Friday 15 December 2006

Pic of the day: A foreign hero protects a run-down American inner city in part of the excellent American computer game City of Heroes, published by Korean company NCSoft. But today's topic is not a game. It is harsh reality.

USA waning

I have to write this one before moving on to my next entry, because there is an otherwise interesting person who seriously thinks that the USA is the greatest nation past or present, chosen by God for some vaguely perceived mission in the world. This is of course ludicrous to those who live in better countries and quietly praise God or good luck (depending on our religion or atheism) for not being born into a society steeped in callousness, cruelty and injustice. But let us remember that just like they are conditioned from childhood to salute the star- spangled flag, we are conditioned to think highly of our own piddly nations. So let us move beyond the gut reactions and have a hard look at the hard facts.

One of the hard facts is that the USA is the dominant political force in the world today, without any obvious competitor. Sure, it has competitors in certain sectors of power: China, Europe and the Muslim world all challenge the USA in various aspects of production, economy and ideology. It is in the sum total that the USA stands out, as the top economic, military and technological power of the world. Sort of.

The European Union has a higher population and in fact a larger economy than the USA. The problem for the European Union is that it is not, in fact, a union. Theoretically it is more unified than the USA, which is a federation. In practice, however, the European Union is a confederation, a more loosely connected group of states. While some laws apply to the entire Union, many do not, and others are not respected everywhere. And not least, the Union is culturally heterogeneous. That is to say, there are different cultures in different parts of the EU. Not necessarily in each and every nation, but the difference from say, Spain to Sweden is enormous. In the USA, English (or some variation thereof) is universally accepted as The Language. While millions of Americans speak Spanish at home, nearly all of them understand English and can speak it in public. And those who cannot, are ashamed. In the EU, several major nations take pride in not being able to speak each other's languages. Religions also tend to be geographically distributed, with Protestantism to the North and Catholicism to the south, and Orthodox Christianity and just a little Islam to the East. The short of it is, the EU is not the United States of Europe. And even if it were, it would still lag in military and in average income.

China may be able to produce pretty much anything that the USA does, only much cheaper. But this is because it is still a developing country with low wages and overall a low standard of living. Its political system is also one that people are more likely to flee from than flee to, which is a pretty good measure of a country's overall success.

It is not completely out of the blue, then, when US citizens think of themselves as living in the Greatest Nation and count themselves blessed. Unfortunately, it is not entirely correct either. And less so for each passing day.

***

Among democratic nations, Norway the only country that spends roughly as much as the USA on its military, compared to population size. (Or did at least, until Bush Jr.) But Norway has a population of less than 5 million, compared to 300 million in the USA. The American military strength is a fact beyond dispute. Unfortunately for them, the military has a very limited role in a civilized nation. Its purpose is to dissuade other nations from attacking, or repel them if worst comes to worst. The time is long over when you could use your military strength as a diplomatic tool, implying in carefully selected words that it would be in the other nation's best interest to give you favorable trade deals unless they want bad things to happen to their citizens. Those days are past, and today if you brandish your weapons like that, people will just consider you a barbarian. Unfortunately this is happening to the USA. The world is starting to think of it as a barbarian country, because it trusts its military too much. But even the USA cannot stand up to the whole world. It turns out that occupying one piddly third world country may be beyond its means.

Beyond means is largely an economic expression, and eerily relevant. Having a large military costs money, and using it costs even more. The USA used to have lots of money, but those days are also past. For a while now the country has been borrowing roughly $2billion a DAY. It is no longer a question of whether the country will be able to pay this money back; it won't. The question is whether it will be able to manage without the borrowing, or even without increasing it. Despite the influx of money, the economic growth is faltering. The money has been used for consumption rather than investment. For the last few years, Americans have largely grown richer by selling their houses to each other for ever higher prices. But is that real income? No, it is just an elaborate pyramid scam, or at best a game of musical chairs, where those who find a chair get a reward from the loser. The loser, of course, is those who have to sell now that the bottom has fallen out of the market. We hear about people who see their retirement fall apart, people who have borrowed against the house and cannot sell it for enough to pay off the loan. If the economy falters when the money is still flowing in like a torrent, what will they do when the flow of credit dries up?

In the very latest news, president Bush considers increasing the US military again. How will he do this without raising taxes? Will he once again rely on his friends in Beijing? They have bought up a LOT of American government bonds. Those things are not called bonds for nothing, as Solomon puts it: The borrower becomes a servant (or slave) to the lender.

A strong economy is the foundation of the other strengths. By economy I largely mean a production base, not only of goods of course but also of services and even ideas. The USA has excelled in the production of ideas in the past. But now that the country is sinking rapidly into indebted servitude, how many of their ideas will they be able to realize?

