Business plan

The 2008 election is America's defining "moment" as the land of opportunity, regardless of winner. If America waits another four years to embrace its role in the world, the election and the campaign year chiseled out its position in the world as definitively as the cannon shot at Gettysburg.

The world anti-slavery movement was in full swing by the time America's civil war broke out in 1861 and went on for four years. Likewise, globalization had been galloping along when America stepped up to the plate and hit a home run in the final game of the global World Series with its two presidential slates. Overnight, women and nonwhites were part of the American mainstream and the global issues facing America wrestled each other to the ground.

As the world's ideal of democracy, the United States came to be loathed for its cavalier adventurism as globalization took off after the Second World War and the worldwide advance of technology. America's leadership as a power for good was lost as its independence turned into a stubborn balking about joining in with an increasingly interdependent world, even as the term "American as apple pie" remained a vague, feel-good concept to Americans who saw themselves in the image of noble British pilgrims building an unprecedented democracy in a new land where civilization and the primitive collided.

Then the year 2008 arrived with its landmark election and a woldwide financial crisis created to a large extent by American policy and practice. The bottom line of economics that defines world stature walloped the country even as the national culture opened its eyes to its position as the land that truly affords opportunity within the world.

The 2008 American election year couldn't have offered a broader menu of sudden opportunities. It opened the way for a half-African American presidential candidate to run against a right-wing beauty-queen vice-presidential candidate tapped by a maverick conservative when runaway financial institutions made an average American "Joe the plumber" into a celebrity with political potential even as two underdogs faced off in the stabilizing all-American sport of baseball in the World Series, which itself made history due to weather.

All those events came after the Olympics in China broke global viewership records because of modern communications through the combined technology of the internet and television that built on lessons learned from previous failings in covering global events. That included the timing of key events to bring them live into American homes across time zones as an American swimmer broke a world record with gold.

The liberal American Democratic Convention that came right after spoke of optimism and power through diversity and a triumph of excellence from competing based on equality. The conservative Republican Convention that followed with its surprise cheerleading vice presidential candidate was a blast of nasty protest against the change that was professed as wanted.

In the months that followed, as those two themes solidified into their polarities, the long-term character of America as a power for good in the world emerged, by the definition of "good" as openness and adaptability for growth, in contrast to a force for "bad", defined as fearful, stagnant, stubborn, secretive, manipulative and operating through fear in a willful insistence on imposing control.

Eight years of an American policy based on the latter was the tidal wave that led to the defining moment of America waking up to a global reality. There's a good chance an economic collapse can be avoided if the implications of that global reality are grasped.

A late October report by the Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), composed of 30 of the world's most developed countries, showed the United States as third, behind Mexico and Turkey, in the growth of the income gap between the rich and poor in their countries over the past 20 years. According to the report, the rich were leaving behind both the poor and the middle class by a rate that was most stark in the United States.

The average income of the richest 10 percent of Americans is $93,000 a year while that of the poorest is $5,800. The average of the richest for the other Organization countries is $54,000 and for the poorest is $7,000. In addition in America, the richest 10 percent hold 71 percent of America's net worth, leaving the other 90 percent to split the remaining 72 percent.

The main reason for the disparity, according to the report, was the increasing difficulty of the poor to find work.

Conservatives, wanting the world as it has always been, complete with inequalities, lean on outworn explanations for current situations. The wealthy Republican presidential candidate has an easy time convincing a grousing "Joe the plumber" that the world is taking his jobs away.

The open-handed, forward looking Democrat, meanwhile, knows that the answers aren't contained in trying to make the world go away. The smart American knows that the solution is to retool America to embrace its identity as a force for good in leading the world toward innovation, prosperity and more equality.

Helen Fogarassy is a New York based internationalist writer who has worked on a contract basis with the United Nations for nearly 20 years. She is the author of a suspense novel, The Midas Maze, about murderous hijinks in UN/US relations. She is also the author of The Light of a Destiny Dark, a novel about the Euro-American cultural gap through Hungarian eyes, and a nonfiction eyewitness tribute to the UN's work, Mission Improbable: The World Community on a UN Compound in Somalia. All are available on the major web bookstore sites.