Global Expansion Quotes

Whether we’re seeking inner peace or global peace or a combination of the two, the way to experience it is to build on the foundation of unconditional openness to all that arises. Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened.

Race theorists, who are as old as imperialism itself, want to achieve racial purity in peoples whose interbreeding, as a result of the expansion of world economy, is so far advanced that racial purity can have meaning only to a numbskull.

One thing which even the most seasoned and discerning masters of the art of choice do not and cannot choose, is the society to be born into - and so we are all in travel, whether we like it or not. We have not been asked about our feelings anyway. Thrown into a vast open sea with no navigation charts and all the marker buoys sunk and barely visible, we have only two choices left: we may rejoice in the breath-taking vistas of new discoveries - or we may tremble out of fear of drowning. One option not really realistic is to claim sanctuary in a safe harbour; one could bet that what seems to be a tranquil haven today will be soon modernized, and a theme park, amusement promenade or crowded marina will replace the sedate boat sheds. The third option not thus being available, which of the two other options will be chosen or become the lot of the sailor depends in no small measure on the ship's quality and the navigation skills of the sailors. Not all ships are seaworthy, however. And so the larger the expanse of free sailing, the more the sailor's fate tends to be polarized and the deeper the chasm between the poles. A pleasurable adventure for the well-equipped yacht may prove a dangerous trap for a tattered dinghy. In the last account, the difference between the two is that between life and death.

It is much easier to condemn Islam and 'oppressive Muslim men' than to unpack the intricate relationships between global politics related to empire building and capitalist expansion as well as regional and national struggles revolving around political and economic power and resources.

Capitalism is a compulsively expansive system. A modern market economy dictates that an enterprise must grow or die, and nothing will prevent capitalism from industrializing—more accurately, expanding—endlessly over the entire face of the planet whenever it is prepared to do so. Only the complete reconstruction of society and the economy can end the dilemmas that globalization raises—the exploitation of workers and the enhancement of corporate power to the point of threatening the stability, indeed the very safety, of the planet.

Many historians have called this the age of 'merchant' or 'mercantile' capitalism, but 'war capitalism' better expresses its rawness and violence as well as its intimate connection to European imperial expansion. War capitalism, a particularly important but often unrecognized phase in the development of capitalism, unfolded in constantly shifting sets of places embedded within constantly changing relationships. In some parts of the world it lasted into the nineteenth century.

Pakistan presents an example of how more than six decades of ossified historical inaccuracies and distortion can resist the sanitizing effect of the global information technology revolution and the resulting expansion of access to abundant—if, alas, low-quality—information.

The courts, instead of being constraints on government, have become alternative instruments for the expansion of government.

In the late nineteenth century, just as in the late twentieth century, the expansion of global trade generated expectations of progress.

There is no credible path to reducing global carbon emissions without an enormous expansion of nuclear power.

Ivan the Terrible, the first Tsar. He put into practice the concept of attack as defence – i.e., beginning your expansion by consolidating at home and then moving outwards.

Love isn't made of a single color, love is a vivacious rainbow, spanning across and beyond the deepest and farthest horizons of the individual mind's ridiculously limited window of perception.

Slavery, the expropriation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed trade, and the assertion of sovereignty over people and land by entrepreneurs were at its core. I call this system war capitalism.

Since histories were first written, the aim of the writer has invariably been to ‘correct’ our view of the past, and to align it more closely with the writer’s view of the present, and the way it was reached.

This business, ultimately, embodied the challenges of globalization, of the push and pull between expansion and identity, about the universalization of a product that is steeped in decidedly nonuniversal customs.

For most of history the economy stayed much the same size. Yes, global production increased, but this was due mostly to demographic expansion and the settlement of new lands. Per capita production remained static. But all that changed in the modern age.

finance was to become a public utility, situated in the public domain or at least alongside a public banking option. Instead, the past century’s expansion of predatory credit has been reinforced by de-taxing interest, land rent, financial speculation, debt leveraging and “capital” (asset-price) gains.

Racism consists in devaluing the humanity of certain people by dismissing it or playing it down (even when not intentional) at the same time as highlighting and playing up European philosophy, assuming it to be universal. It may be global, because it piggybacks on imperial expansion, but it certainly cannot be universal.

The religious scholar and Muslim Brotherhood ideologist Sayyid Qutb articulated perhaps the most learned and influential version of this view. In 1964, while imprisoned on charges of participating in a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Nasser, Qutb wrote Milestones, a declaration of war against the existing world order that became a foundational text of modern Islamism. In Qutb’s view, Islam was a universal system offering the only true form of freedom: freedom from governance by other men, man-made doctrines, or “low associations based on race and color, language and country, regional and national interests” (that is, all other modern forms of governance and loyalty and some of the building blocks of Westphalian order). Islam’s modern mission, in Qutb’s view, was to overthrow them all and replace them with what he took to be a literal, eventually global implementation of the Quran. The culmination of this process would be “the achievement of the freedom of man on earth—of all mankind throughout the earth.” This would complete the process begun by the initial wave of Islamic expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries, “which is then to be carried throughout the earth to the whole of mankind, as the object of this religion is all humanity and its sphere of action is the whole earth.” Like all utopian projects, this one would require extreme measures to implement. These Qutb assigned to an ideologically pure vanguard, who would reject the governments and societies prevailing in the region—all of which Qutb branded “unIslamic and illegal”—and seize the initiative in bringing about the new order.

Enter Ivan the Terrible, the first Tsar. He put into practice the concept of attack as defence – i.e., beginning your expansion by consolidating at home and then moving outwards. This led to greatness. Here was a man to give support to the theory that individuals can change history. Without his character of both utter ruthlessness and vision, Russian history would be very different.

Today both the Democratic and Republican parties support the expansive US Empire as well as the neoconservatives’ agitation for a perpetual Global War on Terror. The disagreement we hear between the two parties is only regarding management style and is designed to use political failures and unintended consequences to enhance the power and influence of one party relative to the other.

Scientific evidence suggests that as we build up our personal store of memories, our minds become sharper. The very act of remembering appears to modify the brain in a way that can make it easier to learn ideas and skills in the future. We don’t constrain our mental powers when we store new long-term memories. We strengthen them. With each expansion of our memory comes an enlargement of our intelligence.

This may be the era of the Anthropocene – the geological epoch in which human action is transforming the planet. But it is also one in which the human animal is less than ever in charge. Global warming seems to be in large part the result of the human impact on the planet, but this is not to say humans can stop the process. Whatever is done now, human expansion has triggered a shift that will persist for thousands of years.

