Thing is, it’s easier now for ordinary citizens to complain and be heard by others than it was in post-WWII Germany or Japan, or in the US in the late 60’s and early 70’s. There was no publicly available internet then, so if people complained and whined about conditions, it didn’t get out the way it does now. If there had been an internet like today’s then, they might not have seemed so stoic.
It’s kind of like how there is less crime now than there has been for many years, but there’s more 24-hour news coverage of the crime that does happen. It makes it seem like crime is more of a threat now, even though it isn’t.
Trafalgar, The Spanish Armada, Manilla Bay and the unrelenting piracy in the Carribean/Spanish Main would suggest that Spain never ever got its act together as a serious naval force.
I remember when Japan was going to eat our lunch and schools started offering Japanese as a foreign language and everyone thought ninjas and samurai were really cool (well ninjas are cool but that’s besides the point). Then I remember when Germany was going to eat our lunch and people started teaching their kids German and this time it was different than the japanese example because this time it was the Germans. Now its the Chinese and its different this time because its the Chinese. Next it will be the Indians and who know who it will be after that.
America has two problems right now, we don’t make enough stuff the world wants to buy to pay for the stuff we want to buy from the world and our politicians would rather win elections than do what needs to be done for the long term health of the country. I think watching Republicans stand in the well and condemn the Democrats for trying to cut waste in medicare was the moment I realized that the road back to sanity might take a while.
This is not your average creditor/debtor relationship. I don’t have nuclear warheads which can reach Bank of America, for example.
China cannot actually do anything with the mounds of US debt it owns, other than ruin us. Considering that we are China’s biggest trading partner by a country mile, that would be the ultimate Phyrric victory. Plus, in the long term we’d regain a huge number of manufacturing jobs.
The real potential threat to our economy is the loss of service jobs, not the debt. It’s becoming practical to outsource labor in more and more industries; it’s not just call centers anymore, but systems analysts and lawyers.
Obviously, some fields are outsourcing-proof; you can’t perform a physical exam over videophone, for example. Still, there are many that are not, and that number keeps growing as data transfer rates increase.
The problem is that not only does it “get out” but it also reinforces ideas already in people’s heads. There have probably always been college-age kids sitting in some bar or coffee shop bitching about the way the world is and terrified of the future. In the past, they would just grow out of it as they graduate and enter the work force. But now they have their laptops and a wireless internet connection to link to every idiot with a blog and that’s how they think the world really is.
I work in Midtown Manhattan and walking outside, you would have no idea that we are or were in any sort of recession. All I see are millions of cars and people going to and from work, eating in restaurants, sitting in bars bitching about work, going to stores to buy stuff and so on.
For the record, I don’t think we’re in trouble. I just think that if we are in trouble, professional outsourcing is a bigger reason why than servicing our debt to China.
From my Canadian perspective, it’s, “Nation most likely to drag us down with them no matter what we do.” I agree with you on, “Not able to evaluate itself honestly.” (Although I suspect that one is common for most countries.)
But it does do something useful - it employs a million and a half poor people.
Military spending produces lots of useful things. For one thing, it subsidizes industries which directly or indirectly benefit commerce, agriculture, medicine and all sorts of other such things. Without military spending we’d have no internet, no (or crappier) passenger jet travel, no interstate highway system…
Plus, it provides employment for lots of people - and until fairly recently it provided much better employment opportunities for non-graduates than could be found elsewhere. It provides the basis for an astonishing amount of our art - fiction, film, music and so on.
I am not a pessimistic person, in fact I hope everything I have said predictively is completely wrong.
Unfortunately, my knowledge of history leads me to believe we are repeating what empires of the past have done - collapsed in on ourselves.
I am quite sure people in congress and the white house know exactly what is coming (and has been for some time). Some of them are trying to be honest to the American people, but the party approved talking heads yell and scream, drowning out the free thinkers in the midst (there are so few it’s not hard).
Sort of the opposite of you, I was confused why so many people said “Yes We Can!” believing a politician was actually going to do what they said. I think some people are starting wake up out of that fantasy a little bit, hence the shift. It’s like when you get a new expensive shiney whatever, and after the initial rush wears off, you wonder if it was worth the money. Not that Obama is ruining the country (he’s had a lot of help along the way). I just don’t think anything Obama is doing is enough to stop the economic hemmoraging we’re facing in this country right now. China and the Federal Reserve have more control over our situation than ANYTHING Obama can do. Our leaders have consistently sold us out to foreign interest in the name of money and special interests. Our current national debt is nearly 90% of our GDP. Any individual with these kind of figures would be bankrupt. We’ve privatized gains and socialized losses, consolidating wealth.
I don’t see anything of that nature being changed by this administration, and never really did, even during the campaign (assuming he would have kept his 503 promises).
So that’s why I don’t see much hope. I see time running out, power slipping away, national sovereignty eroding, and all the while Nero fiddles as the Empire begins to burn.
