Bricks and Pigs: the New Global

If you haven't heard about it yet, the world stage claims that America is on its way out as the most powerful nation on planet Earth. Though my opinion on this subject fluctuates, I thought it worthy to mention the buzz surrounding this idea before I address the "bricks and pigs."

Yesterday, at the aforementioned UCLA seminar, I asked an anonymous Latin American college administrator about the persistence of male Caucasian teachers in American higher education, a sort of "what are your thoughts" kind of question.

"What are the strategies that administrators intend to employ to meet these professors' resistance to diversity?" I asked.

He replied: "I would tell these professors to 'get with the program'."

Furthermore, the administrator iterated to the attendees of the seminar that, in this era of globalization, there are "bricks," and then, there are "pigs." At the time, I had no idea what he was referring to. So I decided to get with the program - here are some of my findings.

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The term "brick" is actually the acronym BRIC, which refers to world powers that, according to many reliable sources, shall eclipse the United States in power and product in the next several years. BRIC stands for:

Brazil
Russia
India
China

This term is actually about ten years old, and we are only hearing about it now because of certain shifts in monetary power. Brazil has authorized offshore drilling for the acquisition of oil, which they intend to sell exclusively to China. Russia is beginning to see the first sustainable economic success since the Cold War; India, of course, answers the phone whenever we call for customer service. And, of course, China makes many of the products we buy. Moreover, as of May 2011, China remains the largest single holder of U.S. government debt with 26 percent of all foreign-held U.S. Treasury securities, which is about 8% of total U.S. public debt (http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/mfh.txt).

On the other end of the spectrum, we have PIGS:

Portugal
Italy (or Ireland, perhaps)
Greece
Spain

Portugal and Italy are out of Euros. The green movement in Spain hasn't generated enough jobs: the unemployment rate reached “a record high of 27.2% in the first quarter of 2013” (http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/25/world/europe/spain-unemployment). And Greece is Greece. (If you don't know about Greece, please type Greece into your Google search bar now.)

We, the United States, contribute a great deal of money to these nations in the form of foreign aid. We do this because our nation is concerned with the well-being of these countries and, as a successful country ourselves, we wish to provide opportunities in globalist fashion. This concludes your lesson in contemporary nomenclature.

Draw your own conclusions.