Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: America – A Bankrupt Empire

America – A Bankrupt Empire 
Financial instability rooted in economic 'blowback' from our disastrous
foreign policy  
by Justin Raimondo 
 
As the stock market gyrates, and Federal Reserve Board meets by
videoconference to inject emergency funds into the system, Chalmers
Johnson's warning that the US empire is not sustainable – that "this is
the way empires end" – resonates rather ominously. 
Johnson, whose most recent book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American
Republic, the third volume in his "Blowback" trilogy, argues that military
expenditures are a drain on the productive capacity of the economy, and
that the mistaken idea of what he calls "military Keynesianism" will
eventually be our economic undoing. The US economy, he avers, has become
increasingly dominated by what President Dwight Eisenhower dubbed the
"military-industrial complex." Rampant militarism has diverted vital
resources away from productive use and lines of research, and given other
countries – Japan and the EU – the technological edge. This trend has also
hollowed out our economic base, caused a debilitating decay in the
physical infrastructure, and led to a growing debt – that is an economic
time-bomb that seems to be exploding … now.
How many Americans realize the US military budget is greater than that of
the rest of the world combined? This doesn't include our "off-budget"
expenditures in the Iraqi and Afghan theaters, which surpass the combined
military budgets of Russia and China. For the first time, the bill for the
"defense" of the United States – a task left to the Department of Homeland
Security [.pdf], not the Defense Department – exceeds $1 trillion. And
that's just what's public: the secret "black budget" costs are unknown,
and on this score Johnson advises us to heed economist Robert Higgs, who
advises us to take any official Pentagon figures and simply double them. 
Empires are expensive, and the American version has a peculiarly
altruistic twist to it, in that, as Garet Garrett remarked, "everything
goes out, and nothing comes in." We've financed it all with deficit
spending, and rather than impose direct taxation – always a risky
proposition – the powers that be have simply set the printing presses of
the Federal Reserve on overdrive, creating a huge bubble that's about to
pop. As Johnson points out, the whole system is financed by massive
borrowing:
"On November 7, 2007, the U.S. Treasury announced that the national debt
had breached $9 trillion for the first time ever. This was just five weeks
after Congress raised the so-called debt ceiling to $9.815 trillion. If
you begin in 1789, at the moment the Constitution became the supreme law
of the land, the debt accumulated by the federal government did not top $1
trillion until 1981. When George Bush became president in January 2001, it
stood at approximately $5.7 trillion. Since then, it has increased by 45%.
This huge debt can be largely explained by our defense expenditures in
comparison with the rest of the world."
Just as the worldwide Islamist insurgency sparked by Al Qaeda is blowback
visited on us by the exigencies of the cold war era, so what we are
experiencing, today, is economic blowback from our reigning ideology of
military Keynesianism, which has built an economy embedded with a fatal
flaw.
In the wake of World War II, the fear of another great depression was
rife, and this was a motivating factor in the growth of the "defense"
sector – neatly rationalized, as Johnson points out, by the Pentagon's
NSC-68, a document outlining US strategic doctrine authored by Paul Nitze,
which proclaimed the cold war dogma of "guns and butter":
"One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was
that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full
efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than
civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of
living." 
Except it wasn't, and isn't, so. 
Public works, in the form of ever-higher military spending, created an
ever-expanding war-industry that sucked vital resources into avenues that
led to a cul de sac, i.e. that had no productive use, such as nuclear
bombs. Our mighty nuclear arsenal, which continues to expand even after
the Soviet meltdown, represents trillions of dollars in frozen resources
which go nowhere – that is, which produce no goods, and yield no
continuing economic benefits. This has led to the fatal distortion of the
American economy, and the massive misallocation of scarce resources: it is
the root cause of the collapse of the US manufacturing sector. As Johnson
puts it: 
"Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable
configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead
to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is, in
fact, a form of slow economic suicide."
Not only has America fallen behind by failing to modernize its capital
assets and losing its technological edge, it has also corrupted its own
currency. By exponentially expanding credit, the Federal Reserve is
weighing down future generations with an unprecedented albatross of debt.
The sheer weight is crushing the vitality out of the American economy, as
military development crowds other investments out of the market. The
dollar is no longer the currency of choice: the Euro has taken its place.
All that has to happen, as Johnson points out in the video above, is for
the Saudis and other oil-producers to demand Euros instead of dollars, and
we're sunk. 
What is likely to stop the rise of the American empire dead in its tracks
isn't a sudden upsurge in the antiwar movement, the election of a rational
President, and/or a sudden radical reversal by the policymaking elite
after more than half a century of folly – it's bankruptcy that will do it,
long before any of these possibilities have a chance to take shape. 
Not that this is anything to anticipate with glee: it means social and
political disruption on a scale we have scarcely experienced before in
this country, perhaps even a revolution. It surely means the end of our
republican form of government, and the institution of something less free,
less secure, less faithful to the teachings and traditions of the
Founders. It almost certainly means the end of constitutional government
in America, and the beginning of our long, slow decline – or, perhaps, a
more dramatic, meteoric descent than anyone now imagines.
 
-- 
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 continuing economic benefits.
veramente a qualcosa servono...se tu hai prestato soldi al tuo vicino
e quello si è riempito la casa di armi e va minacciando in giro di
sparare a chiunque gli rompe i coglioni, ci pensi su 2 volte prima di
andare a chiedere i soldi indietro....più o meno è quello che sta
succedendo...gli USA hanno una bilancia commerciale negativa
praticamente con ogni paese del mondo, ma nessuno chiede di saldare i
conti...
il che non impedirà il crollo degli USA, non appena i debitori
diversificheranno i loro investimenti...

 americane prestano i mutui alle famiglie americane.
perchè ancora la cina non ha un mercato interno sufficiente, quando
l'avrà vedrai quanti soldi mandano negli USA....

 Londra ha abdicato all'impero ma e' piu' ricca che mai.
Ogni uomo rimane sulla terra per un periodo troppo breve per giudicare il
suo tempo. Ma un giorno qualcuno scriverà che chi sconfisse i nazisti e
chi aveva subito da loro la peggiore persecuzione non ne era migliore. Gli
USA sono rimasti più razzisti dei nazisti fino agli anni '60 e adesso sono
i moderni "uber alles", i plagiatori degli ebrei (i nazionalsionisti)
stanno facendo ai palestinesi quello che hanno ricevuto dagli europei.
gus
-- 


 Londra ha abdicato all'impero ma e' piu' ricca che mai.
Una ritirata strategica ordinata ha effetti diversi da una rotta.
Stiamo tutti aspettando speranzosi un nuovo presidente che sappia 
organizzare la ritirata dove è necessario.
Ma francamente non sono certo che i democratici, con Hillary e Obama 
teste di serie, possano vincere.  E non sono neanche certo che, se 
vincesse uno dei due, sappia poi gestire la situazione.
Peccato che Al Gore non si sia candidato.

America – A Bankrupt Empire
Sergio, alla bancarotta ci siamo noi italiani invece, grazie anche al
tuo compagno Turigliatto.