While the popular press focuses on whether the Democrats in the US are going to stop Bush from escalating the war in Iraq, or worse, initiating a war in Iran, are we missing an important piece of the puzzle: China and trade?

Stephen Roach, this week, writes in detail about the parallels between now and the period when the US was Japan-bashing. Interesting to contemplate the issues now with respect to a democratic empowered congress in the US with a large base of support from people whose jobs are disappearing East, because of an order of magnitude savings in production cost. These people used to be working class. Now they are middle class - the consumers of last resort - with growing mortgages and bigger flat panel TV's.

It is these same people who may well find themselves in a double crunch as their jobs disappear at the same time their homes go into negative equity..... at the same time that the dollar starts to crumble too.... see this story from Peter Schiff:

Robert Cringely has an incredibly perceptive insight into the Googleplex and its vision for the future here.

He sees Google building a portfolio of data centres and bandwidth... substantially under the radar of everyone who should be paying attention...  all with an eye on video.

Google is building a LOT of data centers. The company appears to be as attracted to cheap and reliable electric power as it is to population proximity. In Goose Creek they bought those 520 acres from the local state-owned electric utility, which probably answers the land question posed above. By buying out all the remaining building sites in an industrial park owned by an electric utility, Google guarantees itself a vast and uninterruptible supply of power, much as it has done in Oregon by building a data center next to a hydroelectric dam or back here again in Columbia by building near a nuclear power station.

Of course this doesn't answer the question why Google needs so much capacity in the first place, but I have a theory on that. I think Google is building for a future they see but most of the rest of us don't. I'll go further and guess that Google is planning to build similar data centers in many states and that the two centers they are apparently preparing to build here in South Carolina are probably intended mainly to SERVE South Carolina. That's perhaps 100,000 servers for four million potential users or 40 users per server. What computing service could possibly require such resources?

Video is going to be the future. And the traditional media players are not far behind Google. And the TV station proprieters, the newspaper owners, even radio networks are all in the game too, along with the major telcos. This is a truly high stakes poker game. But I don't think that it will be fought in the US. I believe that the real game for all online media is China. Broadband is rolling out at an incredible rate. China is preparing to stun the world at the Beijing Olympics. They don't have legacy copper network issues to deal with - it is all mobile there....