|
This is It!
By David Glenn Cox
These are strange times; I stare into a bowl of water like Nostradamus trying to divine it all out. Perhaps I need a bigger bowl? Let me see if I’ve got this straight, Richard Nixon was forced from office for authorizing a break in at the Democratic campaign headquarters. He resigned from office when House Republicans explained that they could no longer protect him and would be forced to vote in favor of his impeachment.
Barack Obama authorizes extra judicial murders of Americans and nothing happens. George W. Bush lied and manipulated America in to two unnecessary wars and the public was outraged. Bush and Cheney left Washington with the worst approval ratings ever recorded. They made it virtually impossible for John McCain to be anything more than a Ralph Cramden impersonator on the campaign trail, “Habada, habada, habada. His campaign song was the theme from “Dead Man Walking.”
We got in his stead “Hope and Change” and Hope and Change shifted resources from the more unpopular war to the less unpopular war and then expanded the less unpopular war into new countries. Expanding the cost, expanding the troops and nothing happens. When the Bush administration using Predator drones killed innocent civilians the administration said that they would review the policy of drone attacks. When the Obama administration kills innocent civilians in Predator drone attacks it says it will review the policy and then almost doubles the number of attacks over Bush administration levels.
When Ronald Reagan took office the United States was the largest creditor nation in the world. Eight years later the United States had become the largest debtor nation in the world. Reagan’s tax cuts and huge military build up gave us the largest deficit in US history but, it was financed by American banks with American deposits.
Reagan shifted the tax burden off of the wealthy and onto the middle class. They deregulated the banking industry, which promptly led to the Savings & Loan debacle. Through out this entire time wages for American workers fell as their tax burdens increased. Asian Mega-corporations began to win market share from American competitors that weren’t allowed a level playing field when they tried to compete in Asian markets. American companies instead bought into the Asian Mega-corporations in effect to compete against themselves.
If FDR’s New Deal was revolutionary then Ronald Reagan was the counter revolutionary. This is where the rot and blight took hold both inside and outside Washington. Four years of George Bush the elder was all the public could stand and Bush holds the distinction of being the first head of the CIA elected President. It was the Bush administration that fought the first Gulf war with Iraq after the American Ambassador told Saddam Hussein that the US had no interest in how he settled his border disputes with neighboring Kuwait.
This after the navy shot down an Iranian airliner by mistake in 1988 killing all 290 aboard including 66 children. The United States has never admitted responsibility nor apologized to Iran for the incident. And yet people wonder why Iranians don’t like America. I guess they’re all too blinded by Islamo-fascism to understand what nice people we really are once you get to know us.
Bill Clinton was elected to office as a “New Democrat” the moniker of “New Democrat” meant a business friendly Democrat. During eight years of Clinton the economy prospered due in large part to the rise of the Internet and the home computers and technology. As industrial jobs were disappearing Americans were told, “You don’t want those jobs anyway we’ve got new high tech jobs coming!”
In 1992 Ross Perot made his famous comment that if NAFTA was passed that Americans would hear, “a giant sucking sound of jobs going to Mexico.” NAFTA was passed and within ten years the giant sucking was heard in Mexico as well. In 1999 the Clinton Administration signed permanent normal trade relations with China as a precursor to full WTO membership. Since that time 65 percent of NAFTA related jobs in Mexico have moved offshore to China.
So called free trade has left collateral damage all over the globe but the owners and manufacturers are the same people. The alleged drug war in Mexico is a war for criminal market share in a declining market. Manufactures held out the lure of jobs and higher wages causing a population shift in Mexico and then pulled the rug out from under them once less expensive peasants were found in Asia.
Volumes have been written about the exploits of Bush and Cheney and volumes more will be written so there is no reason to expound on them here. Obama was elected as Hope and Change and yet there has been little noticeable change. More war, a larger pentagon budget while a commission considers cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Obama is a called a Socialist and a Communist by Republicans when his actions are demonstrably the opposite of Socialism and are better defined as corporate fascism.
Thirty years of unadulterated idiocy and not one voice in Washington or in the media will say, “Stop! We can’t do this anymore! We can’t keep exporting our labor to benefit the top one- percent; we can’t keep giving the banks free range to pillage the public. We can’t allow the largest transfer of privately owned homes in history to pass into the hands of the investor class. Class war? It’s class genocide! Yet no one says anything, nobody moves.
China is now the third largest economy in the world and its growth has been fueled primarily from the United States, as China isn’t even a factor in the European Union. American manufacturers outsourcing production overseas so that America supplies primarily raw materials. General Motors, Ford and Toyota take $5,000 dollars worth of raw materials and turn it into a $30,000 automobile. That is wealth creation in a nutshell. Supplying raw materials will never build a strong economy and will never create more than a few jobs.
America can no longer afford the super mega fighters planes it once built nor can we afford space exploration. By the end of this year the United States will no longer be able to launch men into space for the first time since 1961. It was the space program and the technology it inspired that gave the United States its technological lead for the past fifty years.
We are running enormous trade and budget deficits but unlike the Republicans I don’t see the problem as being in the dollars amounts. You run large budget deficits during economic hard times and pay it back when times are better. The problem is who we are borrowing the money from. It’s one thing to borrow money from your uncle or parents but its another thing to borrow money from Lenny the loan shark down on the corner.
Our economy is now wholly dependant on cash from foreign powers and nobody talks about fixing that. Our economy is melting away with long term unemployment expected to last for years and nobody has a plan to fix that.The Gini coeffienct used to gauge income distribution by the United Nations has the United States at 40.8 measuring the overall fairness of an economy. For instance Denmark famous for its equitable society has a 24.7. France is at 32.7 and Germany a 28.3, Japan 24.9. The US economy is closer to nations such as Jordan 38.8 and Morocco 39.5, Mexico is at 46.1 and the Peoples Republic of China is at 46.9
When people forecast the immanent collapse of the American economy I say, “look around! This is it!”
Economists of all stripes have all commented on China’s property bubble as hedge fund manager James Chanos said on the Charlie Rose show the other day, that China is “on a treadmill to hell,” the same sentiments are offered by Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke. Like Mexico free trade has created false hopes and rampant speculation. The Chinese government has two choices, let the good times roll unhindered and hope for the best until the crash or try to throttle the economy and hope that it doesn’t cause a crash. The first way a crash is certain to happen but no one can say when the second way a crash is almost certain to happen only sooner.
When it does come it will create an economic vortex like a black hole and will swallow the whole economic universe. The fate of the United States of America is in the hands of a Chinese military dictatorship. There is no divining it, there is no logic to it, only greed and power and idiocy and no one has the courage to say stop it. I do see in my bowl the media asking, “How could this happen?”
It happens when government no longer answers to the people and only to the people with money.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(614 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
