'Why the US should be worried'

[Aptrgangr]

'Why the US should be worried'

Uma Shankar Sathya Kumar

You always think that the United States of America is the only real superpower in the current world. Well… soon you may have to rethink about it. The "real superpower" title is going to become the mother of all lies and conspiracy theories that the world have had ever known. Don't accept it? Read the following facts and think again:
From the beginning of this 21st century, the United States is facing competition from beyond its borders as well as internal difficulties. Its lower and middle class families are slowly turning out to be the biggest losers of current globalisation. The United States, like ancient Rome, is beginning to be plagued by the limits of its power.
The current globalisation is heavily affecting its economy. In fact, the US has actively promoted the worldwide exchange of commodities like no other nation, and the result is that their local manufacturing industries have begun to be eroded.

Some manufacturing sectors such as furniture, consumer electronics, automobile part suppliers and computer manufacturers have had left the country for good. In the recent past, free trade has primarily benefited the very rival countries that are now mounting a heavy economic offence on the United States and the rival countries have cut off a large slice of America's global market share.
The financial position of the United States has declined dramatically in the last 15 years. The US federal budget is in the deep red, adding to America's dependency on debt.

The war in Iraq and Afghanistan is wiping out loads of dollars from US treasury. A government functioning so irresponsible with no sense of the prosperity of its own country and people is not really a superpower in any sense.
Almost no one is saving any money in the United States today. Saving rates are very low or negative. The US debt grows by about $1.5 billion every weekday and has now reached about $6.5 trillion dollars. Private household debt has reached $11 trillion and 50 per cent of these debts have been incurred since 1998. The Americans are enjoying the present spending spree at the cost of their own future and future generations. The fact is that the expanding consumer debt drives the US economy.

In the near future, many US citizens may have to face harsh reality like a poverty-stricken, third world family, living from hand to mouth situation without any kind of financial reserves whatsoever. The imminent economic crisis is waiting to happen in the US and will be the most thoroughly predicted one in recent human history. People spending so irresponsible with no sense of the prosperity of the country is not a superpower.
Half the world is very impressed by the low levels of unemployment in the United States. Only the other half clearly knows very well that these statistics may be the result of a voluntary telephone survey. Is working just ten hours per week enough for one to be classified as "employed"? The US statistics is usually intended to create more positive image and opinion than about its actual condition. The net reality is that the US job growth rate is falling behind its own population growth.
A country that cannot create jobs for its own population is not a superpower.

Today, the United State's biggest bankers are China and Japan, both of whom could cause the United States very serious financial problems, if they wish to do so at any time. Roughly 27 per cent of the government bonds issued by the US treasury are held by China and Japan. That's why US doesn't complain much about China and Japan.
A country whose financial affairs are in the hands of foreigners is not a superpower.

The US is heavily dependent on overseas imports of manufactured goods and oil, including advanced technology products. In 2006, US dependency on imports was thrice as large as US dependency on imported crude oil. "No country or economy can survive by importing nearly 80 per cent of manufactured goods and oil from overseas. In fact, no society in the history had ever survived in excessive imports and offshoring manufacturing. Almost every country in the world now exports products to the United States without purchasing an equivalent amount of US goods in return. The United States can't even achieve a trade surplus in its trade with less developed national economies like those of Ukraine and Ghana. Everyday, container ships arrive in the US - and after they unload the goods at American ports, many return home empty.
A country that imports even matchsticks can't be a superpower.
After the near erosion of all manufacturing sectors, the US is rapidly increasing its dependency on imports of advanced technology products and medical equipments.
A country that depends on import of advanced technology products is not a superpower.

The priority of US military expenditure has created a growing deficit that has creating major problems in public welfare benefits and education. Foreign loans have provided essential support to the dollar but the dollar is declining and so is that support. As the largest debtor nation the US will have to be more conciliatory to its creditors, and China is one of the biggest, for they will eventually and perhaps quite soon switch from the dollar to a new reserve currency for international trade. At that time, the US economy and it's credit standing will plunge all together.
A very striking fact is that the net increase in aging US population will make all the difference. About 17 per cent of the US population is over 55 years old and 23 per cent is over 40 years. There are millions of Americans who don't have any kind of health insurance.
A country that can't even provide free basic healthcare to its citizens can't be superpower.

