This article is in desperate need of editing as I know I repeated myself a few times but I wrote it in about 2 hours of uninterrupted thought and want to keep this as a record for myself as the next decade unfolds. The thing that set me off was the Supreme Court re-affirming the Citizens United case.
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As a kid I felt I was lucky to live in a country like the United States. It was so obvious we weren't only the wo
rld's most powerful country but also one with a political system that was the fairest in history led by enlightened men that only wanted the best for the world. This was true because as my teachers insisted, the American people demanded this from their country due to American Exceptionalism.
To my 12 year old self, it was so obvious who the bad guys were in the story. All you had to do was watch the television and see images of the dastardly Russians with their godless communism. It was a thinly disguise form of totalitarianism like we'd escaped in 1776 and we were the world's best hope.
As I got older I realized that the world wasn't that simple but I remember writing a paper in high school where I tried to imagine that we were in fact the bad guys. My imagination wasn't good enough for the task. After all, we allowed the vote. We protected people's rights. We made other countries toe the line when they committed human rights violations. This wasn't true in the rest of the world.
Since I've gotten out of college my disillusionment with my country has been mostly about money and the fact that the American electorate is willing to turn a blind eye to elected officials who aren't fiscally responsible and unwilling to protect American jobs and industries. The mantra they always spoke was about free trade. They argued that only free trade would allow us unfettered access to the rest of the world as while they took the manual jobs like making cars and computer chips, we would dominate industries like banking and computer software. Retraining was all that was needed.
This logic always has frustrated me because the American education system isn't up to the task of that 100% of it's graduates would be able to work on Wall Street. Frankly no country can be made up of all white collar jobs. And of course it was inevitable that the United States economy was going to crash at some point. After World War Two were were the only country to come out of the war in a better position than we entered. Our industries had gotten a huge shot of capital which killed any remaining vestiges of the Great Depression while the rest of the world had to totally rebuild. This set us up for two decades where the world literally couldn't match our production.
Everything changed around the time of Watergate and OPEC in 1973. These events were merely coincidental as by that time countries like Japan and Germany had recovered from their war time losses and now were able to compete with the United States on equal footing. For most of the 70s the country seemed to take a downward trend. That is until Ronald Reagan got into office in 1981.
After he was in office a shift happened in America. Instead of protecting our steel industry we shipped them overseas where they could make the steel cheaper. Instead of protecting our industries with tariffs, the sales went overseas as well. Big business is mostly to blame as companies like IBM and GM weren't able to make changes in the modern economy or produce quality chips/automobiles. Unions played a role too as it was difficult to argue to companies that they needed to keep jobs here when they had to pay $20/hour here vs $.20/hour overseas. Even our citizens seemed blind to the danger as millions of them seemed to be happy buying Sony, Toyota or Lexus. As a result, twenty years later we virtually have no heavy industry left in our country.
The economy continued to boom during this era and the heroes weren't the Rockefellers in oil or the Carnegie's in steel but the bankers on Wall Street. Thees people moved money around the world and manipulated the world with their money. Corporations downsized middle management through computerization while most of the jobs turned into some sort of service industry.
My question has always been this - If everyone is providing a service for someone else then who is really doing the real work? The answer is no one as the economy in the United States was based on a lie of paper.
It's been about 5 years since the bank collapse took much of the savings from the middle class of the world. People are rebuilding but it is now a different place. One where the money is sitting in the hands of countries like Saudi Arabia and China who could literally destroy our economy if they wanted by selling the T-Bills that fun our debt. The only reason they don't is because Americans still are buying Arabian oil and Chinese goods. Their economies aren't to the point where they could handle the loss of our consumers. Every year we dig ourselves a little deeper and the world is increasingly able to live without our consumption.
How did we get here? What did we do wrong?
I've hinted on it above but the real problem was that like my teenaged self, the American voters couldn't see what was really being done in their name. Jobs left the country but taxes were low and porkbarrel projects were high. It was morning in America.
I still believe that the Soviet Union was evil. That may have been too strong of a word as I have learned Russians are in reality pretty nice but their government was totalitarian and we are a republic. That made us good and them evil to my 12 year old brain. As I said earlier, I struggled to imagine a world where American could possibly be anything but good. It's like movies like Omen 2 where the devil was attempting to gain the presidency. I always laughed at movies like this or the Manchurian Candidate as the simple fix was our president couldn't legislate and was only in office for 4 years before he had to face the electorate. There was no way that we'd ever have a situation like happened in Rome over 2000 years ago when the Roman Republic was replaced by a Totalitarian Empire. That was impossible ... the American people wouldn't allow it.
What I didn't consider was money. Politicians need money to get reelected and television ads have a big impact on the electorate. Term limits don't help because our two party system means anyone that wants to get involved is funneled through those two organizations and have to toe the line or the next person in line will get the money. Add to that the recent development of the Supreme Court recognizing corporations as having all the rights of an individual and now you have entities whose only loyalty is to their stockholder who are spread out all over the world with the ability to pump millions and billions into elections and create negative television ads against any politician that dares to oppose their views.
Politicians aren't rich. They constantly raise funds for re-election every two/six years. The thing is you are now see prime time attack ads in someones district in the middle of their term from a non-descript organization like "Americans for America". Since we are only likely to hear one side of the argument it eventually becomes our truth. Ultimately we'd rather not get into the details of politics because they are difficult so we distracted like the Romans but instead of gladiators we follow stories about the foibles of Hollywood starlets.
All this isn't enough to end the American Republic but the republic is teetering.
In the next 10 years (and I'm probably being generous), we will see inflation like we haven't seen since 1920 Germany hit the economies of the world making all the paper shuffling of the last 20 years irrelevant. The only thing that will matter is solid goods and the only people able to provide them to the American people will be corporations from their enterprises overseas. As the American dollar becomes worthless and the American consumer is unable to spend on credit any longer, the world will turn to a new currency and we will no longer be able to abuse the system.
This would have happened years ago if oil and goods weren't sold in American dollars. This has been our blessing and our curse. It's simple supply and demand and today the world needs dollars. Despite financial policies that would cause inflation and a decrease in buying power in other countries we escape because if we collapse the world economy the world is forced to turn to the only safe investment - the dollar and the T-bill. This actually causes an increase in demand for these items which increases our buying power and allows us to run up our debt even more. Compare that to Argentina in the 80s that had a disastrous war they couldn't afford and their money lost most of its value. We are actually lucky Greek economic policy made moving to the Euro impossible or we could be facing that crisis right now. (OPEC was already making noise they were headed that direction in 2002 but backed off due to American pressure (having tanks in the area helped) and the Euro crisis).
In some ways delaying the inevitable is making it even worse. Instead of getting periodic adjustments like the rest of the world, every bad decision by the United States government is rewarded. Unfortunately for us, every balloon will eventually pop.
When the collapse happens millions will be out of work as the country struggles to figure out if we can do anything anymore. Mega corporations will have all the money and they will own the politicians. I'm sure that people will attempt to stop it but throughout history when all the money is controlled by a few the result is totalitarianism in some sort be it Soviet Communism, German Fascism, a Military Dictator, a Roman Emperor, or a Hereditary Monarchy.
The power of the United States has always been the and the possibility that hard work combined with the natural resources at hand would create personal wealth. This caused a historical anomaly of a majority of citizens in a middle class between rich and poor. Those days are almost at an end.
As a child this idea seemed so ridiculous. We were the United States and our Republic could only be a force for good. Today, I don't see how we can avoid something much much different.
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