Intel report predicts U.S. decline, Russia\'s rise

What a bunch of pessimistic jackasses are the folks who published this"report". America is still, and always will be, the leader of the world. This nation is presently experiencing a few problems and we are faced with some tough decisions concerning the future of our industries and the general economy. I am confident that our way of life will prevail, after all. We are a resilient people, despite our political and social differences and will always unite when we are under adversity. I am not about to give up hope because there is a possibility that "global warming" is going to make things so wonderful for Russia ( still a bunch of Commies ) and Canada  and so on. Our predesessors did not die in vain to preserve this wonerful Democracy. Remember: after every economic bust we have had there has alyays been a corresponding boom that overshadowed the previous downturn. I will continue to work hard , and invest what little I can in my 401K and never give up hope for a brighter future and a dignified retirement. Patience and confidence are always rewarded. USA--USA--USA!

Yah, well let the auto industry go in the toilet and that wouldn't help this country any. Let 3 million plus lose their jobs and that won't help this country either.

One of the main reasons why America is declining is because it has massive debt. It has massive debt because of unnecessary and destructive wars - first we carpet bomb and then reconstruct countries - all financed by the taxpayer. The wars were created by the large financial interests to put America into massive debt. The financial interests want us in debt so that they have total control of our lives. They can produce nothing themselves so must live off our productivity.

When Americans stop producing food, high tech products, innovative solutions to energy, etc. the world loses. Including these criminals that create the wars. But they don't look that far out. They are in apathy going towards death and trying to take us all with them.

Who are these guys? Jefferson had it right.

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." --

Thomas Jefferson 1802

Well... all of this is preventable... with American ingenuity.  Do we still have it?  That remains to be seen.  If we become oil independent and make it our mission to come up with an alternative to the combustion engine.  If we make an effort to see that land should not be moonscaped in the name of consumerism (maybe elevation is the answer -- with ground intact, trees to reduce CO2, decreased erosion... hmmm maybe Jetsons were onto something).  I'm just saying that humans are the only species that has the capacity to prevent any of this.  The only question is whether we choose that path.

And you all remember what placed the Russians in the position for a comeback...an unwinable eight year land war in Afganistan.   I might add...which they just picked up and left.  

Actually, I think the report is counter-intuitive.  Global warming will promote less fossil fuel usage, and reduceboth the market and market prices for that commodity.  Additionally, it is impossible for me to understand how Russia is going to increase food production when it isn't their climate that's causing them problems, but their lack of moisture.  In southern Russia, arguably their most production agricultural region for example, they are prohibited from irrigating in many areas because of salt and alkaline problems.  Also, with regard to acreage under production that has never been a problem since before WWII, they were the world's largest producer/exporter of Wheat albeit with very low yields per acre.  Also, with regard to other economic indicators, other than energy and mineral commodities, natural gas, oil, gold, diamonds, etc.they produce nothing the rest of the world values.  Additionally, they are one of the biggest polluter countries in the world.  They will continue to be a very large land with a fraction of haves and an overwhelming majority of have nots with their government and criminal class working in concert to keep the that vast majority down.  Frankly, I don't know what makes an analyst and analyst, but I do know that our supposed expert analysts have proven themselves on many if not most occasions less than accurate with their predictions.

PS  Russia is about twice the size of the US with less than half it's population which is decreasing every year due to their poor middle class economy.  However, most of their land is tundra and almost unhinabitable, so I doubt any possible scenario where their fortunes rise significantly relative to our own.

The human animal is a perverse creature.The future is a total unknown and it is rather disingenuous to be focusing energy and resources on a dimension with oh so many variables.Live for the day,weenies,because there is no guarantee any of us will be around in 2025 anyway.God is in his heaven and what will be will be!

We don't take care of our own.  They take care of theirs.  Large multi-national companies get larger and more powerful, but could care less about americans, yet we pass legislation that benefits them.  what is wrong with the people in power in this country?

