Americans continue to pull the wool over their eyes that it doesn’t matter that they are selling their souls to protect the instant comforts of their bodies. To believe that runaway trade deficits don’t matter as long as there are foreign countries that are willing to accept liens on our assets because of our huge consumption is tantamount to the runaway domestic credit extension to individuals that in the long run will result in bankruptcy as wage earners’ capacity to meet consumption is in tandem with the decline, rather than the reverse, of real earnings. Eventually there is a reckoning to pay the piper.
When the likes of Lou Dobbs and Henry Kissinger become financial doomsayers, it is time to sit up and take notice. Till recently Dobbs has always been a warrior for big business and investment, now he is hammering away at job loss and outsourcing as virtually unpatriotic and devastating to the US economic base. He even features at the end of his show a growing list of outsourced US corporations. Reported in the “India Financial Express”. Kissinger, not known for his economic expertise, yet thinking in terms of a superpower said last summer, “The question really is whether America can remain a great power or a dominant power if it becomes primarily a service economy, and I doubt that.…I think that a country has to have a major industrial base in order to play a significant role in the world.”
Why is this? Are we not still the strongest nation in all of history since the fall of Hitler’s Germany? Yes, but for how long and still continue to police the world — and by the way shouldn’t we as mercenaries expect payment for our military services? What if the foreign creditors foreclose on us? What then? Counter by invasion? It is ludicrous to think that we can continue on the strength of their capital to lord over the world and yet be indebted to it. Something has to give as it did in the Soviet Union, spreading itself thin when it had not the means to sustain imperial ambition.
Even though Japan was thought to be under duress from a decade of stagnation, in part owing to its hand at outsourcing, it still possessed the enormous advantage in retaining the world’s largest trade surplus and at the same time maintaining a healthy industrial base, including plants and many other assets here in the United States, which in comparison is likened to a banana republic beholden to foreign loans, and what’s worse, being bought lock, stock and barrel by outright purchases of American stocks, real estate and treasury bonds.
Indeed, the entire nation is becoming one giant welfare state subsidized from abroad, and losing its pride in being able to fend for itself. Come home, America.
Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: March 23, 2004.