in other words, I bet the plutonomy skews the stats a hell of a lot
http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2011/el2011-25.html the charts give dollar value and not volume of items, and so if you are shopping at Wal Mart its all about China, if you shop at Sotheby's it's US and Europe
reminds of the book Washinton's China http://books.google.com/books?id=AA-jbmyfl54C&source=gbs_navlinks_s
there is trope floating around those stinky foreigners are taking money out of America, and MSNBC is giving it space a kind of leftist, producerism, a liberal version of Glenn Beck http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI_P3pxze5w&feature=player_embedded
btw, I heard Christian Parenti's interview on Tropics of Chaos today, and I am glad to see he supports the Occupy Wall St movement, i.e. regulating finance for better environmental outcomes. Which makes the Occupy Wallt St action even more important, content free indeed!
In fact, I went to the Occupy Berkeley event and it was far from content free, or hollow at core. What was at core, was a diverse collection of Berkeley's radicals, progressives, liberals. After all, KPFA still puts Doug's show on the air, unlike WBAI.
Christian's book is interesting, but a better historical overview comes from Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts, The Making of the Third World http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts I think its wrong to focus on the tropics or sub-stropics. Think Katrina and New Orleans. There seems to be a pretty big Failed State within the US. i.e, the State of the Poor. AS Chomsky pointed out many years ago in Failed States.
The Occupy Wall St movement is what Chomsky mentioned 2 years ago, this is Obama's Army breaking loose of the heavily managed top down campaigning. Its going global.