Russian commentators welcomed this development, viewing it as a positive shift in the global correlation of power and as an appropriate response to America’s sponsorship of NATO’s expansion. Some even sounded gleeful that the Sino-Russian alliance would give America its deserved comeuppance. However, a coalition allying Russia with both China and Iran can develop only if the United States is shortsighted enough to antagonize China and Iran simultaneously.

Yet history tells us that a deep financial and economic crisis has never occurred without a prior agrarian crisis, which tends to last even after the financial crisis abates. Consider the great depression of the inter-war period: it started not in 1929 as the conventional dating would have it, but years earlier from 1924–25 when global primary product prices started steadily falling. The reasons for this, in turn, were tied up with the dislocation of production in the belligerent countries during the war of inter-imperialist rivalry, the First World War of 1914–18. With the sharp decline in agricultural output in war-torn Europe there was expansion in agricultural output elsewhere which, with European recovery after the war, meant over-production relative to the lagging growth of mass incomes and of demand in the countries concerned. The downward pressure on global agricultural prices was so severe and prolonged that it led to the trade balances of major producing countries going into the red.

Until now China has never been a naval power – with its large land mass, multiple borders and short sea routes to trading partners, it had no need to be, and it was rarely ideologically expansive. Its merchants have long sailed the oceans to trade goods, but its navy did not seek territory beyond its region, and the difficulty of patrolling the great sea lanes of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans was not worth the effort. It was always a land power, with a lot of land and a lot of people – now nearly 1.4 billion.

The American Revolution and its aftermath coincided with two great transformations in the late eighteenth century. In the political sphere, there had been a repudiation of royal rule, fired by a new respect for individual freedom, majority rule, and limited government. If Hamilton made distinguished contributions in this sphere, so did Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. In contrast, when it came to the parallel economic upheavals of the period—the industrial revolution, the expansion of global trade, the growth of banks and stock exchanges—Hamilton was an American prophet without peer. No other founding father straddled both of these revolutions—only Franklin even came close—and therein lay Hamilton’s novelty and greatness. He was the clear-eyed apostle of America's economic future, setting forth a vision that many found enthralling, others unsettling, but that would ultimately prevail. He stood squarely on the modern side of a historical divide that seemed to separate him from other founders. Small wonder he aroused such fear and confusion.

It had been a pretty good world, he thought. Not perfect, far from it, but good enough. Most people had been reasonably happy, most were prosperous, there was progress being made on all fronts—toward deeper scientific understanding, toward greater economic expansion, toward stronger global cooperation. The concept of war had come to seem quaintly medieval and the age-old religious bigotries were mostly obsolete, or so it had seemed to him. And now it was all gone, in one short span of hours, in a single burst of horrifying Darkness.

The premier principles of this book are free thought and free speech—open, mobile, and unconstrained by either liberal or conservative ideology. The liberal versus conservative dichotomy, dating from the split between left and right following the French Revolution, is hopelessly outmoded for our far more complex era of expansive technology and global politics. A bitter polarization of liberal and conservative has become so extreme and strident in both the Americas and Europe that it sometimes resembles mental illness, severed from the common sense realities of everyday life.

The totalitarian systems warn of something far more serious than Western rationalism is willing to admit. They are, most of all, a convex mirror of the inevitable consequences of rationalism, a grotesquely magnified image of its own deep tendencies, an extreme offshoot of its own development, and an ominous product of its own expansion. They are a deeply informative reflection of its own crisis. Totalitarian regimes are not merely dangerous neighbors and even less some kind of an avant-garde of world progress. Alas, just the opposite: they are the avant-garde of a global crisis of this civilization, first European, then Euro-American, and ultimately global. They are one of the possible futurological studies of the Western world.

History can familiarize, and it can warn. In the late nineteenth century, just as in the late twentieth century, the expansion of global trade generated expectations of progress. In the early twentieth century, as in the early twenty-first, these hopes were challenged by new visions of mass politics in which a leader or a party claimed to directly represent the will of the people. European democracies collapsed into right-wing authoritarianism and fascism in the 1920s and '30s. The communist Soviet Union, established in 1922, extended its model into Europe in the 1940s. The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.

In a safe, globalized world such a hybridization model can limp along so long as the commodities flow out and the money flows in. But in an unsafe, fractured world where trade is sharply circumscribed, outright national collapse will by far not be the biggest problem these peoples face. In these countries the very population is vulnerable to changes farther abroad. The industrial technologies that reduce mortality and raise standards of living cannot be uninvented, but if trade collapses, these technologies can be denied. Should anything impact these countries’ commodity outflows or the income or product inflows, the entire place will break down while experiencing deep-rooted famine on a biblical scale. Economic development, quality of life, longevity, health, and demographic expansion are all subject to the whims of globalization. Or rather, in this case, deglobalization

It is the very impersonal quality of urban life, which is lived among strangers, that accounts for intensified religious feeling. For in the village of old, religion was a natural extension of the daily traditions and routine of life among the extended family; but migrations to the city brought Muslims into the anonymity of slum existence, and to keep the family together and the young from drifting into crime, religion has had to be reinvented in starker, more ideological form. In this way states weaken, or at least have to yield somewhat, to new and sometimes extreme kinds of nationalism and religiosity advanced by urbanization. Thus, new communities take hold that transcend traditional geography, even as they make for spatial patterns of their own. Great changes in history often happen obscurely.10 A Eurasia and North Africa of vast, urban concentrations, overlapping missile ranges, and sensational global media will be one of constantly enraged crowds, fed by rumors and half-truths transported at the speed of light by satellite channels across the rimlands and heartland expanse, from one Third World city to another. Conversely, the crowd, empowered by social media like Twitter and Facebook, will also be fed by the very truth that autocratic rulers have denied it. The crowd will be key in a new era where the relief map will be darkened by densely packed megacities—the crowd being a large group of people who abandon their individuality in favor of an intoxicating collective symbol. Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-born Spanish Jew and Nobel laureate in literature, became so transfixed and terrified at the mob violence over inflation that seized Frankfurt and Vienna between the two world wars that he devoted much of his life to studying the human herd in all its manifestations. The signal insight of his book Crowds and Power, published in 1960, was that we all yearn to be inside some sort of crowd, for in a crowd—or a mob, for that matter—there is shelter from danger and, by inference, from loneliness. Nationalism, extremism, the yearning for democracy are all the products of crowd formations and thus manifestations of seeking to escape from loneliness. It is loneliness, alleviated by Twitter and Facebook, that ultimately leads to the breakdown of traditional authority and the erection of new kinds.

