>>I just feel it's easier to point a finger of blame than to get at the real trouble which could be a combination of things <<<
BW, I would be the last one to blame China. If INTC went to AMD's home office and said , "here is all our intellectual property. do what you want with it". And, then several years down the road seeing INTC complaining about AMD competitive prices and unfair competition- would I blame AMD. Hell, no.
Our country is every bit to blame for the mess it is getting itself into. Unrestrained multi-nationalism is not in our best interest. Sure, it's great for the shareholder but not neccessarily for your neighbor. Yes, we get some growth potential but we also make greater gains in not being able to guarantee our children's economic success. We sacrificed jobs and and profit from the future so we could have more now.
BW, when I look at the future, it scares the hell out of me. Not for myself, I'm planning for it now.(if that is possible) I'm talking about the pain and sorrow of watching family, friends and their loved ones facing hardships because because this country's leadership, republican and democratic, are afraid to risk political retribution to do what is right. To tell the truth, our demograhics, combined with changes that have come about in our culture over the last 30 years, guarantee our failure to retain our world leadership position. Sure we will end up one of the taller pygmies. The world has become so US centric that when we fail others will fall further. This will be a very good setup for China to move to the front.
I don't know if you read Mrs. Puplava's piece last week. Her heartfelt plea for change touched my heart. She felt that change can come from the bottom. Times have changed. Grassroot politics are considered as gatherings of extremist. I know most think that I'm an extremist when it comes to my vision of where we are headed. Change must come from the top. Problem is that we don't have leadership anywhere near the top. True leadership has become politically incorrect. True leadership has become political suicide. Very few of us would vote for the candidate that offered us a slate of sacrifices.
I had a short discussion with a college student yesterday about the future of IRAQ. I'm not optimistic about the ability of us to set up a democracy over there. The reason? Lack of natural resources. IRAQ will always have civil discontent because it does not have the resources to provide comfortably for it's population. Civil discontent leads to civil disobedience. Wide spread national civil disobedience is always best controlled with the rule of one with an iron fist. From an economic point of view, Saddam Hussien probably did a pretty good job with what he had to work with. He will be hard to replace. What IRAQ needs is a benovolent dictator. Not too many of them around. I don't know if that will even work.
BTW, speaking of benovolent dictators, this country is in bad need of one now.
But I digress......China. I think China has the leadership and controlls in place to become the world's next #1 super power. They may have gotten there eventully anyways but the US is helping them get there much faster at the expense of our future generations. Just so we can make earnings this quarter and the quarter after that. Unfortunately no one is looking past the next quarter.
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