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WHAT IN THE WORLD IS GOING ON? - 5/11/2008 12:54:36 PM
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Pat-rebel_lady
Posts: 505
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The following [link] 'WHAT IN THE WORLD IS GOING ON? A GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING FOR CEOS
By: HERBERT MEYER', is a long read but interesting and very thought provoking.
Currently, there are four major transformations that are shaping political, economic and world events. These transformations have profound implications for American business owners, our culture and our way of life. - Neil P.
"There are three major monotheistic religions in the world: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In the 16th century, Judaism and Christianity reconciled with the modern world. The rabbis, priests and scholars found a way to settle up and pave the way forward. Religion remained at the center of life, church and state became separate. Rule of law, idea of economic liberty, individual rights, human rights all these are defining points of modern Western civilization. These concepts started with the Greeks but didn't take off until the 15th and 16th century when Judaism and Christianity found a way to reconcile with the modern world. When that happened, it unleashed the scientific revolution and the greatest outpouring of art, literature and music the world has ever known. ...."
HERE
I would like to know:
1.) Do you agree that this is what is going on?
2.) What part really caught your attention, and what your take on it was/is.
3.) If you believe the follow quote is true, what do you suggest we as American Christians can do to help insure we don't give up our Judeo-Christian culture:
quote:
Ultimately, it's an issue of culture. The only people who can hurt us are ourselves, by losing our culture. If we give up our Judeo-Christian culture, we become just like the Europeans. The culture war is the whole ballgame. If we lose it, there isn't another America to pull us out.
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RE: WHAT IN THE WORLD IS GOING ON? - 5/11/2008 3:36:10 PM
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henny
Posts: 1293
Joined: 4/15/2005
From: MN
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quote:
This trend has also created two new words in business, integrator and complementor. At the top of the pyramid, IBM is the integrator. As you go down the pyramid, Microsoft, Intel and the other companies that support IBM are the complementors. However, each of the complementors is itself an integrator for the complementors underneath it. This has several implications, the first of which is that we are now getting false readings on the economy. People who used to be employees are now independent contractors launching their own businesses. There are many people working whose work is not listed as a job. As a result, the economy is perking along better than the numbers are telling us.
Outsourcing also confused the numbers. Suppose a company like General Motors decides to outsource all its employee cafeteria functions to Marriott (which it did). It lays off hundreds of cafeteria workers, who then get hired right back by Marriott. The only thing that has changed is that these people work for Marriott rather than GM. Yet, the headlines will scream that America has lost more manufacturing jobs. All that really happened is that these workers are now reclassified as service workers. So the old way of counting jobs contributes to false economic readings. As yet, we haven't figured out how to make the numbers catch up with the changing realities of the business world.
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His asessment of "outsourcing" is a bit misleading and it paints an overly optimistic view of the situation. He mentions IBM, but then details an example of GM outsourcing to an American company. The difference being that IBM, and many companies of its sort, are outsourcing to companies outside of the USA, like India, where they can get cheaper labor. And increasingly, this isn't just occuring with unskilled customer service and telemarketing type jobs, but is expanding into jobs which 15 years ago would have employed Americans with some sort of technical degrees (i.e. stuff like computer programing, skilled data processing type stuff, etc). He doesn't really mention this, and rather assumes that "outsourcing" only means contracting out to other "American" companies -which is incredibly misleading.
I also have to disagree with his overly cheery asessment of the changing nature of the American economy, which as he notes results in a "fracturing of businesses into different and smaller units, employers can't guarantee jobs anymore because they don't know what their companies will look like next year. Everyone is on their way to becoming an independent contractor. The new workforce contract will be, "Show up at the my office five days a week and do what I want you to do, but you handle your own insurance, benefits, health care and everything else.""
