saudis ask for aid if world cuts dependence on oil

Houston Chronicle | There are plenty of needy countries at the U.N. climate talks in Bangkok that make the case they need financial assistance to adapt to the impacts of global warming. Then there are the Saudis.

Saudi Arabia has led a quiet campaign during these and other negotiations — demanding behind closed doors that oil-producing nations get special financial assistance if a new climate pact calls for substantial reductions in the use of fossil fuels.

That campaign comes despite an International Energy Agency report released this week showing that OPEC revenues would still increase $23 trillion between 2008 and 2030 — a fourfold increase compared to the period from 1985 to 2007 — if countries agree to significantly slash emissions and thereby cut their use of oil. That is the limit most countries agree is needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

The head of the Saudi delegation Mohammad S. Al Sabban dismissed the IEA figures as “biased” and said OPEC's own calculations showed that Saudi Arabia would lose $19 billion a year starting in 2012 under a new climate pact. The region would lose much more, he said.

“We are among the economically vulnerable countries,” Al Sabban told The Associated Press on the sidelines of the talks ahead of negotiations in Copenhagen in December for a treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

“This is very serious for us,” he continued. “We are in the process of diversifying our economy but this will take a long time. We don't have too many resources.”

Saudi Arabia, which sits atop the world's largest proven oil reserves, is seeing economic growth slide because of fallout from the global meltdown, but experts still expect the country, flush with cash from oil's earlier price spike last year, to be better able than other nations to cope with the current crisis.

america 2.0

Warsocialism | The “bad news” is that “peak oil” marks the beginning of the end of capitalism and market politics because many decades of declining “net energy”[1] will result in many decades of declining economic activity. And since capitalism can’t run backwards, a new method of distributing goods and services must be found. The “good news” is that our “market system” is fantastically inefficient!

In order to avoid anarchy, rebellion, civil war and global nuclear conflict, Americans must force a fundamental change in our political process. We can keep the same political structures and people, but must totally eliminate special interests from our political environment. A careful review of the progressive assault on laissez faire constitutionalism and neoclassical economics, from the 1880s through the 1930s, explains how this can be done legally and without violence. These early progressives showed how we can save our country. All that is lacking now is the political will. I call this adjustment of our political environment “America 2.0.”

To achieve America 2.0, we must first separate and isolate our political system from our economic system so that government can begin to actually address and solve societal problems rather than merely catering to corporate interests. The second step is to retire most working American citizens with an annuity sufficient for health and happiness, as government begins to eliminate the current enormous waste of vital resources by delivering goods and services directly. This would allow most adults to stay at home with their families but still receive the goods and services they need to enjoy life.

the demise of the dollar - continued....,

the failing u.s. government - the crisis of public management

Scientific American | The crisis of American governance goes much deeper than political divisions and ideology. The U.S. is in a crisis of policy implementation. Not only are Americans deeply divided on what to do about health care, budget deficits, financial markets, climate change and more, but government is also failing to execute settled policies effectively. Management systems linking government, business and civil society need urgent repair.

The recent systems failures are legion and notorious. The 9/11 attacks might well have been prevented if the FBI and the intelligence agencies had cooperated more effectively in early 2001 when they were receiving various signals of a possible terrorist attack. Hurricane Katrina caused mass devastation and loss of life because recommendations to bolster the levees shielding New Orleans and other protective measures were neglected for decades despite urgent expert warnings, and because the federal emergency relief effort failed completely after the storm. To this day, reconstruction efforts in New Orleans are paralyzed and many poor communities there have been abandoned. The U.S. occupation of Iraq was marked by massive and shocking corruption, incompetence, and implementation failures by U.S. agencies.

can boeing really build jets anymore?

Crikey | The ultimate Boeing 747, the 747-8, isn’t flying this year.

Barely a week after Boeing starting feeding nonsense into the ears of unquestioning reporters about how the 747-8 would exceed its specifications, it has announced it won’t fly until early next year, and has informed investors it will take a $US 1 billion hit because of problems with the project.

It is barely a month since the head of the 748 project, Mohammad “Mo” Yahyavi told reporters up to three of the initial freighter version of the jet could be flying by the end of this year, and that first flight was imminent.

He is either a fool or a liar. How can someone head a commercial jet program and not know the true situation when he opens his mouth?

The 748 looks every bit as shonky in its execution as the 787 Dreamliner project.

In its official statement to the markets, Boeing says ‘late maturity of engineering designs has caused greater than expected re-work and disruption in manufacturing.’

