Alex’s Notes: My main reason for posting the article below is to note what the Chinese are doing in preparations for their massive upcoming natural resource needs.
Between China and India, there is a rapidly growing group of some 1 billion people with new middle class incomes. When all of these people all decide they each want a car, a microwave, a new refrigerator, a new LCD TV, and all the amenities some of us in the western world take for granted, the natural resources requirements to fuel this wave of improved lifestyle will be staggering.
This is just one more example of how China and India thinks ahead, preparing generationally, for what is to come.
Proverbs 13:22: A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just.
By contrast, what does the USA do?
We spend trillions supporting a worldwide military complex under the mantra of ‘national defense’. I still occasionally ponder how exactly projecting military power into another sovereign nation is defending yourself, but we have fallen that far.
We do not engage in the kind of future looking programs that will adress our educational, oil and energy needs of the future. Not to mention the staggering elder care and knowledge vacuum problems we face as our baby boomers enter retirement and remove a massive pool of knowledge, experience and know how from America’s workforce.
We have lost our generational thinking and planning long ago. While highschoolers in India study crammed 100 at a time into small sweltering rooms 7 days a week just to get into a technical college, we create programs like ‘No Child Left Behind’. New Middle Class from India and China work tirelessly with hopes of profiting in the digital future economy, and have no qualms about putting in 12 hour days. What have we taught our kids to do? Lets hook it up with more MTV, and spend our time drinking, doing drugs, having sex, and playing video games. Policies that discourage competition in our schools will have the effect of producing invalid, incompetent, and non-competetive workers that are not equipped to compete nor have the work ethic to do so even if they were equipped, while hard working knowledge workers from China and India take their jobs and leave them in poverty.
The moment we allowed ourselves to create entitlement programs that would enslave future generations because we were to lazy to accept personal responsibility for our retirement needs is the moment we lost our Moral Authority, and it was then that we lost our edge as world leaders. We are only beginning to see the results now. Just wait and see what the next 20 years holds if we do not change our tune.
We have allowed our government representatives to spoon feed us a utopian future, where everyones needs are cared for, just ‘elect me and I will pass legislature that will take care of everything’. What they did not include in those slogans was all the spending they would tack on to those bills for their personal interests, nor did they include the astronomical costs and damage to future generations that their ‘utopia legislature’ would create. Social Security and Medicare are hurtling towards a trainwreck of an event that many Americans are completely oblivious of, and even worse apathetic to. Most people in America still think there is money in the Social Security fund that hasnt been plundered for some other government program. HAHAHHAHAHAHA, thats a good one.
As faithful American citizens we of course voted these people into office and cheer as they provide a means of saving us from our own stupidity. What we are seeing now is only the effects of decisions we have made, and allowed our leaders to make in the past.
The consequences of our choices to spend now by our government will also not have to be dealt with by us, but by Americans who have not even been born yet. Our future generations will be born into a world with hundreds of thousands in National Debt burden from the moment they leave the womb. In our ‘I want it now, I will spend now, regardless of the cost’ culture – we have created a generational habit of instant gratification that may feel good now, but that our grandchildren will pay the price for.
Whats the solution? To take back our personal responsibility and forward looking planning on an individual level, to elect like minded officials, and to labor to create our own financial future versus relying on someone else to do it, and forcing our childrens children to pay the bill. We need to let go of the idea that the government is going to take care of us – let me let you in on a hint, they arent there to help you, they are there helping themselves, and using your tax money to do it.
Granted, now and then we see someone in government who believes in personal accountability and taking steps to improve the future of our chidrens children such as Ron Paul, but why should it be that he is an anomaly versus the norm?
Wake up America, the entire world is surging forward while we stagnate, and its economies are largely fueled by our willingness to becomes slaves to debt. If we allow a government that has no qualms about taxing the ever-living crap out of you to do what feels good for themselves, we are asking for it. If we at some point do not rise up and take back our own future, it will be dished to us on plates that will not taste good. No, they will not taste good at all.
/rantoff. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
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Written by Nicholas F. Benton
nfbenton@fcnp.com
My exclusive interview this week with a leading health official from the U.S. working on the AIDS crisis in Zambia, Africa, revealed conditions on the ground there almost too horrible to describe. There is no one critical problem there that is not interlinked with at least a half-dozen others and the conventional wisdom is that the best case scenario for a turnaround is at least 40 years away.
But as far as the U.S. or any Western interests are concerned, that day will likely never come, since their current foreign policy vacuum in that region has left it to strident and persistent advances by the Chinese.
China is moving into the most ravaged areas of Africa with no humanitarian intent. On the contrary, the Chinese are capitalizing on the corruption at the top of governments there to trade financial payoffs for titles to massive chunks of land rich in untapped natural resources.
The U.S. has turned its back to this process, from combined diplomatic, geopolitical and financial aid standpoints, because of its preoccupation with Iraq, the official said.
So the unspeakable human crisis there is not only a matter of concern for the people in that region, but for the wider global interests of the U.S., as well. The U.S. is stuck in the Iraq quagmire, having expended over $500 billion there to date, in an intended oil grab against perceived Russian and Chinese designs. Yet because of that, it is permitting access to even more vital resources in Africa and elsewhere to the same strategic competitors, over the poverty-stricken and disease-riddled rotting bodies of millions.
It is impossible to imagine anything but a massive shift of focus by the U.S. and its allies to turn this regrettable inevitability around.
As it is now, up to 40 percent of the population of Zambia and surrounding countries is infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS. In Zambia, because of AIDS, the average life expectancy has dropped from 57 to 37 years of age in 20 years.
One out of every two children born there today will die from AIDS-related factors before age 24.
The death rate has created a massive displaced children problem and the local government has no interest in setting up orphanages. Instead, these AIDS orphans either move in with extended family members, live on the streets or are periodically rounded up into military camps.
These children are then either recruited into the exploding trend of child soldiers used as fodder in genocidal tribal wars, or into global human trafficking networks, shipped around the world and forced to become sex workers. The primary destinations of these networks are the large coastal urban centers of the U.S., the official said.
Neither condoms nor AIDS drugs are working in arresting the spread of HIV in Zambia, she added, noting that cultural mores and a pervasive sense of despair make them ineffective.
People living in conditions of extreme poverty have no energy to think beyond how they’re going to eat from day to day, and have no sense that they could work for a better future for themselves, or their children, in the long term. There is simply no notion of opportunities for a better life.
Foreign aids organizations are treated with great suspicion, with Afro-Americans from the U.S. being considered “white.” The suspicions are fueled by local witch doctors whose prescriptions for virility encourage sexual practices by adults with young children too heinous to describe explicitly. Polygamy, without the formality of marriage or commitment, is the norm.
Corrupt local leaders hold aid efforts at bay, demanding huge bribes and diverting resources for their own uses. And there is simply no way the U.S. or any other outside nation can carry out programs in those countries without the blessings of those leaders.
There appears to be no sweeping proposal for a “silver bullet” to fix all this. The only way to start, however, would be for the global community, most importantly the U.S., to begin fixing its gaze on what’s happening there, not only from a humanitarian but from a geo-strategic standpoint.
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