( – promoted by buhdydharma )
Burning the Midnight Oil for the Arc of the Sun
We are sabotaging our main labor resource with mindless rote learning to pass “achievement” tests to avoid being punished for not being full of kids of upper middle class households, we are allowing our equipment resource to collapse through lack of demand and we are sabotaging our natural resource through treating nonrenewable resources as an excuse to destroy renewable resources and treating renewable resources as non-renewable resources, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In fifty years we have gone from technological leadership on all fronts to technological leadership only in some of those areas under the umbrella of War Department Industrial Policy, and from massive trade surpluses that demanded recycling via overseas investment and imports to maintain international liquidity, to massive trade deficits to allow the Chinese to export their unemployment to us.
In forty years we have gone from energy independence to importing twice as much oil as we produce.
And thirty years, we have shifted our record on land wars in Asia from 0-1 with one draw, to at best 0-2 with two draws, and at worst 0-3 with one draw.
If this damn Empire collapses soon enough, we might have a chance to start rebuilding from the catastrophe it represents, but an equally plausible outcome is falling apart into a squabbling series of small and mid-sized nation states, many harboring revanchiste dreams of re-establishing the Empire.
We built this Empire out of immediate and temporary needs, some of them in service of public interests, some of them in service of vested private interests. For the good of the Republic, it is long past time to tear it down.
Burning the Midnight Oil ~ Forgotten Years
Edit: NB. On Saturday, Chalmers Johnson canceled his membership in the Council on Foreign Relations
16 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
Burning the Midnight Oil
go along with this very mild-mannered statement of yours:
All of what has happened was/has been well preconceived, beginning with Reagan, but really, really sealed with the Project for the New American Century’s “REBUILDING
AMERICA’S DEFENSES” Strategy, Forces and Resources
For a New Century — A Report. Even Social Security and Medicare is contemplated therein — see page 70.
There has been and is an ongoing effort to DESTROY the so-called “middle class” period! Afterall, the “jacksters who took their corporate business abroad and got a taste of child labor and lax taxation think it’s great and just, maybe, that’s what they’d like to see here in the good ole’ US of A. People are working 2 and 3 jobs, some probably not at minimum wage.
No, “immediate and temporary needs” were contrived, at best, to serve the rich!
Thank you, McF! How benevolent!
While I have no wish to diminish your excellent contributions on train travel/transporation, I cannot go along with the seeming nonchalance of the last sentence in your diary!