Thursday, October 09, 2008

America Isn't Finished, Far From It


The US meltdown underway and now spreading globally may usher in a new day but it won't see America falling to its knees, at least not for very long.

Think of it more as a rationalization of statehood. It's the doing away with a degree of madness inculcated by Ronald Reagan when he pitched America onto the path of unsustainable policies and practices. That's a real mental disorder which, left untreated, will cause enormous damage.

It was Reagan who transformed the United States of America in the brief window of one administration from the world's largest creditor nation into the world's largest debtor nation. It takes a certain mentality to see greatness in a leader who does that and yet the American people embraced the myth of this character's greatness. It was Reagan who Cheney claimed had proved that "deficits don't matter."

For three decades America has defied fiscal gravity, relying on levitation to hover safely above the mountain of debt that was building below. Now America is going through the first spasm (there will be more) that marks a beginning to the end of that lunacy.

There's a lot of promise in the changes that are coming to the US. It takes an enormous amount of money and effort to dress up as the world hegemon. Imagine one country with only five percent of the world population that spends more on its military than the next, what is it, I don't know - say the next 20 nations combined? (Trivia - who's #2? Why, that'd be Japan, at least by 2002).

America needs to step down from its perch as the self-proclaimed world policeman if only because it is spent and needs the rest. At home it needs a new New Deal for its working and middle classes. Abroad it needs a new, co-operative relationship with its traditional allies, one in which America is not necessarily always the leader but, at times, just an equal.

I really think Americans will be far happier when they learn to back off a bit and focus on returning their government's attention to the American people first, not America's corporatism first. My guess is that would restore a tremendous amount of vitality and confidence that has largely been sapped by globalization and the rise of multinationals that wield undue economic and political clout in Washington. (Look how Germany came back when their companies began re-investing their revenue and their nation's wealth into German companies again instead of Asian. That relatively little country just, I mean just, lost top exporter bragging rights to China.)

America has always considered democracy and capitalism as conjoined. It was the dogma we all learned during the Cold War. You can see its lasting impact in the way Americans misunderstand even mild socialism and use the word as an epithet. Yet China has shown that capitalism hardly needs democracy to flourish, it actually can do better away from democracy. All those industries that have run off to the People's Republic prove that capitalism and corporatism do not find totalitarianism repugnant.
Capitalism benefits enormously from autocratic rule.

When Americans come to demand that their interests prevail over capitalist agendas, they'll hardly become a more backward nation. To the contrary, freed from slavish adherence to the harshest precepts of free market capitalism, Americans will probably advance as a people as they haven't since the early 70's.

Is this too great a tide change to hope for anytime soon? Who can tell? Despite their resistance to change, Americans have undergone some fundamental changes since the advent of Reagan, changes that are now coming home to roost and, in the process, shattering a lot of preconceived notions about the strength and resiliance of their country and its economy.

The changes underway now in the United States appear seismic but, stripped of illusion, are really just a reckoning, a return to sanity. America was in a state of lunacy before the meltdown. Too many people believed that their houses were the real life equivalent of the Golden Goose. The movers and shakers of Wall Street were positively deranged by greed.

Look at the tax burden America's baby boomers have bequeathed to the generations of taxpayers to follow. Imagine the state of penury this most profligate and self-indulged generation would be struggling with today had their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents' generations done the same to them? But those generations didn't do that. They built and grew and preserved, leaving America greater from one generation to the next. And then the madness set in. An entire generation, two in fact, caught up in the imbecilic notion that they could have the wealth of their own making plus a good hunk of the wealth of those who would follow. That perversion, more than anything else, is what has brought America to its knees today.

It's a perversion that's being kept alive and well by the Republicans above all else. They have the notion that their government can spend freely but must not tax, especially not the most privileged. The idea of this generation having to surrender taxes to pay its way is now treated as anti-American heresy, virtual treason.

They mask this charade with the notion of "trickle down" economics. Cutting taxes for the rich actually benefits those beneath. You can only accept that delusion if you ignore that those tax cuts are funded, not by enormous economic activity below, but by vast sums borrowed from foreign lenders.

It's a disease of the mind, one that has seen America's federal debt, under just one addled administration, actually double to reach utterly ruinous heights. It truly is a disease of the mind because it's illogical, totally dysfunctional and ultimately self-destructive.

It all sounds so apocalyptic, so hopeless, but I don't believe that. I had the opportunity to do my undergrad in the States back when they were in the tumultuous throes of Vietnam. I've seen that nation rent with dissent, even hatred of the very same venomous type yelled today at Republican rallies against Obama. And yet the nation recovered, licking its wounds.

The veteran war correspondent and author, Chris Hedges, has said that America was at its best when it came away humbled by Vietnam. He's probably right but then along came a giant of a snakeoil salesman, Ronald Reagan, offering a false return to greatness and laying the path for what besets America today.

We all know that Americans are profoundly patriotic people. There are those who've learned the power to be had in exploiting that fervor. I believe the American people will eventually catch on to that. In fact, roughly half the American population already has so, if the tipping point hasn't been reached it's awfully close. For the sake of the American people, for the sake of us all, I hope it's not too much longer in arriving.

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