So, in an effort to open my mind to the alternative, what do you (or others) see happening that can change this country in another direction.
Capitalism Is Dead, Long Live the Billionaire Bailout Society | HuffPost Impact It took a long time but the robber barons won. America will be a 2 caste society. The fabulously wealthy are international businessmen. America is just another market to them. Patriotism is for the poor.
The financial regulations bill that was supposed to rein them in has been badly watered down . It is lip service now. The credit card companies have already worked around the new regulations in their bill. They can not lose anymore.
By calling overdraft protection, not a loan but a service ,they have no limit on the charges. Their is no top rate for credit cards. How can that be?
The system is owned by the powerful and they have taken it over. We have lost because we don’t speak with one voice. The rich do.
Well sitting around in a blue funk saying “we’ll all be rooned” won’t help.
This attitude of “We are the home of enterprise and competition that has made us what we are, but if we don’t have the monopoly/hegemony on world power and privilege we are aren’t going to play this game any longer” is puerile.
Life is possible if you aren’t the toppest of the poppest, after all that’s where most of the world live quite (well often anyway) happily. How many emerging economies have found themselves in the same debt vice that the US is now in, and copped the excoriating restructuring programs from US dominated financiers. Advise that the doctor seems unwilling to proscribe to themselves.
If we were discussing the survival of Zimbabwe as a nation in this thread the attitude wouldn’t be more negative.
A bon mot from this neck of the woods.
Down here, our nearest neighbour Indonesia has spent most of it’s existence as a military dictatorship with expansionist tendencies and is the largest Islamic country in the world, with a population that is 10 times ours.
A while ago now, Lee Kuan Yew, still the chief string puller in Singapore, forecast Australia as the poor white trash of Asia. He doesn’t say that now, and is not unhappy about it, because we adopted, (and still have a bloody long way to go), lifted our game, exploited our advantages, engaged with our neighbours. We now run a trade surplus with China, and beetling away at the top of the OECD growth charts for most of the past two decades.
But that’s our niche. You’ve got to find your own.
And for my final 2c … you won’t find it in your navel.
Yeah fine but in all those cases the empires declined for clear reasons and it took a long period of time. According to this thread (and others I keep finding myself reading) America is now in hopeless decline simply because it doesn’t have complete control of the world (even though as far as I can see it has more clout than pretty much everyone else). That’s not actually a definition of an empire, you don’t have to be the ONLY power, just extremely strong.
Also it seems like this decline has happened in the space of less than a decade as no-one was foretelling the death of the US before Dubya’s presidency, and I’m not aware of any empire that has collapsed THAT quickly.
I accept all the factors that people are citing about poor economy, changing geo-and domestic political situation, wealth inequality etc but it’s not like these things are particularly new. Why the doommongering now as opposed to 10 years ago? The rich were just as much in control of the country then as they are now, and your industrial base wasn’t all that much bigger. Otherwise all I’m seeing are a bunch of nebulous reasons like “we don’t have clear conviction in ourselves anymore” or “China is holding so much of our debt”. Yeah well following the Napoleonic war Great Britain was sitting on debt amounting to 200% of its GNP, and it carried on being an empire for another hundred years, why is the US so certain to collapse imminently?
It gets tedious after awhile. It’s one thing to bitch and moan. Everyone does that. But at some point it just becomes a excuses for doing nothing by a bunch of losers. It’s like guys I know from high school who spend all their time complaining about the government or “The System” on Facebook. OF COURSE the system doesn’t work for them! They fucked around all though high school. They fucked around after high school for the past decade. Now they’re bitching about their lot in life.
The Rich are ruining America are they? The people who invent stuff, run businesses, create wealth and made something out of themselves are the ones destroying America? Maybe people should spend less time figuring out what entitlements they think they deserve and more time looking at the habits of people who actually became successful.
Yes indeed. The financial geniuses that invented the complex financial banking devices that ruined the economy of the whole world are to be admired. Packaging mortgages, creating swaps ,and avoiding and killing regulation while becoming fabulously wealthy is just great don’t you know.
Shipping out manufacturing base abroad to get cheaper labor and escape environmental regulations.,just great business. Corporations are designed to ignore people and country problems. People don’t matter. They have proven that over and over.
The corporations are shrinking the American job base. yet so many argue they should get tax breaks because they will increase hiring. If they do, it wont be here. They have been cutting American jobs for decades. Small businesses create American jobs. They have great difficulty getting loans to keep afloat. The banksters that looted the treasury don’t want to lend to small businesses. It is so much easier to clean up on enormous business loans . If they send jobs abroad and harm America, not their concern.
I get bored with the meme that rich people all invented and created important things and are getting what they deserve. With few exceptions, it is a joke.
I suppose if I emulate Paris Hilton ,I too can become successful. Perhaps I should copy the habits of the financial pros who looted the whole world and then got their fingers in the treasury. Those are successful people.