible and sustainable future. How did we ever get duped into believing that all children must be raised to follow a narrow prescription: compete, engage in all out global economic war? It's absolutely nuts, until you realise that it suits one purpose very well indeed - the concentration of wealth with the elite.

Poor countries have traditionally been artificially suppressed by rich countries, and since Bretton Woods the IMF has been instrumental in carrying this mission out as described by Noam Chomsky etc in exhaustive detail. It's utterly obscene what they've done, but again it suits wealth concentration. Now lets be honest, citizens in rich countries have been quite happy to maintain their relative luxury whilst throwing hands in the air (and in fairness money at charities) over third world poverty.

Most don't realise just what our leaders do in our name, but some do, Irish farmers insisted in the run-up to lisbon that the government guarantee it will use its veto at the WTO to reject fair trade in the stalled Doha round. They want to keep the subsidy/tariff regime which puts millions of third world peasant farmers out of a livelihood. Handy, this creates a supply of cheap labour for the giant corporate machine, from Nike to Coca cola, their sins are well documented.

Meanwhile our unions in their fancy georgian offices, or skyscraper, fight to protect workers pay and conditions, but this is faux protectionism, peeing in the breeze of global competition. The employers continue to close up shop and move abroad to avail of those ex-farmers who'll work all year in those corporate fiefdoms called export processing zones for a fistful of dollars.

In theory this all proves that the markets are the only thing allowing 'the rise of the rest', since redistribution of wealth on a global scale could never be agreed at the UN. After all, half of us are up to our necks in debt for overpriced property as these asset bubbles have turned us into debt slaves, how can we contemplate lower wages, especially when we all want higher wages?

We need to get out of this boom bust rollercoaster of doom, Keynes proposal stands alone as a long term leveller at the international level with its negative feedback loop. We in the rich countries have to agree to such global plans that will transition us to long term equilibrium, peace, and survival. It's about you and me agreeing that we'll forego excesses like suv's, multiple cars in one household, multiple holidays each year, second homes and so on in order that the poor of the world can raise their standard of living. That we'll co-operate on where production happens so that we get efficient scale economies and sane transport, and to ensure employment is shared around.

If we try to compete our way to peace, and to consume and pollute our way to sustainability, we will fail. Co-operation must become the overarching technology if man the thinker is to become human the carer. If you read this whole post fair play

Lol, well done, and that's just what Reagan said about aliens, so long as it's not the Vogons informing us that earth is to be destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass :eek:

I was at the festival of world cultures earlier this year, bear with me, and as part of it went to shoot the Yuanxiao Jie on Dun Laoghaire pier, just as the dragons began to make their way back from the bandstand some guy shouts "idiots", sounding pretty angry. Couldn't see him in the crowd, but as we made our way back he shouted it again, so I moved in the direction it came from, third time lucky and having ID'd the culprit with his backpack shouted back "what's your problem?", one guy in the crowd chipped in "yeah!", no answer from angry dude, within a minute he was about to shout again but when he glanced around I was right behind him by then and eyeballed him, he kept his mouth shut and disappeared.

I don't know what a guy with that chip on his shoulder expected to achieve at a festival of world cultures, but he frightened the children I saw it on their faces and that's what got me the most. What also gets me is that in the whole crowd, no one else seemed ready to challenge him, they'd all look around when he shouted but did nothing. I expect there's a line and if he'd crossed that then people would have stepped in, but that high threshold of tolerating wrongdoing is a problem that manifests itself in every sphere of life.

We let corporations and political puppets walk all over us. Too sheepish by far, but I disagree with a French observation that the Irish have no sense of outrage, we do, it's just that too many have boiling frog syndrome, too dozy to deal with problems until they get really serious, or it's too late. Worldwide the same phenomenon allows corruption and greed to flourish at the expense of the common good, we need to move toward zero tolerance and take control of our destinies. Amen!