Prague

PRAGUE, Feb 28 - I spent less than a day in Prague, mostly in meetings at this high-tech office park...

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this photo illustrates how intense the competition is in Czechia.  IBM and Dell share the same office building. Sun Microsystems is across the street.  Accenture and Computer Associate are also present, as are DHL, GE, SONY and BP - all major IT customers.

My discussions with the local Czech business people left me with the impression that Czech Republic has become a branch office of most multinational companies that operate here.  Most of the decisions are made elsewhere.  The Czech management are given strategic directives they are expected to implement.  

Yet the Czechs as well as the Hungarians, both tiny countries in terms of population and area, were once happy to be among the first Eastern European countries to receive largest foreign investments (see above chart from 2002, for example).  

The new NATO members, Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary, for example, continue to receive most of the money from the West.  Russia, on the other hand, continues to be treated as a bogey.

(An excerpt from "China: Real Cold War Winner," 2002)

As I have been pointing out ever since the mid-1990s, the two countries got more than an order of magnitude more foreign dollars than did Russia, for example, the world's largest and richest country in terms of resources (see above chart).  And now, the Czechs are reaping what they sowed in the 1990s when they traded sovereignty and autonomy for "a better standard of living," promised by the globalists.

Is it worth it now in hindsight as it seemed when looking ahead 10 years ago?  That would be a good question to put on a referendum.  Don' hold your breath for it, though, as the governments of all these newly-minted EU countries are working out of the globalists' pockets.

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