I’ve finally started educating myself on the current economic crisis. However we move past this current credit crunch (soft landing vs. hard landing), the fact is that Americans will likely face a lower standard of living within our lifetimes. You might not have believed that the decline of the American Empire had begun up until 2008, but it’s clearly in motion now.
Unfortunately, the imperial decline could have dire effects, worldwide. Whatever your opinion on the fairness of an empire, one thing it can promote is stability. If our capacity to service our national debt diminishes to the point where we have to remove our military presence from the hundred or so nations where we have bases, we may see scores of regional wars in the power vacuum.
Additionally, an empire in decline has few resources to devote to stewardship of the enviroment (or, put more simply, long-term planning.) We can elect as progressive a government, come November. The US may simply be unable to withstand the political and economic costs of raising energy prices in order to combat global warming.
Perhaps another nation will take up the role of “global policeman.” Perhaps dramatic new technologies will save our GHG-saturated climate. The future is unknown, but the dire scenarios are looking worse and more likely than ever.
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It appears that Hugo Chavez, through the Venezuelan government, has purchased Sequoia systems, a manufacturer of electronic voting machines used in 17 states and the District of Columbia. An investigation has been opened by Committee on Foreign Investment, and rightfully so.
Apparently, the idea that the owner of an e-voting software producer may influence the operation of their machines is not so “kook fringe” after all.
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Maybe the Asia edition just printed too early to pick up the Annie Liebovitz retrospective scoop.
Original site here.
Via TittyD
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The comment reproduced below was posted to Marginal Revolution (the blog of a pair of economics professors who dance mainly on opposite sides of the libertarian divide), in response to some thoughts on ‘fixing’ the trade imbalance with China.
The poster, a US Naval officer, makes a very rational, non-conspiracy-laden case for the sturdiness of the seemingly ludicrous current fiscal situation, where the USA depends on poor nations such as China to finance our deficit spending. Essentially, he frames the current account deficit and the associated dollar hegemony as a mild tax on global trade, paid to ensure security of transporting manufactured goods against the very real threat of service disruption, a service that no military besides ours is currently capable of providing (and in fact as the relative capabilities of non-state actors increases, this service will become increasingly costly to provide and difficult to match). The very first US standing military presence was created explicitly to halt piracy (after bribing them didn’t work out so well), and that role has continued more or less uninterrupted to this present day. I disagree with the commenter about how sudden the move between security regimes would have to be, but after reading I don’t disagree that it’s unlikely to change for a significant period of time. Europe doesn’t have the desire to be a military superpower on our scale, and China might have the will but would need to increase it’s military spending by at least a factor of twenty in order to rival ours… even accounting for lower labor costs (ahem), there’s much to be said for experience in these matters…
So, take this an example of why the rampant China fear (something I’ve succumbed to myself from time to time) is at least partly hype, inflated because it is a convenient tool for protectionists and xenophobes and other vested interests…
The original comment, after the jump Read the rest of this entry »
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Is there anything else left for him to ruin?