Please. Maturity? The 747 first flew in 1969. It has benefited from many enhancements down the years. It is a known quantity. The –8 freighter and passenger versions involve an adapted version of the new generation GE engines that will also, one day, fly on the 787 Dreamliner. The actual body of the 748 is stretched, making it the longest commercial jet even made.

The 748 has sold less than 100 jets, most of them in the freighter version, with Lufthansa the only carrier to order the airline version, originally for delivery next year, but not now expected until 2012.

Under the current management of the company Boeing has turned into a monstrous joke. Highlights of this dark comedy of spin and deception include deskilling the work force to the extent that it couldn’t even fit the right bolts into the right holes on the plastic fantastic 787, which wasn’t supposed to have so many bolts in the first place in its once seamless, super light weight carbon fibre laminated oven cooked shell.

capital gains

Senscot | Ask yourself this question: do you think most people can be trusted? Don’t dwell on it for too long – just offer a general sense. Would you say ‘yes’, or would you say ‘no, you can’t be too careful’? The chances are that, if you are from a professional background, relatively politically engaged and with a university degree – a typical RSA Fellow – you would answer ‘yes’. If so, you would be among a minority of Britons today.

This wasn’t always the case. In the late 1950s, about 60 percent of Britons said they thought most other people could be trusted. The figure had fallen to 43 percent by the early 1980s and to 29 percent by the mid- to late 1990s. This question helps measure what sociologists and political scientists call ‘social capital’. It gives a sense of the extent to which individuals and communities trust each other, reciprocate helpfully and are connected to other people.

Robert Putnam first brought this declining trend to wider public attention using US data in the mid-1990s and subsequently published his findings in Bowling Alone (2000). He found that Americans seemed to have become less engaged with one another from the late 1960s – as demonstrated by falling memberships in Parent-Teacher Associations, fewer family picnics, a decline in churchgoing, less political engagement and less social trust.

Yet Putnam – a friend and colleague with whom I have worked for more than a decade – got his initial account wrong in one important respect. The story he told so comprehensively using US data turned out not to be true for all countries. While a broadly similar decline occurred in the UK and some other Anglo-Saxon countries, as well as in France, subsequent analysis has shown that this was not the case in all countries. Evidence suggests that in the already high-trust Scandinavian nations, social trust has actually increased over the past two decades. The World Values Survey for 1981-2005 put it at 59 percent in Finland, 68 percent in Sweden and 74 percent in Norway.

Certain ‘traditional’ forms of social capital, such as church-going, Women’s Institutes, party membership and trade union memberships, have almost universally declined. But while in the US and the UK this seems to have been associated with a trend towards privatisation and disengagement, in other countries it was associated with the rise of ‘solidaristic individualism’, to use a phrase coined by Swedish sociologist Bo Rothstein.

In essence, we Anglo-Saxons have spent the past few decades using our growing personal wealth to escape from the inconvenience of other people. To use an everyday example, we buy several TVs so that even our own children don’t have to negotiate with each other about what to watch. We use our wealth to ensure that we can do what we want, when we want to. In contrast, our Scandinavian neighbours seem to have used their wealth to see more of one another – to go out with friends, to join more reading groups and so on.

It is not just a matter of idle curiosity that nations, regions and individuals have such different levels of social capital. National economic growth rates have been shown to be strongly affected by levels of social trust. Econometric models suggest that social trust has an effect on economic growth that is as significant as that of economic catch-up (the tendency of less developed countries to catch up economically with their more developed counterparts) and larger than that of human capital (levels of education and skills).

eu moves to unify science

The Scientist | Europe must invest more money and create better infrastructure to support science in order to remain globally competitive, said an independent panel of scientists advising the European Union in a report released today (October 6).

The group, called the European Research Area Board (ERAB), pointed out that Europe spends only 1% of its GDP on research, in comparison with 1.69% in the US and 2.62% in Japan. And although European researchers produce a third of all research papers world-wide, research published in the US is more highly cited. In today's report, the board proposed six strategies to unify and strengthen science in Europe -- from improving mobility of scientists to promoting scientific excellence over nationalism.

The ERA initiative was created in 2000 to provide a unified structure for science, but efforts to integrate research across nations soon stalled. Last year, the European Commission assembled 22 academic, non-profit, and industry scientists from different countries to advise the Commission on how to how to focus its efforts.

"Many of us have a very firm intention to realize [the recommendations] as fast as possible," Norbert Kroo, vice president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a board member of the European Research Council, told The Scientist. He added, though, that the global economic crisis might slow the process.