With US school students increasingly shunning mathematics and the science subjects, United State's image of global technology leader will soon become history.
A country which depends on "foreign brains" to be technology leader can't be a superpower.
Leading technology companies such as Xerox, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, GE, Google are moving their Research and Development projects out of US is the one and only evidence needed to prove that the US will not be superpower in this century.
The US was founded on the principles of equality and freedom of expression for all race and religion. Whites don't like blacks, blacks don't like whites, whites don't like hispanics, hispanics don't like whites. The statement that "US is a melting pot" is indeed a pot full of lies.
A country with racial inequality can't be a superpower.
What did "Hurricane Katrina's message" to all Americans and the rest of the world? There is also a Somalia or Sudan is within the great United States of America. The US government took five days to respond after all was out of control.
A government, which is too lazy to protect it's own citizens and lie to them that they are safe can't be superpower.

"You are either with us or against us" and by launching a war of aggression on the basis of lies and fabricated "intelligence", the Bush regime violated the Nuremberg standard code established by the UN and international laws. By going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, many US military companies owned by the politicians must have made billions in profit.
Thus, a land of liars can't be the land of superpower.

Extensive civilian casualties and infrastructure destruction in Iraq, along with the torture of detainees in concentration camps and an ever-changing excuse for the war, have destroyed the moral qualities that provided diplomatic foundation for America's superpower status. A country that is no longer respected and which promises yet more war isolates itself from cooperation from the rest of the world.
An isolated country in the world will never be a superpower.
A country that fears small, distant countries such as North Korea and Iran to such an extent that it want to use military in place of diplomatic means is not a superpower.
US politicians think that the US is still a superpower because of its military weapons and nuclear missiles. However, as the Iraqi resistance has demonstrated that the United State's superior military power is not enough to prevail in fourth generation warfare.
The reality is that the US is not a superpower at all.

The US is the only country in the world to have used nuclear weapons against a country and killing thousands of innocent sleeping Japanese civilians. If six decades after nuking Japan, the US again warns to the use of nuclear weapons on Iran, it will only establish itself as a criminal state under the control of insane Americans.
If the US foreign policy and foreign relations doesn't change totally, any sympathy that might still exist in rest of the world for the United States would soon disappear in the years to come, and the world would unite against the US.
A country against which the world is united is not a superpower.
The land of the great American dream, land of opportunities, land of creations, land of all enterprises, land of wealth, land of future-minded people, land of racial equality, America is revered by many. However, America is not the same after 9/11, not even for the Americans, America is still the same after 9/11 tragedy.
If one were to go by the theory of Ibne-Khuldun, a 12th century Arabic scholar from Morocco whose writings was compiled in the book "Muqqadima", theorises that all civilisations in this world usually will have a life span of approx 300 years before totally fading out. Some civilisations after they fade away become dead civilisation like Aztec and Mayan. Others like Persian, Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, etc, are living civilisations capable of rising again and again.
This might create a stir, but by this account USA has gone past its zenith and could be on the decline now.
The present US leads the world in divorce, crime and immorality. It is a country, which is actually waiting for total economical, social and lifestyle disaster. The United States is too engrossed in power obsession to ever have the will to revive and remain as a real democratic country for its own citizens. It won't be long before the US will have to face grim reality of the future.

The day is not so far ahead when the world historians and world history will remember the US as 'once a superpower'.

\'Why the US should be worried\' : HindustanTimes.com

[kanz]

Once again nice post mate

[Theobald]

Emmanuel Todd, a French historian and political scientist, said the same things in a book published in 2002, "After the Empire - The Breakdown of the American Order". An excellent book.
He had already published a similar book, "The final fall: An essay on the decomposition of the Soviet sphere" (in 1976), predicting the collapse of the USSR.

Widely reviewed and critically praised, Emmanuel Todd's After the Empire predicts that the United States is forfeiting its superpower status as it moves away from traditional democratic values of egalitarianism and universalism, lives far beyond its means economically, and continues to anger foreign allies and enemies alike with its military and ideological policies. As America's global dominance evaporates, Todd foresees the emergence of a Eurasian alliance bringing together Europe, Russia, Japan, and the Arab-Islamic world. Todd calmly and straightforwardly takes stock of many negative trends, including America's weakened commitment to the socio-economic integration of African Americans, a bulimic economy that increasingly relies on smoke and mirrors and the goodwill of foreign investors, and a foreign policy that squanders the country's reserves of "soft power" while its militaristic arsonist-fireman behavior is met with increasing resistance. Written by a demographer and historian who foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union, this original and daring book cannot be ignored.