***

Even at its best, the US economy was a mixed beast. The difference between rich and poor was greater than in other democratic countries, and still is. A small minority of the "super-rich" hold a great deal of the income and fortune, so that the average GDP per capita is much less representative than in Europe. In Europe, the money largely goes to the actual average citizen, either directly or through subsidized government services such as medical care or state-owned pensions funds. In the USA, each citizen has to save up for such expenses himself (or hope that rich family members will help out), or their health insurance and pensions depend on their employer, which could go bust and take their future with it. If you keep the few super-rich out of the picture, and put aside the money needed for health care and pensions, you suddenly see that the average American is not so much better off than his European friend. Quite the opposite, in the case of some Protestant countries.

And if the American middle class can still compete with that of western Europe, the lower classes can best be compared with developing countries. Here on the right side of the pond, it is unheard of and unthinkable that working families should go to bed hungry because the wages are so low. In the USA, this is perfectly acceptable. If even an unemployed in Scandinavia or Holland had to choose between food and life- prolonging drugs, it would cause the press to break out the war headlines. If you live in America, you probably know someone who faces this dilemma ... or you could know them if you wanted to.

It would be wise to remember that the economy is not a god that man should serve, but a machine that should serve real humans. If it becomes an end in itself, it does not help how efficiently it runs: It fails its purpose and its output goes to waste.

***

But you could argue – and certainly many conservative Americans will – that what makes the USA special is not its money but its freedom. Liberty is more important than equality or brotherhood, surely? And indeed, at the time of its founding, the young nation stood out as a rare haven of freedom in a world of more or (usually) less enlightened monarchy with absolute power over its citizens. The founders were ahead of their time in intelligence and realism, recognizing Machiavelli's bitter wisdom: If freedom is to be preserved, power must be divided. So they first split power between the federation and the states, reserving for the states all powers not explicitly given to the central government. On each level they partitioned the power in three: A legislative, executive and judicial branch. Generally the legislative body was again made up of two houses. The men who drew up the guidelines for the new nation set a standard that has not yet been overcome, it can be argued. There have been improvements since: Slavery has been abolished, voting rights extended to women and the poor. But the basic structure that keeps this vast "empire" from falling into the hand of dictators, has stood a test of time.

Two hundred years ago, this all made the USA stand out as a beacon of freedom. Even a hundred years ago, its liberty was unusual in the world. But we don't live a hundred years ago. And while the USA has been sleeping soundly on its laurels, much of the world has caught up and it can be argued that part of it has passed. Some American states still reserve the right to regulate the sex life of consenting adults, for instance, something that may make ordinary people feel better but cannot with any stretch of imagination be called liberty. Unless you think the right to meddle in other people's lives is an essential freedom, in which case you would argue that it should work both ways. But you don't actually want people with a different sexuality to meddle in your bedroom, do you? Golden rule and all that.

In the "war against terror", the US government has taken to spying on its own citizens (and others) on a massive scale. It can be argued that this is necessary to save American lives, but is the government really out to save lives? They have a "war against terror" and a "war against drugs" which both look eerily like "war against cultural minorities" from a distance. If the goal was to save lives, why is there not a "war against fat"? It doesn't take many days for fat-related illnesses to kill off more Americans than terrorism has done, but you don't see police breaking into houses and confiscating bacon and sausages. Of course they don't, because it would violate the rights of common people. But violating the rights of uncommon people seems eerily acceptable. Is that liberty? No, any upstanding citizen would say that liberty cannot exist unless it is for all. At best you could argue that people should have the right to hurt themselves, like gluttons do, but not to hurt others like terrorists do. But that would render the whole "war on drugs" morally unfounded. Either that, or you would have to arrest people who run donut shops.

Whatever logic you may bring to justify this, the fact remains that there are other countries in which the citizens currently have more freedom than in the USA, and they seem to take no particular damage from it. Holland is softer on drugs than the USA but has far less crime. European countries live under the same threat of Islamic extremism, but they have not established hidden torture camps or given their presidents (or prime ministers) the right to whisk away any suspicious person in secret without judicial supervision. While the USA is gradually sliding toward banana republic levels of liberty, other democratic nations are moving forward.

***

I think that should be enough for now. There may be a sentence or two in there that is misinformed or just plain wrong; if so, please correct me in the forum or mail me a link to your own blog where you disprove me. But know that there is no triumph or glee in what I write. By now I probably have more friends in the USA than in my native Norway, and many relatives too. In any case the loss of such a greatness is a bane to the whole world. Even five years ago I honestly thought that the process could be reversed. But now I know that I was wrong even then. The more I hear from real people who actually live there, the more I see that the crumbling has already begun. No amount of whitewash can stop it now. A large part of the population would have to repent, as in change the direction of their lives. And you don't do that when you think you are already born supreme.