Some of the ERAB's recommendations have already been promised by European leaders. Last month, upon being sworn in for his second term as president of the European Commission (EC), Jose Manuel Barroso said that he would promote the creation of a new position, a chief scientific officer of Europe, who would represent European science and advise the EC. The ERAB document, too, makes this suggestion; European science "should be represented by one single voice," said Kroo.

Broadly, the aim of the ERAB recommendations is to create "a more cohesive society from a research perspective," said John Wood, chair of the ERAB and a professor of engineering at Imperial College London -- to "use all the brains we've got." The report outlines 6 major themes to accomplish that goal: creating a unified research strategy; focusing research on societal needs such as sustainable energy and healthcare; increasing the interaction between science and policy, and between academia and industry; and promoting cohesion as well as excellence among European researchers.

gore vidal - united states of fury

The Independent | Gore Vidal is not only grieving for his own dead circle and his fading life, but for his country. At 83, he has lived through one third of the lifespan of the United States. If anyone incarnates the American century that has ended, it is him. He was America's greatest essayist, one of its best-selling novelists and the wit at every party. He holidayed with the Kennedys, cruised for men with Tennessee Williams, was urged to run for Congress by Eleanor Roosevelt, co-wrote some of the most iconic Hollywood films, damned US foreign policy from within, sued Truman Capote, got fellated by Jack Kerouac, watched his cousin Al Gore get elected President and still lose the White House, and – finally, bizarrely – befriended and championed the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh.

Yet now, he says, it is clear the American experiment has been "a failure". It was all for nothing. Soon the country will be ranked "somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs." The Empire will collapse militarily in Afghanistan; the nation will collapse internally when Obama is broken "by the madhouse" and the Chinese call in the country's debts. A ruined United States will then be "the Yellow Man's Burden", and "they'll have us running the coolie cars, or whatever it is they have in the way of transport".

A Scotch is fetched for him as he is wheeled into the corner of the bar. "I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic. Everything we had been saying about racial integration was vindicated," he says, "but he's incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election. It's a pity because he's the first intellectual president we've had in many years, but he can't hack it. He's not up to it. He's overwhelmed. And who wouldn't be? The United States is a madhouse. The country should be put away – and we're being told to go away. Nothing makes any sense." The President "wants to be liked by everybody, and he thought all he had to do was talk reason. But remember – the Republican Party is not a political party. It's a mindset, like Hitler Youth. It's full of hatred. You're not going to get them aboard. Don't even try. The only way to handle them is to terrify them. He's too delicate for that."

When he compares Obama to his old friend Jack Kennedy, he shakes his head. "He's twice the intellectual that Jack was, but Jack knew the great world. Remember he spent a long time in the navy, losing ships. This kid [Obama] has never heard a gun fired in anger. He's absolutely bowled over by generals, who tell him lies and he believes them. He hasn't done anything. If you were faced with great problems in chemistry – to find the perfect gas, to gas a population – you won't know for a long time whether it works. You have to go by what people tell you. He's like that. He's not ready for prime time and he's getting a lot of prime time on his plate at once."

Is there any hope? "Every sign I see is doom. But then people say" – he adopts a whiny, nasal voice – "'Oh Mr Vidal, you're so negative, can't you say something nice about America? It's a wonderful country, everybody wants to live here.' Oh yes? When was the last time you saw a Norwegian with a green card who wanted to come here because of the health service? I'll pay you if you can find one."

will california become america's first failed state?

Guardian | Los Angeles, 2009: California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state government is issuing IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike. So what has gone so catastrophically wrong?

California has a special place in the American psyche. It is the Golden State: a playground of the rich and famous with perfect weather. It symbolises a lifestyle of sunshine, swimming pools and the Hollywood dream factory.

But the state that was once held up as the epitome of the boundless opportunities of America has collapsed. From its politics to its economy to its environment and way of life, California is like a patient on life support. At the start of summer the state government was so deeply in debt that it began to issue IOUs instead of wages. Its unemployment rate has soared to more than 12%, the highest figure in 70 years. Desperate to pay off a crippling budget deficit, California is slashing spending in education and healthcare, laying off vast numbers of workers and forcing others to take unpaid leave. In a state made up of sprawling suburbs the collapse of the housing bubble has impoverished millions and kicked tens of thousands of families out of their homes. Its political system is locked in paralysis and the two-term rule of former movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger is seen as a disaster – his approval ratings having sunk to levels that would make George W Bush blush. The crisis is so deep that Professor Kevin Starr, who has written an acclaimed history of the state, recently declared: "California is on the verge of becoming the first failed state in America."

