Forbes Billionaires List Shifts To China, India & Mexico
Carlos Slim Helú. Photo: José Cruz/ABr (CC)
A sure sign that the balance of power is shifting away from the United States and Europe towards developing nations is shown in the new Forbes list, with the Mexican Carlos Slim Helu beating out Bill Gates for the top spot and China claiming more billionaires than any country outside the US.
India’s billionaires, however, are richer, as reported in the Christian Science Monitor:
With the release of the latest Forbes rich list of billionaires, India is finding much to brag about – even as other fast-growing economies like China make their mark.
Eight Indians made Forbes magazine’s latest list of the top 100 billionaires, and two – energy tycoon Mukesh Ambani and steel mogul Lakshmi Mittal – sit in the top 5. Mr. Ambani is now the fourth richest person in the world, and the richest person in the Asia-Pacific region.
The highest-ranking Chinese person on the…
Population Wars: What’s Next, Explosion Or Depopulation?
In a new article by Paul Farrell, he argues that the good old population bomb is going to explode:
So what’s the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America, capitalism, the world? No, not global warming. Not poverty. Not even peak oil. What is the absolute biggest, one like the trigger mechanism on a nuclear bomb, one that’ll throw a wrench in global economic growth, ending capitalism, even destroying modern civilization?
The one that — if not solved soon — renders all efforts to solve all the other problems in the world, irrelevant, futile and virtually impossible?
News flash: the “Billionaires Club” knows: Bill Gates called billionaire philanthropists to a super-secret meeting in Manhattan last May. Included: Buffett, Rockefeller, Soros, Bloomberg, Turner, Oprah and others meeting at the “home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan,” reports John Harlow in the London TimesOnline. During an afternoon session each was “given 15 minutes to present their favorite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an ‘umbrella cause’ that could harness their interests.”
The world’s biggest time-bomb? Overpopulation, say the billionaires.
Well that’s not exactly a new argument. In fact it’s been around for decades and if the predictions made in the ’70s had come true, we’d already be experiencing most of the apocalyptic things that Farrell’s worried about now. There’s actually a couple of new films that expose the argument not only to have been fallacious in decades past, but an extremely dangerous mistake now. Check out the trailer for Demographic Bomb and please post comments as to who you think is right.
