====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
This transcript is informative and challenging and worrisome - and well worth reading. With my limited computer skills I haven't figured out how to locate a url through my Firefox browser. Google orville schell + fresh air. Early warning? This administration and those to come trying to run things in the US may well be running out of patience with this recalcitrant system in the context of prolonged, intractable crisis. Also, the growing clout of China must be keenly felt. And successive US administrations may even be able as events develop to get electoral assent (especially given the tumultuous right wing and the apathetic left wing) to an even vastly stronger executive, increasingly bypassing the Congress and hog-tying the courts. Schell's perceptions here may be prescient and widely felt among US policymakers. And that's either extremely alarming or I'm merely an alarmist. Council on Foreign Relations member Orville Schell, who accompanied Obama to China, on Terry Gross's Fresh Air today: "I heard a statistic the other day that a couple years ago China had 700 miles of high-speed rail, and now they have 7,000 miles. Now, I may have those statistics slightly off, but that's a staggering figure. The United States really doesn't have one mile. We have the corridor from Boston to New York to Washington, but that's not really high-speed rail. That's sort of faster-speed rail. So you see the infrastructure that's getting laid down, the new highways, the new airports, the new ports, the new railroad systems. It's extremely impressive, and I think, you know, it raises a question that is sort of frightening to contemplate for an American, and that's this: _/*Does the Chinese system, this sort of autocratic form of capitalism, deliver better than democracy?*/_ And as an ardent democrat, I contemplate the answer to that question with some trepidation, because I think, you know, we feel in America, and in fact I think it's more than a feeling, that _/*in many ways our government is paralyzed, paralyzed by a lack of money, paralyzed in Congress, paralyzed by sort of vicious partisan politics, whereas China is able not only to gather information well but to form policy quickly and then, most importantly, to effect it.*/_ And you feel that everywhere you look in this country now, that they are on top of things, they're able to do things swiftly to meet the very high-speed demands of the situation, whereas I think we are kind of languishing in many respects, and I'd say climate change is a kind of a metaphor for how difficult it is for us to do things, and health care would be another."] ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