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In 1976 -- long before American conservatives would claim that Ronald Reagan's 1980s debt-driven massive military spending "bankrupted" the Soviet Union -- French demographer and author Emmanuel Todd wrote a best-selling book titled La Chute finale (The Final Fall), predicting the imminent fall of the USSR. He based his projection, in large part, on a careful study of the increase in infant mortality in that empire, one of the leading indicators of the health of a nation.

Time proved him right, and hindsight tells us that Reagan and Bush had nothing whatever to do with the fall of the USSR, con claims notwithstanding. It rotted from within, something that I witnessed in the 1970s and 1980s visiting both the USSR and several of its captive states, and living a year in 1986-1987 within 30 miles of Soviet-dominated East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Any 70s or 80s visitor to the USSR or its vassal sates, in fact, could have come to the conclusion that -- barring a world war -- it was an empire about to expire, and the CIA and others in the American, European, Israeli, and Japanese intelligence services had been saying the same thing since, in some cases the 1960s.

Yet it was Emmanuel Todd who captured Europe's attention by explicitly saying that the Soviet Emperor had no clothes - and doing so in a way that was widely discussed across Europe. Thus, when my best friend and former business partner Jerry Schneiderman and I found ourselves in Budapest in early November, 1989, the week before the Berlin Wall fell, as East German refugees were streaming into the country and the Soviets seemed helpless to stop it, we discovered that the reaction of the Hungarian shopkeepers and bartenders we talked with was a resigned shrug: "We knew it was coming. Everybody knew it was coming." Other than, of course, the average American.

Now comes Emmanuel Todd to predict the fall of another empire: America.

In Après l' empire, a runaway bestseller across Europe and in Japan, Todd points out that many of the same demographic and historic indicators that led him to boldly predict the looming collapse of the Soviet system can now -- with some variations that are even more alarming -- be applied to the United States.

Every American should read this book. First, we must read it to understand how Europe, Russia, China, and Japan (among others) view us. Second, we must read it because its logic, facts, statistics, and conclusions are unassailable.

The main thesis of Todd's book is that America is posturing, playing the role of the leader of the "free world" and head of the new American Empire, when, in fact, we are militarily, economically, and morally bankrupt -- and the rest of the world knows it. In fact, he suggests, much of the posturing is for the consumption of the domestic American audience, as the rest of the world (with the exception of a few dependent Third World nations) knows we're already in decline and perhaps even ready to implode.

Economically, twenty-five years of conservative Reaganomics -- "free trade" elevated to a virtual religion (including complicity by Clinton in signing GATT/WTO and NAFTA) -- and the massive budget and trade deficits that have resulted from this, have turned the United States from an independent manufacturing powerhouse and the world's leading creditor into a bankrupt nation with little manufacturing capacity left, dependent on other nations for the imports that maintain our unsustainable standard of living. The result is that the US "has become the center of a system in which its number one job is to consume rather than produce."

"If the United States has greatly declined in relative terms as an economic power," writes Todd, "it has nevertheless succeed in massively increasing its ability to siphon off wealth from the world economy. Objectively speaking, America has become a predator; ... [and] is going to have to fight politically and militarily in order to sustain the hegemony that has become indispensable for maintaining its standard of living."

In his concluding chapter, Todd writes, "The United States is unable to live on its own economic activity and must be subsidized to maintain its level of consumption -- at its present cruising speed that subsidy amounts to 1.4 billion dollars per day."

Referring to the "bizarre behavior" of the Bush administration's America, Todd asks the question -- in italics for emphasis -- "How does one deal with a superpower that is economically dependent but also politically useless?"

In "The Fragility of Tribute" chapter, Todd suggests the world won't -- or can't -- long continue to support our "parasitic" lifestyle by loaning us money to sell us goods, while we export our manufacturing industries and hollow out our internal productivity. "The most likely scenario" he sees as a result of this "is a stock market crash larger than any we have experienced thus far that will be followed by a meltdown of the dollar -- a one-two punch that will put an end to any further delusions of 'empire' when it comes to the US economy."

Our moral bankruptcy, Todd suggests, is the result of these same economic and political policies emanating from the radical right (neoliberals) in America, and are rapidly morphing our nation from a democracy into an oligarchy.