centuries-long debate over the nature of money can be reduced to two sides. One school sees money as merely a commodity, a preexisting thing, with its own inherent value. This group believes that societies chose certain commodities to become mutually recognized units of exchange in order to overcome the cumbersome business of barter. Exchanging sheep for bread was imprecise, so in our agrarian past traders agreed that a certain commodity, be it shells or rocks or gold, could be a stand-in for everything else. This “metallism” viewpoint, as it is known, encourages the notion that a currency should itself be, or at least be backed by, some tangible material. This orthodox view of currency is embraced by many gold bugs and hard-money advocates from the so-called Austrian school of economics, a group that has enjoyed a renaissance in the wake of the financial crisis with its critiques of expansionist central-bank policies and inflationary fiat currencies. They blame the asset bubble that led to the crisis on reckless monetary expansion by unfettered central banks. The other side of the argument belongs to the “chartalist” school, a group that looks past the thing of currency and focuses instead on the credit and trust relationships between the individual and society at large that currency embodies. This view, the one we subscribe to and which informs

As the future draws ever closer – with speedy travel, immediate communication and almost-instant trade – the historical past can seem more remote, like another world, rapidly receding. And whilst we may be increasingly aware of cultures other than our own, the genuine understanding that allows us to connect through what we share, and also to respect our differences, does not always come naturally. But at a time when misunderstanding can easily escalate, it is vitally important that we seize opportunities to learn – both from our global neighbours and from our collective past. If we consider an age of unexpectedly changing political landscapes, with regions of cosmopolitanism alongside those of parochialism, when developments bring a better quality of life to many, yet the world remains vulnerable to serious threats such as disease, poverty, changing climate, violence and oppression, we might well recognise this as our own age. It is equally true of the 10th century, on which this book focuses. The centuries surrounding the second millennium saw enormous dynamism on the global stage. Influential rules such as those of the great Maya civilisation of mesoamerica and the prosperous Tang dynasty in China were on the decline, while Vikings rampaged across north-western Europe, and the Byzantine Empire entered its second-wave of expansion. Muslim civilisation was thriving, with the establishment of no fewer than three Islamic caliphates.

In the end, Putin won with the aid of Americans who had turned on their own values. The news media assisted greatly by elevating stolen innocuous emails from an insecure party server to a national crisis in which the victims were treated suspiciously. To Trump supporters it validated everything they ever suspected about Hillary Clinton—she hid emails, which meant she was a liar. No matter that Trump voters elected a man who openly embraced white supremacy, rejected diversity, abhorred global engagement, ignored his own corruption, and enlisted his own family and staff as royalty to be worshipped. Trump voters saw these traits as perks. They viewed nepotism, largess, and excess as virtues of a business and political shark. If he vocally stood against virtually all gains America had made in equality and global economic expansion since 1964 and it got him elected, then all the better that he hold those positions. By all means necessary was Trump’s apparent motto for the 2016 election. Russian intelligence lived by that motto too. The spies of the Red Square were shameless enough but the real scandal was that Team Trump saw nothing wrong with it. Trump voters had blindly elected him despite knowing that Russia had intervened in the electoral process. They cared not that Trump’s own surprising level of slavish devotion to Putin was suspicious. It. Did. Not. Matter. Trump had created a cult of personality in the white lower class so that they worshipped his every word and challenged the veracity of anything negative said against him. This worked out well for Putin. For the

CYBERPOWER is now a fundamental fact of global life. In political, economic, and military affairs, information and information technology provide and support crucial elements of operational activities. U.S. national security efforts have begun to incorporate cyber into strategic calculations. Those efforts, however, are only a beginning. The critical conclusion...is that the United States must create an effective national and international strategic framework for the development and use of cyber as part of an overall national security strategy. Such a strategic framework will have both structural and geopolitical elements. Structural activities will focus on those parts of cyber that enhance capabilities for use in general. Those categories include heightened security, expanded development of research and human capital, improved governance, and more effective organization. Geopolitical activities will focus on more traditional national security and defense efforts. Included in this group are sophisticated development of network-centric operations; appropriate integrated planning of computer network attack capabilities; establishment of deterrence doctrine that incorporates cyber; expansion of effective cyber influence capabilities; carefully planned incorporation of cyber into military planning (particularly stability operations); establishment of appropriate doctrine, education, and training regarding cyber by the Services and nonmilitary elements so that cyber can be used effectively in a joint and/or multinational context; and generation of all those efforts at an international level, since cyber is inherently international and cannot be most effectively accomplished without international partners.

When Dennis McKenna drank ayahuasca , he had a vision in which he became “a sentient water molecule, percolating randomly through the soil, lost amid the tangle of the enormous root fibers of the Banisteriopsis World Tree.” I could feel the coolness, the dank dampness of the soil surrounding me. I felt suspended in an enormous underground cistern, a single drop among billions of drops … as if squeezed by the implacable force of irresistible osmotic pressures, I was rapidly translocated into the roots of the Banisteriopsis tree …” He was “carried through the articulating veins toward some unknown destination”. McKenna found himself within the extraordinary cellular mechanisms that turn light into “the molecular stuff of life”. Pulled on a kind of conveyor belt to the place where photosynthesis occurs. His consciousness exploded as he was “smited by the bolt of energy emitted by the phytic acid transducers and my poor water-molecule soul was split asunder”. As this vision ended, he found himself “embedded in the matrix” of the plant’s biochemical makeup. Suddenly he was suspended above the Amazon rainforest, looking over its vast expanse: “The vista stretching to the curved horizon was blue and green and bluish green, the vegetation below, threaded with shining rivers, looked like green mold covering an overgrown petri plate.” McKenna felt: “anger and rage toward my own rapacious, destructive species, scarcely aware of its own devastating power, a species that cares little about the swath of destruction it leaves in its wake as it thoughtlessly decimates ecosystems and burns thousands of acres of rainforest.” He wept. Suddenly a voice spoke to him: “You monkeys only think you’re running things. You don’t think we would really allow this to happen, do you?

