It is said that a few people immigrated to America in search of God, but the overwhelming majority of immigrants came in search of gold.
Everything in America is for sale. With the dollar you can buy anything: railway stations, airports, churches, cemeteries with the dead buried in them. Everything. Everything except wives and kids. But wives in America can sell their husbands.
Everywhere in America you will find ads about items for sale: in the streets, on corners, on houses, on cars, and even airplanes. Newspapers devote about 70 percent of their space for ads. On TV ads are the one and the only revenue for TV channels. Whole channels are sometimes totally devoted to ads; the ads are run for 24-hours-a-day and people can buy with a simple phone call during which they provide their credit cards numbers and the next day they get the merchandise by mail.
There was land for sale, property for sale, an island for sale, America itself for sale. But who would buy America? Americans or foreigners?
After being in the United Arab Emirates for the past several months, I have seen that, in fact, this country has taken the idea that "everything is for sale" to a whole new level.
In America, we have the "vanity plate," a license plate that a car owner can pay a bit of extra money for in order to put a special word or abbreviation that holds meaning for them. In the Emirates, the license plates are as vain as can be. License plates here are not an expression of creativity or originality; rather, they are an expression of status and wealth. It seems like many people here have more money than they know what to do with, so they spend millions of dirhams buying a scrap of metal with a low number printed on it to attach to their Mercedes, Range Rover, Lamborghini or Bentley.
The lower the number, or the "cooler" the number, the more a license plate will cost. Abu Dhabi, being the richer emirate, has more expensive number plates with only numerical digits and different colors. Dubai license plates are plain black and white and normally carry a letter and numbers. A single- or double-digit number plate can cost several million dirhams, and there are car magazines available with advertisements selling these plates. In 2008, a world record was set when the Abu Dhabi license plate bearing only the number "1" sold at auction for 52.2 million dirhams... that's 14 million U.S. dollars.