Without irony, he notes, "It is a surprising return to the world of Aristotle in which oligarchy may succeed democracy." As "American society is changing into a fundamentally unegalitarian system of domination..." he notes that this turnaround of increasing rule by the rich in America and a wiping out of our middle class "explains the strained relations between the United States and the rest of the world. The progress of democracy around the world is masking the weakening of democracy in its birthplace [America]." The result? "...the United states is beginning to lose its democratic characteristics..."

Because America has become a "parasitical" nation of importers of oil and goods from around the world, paying with debt, Todd says, "From now on the fundamental strategic objective of the United States will be political control of the world's resources."

Thus we have had to invent a "myth of global terrorism" so we can convince ourselves that our projection of power into oil-rich regions of the world is to "save" both America and the world from "terrorists." Because our military power is insufficient to take on any serious foes, we rattle sabers, proclaim "Axis of evils," and attack essentially defenseless nations, while proclaiming our efforts great military victories comparable to the defeat of the Third Reich in World War II.

The world, Todd notes, isn't buying it. And they're getting tired of our constant hectoring about "democracy" even as we cut back on civil liberties and economic opportunity at home, support "strategic" dictators abroad, and are increasingly ruled by oligarchic families.

Which brings us to his third conclusion -- that we have become militarily impotent. Todd notes that, "In the childlike universe of Donald Rumsfeld, for example, only physical force matters." Thus, we stir up problems in the militarily weak (but oil rich) Arab world, destabilizing the entire planet. This is not a situation European and Asian powers take lightly. Europe, Todd notes, "cannot accept indefinitely the continuous disorder in the Arab world sponsored by the United States..."

The result is clear, he says. "But make no mistake, all the ingredients are there for a serious conflict between Europe and the United States in the near future." Such a conflict could be devastating to the US.

Dissecting -- and dismissing -- numerous American "strategic" books like Zbigniew Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," Todd notes that our leaders in the post-Carter world have always taken the lazy way out, rather than building the strategic alliances and offering the moral leadership that would have been necessary to maintain America as the moral, economic, and political international leader we were before Reagan began the destruction of the traditional American way of life.

In part, this has been the result of the capture of our political system by oligarchs, powerful rich interests including multinational corporations with little allegiance to America (or any nation). "This is why," he notes, "the United States' export of its specific model of unregulated capitalism [necessary to sustain oligarchy] constitutes a danger for European societies, as well as for Japan...."

The result of our export of privatization, deregulation, and unrestrained oligarchic capitalism (called "the liberal model" in Europe) is that "the constant attempts to foist the liberal model onto the strongly rooted and state-centered societies of the Old World is in the process of blowing them apart -- a phenomenon that can be observed nowadays in the regular gains of the far right in a number of recent elections. Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria have all been affected."

Rush Limbaugh/Newt Gingrich politics have led to the rise of a neofascist right in America, and our export of these ideas are inspiring the return of right-wing politics in Europe, threatening to tear apart the social fabric of that continent.

Todd notes that Portugal and Spain are the least affected by these ideas, because of their recent experience with Franco's fascism.

But our increasing moral bankruptcy (detention without trials, phony war on terror), economic bankruptcy (living on debt borrowed from Europe, China, and Japan, along with the dramatic oligarchic trends in America toward richer rich, poorer poor, and the loss of the middle class), and military impotence (leading us to loudly attack relatively defenseless countries to create "show victories" and a "bloody vaudeville show" in Iraq) are causing many in Europe to reevaluate their relationship with -- and support of -- America.

If they decide to throw their lot in with Russia and Iran instead of the US -- and Todd suggests this is a growing probability -- then the result is "easy to predict."

"The United States," he says, "will then have to live like other nations, notably by reigning in its huge trade deficit, a constraint that would imply a 15 to 20 percent drop in the standard of living of the population."

And this, he suggests, may be a good thing, long term. "What the world needs is not that America disappear but that it return to its true self -- democratic, liberal, and productive."

One can only hope that America will return to the ideals we held prior to Reagan, and do so with a minimum of damage to our working class. Reading Emmanuel Todd's book "After The Empire" will help crystallize in your mind so many of these issues, and help provide a roadmap for Americans to a return to domestic and international political sanity, hopefully as soon as the 2006 elections...

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