We usually think of empires as violent undertakings. As Frantz Fanon observed in the 1960s, the process of conquering and governing a colony is, by definition, violent. But in the context of global capitalism, empire has a more expansive meaning. Capitalist empires are not simply the states capable of winning the most wars; they are the command centers of the capitalist world system. Their corporations are the largest and most powerful multinationals, extracting profits from all corners of the globe and sucking them back to the imperial core. Their financial institutions are some of the most important nodes in the networks of global finance. The priorities of their governments are forcefully communicated to -and sometimes enforced upon- less powerful states. In fact, at the global level it is much easier to see the equivalence between economic and political power than it is domestically. The power of US businesses abroad is maintained through an international order that prioritizes the interests of US capital, promulgated by the US government and its allies. The power of US finance rests on the central role played by the dollar as the global reserve currency, which is it self a function of American military, political, and economic might. American military power, meanwhile, stems from and helps to reinforce the power of a web of military contractors, weapons manufacturers, and research hubs that provide the expertise and equipment needed to maintain its supremacy. In certain parts of the world, as in Iraq after its invasion, the US government has rules through private corporations like Halliburton. Empire is, then, about more than formal colonization -it refers to all the processes through which the world's most powerful capitalist institutions plan who gets what at the level of the world economy. Throughout history, this imperial power has often been exercised through horrendous acts of violence that have warped the development of entire societies for decades. But today, it is often exerted in far more covert ways, such as through the secretive system of international courts or international financial institutions imposing rigid conditions on countries trying to access emergency lending.

This might be perhaps the simplest single-paragraphy summation of civilizational advances, a concise summary of growth that matters most. Our ability to provide a reliable, adequate food supply thanks to yields an order of magnitude higher than in early agricultures has been made possible by large energy subsidies and it has been accompanied by excessive waste. A near-tripling of average life expectancies has been achieved primarily by drastic reductions of infant mortality and by effective control of bacterial infections. Our fastest mass-travel speeds are now 50-150 times higher than walking. Per capita economic product in affluent countries is roughly 100 times larger than in antiquity, and useful energy deployed per capita is up to 200-250 times higher. Gains in destructive power have seen multiples of many (5-11) orders of magnitude. And, for an average human, there has been essentially an infinitely large multiple in access to stored information, while the store of information civilization-wide will soon be a trillion times larger than it was two millenia ago. And this is the most worrisome obverse of these advances: they have been accompanied by a multitude of assaults on the biosphere. Foremost among them has been the scale of the human claim on plants, including a significant reduction of the peak posts-glacial area of natural forests (on the order of 20%), mostly due to deforestation in temperate and tropical regions; a concurrent expansion of cropland to cover about 11% of continental surfaces; and an annual harvest of close to 20% of the biosphere's primary productivity (Smil 2013a). Other major global concerns are the intensification of natural soil erosion rates, the reduction of untouched wilderness areas to shrinking isolated fragments, and a rapid loss of biodiversity in general and within the most species-rich biomes in particular. And then there is the leading global concern: since 1850 we have emitted close to 300 Gt of fossil carbon to the atmosphere (Boden and Andres 2017). This has increased tropospheric CO2 concentrations from 280 ppm to 405 ppm by the end of 2017 and set the biosphere on a course of anthropogenic global warming (NOAA 2017). These realities clearly demonstrate that our preferences have not been to channel our growing capabilities either into protecting the biosphere or into assuring decent prospects for all newborns and reducing life's inequalities to tolerable differences. Judging by the extraordinary results that are significantly out of line with the long-term enhancements of our productive and protective abilities, we have preferred to concentrate disproportionately on multiplying the destructive capacities of our weapons and, even more so, on enlarging our abilities for the mass-scale acquisition and storage of information and for instant telecommunication, and have done so to an extent that has become not merely questionable but clearly counterproductive in many ways.

The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–08 represented the greatest financial downswing of my lifetime, and consequently it presents the best opportunity to observe, reflect and learn. The scene was set for its occurrence by a number of developments. Here’s a partial list: Government policies supported an expansion of home ownership—which by definition meant the inclusion of people who historically couldn’t afford to buy homes—at a time when home prices were soaring; The Fed pushed interest rates down, causing the demand for higher-yielding instruments such as structured/levered mortgage securities to increase; There was a rising trend among banks to make mortgage loans, package them and sell them onward (as opposed to retaining them); Decisions to lend, structure, assign credit ratings and invest were made on the basis of unquestioning extrapolation of low historic mortgage default rates; The above four points resulted in an increased eagerness to extend mortgage loans, with an accompanying decline in lending standards; Novel and untested mortgage backed securities were developed that promised high returns with low risk, something that has great appeal in non-skeptical times; Protective laws and regulations were relaxed, such as the Glass-Steagall Act (which prohibited the creation of financial conglomerates), the uptick rule (which prevented traders who had bet against stocks from forcing them down through non-stop short selling), and the rules that limited banks’ leverage, permitting it to nearly triple; Finally, the media ran articles stating that risk had been eliminated by the combination of: the adroit Fed, which could be counted on to inject stimulus whenever economic sluggishness developed, confidence that the excess liquidity flowing to China for its exports and to oil producers would never fail to be recycled back into our markets, buoying asset prices, and the new Wall Street innovations, which “sliced and diced” risk so finely, spread it so widely and placed it with those best suited to bear it.

But why is an understanding of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse in women's prisons an important element of a radical analysis of the prison system, and especially of those forward-looking analyses that lead us in the direction of abolition? Because the call to abolish the prison as the dominant form of punishment cannot ignore the extent to which the institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and practices that are hopefully approaching obsolescence in the larger society, but that retain all their ghastly vitality behind prison walls. The destructive combination of racism and misogyny, however much it has been challenged by social movements, scholarship, and art over the last three decades, retains all its awful consequences within women's prisons. The relatively uncontested presence of sexual abuse in women's prisons is one of many such examples. The increasing evidence of a U.S. prison industrial complex with global resonances leads us to think about the extent to which the many corporations that have acquired an investment in the expansion of the prison system are, like the state, directly implicated in an institution that perpetuates violence against women.

The prospects for electric power in the twenty-first century can be summarized in a single word: growth. Electricity consumption, both worldwide and in the United States, has doubled since 1980. It is expected, on a global basis, to about double again by 2035. And the absolute amount of the doubling this time will be so much larger, as it is off a much larger base. An increase on such a scale is both enormous and expensive. The cost for building the new capacity to accommodate this growth between now and 2035 is currently estimated at $10 trillion—and is rising. But that expansion is what will be required to support what could be by then a $130 or $140 trillion world economy.1 Such very big numbers generate very big questions—and a fierce battle. What kind of power plants to construct and, then, how to get them built? The crux of the matter is fuel choice. Making those choices involves a complex argument over energy security and physical safety, economics, environment, carbon and climate change, values and public policy, and over the basic requirement of reliability—keeping on not just the lights but everything else in this digital age. The centrality of electricity makes the matter of fuel choice and meeting future power needs one of the most fundamental issues for the global economy.

