The root problem is simple: Investment capital, like a river, needs a place to flow and accumulate; otherwise it evaporates. When the Dot-Com bubble burst, capital flowed into real estate. After real estate, it flowed into commodities, however, that bucket was not big enough to hold it. Now the money has nowhere else to go, and is evaporating through depreciating prices and equity.Persons who see opportunity, not tragedy, and adapt to it, will benefit tremendously. The dinosaurs of the "old" economy are dying and new types of business entities will feed on their corpses, and still-living bodies, as they ascend to replace them.
The most successful of these entities will think and function collectively through a "hive" mind and structure, as opposed to traditional, individualistic hierarchies. The common good of the country, and planet, will be core elements of their missions and mandates, and they will form new "rivers" of investment capital that are bubble-proof because of safeguards inherent to their structures. As no individual can prevail against a collective, they will be formidable global competitors.
The current economic crisis hopefully will also cause Americans to examine the value of their lifestyles, since this is what the majority have to look forward to:
Go to work, eat, go shopping, eat, watch American Idol, eat, get married, eat, be unhappy in marriage, eat, get drunk, eat, have kids, eat, buy a dog, eat, send kids to college, eat, save for retirement, eat, die without spending all retirement money. Kids repeat cycle.
How many Americans reach for, and achieve, the lofty aspirations they proclaim as a birthright? How many fail because of needless barriers erected against them? How many recognize that their shopping-centric lifestyle reduces them to little more than walking credit scores? How many feel it is justifiable to kill people around the world to protect freedoms squandered on a mundane existence?
Unflattering, but also how the world, and many of ourselves, perceives us. Restoring America's global stature will require more focus on transforming values, our priorities, and ourselves than on mending diplomatic fences.
America's Global Standing: Reinventing an Image Advancing your interests sometimes requires you to set them aside, particularly when the needs of other people outweigh your own. Hopefully that will be one of
Previous Page Page 3 of 4 Next Page 
