My issue is chiefly with the process, not the position. And my concern has to do with the long-term health and strength of the American economy. I see no sense in belaboring my points, however.
Were you expecting it to be a picnic or a soirée? I don’t think it realistically could’ve gone much better for the first two decades after the war. The real screwup didn’t come until a bit after the fall of the USSR, imo. For clarity, US debt breaks down to $36T for the government, $11T corporate, and $18T for households. Household wealth alone, however, clocks in at about $160T, which leaves the US pretty far from being bankrupt. As to allies taking advantage of us, yes, I agree. But I’ll add that sometimes it was less an active choice and more a product naïveté and being self-deluded, thinking that peace would be a natural state of affairs if only everyone else thought and behaved like Europeans. I’ve been back to the homeland in Norway to visit relatives and they found it totally incomprehensible their peaceful lives were made possible in part by an imposition put in place and maintained largely by American power.
Wage arbitrage by MNCs covers the bankrolling of the foreign investments. And wage arbitrage is also why the business wing of the Republican Party is happy with illegal immigration. It’s simply a tool to hold down wages for the working class.
I see at as more of a quasi empire, and mostly a commercial one at that. Or at least until W’s two terms.
I don’t know. Is he ushering in a G-Zero world? Concert of Hegemons? Making Crackerdom Crackerific Again? We’ll have to wait and see.
The inevitable risk of a deep state is in its unelected structure, persistence intergovernmentally, and propensity to function unchecked. Between that and the necessary power it wields, it is ripe for infiltration of bad actors.
As to who those bad actors are depends on the conspiracy theorist you ask, and can range from corrupted business interests to ancient primeval forces. I would propose it as a conglomeration of various mafia groups enacting out their interests: allowing avenues for black markets such as drug and human trafficking, as well as enacting political agendas. Whether they work in concert or have their own secret fights, I don’t know. But I do know that there is more than enough preponderance of evidence to say that something like this is going on, and probably in every government around the world.
I basically see it as countervailing forces which sometimes act in concert. And yeah, mostly permanent government types. However, I see the actors as the Neocons in the State Department, the military industrial complex, Big Oil, and Big Capital. I’m not saying there aren’t any others, just that those are the real problems.
- 08/03/2025 12:34:40 AM
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