Controlling energy use would be an enormous expansion of government power, so these people pursue it not just for scientific reasons but also for self-advancement.

Mind is the world, world is the mind. Exclusion makes cruel, expansion makes kind.

Befriending Time: Making Delay a Friend

Not every budding platform has an opportunity to achieve viral growth. But if it does, it can help turn slow but steady expansion into the kind of skyrocket growth that makes a platform into a national or global phenomenon with the potential to dominate its market for years to come.

By effectively protecting its assets and interests, a think tank can ensure its sustainability, credibility, and continued influence in the global policy landscape.

In the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, it seemed at first that Europe could dodge the blow that was hitting the United States. The unspoken reality was that in the 6 months after September 2008 European governments had to quietly spend 3 trillion dollars to bail out their troubled banks. In the case of the periphery countries, the main problem came from the abrupt departure of capital that up till then had been flowing in abundance to finance expansion plans. In the case of the strong countries’ banks, the travails came from their excessive exposure to sub-prime investments. The ensuing recession, plus the effort to rescue the banks, put several countries in a vulnerable situation. This was more apparent after the financial markets became jittery on discovering the magnitude of the Greek problem.

While Germany applied wage restraint, fiscal austerity and saving, southern Europe embarked on an aggressive expansion, largely financed through the recycling of the German external current account surplus by German banks. When the tide turned in 2008 and German financing was abruptly withdrawn, the debtor countries of the periphery went into recession and fiscal difficulty. By this time, Germany had already consolidated its position in emerging markets as an exporter of high-tech goods, allowing her to ride the Global Financial Crisis with barely a scratch.

Here was a tangible example of the inevitable exclusivity of globalization, as the construction and expansion of a world interior whose invisible boundaries are nevertheless virtually insurmountable from without, and which, now, is inhabited by the one and a half billion ‘winners’ of globalization; three times this number are left standing outside the door.

Few irruptions in history have transformed societies as rapidly and irrevocably as did the conquest and expansion of the Arabs of Islam in the seventh century. And none came with greater swiftness.

These remarks reflect the expansive reach of the discourse on law and order, which since the 1970s tended to conflate "crime" with civil rights protests in the South and with the widespread turmoil generated by racism in the North. The moral panic produced by this discourse increasingly meant that the "law and order" slogan served as a proxy for more explicit calls to suppress Black movements and ultimately also to criminalize indiscriminately broad swaths of the Black population. By 1994, the deindustrialization of the U.S. economy, produced by global economic shifts, was having a deleterious impact on working-class Black communities. The massive loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector, especially in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, had the result, according to Joe William Trotter, that "the black urban working class nearly disappeared by the early 1990s." Combined with the disestablishment of welfare state benefits, these economic shifts caused vast numbers of Black people to seek other—sometimes "illegal"—means of survival. It is not accidental that the full force of the crack epidemic was felt during the 1980s and early '90s. During this period there were few signs of governmental effort to address the circumstances responsible for the rapid impoverishment of working-class Black communities, and the 1994 Crime Bill was emblematic of the turn to carceral "solutions" as a response to the impact of forces of global capitalism. As Cedric Robinson has pointed out, capitalism has always been racial capitalism, and the Crime Bill was a formidable indication that Republicans and Democrats in Washington were united in their acceptance of punitive strategies to stave off the effects of Black impoverishment.

As we dismantle the traditional notions of talent, it's imperative to broaden our lens to include the global talent pool—a vast expanse of potential that, when tapped into wisely, can become a cornerstone of our talent revolution.

Since the beginning of neanderthal man, personal branding has existed. Many choose to believe that personal branding is a new concept and is something that globalization and the expansion of the internet and new technologies have created. Because it is not new, it means we have hundreds of years, as a matter of fact, thousands, to learn and study.

top research company in Myanmar scene is powerful and different, with a few driving organizations offering thorough types of assistance to organizations looking to comprehend and enter the neighborhood market. Here are a portion of the top exploration firms in Myanmar: Myanmar Study Exploration (MSR): Laid out as the main free exploration organization in Myanmar, MSR brags north of 25 years experience. The organization offers an expansive scope of administrations including quantitative and subjective exploration, web-based entertainment research, and CATI (PC Helped Phone Talking) research. MSR is known for its profound comprehension of the nearby market and its capacity to convey experiences across different areas like farming, medical care, and customer products (Statistical surveying Organizations) . STP Exploration Myanmar: STP Exploration Myanmar (Single Touch Point Co., Ltd.) works in both market and social examination. With a rich history of leading north of 150 examination projects, STP has shown skill in areas like wellbeing, farming, schooling, and monetary effect evaluations. Their accomplished group offers subjective and quantitative examination administrations, custom fitted to meet the particular necessities and spending plans of their clients (STP Myanmar) . Aventura Exploration Myanmar (ARM): ARM gives a far reaching set-up of statistical surveying administrations including brand following, client experience, secret shopping, and B2B research. ARM is especially noted for its imaginative methodology and the utilization of a delegate portable exploration board of more than 85,000 shoppers spread across Myanmar. This permits them to catch continuous bits of knowledge and convey significant outcomes to their clients (ARM) . Statistical surveying Myanmar by YCP Solidiance: Under the umbrella of YCP Solidiance, Statistical surveying Myanmar assists organizations with growing in the Burmese market by giving proof based statistical surveying and methodology suggestions. Their administrations incorporate market section and development technique, cutthroat benchmarking, channel model distinguishing proof, and M&A warning. They have major areas of strength for a record of helping global organizations in exploring the neighborhood monetary scene and recognizing manageable learning experiences (Exploration in Myanmar) . Xavey Exploration Arrangements: 1. Xavey Exploration Arrangements is known for its tech-driven statistical surveying arrangements. They have practical experience in catching "in-the-occasion" bits of knowledge through portable and advanced stages, which is essential for grasping powerful purchaser ways of behaving in Myanmar. Their inventive methodology considers proficient information assortment and examination, settling on them a favored decision for educated clients seeking influence computerized instruments for top research company in Myanmar 2. These organizations feature the top research company in Myanmar , offering a scope of administrations that take care of different business needs from top to bottom area examinations to constant shopper bits of knowledge. Each firm brings its exceptional assets and procedures, guaranteeing that organizations can track down the right accomplice to assist them with prevailing in the Burmese market. Whether it's through customary subjective techniques or high level advanced procedures, these organizations are exceptional to give the experiences important to informed direction and key preparation.

