Roger Cohen: The world is upside down

[DogPoundPup]

For a while the world was flat. Now it's upside down.

To understand it, invert your thinking. See the developed world as depending on the developing world, rather than the other way round. Understand that two-thirds of global economic growth last year came from emerging countries, whose economies will expand about 6.7 percent in 2008, against 1.3 percent for the United States, Japan and Euro zone states.

The sharp rise in prices for energy, commodities, metals and minerals produced mainly in the developing world explains part of this shift. That has created the balance of payments surpluses fueling dollar-dripping sovereign wealth funds in countries like China. They amuse themselves picking up a stake in BP here, a chunk of Morgan Stanley there, and why not a sliver of Total.

We of the developed-world Paleolithic species are fair game for the upstarts now, our predator role exhausted. The U.S. and Europe may soon need all the charity they can get.

To place this inversion in focus, it helps to be in Brazil, where winter (so to speak) arrives with the Northern Hemisphere summer, and economic optimism, as exuberant as the vegetation, increases at the same brisk clip as U.S. foreclosures.

Huge offshore oil finds, a sugarcane ethanol boom, vast reserves of unused arable land, mineral wealth and abundant fresh water contribute to Brazilian buoyancy. But natural resources are only part of the story. As in China and India, an expanding internal market is bolstering growth. So is increasing corporate sophistication and global ambition.

At the annual National Forum, a gathering of business leaders, I felt like a first-world pipsqueak as leaders of the national energy company Petrobas (bigger than BP, Shell and Total) and Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, or CVRD (the world's second largest mining company), reeled offhead-turning statistics.

Petrobras, which has spearheaded Brazil's push to self-sufficiency from heavy dependence on imported oil 30 years ago, will more than double oil production to 4.2 million barrels a day in 2015 from 1.9 million barrels today.

"With the latest discoveries, the South Atlantic will become a huge oil producer," predicted José Sergio Gabrielli de Azvedo, its chief executive.

Roger Agnelli of CVRD waved away the United States ("It's full of debt") to focus on the company's ambitions in Asia....

Read more: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/01/opinion/edcohen.php

[Warpy]

1. Uh, Cohen, maybe it's because they're turning LEFT

and that means ordinary people have the means and confidence to invest their time and effort into improving their lives by starting and building businesses and educating their children. That produces wealth throughout the system, allowing them to do things that an oligarchy won't bother with.

Fascism, on the other hand, discourages this via heavy handed oppression and wealth concentration.

That's what you're seeing, not some corporate engineered swing to prosperity. They wouldn't be pushing for energy independence if that were the case because corporations would rather buy and sell other people's effort than produce their own.