http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/05/america_in_decline_or_the_rest.html
Danny Huddleston
Does it really matter which it is? Either way we don't feel like we
are the biggest kid on the block anymore. It's not that we grew
smaller it's that the other kids got bigger. The value of the dollar
is dropping and the price of gas is going up because more people in
China and India are driving cars. And the price of diesel is going up
because people in Europe use it in their cars. America is not in
charge of her destiny anymore. The unease manifest itself in polls
showing 81% of Americans think we are on the wrong track. Fareed
Zakaria has the story in Newsweek.
Look around. The world's tallest building is in Taipei, and will
soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing.
Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest
passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on
the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood,
not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped
by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singa****e. The largest
casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last
year. America no longer dominates even its favorite s****t, shopping.
The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest
shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn't make the top ten. In the
most recent rankings, only two of the world's ten richest people are
American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that
only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped
almost every one of these categories.
He goes on to say that while we are arguing over why they hate us.
"They" have moved on, "The world has ****fted from anti-Americanism to
post-Americanism". Here he describes the new world we are part of:
At the military and political level, we still live in a unipolar
world. But along every other dimension-industrial, financial, social,
cultural-the distribution of power is ****fting, moving away from
American dominance. In terms of war and peace, economics and business,
ideas and art, this will produce a landscape that is quite different
from the one we have lived in until now-one defined and directed from
many places and by many peoples.
It looks like this globalization we've been pu****ng has worked a
little too well. I'm thinking about joining the protesters at the next
WTO meeting. But on second thought maybe things are not as bleak as
they seem, on page 6 of the article we finally get some good news:
Over the last 20 years, globalization has been gaining depth and
breadth. America has benefited massively from these trends. It has
enjoyed unusually robust growth, low unemployment and inflation, and
received hundreds of billions of dollars in investment. These are not
signs of economic collapse.
Thomas Friedman was also optimistic about our economy in an interview
he gave back in 2005 titled "Wake up and face the flat earth" in it he
explains how Dell, UPS and Walmart have prospered by going global.
I really dove into some key companies that are now globalizing and
are really the source for understanding globalization. Wal-Mart, UPS -
these are companies we don't traditionally think of as being goldmines
of insights into globalization, but in fact if you understand what's
going on inside these companies, you can get an amazing view of the
flattening of the global playing field and the forces that are doing
it.
Globalization may even bring peace to the world, according to
Friedman's "Dell Theory".
The Dell Theory says that no two countries that are part of the
same global supply chain will ever fight a war as long as they're each
still part of that supply chain. Now, the big test case is China and
Taiwan. Both are suppliers of the main parts of computers. If they go
to war, don't try to order a computer this month because you'll have a
real problem.
Remember though even good trends can have side effects. Yes, it is a
good thing to have 2.5 billion people lifted out of poverty but as
Thomas Friedman has said the earth is flat now. In the past we drove
big cars and the Chinese rode bicycles. There is a finite amount of
oil in the world, in the future we will all be driving small cars.
Please stop what you are doing now and let us have a moment of silence
for the passing of the quintessential big American car.
We can survive and prosper in this new world order, The United States
is ranked as the globe's most competitive economy by the World
Economic Forum, we are a free and open society and as long as we
encourage the brightest young people from around the world to come
here get an education and become entrepreneurs we will have more
companies like Bose and Intel.
There is one fly in the ointment of our future, well actually two.
Here is Obama's and Hillary's plan for America: "Renegotiate" the
NAFTA trade deal with Canada and Mexico, No trade deal for our
Columbian friends, keep our cor****ate taxes high, raise taxes on
"wealthy" Americans, raise capital gains taxes and do away with secret
ballots for union elections. If one of these liberal democrats is
elected president all bets are off for our future. While the rest of
the World moves forward the democrats want to drag us back to the past.
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