As Elsa Kania put it, ‘Huawei’s global expansion, in and of itself, can serve as a vector for Beijing’s influence.’137 After all, if Huawei achieves its goal of becoming the dominant supplier and builder of the global communication network of the twenty-first century, that gives Beijing enormous influence around the world. Huawei is at the fulcrum of President Xi’s two fusions, the Party–corporate fusion and the civilian–military fusion, to which might be added a third, the influence–espionage fusion.

Europeans and Americans have spent five centuries conquering, plundering, exploiting, and polluting the earth in the name of human progress. They used their technological superiority to create the most efficient killing machines on the planet, directed against anyone and anything, especially indigenous cultures, which stood in their way. They stole and hoarded the planet’s wealth and resources. They believed that this orgy of blood and gold would never end, and they still believe it. They do not understand that the dark ethic of ceaseless capitalist and imperialist expansion is dooming the exploiters as well as the exploited. But even as we stand on the cusp of extinction we lack the intelligence and imagination to break free from our evolutionary past. As the warning signs become more palpable—rising temperatures, global financial meltdowns, mass human migrations, endless wars, poisoned ecosystems, rampant corruption among the ruling class—we turn to those who chant, either through idiocy or cynicism, the mantra that what worked in the past will work in the future. Factual evidence, since it is an impediment to what we desire, is banished

Gone are the days of nationalistic insecurity. Lo the time comes for expansion of humanity.

The color red is known to have expansive energy. Consider the famous Target logo with its red target symbol, as well as McDonald’s for its widespread usage of red in its signage, restaurants, packaging, and clownish icon. In fact, many top brands globally use only the color red in its name and logo, including Coca-Cola, Oracle, Honda, H&M, and Budweiser.

My heart is too grand to be confined within the pages of a puny passport.

The Dream Lives On (The Sonnet) Washington had a dream, The dream of free America. Martin Luther had a dream, The dream of equal America. Adi Shankara had a dream, The dream of advaita Bharat. Chandra Bose had a dream, The dream of azad Bharat. Naskar too has a dream, The dream of undivided Earth. My body will perish soon but, The dream will live on through hearts. Gone are the days of nationalistic insecurity. Lo the time comes for expansion of humanity.

There is only one pedagogy to peace, the individual willingness for expansion.

The deep disruption caused by COVID-19 globally has offered societies an enforced pause to reflect on what is truly of value. With the economic emergency responses to the pandemic now in place, the opportunity can be seized to make the kind of institutional changes and policy choices that will put economies on a new path towards a fairer, greener future. The history of radical rethinking in the years following World War II, which included the establishment of the Bretton Woods institutions, the United Nations, the EU and the expansion of welfare states, shows the magnitude of the shifts possible.

The deep disruption caused by COVID-19 globally has offered societies an enforced pause to reflect on what is truly of value. With the economic emergency responses to the pandemic now in place, the opportunity can be seized to make the kind of institutional changes and policy choices that will put economies on a new path towards a fairer, greener future. The history of radical rethinking in the years following World War II, which included the establishment of the Bretton Woods institutions, the United Nations, the EU and the expansion of welfare states, shows the magnitude of the shifts possible. This raises two questions: 1) What should the new compass for tracking progress be? and 2) What will the new drivers of an economy that is inclusive and sustainable be?

Consensus of Heart (The Sonnet) Place truth at the feet of love, Intellect at the feet of integration. Place belief at the feet of harmony, Stubbornness at the feet of ascension. Place tradition at the feet of expansion, Individuality at the feet of collectivity. Place knowledge at the feet of warmth, Patriotism at the feet of world community. Place differences at the feet of unity, Rebellion at the feet of accountability. Place serenity at the feet of social uplift, Practicality at the feet of dignity 'n equality. Whether there is consensus of head or not, Let us first ensure consensus of the heart.

In the nineteenth century the global economy was worth a little more than $1 trillion, in today’s money. That means each year capital needed to find new investments worth about $30 billion – a significant sum. This required a huge effort on the part of capital, including the colonial expansion that characterised the nineteenth century. Today the global economy is worth over $80 trillion, so to maintain an acceptable rate of growth capital needs to find outlets for new investments worth another $2.5 trillion next year. That’s the size of the entire British economy – one of the biggest in the world. Somehow we have to add the equivalent of another British economy next year, on top of what we are already doing, and then add even more than that the following year, and so on. Where can this quantity of growth possibly be found? The pressures become enormous. It’s what is driving the pharmaceutical companies behind the opioid crisis in the United States; the beef companies that are burning down the Amazon; the arms companies that lobby against gun control; the oil companies that bankroll climate denialism; and the retail firms that are invading our lives with ever-more sophisticated advertising techniques to get us to buy things we don’t actually want. These are not ‘bad apples’ – they are obeying the iron law of capital. Over the past 500 years, an entire infrastructure has been created to facilitate the expansion of capital: limited liability, corporate personhood, stock markets, shareholder value rules, fractional reserve banking, credit ratings – we live in a world that’s increasingly organised around the imperatives of accumulation.

People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept, but a concept of love is just what we need to grasp the consistuent power of the multitude. The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustraphobic confines of rhe nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love. We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern tradition. .[...] Love means precisely that our expansive encounters and continuous collaborations bring us joy. [...] We need to recover today this material and political sense of love, a love as strong as death. This does not mean you cannot love your spouse, your mother, or your child. It only means that your love does not end there, that love serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society. Without this love, we are noting." "Now, with the cold war over and the first experiments of global order completed, we cannot help but recognize the planet as a sick body and the global crisis of democracy as a symptom of corruption and disorder.

My roots are grounded in humanity, not in one culture or nation. Cosmos courses through my corpuscles, My life is a call to expansion.

When the shoe was launched as the ‘Freestyle’ in 1982, I was worried. In my eyes, it was still too weak to withstand extreme workouts. But my education in the difference between UK and US consumer habits was furthered when the shoe’s longevity, or lack of it, proved inconsequential. Women in America loved them so much that they weren’t bothered when they fell apart – they simply bought another pair. If the same thing happened in the UK, the public outcry would have damaged our reputation. We would never have gotten away with such a fragile product, further proof that breaking into America had been essential for our expansion.

