RUST COMMENTARY: NEW OSAGE CENTRE PROVIDES ANOTHER COMMUNITY OPTION

The new CAPE OSAGE COMMUNITY CENTER was dedicated last night at 4:30 followed by the Cape Chamber's Business After Hours monthly mixer.

This facility gives another option for the many sports and civic functions that fill up the calendar in Cape.

Cape's infrastructure and support facilities are in process of becoming the best in the state on a per population basis.

The many facilities available at Southeast Missouri State University (Show Me Center, Student Recreation Hall, Rose Theater, Academic Hall, Kent Library, Little Theater, etc. including the new business school with its Glenn Auditorium a very functional and intimate 400 seat lecture hall.

This all in addition to the many existing private and public school facilities, PLUS the scheduled construction of a new Notre Dame High School; the Christian Eagle Ridge School; and the newly voted Vocational Tech and elementary school ... later to be followed by a new public high school and major remodeling of the remaining elementary schools.

Coupled with new meeting facilities are the new sewer systems and improvements; the street and roadway improvements in progress; the upgraded and expanded water system voted last fall; the expected completion this fall of a the bridge route linking I-55 to South Sprigg Street. All in all the signs of growth are all around us.

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"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."

Plato

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How Bill Clinton Makes Foreign Policy

A little over a year ago President Clinton personally promised the visiting president of Turkey, Suleyman Demirel, that the U.S. would sell the Turks three decommissioned Navy frigates. The proposed sales was vetted by both the State and Defense departments and was then sent to Capitol Hill where Congress had 15 days to veto it. Congress did not block the transaction. The Turks went ahead and trained crews to man these frigates.

Shortly thereafter, Senator Paul Sarbanes (D-Md.) organized opposition to the sale. The President stopped the sale in its tracks. It has yet to be consummated, despite the President's personal assurance to his Turkish counterpart, thereby humiliating the strongly secular Turkish military, a forceful bulwark against militant fundamentalism.

Even noncynics speculate that the President was persuaded less by the power of Sarbanes' arguments than by the fact that the senator was then the ranking Democrat on the committee investigating Whitewater.

Steve Forbes

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China, arms and oil

"Somewhere between 2005 and 2010," predicts Exxon Chairman Lee Raymond, "the amount of crude oil consumed in Asia will exceed the amount consumed in Europe and the U.S. combined."

Now you know why Exxon is loosening its purse strings to develop large new sources of oil. Exxon has tied up the biggest chunk of exploration acreage that China has so far offered to outsiders, but Raymond doubts that China will be able to produce more than a small fraction of its domestic needs. "They will import more and more oil for as far as the eye can see," Raymond thinks.

Most of it will have to come from the Middle East. The U.S. Energy Department forecasts that Middle East exports of crude and refined products to China will swell, from 270,000 barrels a day in 1995 to 5 million barrels in 2015. By then India, Korea and the rest of developing Asia will be lapping up 11 million barrels a day of Persian Gulf oil.

In these circumstances Asia is Big Oil's fastest-growing market. "The center of this industry is moving to the Far East," says Raymond, and he is positioning Exxon accordingly, with large investments there.

The situation poses military dangers. To pay for the oil it needs, China may well step up its arms exports to volatile areas. Since 1989 China has sold more than $1 billion worth of missiles and other weapons to Iran. Iraq is another big customer. In 1995 the U.S. implored China to scotch a deal to build two nuclear reactors for Iran. China reportedly said it would "suspend" -- but not cancel -- the deal.

T.M.--Forbes April 21, 1997

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Last week I referred to John Naisbitt's "MEGATRENDS ASIA" book, which I started on my recent trip to Japan and Thailand (I've previously been to Korea and Hong Kong). The following are some excerpts worth considering:

In the 1990s Asia came of age. As we move toward the year 2000, Asia will become the dominant region of the world: economically, politically, and culturally. We are on the threshold of the Asian Renaissance. ...

... Given the extraordinary changes in the works, it is high time for the West to try to see the world from Asia's perspective.

In Asia, for example, it is widely believed that the West is losing moral standing internationally, as shown in its lack of leadership in the crisis in Bosnia-Herzegovina (there are more than 500 million Muslims in Asia). Given this perception, Asians are increasingly irritated by the West's lecturing and hectoring on freedom and human rights.

America's moralizing may come back to haunt it. Down the road imagine a big, economically powerful China threatening to withhold Most Favored Nation status from the U.S. unless it did something about the slums in its big urban centers (or improved those SAT scores!)

A new network of nations based on economic symbiosis is emerging: the Asian network. A spirit of working together for mutual economic gain, a new Asian collaboration, is emerging in Asia for the first time. The catalyst is the free market.

The old Asia was divided by culture, language, political ideology, religious philosophies and geography. The new Asia, forged by economic integration, technology, especially telecommunications, travel and mobility of people, will increasingly look like one coherent region. My Telluride neighbor and friend, John Lifton, an Englishman, remembers that in the 1960s young people in Europe began for the first time to call themselves Europeans, rather than English, French, or German, just as many young people throughout Asia are beginning to call themselves Asians ...

... Up until the 1990s everything revolved around the West. The West set the rules. Japan was run by those rules during its economic emergence. But now Asians -- the rest of Asia -- are creating their own rules and will soon determine the game as well. Even Japan will be left behind as the countries of Southeast Asia, led by the ethnic Chinese and China, increasingly hold economic sway.

When Macau returns to China at the end of this decade, the final chapter of Western dominance will have been written. For the first time in 400 years, every inch of Asian soil will be controlled and managed by Asians.

The modernization of Asia must not be thought of as the Westernization of Asia, but the modernization of Asia in the "Asian Way."

At the same time as Asia is modernizing, the Asian conscience is rising. It is very much the Asianization of Asia.

The West needs the East a lot more than the East needs the West.

The Asian continent, from India to Japan, from below the old Soviet Union down to Indonesia, now accounts for more than half of the world's population. Within fives years or less, more than half of these Asian households will be able to buy an array of consumer goods -- refrigerators, television sets, washing machines, computers, cosmetics, etc. And as many as half a billion will be what the West understand as middle class. That market is roughly the size of the U.S. and Europe combined. As the widely placed Hongkong Bank advert says, "There are 3 billion people in Asia. Half of them are under 25. Consider it a growing market." This is a consumer miracle holding vast economic consequences.

Many Asians have told me that they believe in the long run they will best the West competitively because they do not have and will not have a social security system, or any of the other manifestations of the welfare state. Yet this is an economic factor most Westerners have completely closed their eyes to. What does it mean, particularly in economic terms?

In Asia families take care of themselves, above all else, and personal responsibility is emphasized. For Asians, the very idea of a central government being involved in family life is culturally unthinkable, horrifying. The concept of taking care of family first is why the savings rate in Asia is 30 percent or more in almost every country. Asia lives out family values and self-sufficiency.

Not only do Asians believe the cost of the welfare state is a heavy burden on competitiveness, they also contend that it undermines the importance of family and leads to out-of-wedlock children (in the U.S. 30 percent of children are born out of wedlock, while in Malaysia it is 2 percent), high divorce rates, crime, loss of self-reliance, and lower academic achievement.

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Is that enough to whet your curiosity? ... And Naisbitt goes on and on with demographics and trends already underway. The book is worth reading.

~Gary Rust is president of Rust Communications, which owns the Southeast Missourian and other newspapers.