I honestly predict it will happen much sooner if we do not drastically change our monetary policy. The culprit behind this collapse in the Federal Reserve-which is neither part of the federal government, nor does it rely on monetary reserves – is an unconstitutional, unelected cartel that literally creates the devastating problems it was supposed to prevent.

Today, the entire Western financial world holds its breath every time the Fed chairman speaks, so influential are the central bank's decisions on markets, interest rates and the economy in general. Yet the Fed, supposedly created to smooth out business cycles and prevent disruptive economic downswings like the Great Depression, has actually done the opposite.

From the Great Depression, to the stagflation of the seventies, to the burst of the dotcom bubble in 2001, every economic downturn suffered by the country over the last 80 years can be traced to Federal Reserve policy.

While many Fed defenders claim it worked valiantly to prevent or minimize the ravages of the Great Depression, in reality the Fed caused the Depression and greatly increased the severity of its effects. Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, middle and working-class Americans have been victimized by a boom-and-bust monetary policy.

And now Obama is looking to fill his Treasury position with the Federal Reserve governor of San Francisco...this is absolutely sickening!! Open your eyes! (this is not a partison statement, because I hate Bush and company just as much)

The truth is that the markets have come to the sobering realization that the Bush administration's $850 billion rescue plan won't work quickly to unfreeze the credit markets, and that many banks are still having difficulty gaining access to cash. That's caused investors to exit stocks and move money into the relative short-term safety of government debt.

But if you had a bird’s eye view of events since 2000, then you will have seen a lot more than that- you will have witnessed the devaluation of the US Dollar by nearly 70%. During this period, the Federal Reserve Bank repeatedly printed large sums of money and pumped it into the system, further devaluing our nation's Fiat currency beyond recognition. Foreign dollar reserves disappearing as these devalued dollars get dumped on to the international money markets.  

The ‘Bail Out Bill’ is not the last bail out, but it does mark a point in US history. It essentially signals the takeover of the US by private bankers. Congress has essentially  handed over $850 billion in unmarked bills to the very cartel who engineered the financial crisis in the first place. This so called rescue package was sold to the American public as a “plan to save us”, yet it is us the people, whose taxes have been used to run this entire façade, who will be left with nothing but an over-inflated money supply and the increasing spectre of stagflation.

So do not be surprised in a few months time, when the Central Bankers will rear their heads and say "hey, here's a new currency. This will solve all of our economic problems". Say hello to the AMERO!

"The Magic Act of George W. Bush"

ilovepoetry.com/viewpoem.asp?id=95898

Making predictions that far out are iffy at best but interesting. The US has been in decline internally for the past 15 years so the prediction of it getting worse was a no brainer. Our government has been getting worse which obviously impacts our country as a whole. You can't point fingers at one party either, they are both to blame. Also, I am surprised that there is no mention of China. It seems like they are this big quiet giant that is growing stronger year after year. I would think that they would be a major player in the future and probably have a more stable government than Russia.

US dominance will wane ... this is a pretty safe prediciton ... point at one nation that has never waned at some point.  China as an example, has been up and down, up and down for thousands of years.  Hopefully if we stick to our principles rather than abandon them in a desire to retain our power, we will influence and "infect" the people who constitute the next world power with our ideas, and they'll continue them, just as we continued the ideas of the ancient Greeks (democracy), Romans (global order and infrastructure), and British (magna carta and religious pluralism).

The big three are down because of regulation, hardly. The American automobile manufactures stepped into their own manure over thirty five years ago when the Japanese automakers tolerancing methods as applied to manufacturing engineering were implemented to become producers of higher quality, and reliable vehicles to this day.  The American automakers are going through the same thing as IBM went through in the early 1980s when the PC market took off and IBM was still "selling" large mainframe computers. 

In the early seventies, university engineering students had senior projects in developing an "air  cycle" and the electric car, yet unfeasible for the big three at that time to invest in research of alternatives to the ever guzzling internal combustion engine, therefore leaving the development to India and Israel as of today.   