In this global contest for influence, the skillful flanking maneuver may just tip the scales in favor of the astute player, granting them a crucial edge in this high-stakes game.

Mastering this trinity of influence is akin to an orchestra conductor leading a symphony, where the harmonious interaction of disparate components creates a resonant impact that far exceeds the sum of its parts.

In conclusion, the pathway to turning opposing stakeholder interests into opportunities lies in the artful management of polarity.

The dense fog of globalization, while challenging, also teems with opportunities.

The friction of globalization is not an obstacle to be feared or avoided but an integral part of the process of expansion and influence-building.

Polarity, a condition often perceived as detrimental, bears within its folds the potential to foster innovation, encourage dialogue, and cultivate understanding.

Being able to predict next year’s prices is enormously important to management. Being able to predict prices in five and ten years hence is a major strategic advantage. The managements of certain aggressive companies have realized that well-documented cost behavior could be factored into their pricing strategies. They set pricing and investment strategies as a function of volume-driven costs. At times, they reduced prices below current costs in anticipation of the decline in costs that they knew would result from expansion of volume. Capacity was added ahead of demand. The earliest companies to adopt experience-based strategies ran roughshod over their slower-adapting competitors. They often preempted their competitors by claiming enough of a growing demand so that when their competitors attempted a response, little volume remained, and the leaders’ costs could not be matched.

However, more intriguing than either the dramatic improvements in labor or in net asset productivity was the fact that as these companies became more productive they could also expand the variety of the product line they offered their customers. They grew by giving their customers more choice. Variety expansion is far more important to growth than is the cutting of price facilitated by improved labor and net asset productivity. After prices are cut, customers have little more to look for, while expanding choice enables companies to become increasingly relevant to their customers. On average, these companies expanded their product lines by 30 to 270 percent.

Thus, it is taking more American churches to field one missionary than churches in other parts of the world. For example, whereas there is one crosscultural missionary supported by every 0.7 evangelical churches in Singapore, by 2.1 churches in Hong Kong, 2.4 in Albania, 2.5 in Sri Lanka, 2.6 in Mongolia, 4.2 in South Korea, 4.9 in Myanmar, and 5.3 in Senegal, in the United States the ratio is 7.6 churches to one missionary.[6] The proper conclusion from this flurry of numbers would seem to be that, while the United States contains a whole lot of evangelical churches, those churches are not now as proportionately active in crosscultural missionary activity as many churches in the non-Western world. Evangelical dynamism in these other churches has replaced, or is replacing, the evangelical dynamism of American churches as the leading edge of world Christian expansion. That expansion seems to be tracking the earlier pattern of American adjustments to Christianity-after-Christendom.

It has become increasingly popular today to say that we live in an era of what Benjamin Barber has labelled ‘Jihad vs. McWorld’. The globalising powers of capitalism (‘McWorld’) are confronted with or resisted by the forces that Barber labels ‘Jihad’ – the variety of tribal particularisms and ‘narrowly conceived faiths’ opposed to the homogenising force of capital. Even those with a critical view of the growth of American empire and the expansion of what is erroneously termed the global market usually subscribe to this interpretation. In fact it is the critics who often argue that we need a better understanding of these local forms of resistance against the ‘universal’ force of the market. The terms of this debate are quite misleading. We live in an age, to adapt Barber’s nomenclature, of ‘McJihad’. It is an age in which the mechanisms of what we call capitalism appear to operate, in certain critical instances, only by adopting the social force and moral authority of conservative Islamic movements.

There is a rhythm throughout the universe. The pulsation throbs within every heart, during each moment of ecstasy, in every birth contraction. The rhythm exists in the pull of the ocean tide, around the weight of each raindrop, woven into every cocoon. The sequence, the progression, is what we call time. Our time of influence affects the expansion of the universe. Heaven is eager to learn how we will add to the growth of eternal existence. God is ready to respond as you take part in creation. The rhythm never ends, it only strengthens and expands. This life force is you. You are the mystery. You are the journey. You are exquisite. You are here. Now, it’s your time.

Over the next thirteen years the viceregal capital, Rio de Janeiro, became the center of the Lusitanian world. It was a dual premiere: it was not only the first exodus overseas by a whole system of rule but the first time in the history of European maritime expansion that a ruling monarch had paid a visit to one of his colonies.

Between this class [of subaltern workers] and the class of carriers of labor power there is a somewhat vague boundary which although permeable (subaltern workers can sometimes become employers or self-employed and vice versa) at the same time implies a structural contradiction continually reproduced by capitalism in the course of its expansion. The basic source of class conflict is weakened or strengthened by other contradictions, arising from differences related to gender, ethnicity, race, nationality, age, etc (..) In the process, the subaltern workers are constantly uprooted, regrouped, and reorganized; their number, sectoral and geographic distribution or composition continually changes. Not only the different gradations of autonomy can vary, but people are also continually being absorbed into or expelled from this class. The parameters and modalities of class conflicts within global capitalism change continually for this reason. Sometimes the conflict between capital and labor is clearly visible, at other moments it remains hidden behind other, more palpably visible contrasts and conflicts. But whatever form it takes, openly or obscured, a constant battle continues between carriers of labor power and their buyers or hirers

By the early 21st century, the most profound consequence of globalization and the culture of the Internet has been an expansion of our understanding of who our neighbors are. Ideas and influences can travel around the world and touch the lives of millions within seconds.