Outside the Forum in Inglewood, near downtown Los Angeles, California has already failed. The scene is reminiscent of the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, as crowds of impoverished citizens stand or lie aimlessly on the hot tarmac of the centre's car park. It is 10am, and most have already been here for hours. They have come for free healthcare: a travelling medical and dental clinic has set up shop in the Forum (which usually hosts rock concerts) and thousands of the poor, the uninsured and the down-on-their-luck have driven for miles to be here.

The queue began forming at 1am. By 4am, the 1,500 spaces were already full and people were being turned away. On the floor of the Forum, root-canal surgeries are taking place. People are ferried in on cushions, hauled out of decrepit cars. Sitting propped up against a lamp post, waiting for her number to be called, is Debbie Tuua, 33. It is her birthday, but she has taken a day off work to bring her elderly parents to the Forum, and they have driven through the night to get here. They wait in a car as the heat of the day begins to rise. "It is awful for them, but what choice do we have?" Tuua says. "I have no other way to get care to them."

office of the attending physician

Washington Monthly | From time to time, we're reminded of the fact that members of Congress -- many of whom are fighting to kill health care reform -- give themselves pretty good coverage. Several weeks ago, the LA Times reported on the taxpayer-subsidized insurance federal lawmakers currently enjoy.

The piece noted that, while most Americans have to go with whatever their employer offers, members have a choice of 10 plans that offer access to a national network of doctors. "Lawmakers also get special treatment at Washington's federal medical facilities and, for a few hundred dollars a month, access to their own pharmacy and doctors, nurses and medical technicians standing by in an office conveniently located between the House and Senate chambers," the article added.

ABC News explores this conveniently located facility in more detail today. It sounds like a pretty sweet deal for lawmakers.

the demise of the dollar

Independent | In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading. In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

The Americans, who are aware the meetings have taken place – although they have not discovered the details – are sure to fight this international cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs. Against the background to these currency meetings, Sun Bigan, China's former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. "Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable," he told the Asia and Africa Review. "We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security."

blinding white flash

how nonsense sharpens the intellect

NYTimes | In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.

“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”

okc bombing tapes appear edited

Washington Post | Long-secret security tapes showing the chaos immediately after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building are blank in the minutes before the blast and appear to have been edited, an attorney who obtained the recordings said Sunday.

"The real story is what's missing," said Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City attorney who obtained the recordings through the federal Freedom of Information Act as part of an unofficial inquiry he is conducting into the April 19, 1995, bombing that killed 168 people and injured hundreds more.

Trentadue gave copies of the tapes to The Oklahoman newspaper, which posted them online and provided copies to The Associated Press.

The tapes turned over by the FBI came from security cameras various companies had mounted outside office buildings near the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. They are blank at points before 9:02 a.m., when a truck bomb carrying a 4,000 pound fertilizer-and-fuel-oil bomb detonated in front of the building, Trentadue said.

"Four cameras in four different locations going blank at basically the same time on the morning of April 19, 1995. There ain't no such thing as a coincidence," Trentadue said.

He said government officials claim the security cameras did not record the minutes before the bombing because "they had run out of tape" or "the tape was being replaced."

"The interesting thing is they spring back on after 9:02," he said. "The absence of footage from these crucial time intervals is evidence that there is something there that the FBI doesn't want anybody to see."

A spokesman for the FBI in Oklahoma City, Gary Johnson, declined to comment and referred inquiries about the tapes to FBI officials in Washington, who were not immediately available for comment Sunday.

on going rogue...,

Gawker | Lynn Vincent, the woman who is writing a book called Going Rogue "by" Sarah Palin, sure can pick her co-writers. She's written books before with a general who kills "demons" for God and a guy who finds interracial dating "revolting."

As Charles Johnson—whose ongoing reformation from Muslim-hating wacko to right-wing apostate continues to puzzle and delight us—points out, Palin's ghostwriter's previous work includes Donkey Cons, a thoughtful investigative look at the Democratic Party's criminality that blows the lid off that "killer and traitor Aaron Burr." Vincent's co-writer on Donkey Cons was Robert Stacy McCain, a former Washington Times editor who writes things like this:

[T]he media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion. The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us.

That was from a private e-mail McCain once wrote that a recipient posted online, so in his defense, McCain (no relation to Palin's running mate) wouldn't write something like that in public. In public, he says things like slaves and whites in the Old South had "cordial and affectionate relations," is a member of the League of the South, which wants to secede from the Union (again!), and writes for a web site called VDare, which proudly publishes the work of "rational and civil...white nationalists" who "unashamedly work for their people."

