Seven Generational Ruminations

This is a opinion piece by Warren Buffet warning the U.S. about the dangerous situation we've gotten ourselves into. He uses an analogy of Thriftville and Squanderville, two neighboring communities, one of whom takes over the other through purchase rather than through conquest.

At that point, the Squanders are forced to deal with an ugly equation: They must now not only return to working eight hours a day in order to eat--they have nothing left to trade--but must also work additional hours to service their debt and pay Thriftville rent on the land so imprudently sold.

Hopefully you saw Fahrenheit 9/11, the movie by Michael Moore that was prominent in 2004. His main topic throughout the movie was to explore cronyism and how that created the war in Iraq. The main example is the laundry list of business ties between the Administration, the Saudi royalty and even to the bin Laden family.

This CNN article: Chavez threatens to cut off oil to U.S. discusses a threat by Hugo Chavez to cut off Venezuela's shipments of oil to the U.S. Part of this has been an ongoing story, for example the American-backed coup attempt in Venezuela a couple years ago.

Democracy Now for February 15, 2006 has an interesting interview with John Perkins, author of "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man". Ostensibly he worked as an economist for a big consulting company, but he describes his real job as

This is meant to calm us?

Wow, now I understand the significance of something I've seen mentioned in the press. The U.S. Federal Reserve is planning to stop publishing the M3 number. I've seen this in the news, but it didn't register for me the significance, but according to The Story about Oil you NEED to Hear this technical detail in the economic statistics reporting couldn't be more important.

Okay, we have another World Trade Organization (WTO) summit coming up. And, as a prelude to the summit, we have protesters coming in from around the world.

Here's an article going over the preparations for the protesters: Hong Kong on high alert as thousands of protesters fly in (Jonathan Watts in Hong Kong, Monday December 12, 2005, The Guardian)

Hmm, the world global economy is shaping up into a few large trading blocks.

China, ASEAN to create trade bloc
Monday, November 29, 2004 Posted: 8:34 AM EST (1334 GMT) CNN.COM

Already existing is NAFTA (Canada+US+Mexico) and the EU (Europe).

I've seen proposals to expand NAFTA to more of the America's, and now China and ASEAN have agreed to form a free-trade zone.

That leaves me pondering the fate of other regions .. for example, India is not included in this new China/ASEAN bloc, and we have India and Pakistan in interesting conversations. That leaves Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia uncovered by "free-trade" zones.