There are other problems more closely related to the question of culture. The poor fit between large scale and Korea’s familistic tendencies has probably been a net drag on efficiency. The culture has slowed the introduction of professional managers in situations where, in contrast to small-scale Chinese businesses, they are desperately needed. Further, the relatively low-trust character of Korean culture does not allow Korean chaebol to exploit the same economies of scale and scope in their network organization as do the Japanese keiretsu. That is, the chaebol resembles a traditional American conglomerate more than a keiretsu network: it is burdened with a headquarters staff and a centralized decision-making apparatus for the chaebol as a whole. In the early days of Korean industrialization, there may have been some economic rationale to horizontal expansion of the chaebol into unfamiliar lines of business, since this was a means of bringing modern management techniques to a traditional economy. But as the economy matured, the logic behind linking companies in unrelated businesses with no obvious synergies became increasingly questionable. The chaebol’s scale may have given them certain advantages in raising capital and in cross-subsidizing businesses, but one would have to ask whether this represented a net advantage to the Korean economy once the agency and other costs of a centralized organization were deducted from the balance. (In any event, the bulk of chaebol financing has come from the government at administered interest rates.) Chaebol linkages may actually serve to hold back the more competitive member companies by embroiling them in the affairs of slow-growing partners. For example, of all the varied members of the Samsung conglomerate, only Samsung Electronics is a truly powerful global player. Yet that company has been caught up for several years in the group-wide management reorganization that began with the passing of the conglomerate’s leadership from Samsung’s founder to his son in the late 1980s.72 A different class of problems lies in the political and social realms. Wealth is considerably more concentrated in Korea than in Taiwan, and the tensions caused by disparities in wealth are evident in the uneasy history of Korean labor relations. While aggregate growth in the two countries has been similar over the past four decades, the average Taiwanese worker has a higher standard of living than his Korean counterpart. Government officials were not oblivious to the Taiwanese example, and beginning in about 1981 they began to reverse somewhat their previous emphasis on large-scale companies by reducing their subsidies and redirecting them to small- and medium-sized businesses. By this time, however, large corporations had become so entrenched in their market sectors that they became very difficult to dislodge. The culture itself, which might have preferred small family businesses if left to its own devices, had begun to change in subtle ways; as in Japan, a glamour now attached to working in the large business sector, guaranteed it a continuing inflow of Korea’s best and brightest young people.73

Zen is spontaneity, and spontaneity comes from within. Meditation awakens the intuitions, and only when the rational mind is supported by, and couched in, the intuitions does the waking ego not live in a constant baseline fear of death with its associated existential paranoia and unconscious survival strategies. When rationality and intuitions work together and not in opposition there is a great expansion in human consciousness; one enhances the other and both are improved. You are improved and the world is improved because of this. A new State of Being is realised; more precisely, a State of Becoming.

Globally, each year some seventy-five billion tons of soil is lost. That would cover about thirty-eight thousand square miles of arable land, an expanse larger than the nation of Austria.

A healthy global financial system is essential to meeting the aspirations of billions of people entering the middle class; to fund the growth of cities; to build the global networks of roads, airports, ports, and telecommunications the world needs; to underwrite the expansion of health care, education, and other vital social services; and to raise the trillions of dollars that will be necessary to deal with climate change. The centrality of finance and the search for more and different kinds of funding and credit—the kind of innovation and expansion epitomized by the House of Rothschild—remain pivotal to our interconnected and expanding world economy. And if we look for the most important historical models for effective, enlightened global bankers, Mayer Amschel Rothschild is at the top of the list.

The closest modern equivalents to the Company, however, are the giant state-owned companies of China, such as the Sinopec Group, the petroleum behemoth. As Beijing extends its influence across East Asia and works to secure supplies of oil and other raw materials from Africa to Latin America, its large state firms are and will continue to be critical vehicles of this expansion.

Indeed, the consensual nature of the EU itself has meant that EU-level institutions are far weaker than certain federal institutions in the United States. These weaknesses were made painfully evident in the European debt crisis of 2010–2013. The United States Federal Reserve, Treasury, and Congress responded quite forcefully to its financial crisis, with a massive expansion of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, the $700 billion TARP, a second $700 billion stimulus package in 2009, and continuing asset purchases by the Fed under successive versions of quantitative easing. Under emergency circumstances, the executive branch was able to browbeat the Congress into supporting its initiatives. The European Union, by contrast, has taken a much more hesitant and piecemeal approach to the euro crisis. Lacking a monetary authority with the same powers as the Federal Reserve, and with fiscal policy remaining the preserve of national-level governments, European policy makers have had fewer tools than their American counterparts to deal with economic shocks.

A CEO To increase global presence, product mix, and market share to improve and maintain shareholder earnings and value Mergers and acquisitions Reengineering and change management International corporate leadership experience Visionary strategist; identify and pursue new growth opportunities Board member and shareholder relations management Developer of world-class teams to achieve world-class results MBA from Oxford in international business Skilled in raising capital for growth and expansion

The impact of the internet on economic development is shifting in two important directions. First, given the aging population and near-saturated market penetration in the advanced economies, most of the expansion of the internet related market will take place in developing countries like Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Secondly, the globalization of the internet is expected to increase the share of developing countries in the internet economy presenting a historic opportunity for the young and poor in Pakistan to improve their economic condition.

[...] All colonial powers have wrestled with decolonization after World War II, but while England and France in particular were driven step by step from their global positions, the Netherlands lost everything at once.” This fact, to lose “everything at once,” played a role also in Russia. The decolonization was sudden, unexpected, and total. The Russian frontiers were completely redrawn, and after centuries of almost uninterrupted expansion, the map of the country resembled that of sixteenth-century Russia [50].

Do we give up on the the messianic after a particular moment fails to actualise every element of expansive dreams?

But too much of the time was lost to the distraction of global expansion—wasteful efforts to establish toeholds and run pilots in new geographies before Better Place’s two core markets had been secured.

Automotive and aerospace figure highly, but what the Germans are exceptionally good at is building the machines that manufacture other things. The bulk of the expansion of China’s industrial base since 2005 has been possible only because the Germans built the core machinery that made it happen.

when it came to the parallel economic upheavals of the period—the industrial revolution, the expansion of global trade, the growth of banks and stock exchanges—Hamilton was an American prophet without peer. No other founding father straddled both of these revolutions—only Franklin even came close—and therein lay Hamilton’s novelty and greatness.

President Truman laid out bold, new policies to contain Soviet expansion.142 Global tensions translated to federal contracts for the region's defense industries, especially Boeing. The company built B-50 and B-52 bombers for the newly established U.S. Air Force,

Between 1600 and 1750 the firing rate for French troops using their muskets increased by a factor of ten.46 This amounts to an annual rate of labor productivity growth of 1.5 percent, something we might expect to see in a modern advanced economy during an economic expansion.

Saudi Oger’s Saad Hariri, a dual citizen who also happened to be the prime minister of Lebanon, was struggling to keep the cash flowing too. The Oger business was poorly managed, so it had little cushion for a slowdown in payments. Saad desperately tried to win Mohammed bin Salman’s approval, building an extension to King Salman’s expansive seaside palace in Tangier for Mohammed. And when Mohammed suggested he’d like a more direct passageway in the Royal Court to access the foyer of his cousin Mohammed bin Nayef’s section, Saad himself stayed up through the night with workers to cut through marble and concrete to get the job done. Mohammed thanked him but clearly felt no exchange had taken place. Saad hadn’t won any goodwill.