I completely agree with your remarks about how bad the USA in many aspects is. There is another side to that of course: several of the wars they fought were to liberate Europe and many other countries from ruthless regimes and dictators. And yes, some of those dictators came to power thanks to the USA. And so forth and so forth. We know the flame wars about this from usenet, I participated in some of them. To cut it short: I don't like the power and the ways of he USA all too much, and neither of those of the USSR, Russia, China and the old imperial powers of Britain, Holland and Spain. But I am glad it is the USA who is mightier than anybody in the world now and not the USSR or China, since the ways of the USA are more attractive to me than many other ways.

It is Europe and the USA that has the people investing in people in India and Korea. It is thanks to many people in Europe and the USA that Korea and Japan are now mighty car, computer and household appliance builders. What's next, software from those countries is cheaper and perhaps better than ours?

Do we mind that? As long as it is as open as Linux, Apache, Perl and many other open source developments, I don't mind. As long as those developers have a decent living, I don't mind too much either.

I do mind if this makes the USA more paranoid than they already are. I do mind if this wreaks havoc amongst the lines of good programmers in the west, when western companies fire their programmers to use the low wage programmers as cheap labour. I do mind a lot of other things.

This is going too much into politics for my taste. So, let me finish this by thinking how fortunate we are to be in a position to help guide this process into a civilized result, from which all sides can benefit. And that "the powers that be" have much less a say in this that they would like.