America Dependence Day Whine

Andrew McKillop

JULY 4

Predictably, another July 4 brought its now-ritual handwringing and soulsearching, its whining and moaning. Downsized America in a big, bad and dangerous world is more than abundantly commented by US media. Past glories of Old Glory are unable to kindle hope for the future. Downsized Hollywood is now Bollywood and Chevrolets are now small cheap cars made in China, Korea or Slovenia. Obama has become a disappointment, or even an embarassment, another failed president pursuing eccentric causes like saving the world from global warming armageddon. The giant steelmaking and engineering corporations of yesteryear are all gone, replaced by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and other packagers of information and enablers of communication for laptops and Apple smart phones made in China, to upload or download dumb and useless information. These almost-virtual corporations of course, and for a price of course, furnish all their users’ private information to the NSA, CIA, FBI and the sinister Department of Homeland Security.

America’s new dependence on security is massive and obsessional. If there was any one single result or cause of the USA’s lost greatness syndrome, the Stasi-like security obsession must be high on the list. The quest for security is the meat of unceasing, often well-meaning but always failing legislation to empower and enable, care and protect, aid and support the US citizen. Well-known in Europe and for decades, the American version of this mass hysteria movement started much later, but has grown – out of control – much faster, reaching monstrous proportions in record time.

As in Europe, its role in destroying the economy is paramount and total.

THE REVOLUTION

If America ever had a foreign policy it is now in shreds and tatters. The latest Egyptian revolution provides us all we need to know. Obama is forced to admire and admit the street rage of protestors by their millions, but regret the Army’s coup to remove an elected president. Could that happen here?

For decades in Egypt the airforce general Mubarak was America’s man, supervising an East German style security “apparatus”, but he was overthrown. America’s chosen replacements, the Muslim Brotherhood selected for the US by America’s Saudi friends, allies or at least oil suppliers, took the helm. In less than 13 months they were trashed by street protest and their own total incompetence.

The so-called strategy of always backing the winning horse failed – even when it was a US organized two-horse race!

For some historians however, this only shows what the 1770s-vintage American revolution showed – history is surprising. Very surprising to some, History did not “die” in or about 1990 as US historian Francis Fukuyama once pretended and claimed. America is living with historical change – and it is difficult. Times really do change.

From the 1980s, according to David Stockman and his book “The Great Deformation”, the US led the developed world into a maze of economic policy fantasy, bundled together under the beguiling title, for some, of ‘neoliberalism”. This was in fact a mix-and-mingle of the Stasi-type security state and the ultimate excesses of the casino-type financialized economy, but it took more than 30 years of damage to get a handle on what had happened.

The ritual bleat is “We didn’t know”.

For at least a decade, July 4^th whining in the US features the decline of the economy, as if this was unexpected and unmerited, a punishment inflicted from on high like bad weather because we used an old-style American Chevrolet with a 450 HP engine to go shop at the Wal-Mart, releasing so much carbon our children will hate us for the thoughtless damage we did to polar bears. Everywhere, the July 4^th moaners say, there is dangerous surprise change – but this is because we are expected to believe “the economy” was apple pie and hunky dory, before.

GETTING REAL

Stockman, among others simply lays out pertinent facts of a 30-year bad trip. Similar to banging one’s head against a brick wall, stopping the exploit will bring instant relief.

The image problems for doing just that are, to be sure, enormous as Obama would tell us without an instant’s hesitation. He can however check with Mohamed Morsi on before-and-after conditions for presidents who “govern with God”. Before, they really had no choice but after, they were in prison.

The studied, self-satisfied refusal to take any account of the real world, and govern by ideology, really does carry risks for those who, passively or actively, enable degeneracy to take the driver’s seat.

Almost certainly under-appreciated by Obama’s army of spin doctors, times change and the process is cumulative. History tells us this has no problem ending with a revolution – which naturally means street protests and violence, as if that could surprise.

One thing is certain. The US is not an island-continent and nation whatever the maps would show. Obama can can take a look at how Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan reacted to Morsi’s ouster in Egypt. Himself a latter-day Mubarak, Erdogan is even more troubled than Morsi’s Gulf Arab paymasters by the instant collapse of his bungled attempt at creating the Islamized Republic of Egypt.

Obama works long work weeks to perfect the late-stage neoliberal casino economy and its Stasi-style “sheltered” society in the USA. Where every call or Internet site visit is recorded. What Obama has to learn is that he is wasting his time – and History proves that time is always short.