Toyota auto manufacturing plants in this country when compared to American ones are vastly different such as in:  management style, employee decision in policy making,  and by the way the "employee" is the most important resource and not the CEOs.  Toyota executives earn not even one million dollars per year producing 20 - 30 percent increase in sales and safeguarding jobs whereas American auto maker CEOs earn over 20 million dollars per year, but with losses of 30% of sales commensurate with layoffs, more politically correct by saying that companies are downsizing.  There is something wrong with this picture.

  A new mind set is needed in this country, otherwise the Russians, Indians and the Chinese will be the top producers globally in the future.  For me, I will continue to teach kids their math and science. 

In 1950 34% of our jobs were in manufacturing, which was almost double that in 1900. Now we are down to about 10% of our jobs in the manufacturing fields. We continue to send our jobs oversea's donkey's and elephant's alike. Greed is behind this nothing else. Instead of being satisfied with 10million in profits we send our jobs to china, india wherever we can make 20million. The hell with the fact that people can't afford to buy it when it get's here. We are heading down the drain in the name of the almighty dollar. Someone mention the lack of China in this report, I can't believe there not listed as well. China is admitting to spending 24% of their new windfall on their military. If that is what they admit to, guess what, it's probably double that at least. We will all be afraid of China in the not to distant future, you should be afraid now.

The U.S. definitely needs to get away from OIL!

If alternate sources of energy will be a norm than an exception by 2025, I hope it will be by then, then oil abundance in Russia & hence its prominence will become a less important factor.  On the other hand Russia gaining more prominence for other reasons, such as their own technological advances meanwhile (esp.) if US still have the same short-sighted vision of promoting service-oriented industries more at the expense of the product-oriented ones, or neglecting R & D in Science and Technology here in US, or Russia developing more closer friendship/ties with now emerging countries like China, India, etc. will then be a different story. Those are some areas where we need to learn lessons to be competitive and remain relevant in the changing world's landscape. 

We need to pump the hell out of our own resources.

Bush and the Neo-cons (and they are cons) should be held accountable for the financial cesspool we are in and for the overall decline in our country's wellbeing. They should be tried for treason, along with EXXON and the rest of the oil companies who have put profit ahead of the wellbeing of the country.

Two nasty words we all need to repeat:

Nuclear power.

It doesn't produce green house gases, and coal ash puts into the atmosphere 5 times the amount of uranium mined every year in the world. (It's a lot.) Where do people think Marie Curie got her radium from?  That's right!  Pitchblende, leftovers from coal burning.

Nuclear power is also almost entirely priced by regulations. Pre-approve Swedish design plants, kick the regulatory roadblocks out of the way and we could be selling power at $0.01 per kilowatt or less. That would be a huge shot in the arm for our economy.

Folks, war is what happens when the world has a depression - it's as predictable as clockwork. War has huge environmental impacts. Time for us to go for the true low-impact system.

As the causes (man-made or naturally) of global warming are somewhat irrelevant, the effects are proven, and solutions are complicated.  For those of you who want to ignore the problem, put your head in the sand and get your butt kicked.

If the US is no longer the worlds police force- so much the better.  While we can not descend into isolationism we can still look inward to get our own house in order first- environmentally, morally, financially, educationally, and politically.  Let's help ourselves, our neighbors, and our friends first and worry about the rest later. The US can still be the shining example for the rest of the world, but we need to lead by example, not by dictates and military might.

If we don't bail out our big 3 auto manufacturers our nation will sink like a rock even faster than it is now.

Maybe Russia is on the rise is because they are not owned by Israel or maybe it is because their people are expected to act like adults instead of whiney useless self-serving lying idiots!!!

I find most of this article to be dubious; give me the who, what, when, where and why of and for the integrity of the intel used to make these statements and then maybe I will listen.
Anything to do with intel at this point will somehow have a Bush/Cheney thumb print and we know how skewed things have been under that administration!

One really fed up boomer

You say that the Earth can sustain only 2 Billion people. What do you suggest we do with the other 4.7 Billion people now living?

This is not a good article. If The world is going to be off of oil by 2025, how is Canada going to rise because of oil?