Anyway, when Palin was doing her due diligence before hiring Vincent, she probably didn't look into her association with McCain, because she probably just assumed it was John McCain, because she's an idiot. We're sure she will promptly reject and denounce Vincent's racist affiliations.

Progressive Alaska | Palin has been filmed declaring the Iraq War to be a holy war. She has stated that she wants Alaska Natives relocated to strategic hubs hamlets. Her sole trip to Alaska's Yukon Delta during the winter of 2009 was with proselytizing Cristianist supremacists Jerry Prevo and Franklin Graham. Both have made efforts in the past to suppress, if not eradicate, Alaska Native culture.

Vincent co-authored a book with Christianist zealot, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, called Never Surrender. Here's some classic Boykin:

As many will remember, we couldn't have gotten off to a better start on winning hearts and minds when Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, on his speaking tour of churches in 2003, publicly and in uniform proclaimed that the so-called war on terror was really a fight between Satan and Christians.

He made comments like, "We in the Army of God, in the House of God, the Kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this," saying that George W. Bush, who had ignorantly called the war a crusade, was "in the White House because God put him there," and referring to the capture of Somali warlord Osman Atto, said, "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol."

Speaking at a Rotary Club meeting in his hometown of Concord, N.C., in December 2006, one of Boykin's supporters, former Rep. Robin Hayes, R-N.C., pronounced that stability in Iraq ultimately depended on "spreading the message of Jesus Christ, the message of peace on earth, good will towards men. ... Everything depends on everyone learning about the birth of the savior."

Palin's fit with Vincent may be a stroke of sick genius. Imagine Vincent tossing Palin's verbal herbage into a lethal concoction, designed to spread more hatred of non-whites, urging people to reject the products of interracial marriage, conjuring up the false spirits of the Old South, touting carrying loaded weapons into public meetings, urging citizens to strike out openly and assertively against census workers - and on and on and........

set free....,

god inside the brain

Arstechnica | Why do some embrace religion and others reject it outright? For a long time, scientists have been trying to answer this question by probing the neural roots of religion. Until fairly recently, many thought the answer lay in a "God-spot"—a small region of the brain that has been linked to the mystical experiences associated with faith.

Thanks in large part to the growing sophistication of brain-scanning techniques, which let neuroscientists peer into the brain’s inner workings, that concept has largely been rendered moot; there is now widespread agreement that religious behaviors are modulated by well-defined neural pathways. Indeed, several studies have indicated that the feelings of joy, doubt, and self-reflection that are evoked by intense religious experiences can be correlated with specific patterns of brain activation. Earlier this year, a group of researchers led by the National Institute on Aging’s Dimitrios Kapogiannis identified several of the cognitive mechanisms and brain circuits that seem to be engaged during the processing of religious belief.

Their findings showed that, far from being an inscrutable phenomenon, religion could in fact be experimentally addressed and that its emergence may have been driven by changes in the neural capacity for language, logical reasoning, and other evolutionarily significant processes. In a follow-up study, the same group investigated whether the expression of religious beliefs could be tied to variability in the brain's architecture. Their results, which reveal that differences in regional cortical volumes correlate with key aspects of religiosity, were reported in PLoS ONE. Fist tap Dale.

the struggle between good and non-evil

cream of hurt

chinese economic juggernaut is gaining on japan

NYTimes | For years, Japan has been readying itself for the day that it is eclipsed economically by China. But as a result of the global slowdown, Japan’s difficulty in managing its economy and China’s rise — on vivid display Thursday as Beijing celebrated the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic — that day may come sooner than anyone predicted.

Though recent wild currency swings could delay the reckoning, many economists expect Japan to cede its rank as the world’s second-largest economy sometime next year, as much as five years earlier than previously forecast.

At stake are more than regional bragging rights: the reversal of fortune will bring an end to a global economic order that has prevailed for 40 years, with ramifications across arenas from trade and diplomacy to, potentially, military power.

China’s rise could accelerate Japan’s economic decline as it captures Japanese export markets, and as Japan’s crushing national debt increases and its aging population grows less and less productive — producing a downward spiral.

“It’s beyond my imagination how far Japan will fall in the world economy in 10, 20 years,” said Hideo Kumano, economist at the Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo.

Not long ago, Japan was “the economic miracle,” an ascendant juggernaut on its way to rivaling the United States, which has the biggest economy.

Now, many here ask whether Japan is destined to be the next Switzerland: rich and comfortable, but of little global import, largely ignored by the rest of the world.

Yet even this widely held hope among the country’s 127 million people may be slipping from Japan’s grasp.