The US is poised to lose its role as a global financial “superpower” in the wake of the financial crisis, Peer Steinbrück, German finance minister, said on Thursday as he called for a regulatory crackdown on financial markets. “The US will lose its status as the superpower of the world financial system. This world will become multipolar” with the emergence of stronger, better capitalised centres in Asia and Europe, Mr Steinbrück told the German parliament. “The world will never be the same again.” Financial TimesRemember the mood music of eight years ago. The greatest power the world has ever seen. Rome on steroids. An international system said to be unipolar, and Washington's unabashed embrace of unilateralism. The US as "Prometheus unbound", according to the neoconservative commentator Charles Krauthammer. Wall Street investment bankers bestriding the financial globe as Pentagon generals did the military globe and Harvard professors the soft power one. Masters of the universe. Timothy Garton Ash - Guardian
My bills are all due and the baby needs shoes and I'm busted
Cotton is down to a quarter a pound, but I'm busted
I got a cow that went dry and a hen that won't lay
A big stack of bills that gets bigger each day
The county's gonna haul my belongings away cause I'm busted. "Busted" - Ray Charles
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I think now that the USA is really going to be down and out, I'm going to stop kicking it.
What I hate is the stupidity of imperial hubris, the bloated idiocy of it all. I think that most of us, or at least me who writes and you who read this blog, are hurt and angry at being identified with all of the swollen, bullying imbecility and not one bit in contradiction with our language or culture, curious religious habits or the smell of our earth.
There was a wonderful Spanish song about a woman that wanted to be "the bride at the wedding, the child at the baptismal font, the cadaver at the funeral", just so that she could always be the star of the show. I think that is what all the world and even many Americans are mortally tired of... I know I am.
I am panting for a multipolar world: one where the shops smell differently in one country from the shops in another country, where the hotels don't look the same... different odors, different tastes, different sounds.
I detest it that everyone everywhere tries to speak our language and knows so many useless (for them) things about our "way of life". I envy people like Romanians who can speak their mother language on a crowded bus without anyone else understanding them... Small countries, whose local dishes are family secrets, private pleasures waiting to be accidentally discovered and not unhealthy travesties pitifully and methacrylicly replicated on street corners all over the planet.
What could sound more foreign than the following phrase:
"Down with the empire, long live America!"
World, forget you ever knew us.
I'll drink to that. DS
I think now that the USA is really going to be down and out, I'm going to stop kicking it.
What I hate is the stupidity of imperial hubris, the bloated idiocy of it all. I think that most of us, or at least me who writes and you who read this blog, are hurt and angry at being identified with all of the swollen, bullying imbecility and not one bit in contradiction with our language or culture, curious religious habits or the smell of our earth.
There was a wonderful Spanish song about a woman that wanted to be "the bride at the wedding, the child at the baptismal font, the cadaver at the funeral", just so that she could always be the star of the show. I think that is what all the world and even many Americans are mortally tired of... I know I am.
I am panting for a multipolar world: one where the shops smell differently in one country from the shops in another country, where the hotels don't look the same... different odors, different tastes, different sounds.
I detest it that everyone everywhere tries to speak our language and knows so many useless (for them) things about our "way of life". I envy people like Romanians who can speak their mother language on a crowded bus without anyone else understanding them... Small countries, whose local dishes are family secrets, private pleasures waiting to be accidentally discovered and not unhealthy travesties pitifully and methacrylicly replicated on street corners all over the planet.
What could sound more foreign than the following phrase:
"Down with the empire, long live America!"
World, forget you ever knew us.
I'll drink to that. DS