This basic model of business seems to be the ideal of certain portions of the right wing (and in that sense I think this guy is hoping it will become a self-fullfilling prophecy, as oppossed to just describing a "general trend"), but I don't think turning America's workforce into one huge temp agency is going to make its culture "Stronger" in the long run. Rather, it's just going to make people more anxious and less secure about their futures as they will have no idea if they will have a job or what this job will be like in the future (or even if they will have things like health insurance). As he notes, America needs to "have more children" for its culture to survive, but this sort of econmoic model really isn't going to be the best environment for having babies. I think part of the baby boom was due to the post-war boom in manufacturing and the availability of "careers," as oppossed to just "temp jobs," that people could rely on in the long term for a living. These sorts of "career" jobs are becoming increasingly rare.
His whole asessment of Islam vs the West and the Iraq war is overly simplistic and entirely wrong headed too, but I won't go into that.
_____________________________
Many Bothans died to bring you this information.
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RE: WHAT IN THE WORLD IS GOING ON? - 5/11/2008 4:53:02 PM
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Pat-rebel_lady
Posts: 505
Joined: 4/12/2005
Status: offline
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quote:
His asessment of "outsourcing" is a bit misleading and it paints an overly optimistic view of the situation. He mentions IBM, but then details an example of GM outsourcing to an American company. The difference being that IBM, and many companies of its sort, are outsourcing to companies outside of the USA, like India, where they can get cheaper labor. And increasingly, this isn't just occuring with unskilled customer service and telemarketing type jobs, but is expanding into jobs which 15 years ago would have employed Americans with some sort of technical degrees (i.e. stuff like computer programing, skilled data processing type stuff, etc). He doesn't really mention this, and rather assumes that "outsourcing" only means contracting out to other "American" companies -which is incredibly misleading.
I also have to disagree with his overly cheery asessment of the changing nature of the American economy, which as he notes results in a "fracturing of businesses into different and smaller units, employers can't guarantee jobs anymore because they don't know what their companies will look like next year. Everyone is on their way to becoming an independent contractor. The new workforce contract will be, "Show up at the my office five days a week and do what I want you to do, but you handle your own insurance, benefits, health care and everything else.""
This basic model of business seems to be the ideal of certain portions of the right wing (and in that sense I think this guy is hoping it will become a self-fullfilling prophecy, as oppossed to just describing a "general trend"), but I don't think turning America's workforce into one huge temp agency is going to make its culture "Stronger" in the long run. Rather, it's just going to make people more anxious and less secure about their futures as they will have no idea if they will have a job or what this job will be like in the future (or even if they will have things like health insurance). As he notes, America needs to "have more children" for its culture to survive, but this sort of econmoic model really isn't going to be the best environment for having babies. I think part of the baby boom was due to the post-war boom in manufacturing and the availability of "careers," as oppossed to just "temp jobs," that people could rely on in the long term for a living. These sorts of "career" jobs are becoming increasingly rare.
I completely agree with you.
However, I believe his assessment speaks of what is the now --- today; what it has come to. But I DO NOT believe it will continue; people are starting to see what has happened and they don't like it, much less want it --- they WILL go back to the old ways of doing business.
quote:
His whole asessment of Islam vs the West and the Iraq war is overly simplistic and entirely wrong headed too, but I won't go into that.
I wish you had gone into this, as I do agree with his assessment of radical Islam and their attack on Western civilization.
I also agree with the following assessment; of the 'where we are today', but again, not where we will be in the not to far future --- things Will turn around --- say starting in 2009.
"3. Shifting Demographics of Western Civilization
Most countries in the Western world have stopped breeding. For a civilization obsessed with sex, this is remarkable. Maintaining a steady population requires a birth rate of 2.1. In Western Europe, the birth rate currently stands at 1.5, or 30 percent below replacement. In 30 years there will be 70 to 80 million fewer Europeans than there are today. The current birth rate in Germany is 1.3. Italy and Spain are even lower at 1.2. At that rate, the working age population declines by 30 percent in 20 years, which has a huge impact on the economy.
When you don't have young workers to replace the older ones, you have to import them. The European countries are currently importing Moslems. Today, the Moslems comprise 10 percent of France and Germany, and the percentage is rising rapidly because they have higher birthrates. However, the Moslem populations are not being integrated into the cultures of their host countries, which is a political catastrophe. One reason Germany and France don't support the Iraq war is they fear their Moslem populations will explode on them. By 2020, more than half of all births in the Netherlands will be non-European.
