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Stephen Lendman
It’s an idea whose time has come. On October 13, China’s official press agency Xinhua headlined “Commentary: US fiscal failure warrants a de-Americanised world.” More on this below. Thomas Jefferson once warned: “If the American people allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation, and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied.”
“The issuing power of money should be taken from the banks and restored to Congress and the people to whom it belongs.”
Money power in private hands doesn’t work. It bears full responsibility for today’s crisis.
Wall Street and other monied interests wreak havoc worldwide. They profit at the expense of ordinary people. They do it ruthlessly. They do it destructively. It’s high time that changed.
A previous article said America has been declining for decades. It’s going the way of all empires.
It’s dying a slow death. Its epitaph one day may read hubris and overreach killed it. Misguided policies don’t work. Chalmers Johnson called it the same dynamic that doomed past empires — “isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end, bankruptcy.”
The “combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favour of an imperial presidency.”
America is declining “for the sake of keeping our empire,” Johnson stressed.
In his book titled, “The World in Crisis: The End of the American Century,” historian Gabriel Kolko said America’s decline “began after the Korean War, was continued in relation to Cuba, and was greatly accelerated in Vietnam.”
Immanuel Wallerstein believes America began declining since the 1970s. Post-9/11, it accelerated.
“(T)he economic, political and military factors that contributed to US hegemony are the same (ones) inexorably produc(ing) (America’s) decline,” he said.
On October 15, he headlined “The Samson Complex.” “We have a lot of putative Samsons these days,” he said. They’re “blocking or seeking to block what they consider dangerous ‘compromises.’”
Ongoing Washington squabbles are Exhibit A. “It is not hard to show (they’re) pulling the house down, not only on the enemy but on themselves.”
“(T)he temple is crumbling” in plain sight. Wallerstein hopes for transition from today’s world-system to something entirely different. Everything is possible, he says — “possible but far from certain.”
America’s decline reflects a combination of:
- money power in private hands;
- dollar debasing;
- military Keynesianism;
- permanent wars;
- pernicious corporate dominance;
- banker bailouts and potential bail-ins confiscating personal savings;
- generous handouts to corporate favorites;
- off-shoring America’s industrial base
- replacing full-time high pay/good benefit jobs with part-time/temp low pay/poor or no benefit ones;
- neo-liberal austerity;
- depression level poverty, unemployment, underemployment, hunger and homelessness;
- destructive class warfare;
- systemic corruption;
- police state repression;
- sham elections; and
- democracy in name only.
Absolute power corrupted America. It’s beyond fixing. A two centuries-long experiment failed.
Benjamin Franklin’s warning went unheeded. He felt hubris might doom the new republic. “(W)e shall be divided by our little partial, local interests, our projects will be confounded and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a byword down to future ages,” he said.
“And, what is worse, mankind may hereafter, from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing government by human wisdom and leave it to chance, war, or conquest.” Today’s America is lawless. It’s belligerent. It’s ruthless at home and abroad. It’s secretive. It’s unaccountable. Incestuous business/government ties exploit people globally for profit.
Monied interests run things. Whatever they want they get. They cycle their executives in and out of government. They make policy. They buy politicians like toothpaste. They dump those they don’t want them.
America is declining. China is rising. It’s heading toward become the world’s largest economy.
Based on purchasing power parity as measured by the cost of a representative basket of goods in one country versus another, the IMF believes it’ll overtake America before 2020.
Xinhua minced no words saying:
“As US politicians of both political parties are still shuffling back and forth between the White House and the Capitol Hill without striking a viable deal to bring normality to the body politic they brag about, it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanised world.”
Post-WW II, America began “build(ing) a global empire by imposing a postwar world order, fuelling recovery in Europe, and encouraging regime-change in nations that it deems hardly Washington-friendly.” — Trinicenter.
l Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago.
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