The pageantry of Barack Obama's inauguration is dying down. And by now he's probably wondering what the hell he's just gotten himself into.The always excellent William Grieder has a great story on U.S. finances and how they're now driving the bus, not any politician, as reprinted here from the magazine "The Nation".
It brings to mind another occasion when a great world power had a new, eagerly awaited, leader that was promising more openness, accountability and freedom. I'm speaking, of course, about Mikhail Gorbachev, and we all remember how that worked out for the Soviet Union, right?
The important thing to remember is that the collapse of the Soviet Union was primarily a failure of their economic system and that the resulting disappearance of Ronald Reagan's Evil Empire was pretty much a complete surprise to everyone.
Arguably, U.S. supremacy has long rested not just on their military, but on the power of having the globe's reserve currency at their beck and call. Today, in the words of writer James Howard Kunstler, “America doesn't produce anything but fried chicken and haircuts.”
And Paul Craig Roberts, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal's opinion pages and Reagan's former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (as well as being a noted paleo-conservative who's sometimes accused of being a whack-job) has gone even further, describing the U.S. as the world's largest ever 'failed state' in waiting.
Even some mainstream columnists are taking up the meme.
Nobody knows how the whole thing will play out, but one thing is certain. The America of tomorrow won't look much like the America of today.
But whether a better country or just another Third World hell-hole emerges out of it is anyone's guess.
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1 comment:
Honestly, what do we produce? I think we get buy on a wad of recycled money that recirculates until it ends up, dollar by dollar, in the bank accounts of the richest 0.1 per cent. Maybe every 20 years they release some of it to keep the system going.
People assume this is "just another recession, we will recover, things will come back," but how and why? Manufacturing is based in the Third World, there's a glut of everything, the rich have enough and don't feel like playing/sharing anymore and we can pretty much get by without whatever it is we do still produce.
What's the source of the dollar you earn? What supports that source? If it's able to corrode and collapse, it probably will. We're quite possibly effed. Even if oil continues, how does that help YOU if you don't work in that field?
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