The huge design flaw in the post-modern secular state is that you need a traditional religious society birth rate to sustain it. The Europeans simply don't wish to have children, so they are dying.
In Japan, the birthrate is 1.3. As a result, Japan will lose up to 60 million people over the next 30 years. Because Japan has a very different society than Europe, they refuse to import workers. Instead, they are just shutting down. Japan has already closed 2000 schools, and is closing them down at the rate of 300 per year. Japan is also aging very rapidly. By 2020, one out of every five Japanese will be at least 70 years old. Nobody has any idea about how to run an economy with those demographics.
Europe and Japan, which comprise two of the world's major economic engines, aren't merely in recession, they're shutting down. This will have a huge impact on the world economy, and it is already beginning to happen. Why are the birthrates so low? There is a direct correlation between abandonment of traditional religious society and a drop in birth rate, and Christianity in Europe is becoming irrelevant. The second reason is economic. When the birth rate drops below replacement, the population ages. With fewer working people to support more retired people, it puts a crushing tax burden on the smaller group of working age people. As a result, young people delay marriage and having a family. Once this trend starts, the downward spiral only gets worse. These countries have abandoned all the traditions they formerly held in regards to having families and raising children.
The U.S. birth rate is 2.0, just below replacement. We have an increase in population because of immigration. When broken down by ethnicity, the Anglo birth rate is 1.6 (same as France) while the Hispanic birth rate is 2.7. In the U.S., the baby boomers are starting to retire in massive numbers. This will push the "elder dependency" ratio from 19 to 38 over the next 10 to 15 years. This is not as bad as Europe, but still represents the same kind of trend.
Western civilization seems to have forgotten what every primitive society understands, you need kids to have a healthy society. Children are huge consumers. Then they grow up to become taxpayers. That's how a society works, but the post-modern secular state seems to have forgotten that. If U.S. birth rates of the past 20 to 30 years had been the same as post-World War II, there would be no Social Security or Medicare problems.
The world's most effective birth control device is money. As society creates a middle class and women move into the workforce, birth rates drop. Having large families is incompatible with middle class living. The quickest way to drop the birth rate is through rapid economic development. After World War II, the U.S. instituted a $600 tax credit per child. The idea was to enable mom and dad to have four children without being troubled by taxes. This led to a baby boom of 22 million kids, which was a huge consumer market that turned into a huge tax base. However, to match that incentive in today's dollars would cost $12,000 per child.
China and India do not have declining populations. However, in both countries, there is a preference for boys over girls, and we now have the technology to know which is which before they are born. In China and India, many families are aborting the girls. As a result, in each of these countries there are 70 million boys growing up who will never find wives. When left alone, nature produces 103 boys for every 100 girls. In some provinces, however, the ratio is 128 boys to every 100 girls.
The birth rate in Russia is so low that by 2050 their population will be smaller than that of Yemen. Russia has one-sixth of the earth's land surface and much of its oil. You can't control that much area with such a small population. Immediately to the south, you have China with 70 million unmarried men - a real potential nightmare scenario for Russia. "
quote:
As he notes, America needs to "have more children" for its culture to survive, but this sort of econmoic model really isn't going to be the best environment for having babies.
our Judeo-Christian culture, and our money still says, 'In God We Trust' --- so lets do all we can to change it and trust God to do the rest.
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RE: WHAT IN THE WORLD IS GOING ON? - 5/11/2008 5:40:08 PM
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Pat-rebel_lady
Posts: 505
Joined: 4/12/2005
Status: offline
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BTW, I also think that these are not just average citizens but Judeo-Christian fighting/demonstrating for their culture to continue in tact.
quote:
It may be that pushing 500 million people from farms and villages into cities is too much too soon. Although it gets almost no publicity, China is experiencing hundreds of demonstrations around the country, which is unprecedented. These are not students in Tiananmen Square. These are average citizens who are angry with the government for building chemical plants and polluting the water they drink and the air they breathe.
They just may be our [America's Judeo-Christians] model, before it's all over, in what we'll have to do to keep our culture in tact.
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