We often hear this cited as a truism. The US is a wealthy nation. Yeah, well how come the US is $13 trillion in debt? Also we hear China is still a developing nation. It's poor compared to the US. Yeah, then how come the US owes China $2 trillion and China is going around buying up all the world's resources? The fact of the matter is that, while there may be a lot of private wealth located in the US, the US as a nation is extremely poor. All of its public resources have been raided and stripped in the last 30 years and turned over to private corporations. Obama is beginning to claw back some of these resources. For instance, the student loan industry which was handed over to private corporations which then proceeded to run students into debt has been returned to the government fold. The prevailing philosophy in the US has been to privatize everything. Therefore, the US government is a pauper in the midst of great wealth primarily owned by the financial sector one of whose hedge fund managers made $4 billion last year.
China, on the other hand, has a lot of poor private individuals although its middle class is growing. But as a nation China is extremely wealthy. This disparity between private and public wealth is at the root of the bait and switch debate about the relative disparity in wealth between China and the US. China as a nation is wealthy despite having a fairly large segment of its population being poor while the US as a nation is poor despite having a large segment of extremely wealthy private individuals and corporations. The wealthy individuals and corporations are increasingly global citizens with little allegiance to the US. They offshore their taxes and bank accounts. They will reside in the US only so long as it is preferable to live here compared to other locstions.
While the US flounders around in a recession, China wasted no time in putting together a $586 billion dollar stimulus package and forging ahead with acquisitions of oil and mineral rights all over the world including major oil fields in Iraq. While the US spent a trillion dollars fighting a war in Iraq - purportedly to gain the right of private corporations to buy up Iraq's oil fields after Saddam Hussein had nationalized them - China waltzes in and buys up a major portion of said oil fields having spent nothing on fighting a war there! So China, to its credit, is gaining on the US through a strategy of peace and commercialism while the US tries to project its military power in the world but to what avail? Is this worldwide projection of military power buying the US anything? Well no, when it comes to controlling the world's natural resources. The US is being a sucker. Instead the US runs trade deficits with China every month further adding to China's profits. The US is dependent on China for capital with the US government borrowing billions in the capital markets every month. China has become the US' veritable banker. And in addition the US has become dependent on China for products as its manufactureing base has been crated up and shipped to China.
The US quest for cheap foreign labor and cheap products has sucked it into a downward spiralling vortex of dependency on China while China pretends it's a poor developing nation. The US, a nation in decline, is rapidly becoming a poor undeveloping nation as its middle class languishes and becomes less well off as time goes by.
Think of it as a tale of two countries. When it comes to procuring the resources that make industrial societies run, China is now the shopaholic of planet Earth, while the United States is staying at home. Hard-hit by the global recession, the United States has experienced a marked decline in the consumption of oil and other key industrial materials. Not so China. With the recession's crippling effects expected to linger in the U.S. for many years, analysts foresee a slow recovery when it comes to resource consumption. Not so China.
In fact, the Chinese are already experiencing a sharp increase in the use of oil and other commodities. More than that, anticipating the kind of voracious resource consumption that goes with anticipated future growth, and worried about the availability of adequate supplies, giant Chinese energy and manufacturing firms -- many of them state-owned -- have been on a veritable spending binge when it comes to locking down resource supplies for the twenty-first century. They have acquired oil fields, natural gas reserves, mines, pipelines, refineries, and other resource assets in a global buying spree of almost unprecedented proportions.
The US with its farflung military empire and more than a 1000 military bases located in virtually every country of the world is slowly bankrupting itself while China spends comparably nothing on its military and goes around buying up resources. It makes a ton of money charging the US interest on its debt and selling the US what amouints to cheap trinkets. The US has sold its soul - and manufacturing base - for a mess of pottage.
The Pentagon’s most recent inventory of bases lists a total of 716 overseas sites. These include facilities owned and leased all across the Middle East as well as a significant presence in Europe and Asia, especially Japan and South Korea. Perhaps even more notable than the Pentagon’s impressive public foreign property portfolioare the many sites left off the official inventory. While bases in the Persian Gulf countriesof Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates are all listed, one conspicuously absent site is Al-Udeid Air Base, a billion-dollar facility in nearby Qatar, where the U.S. Air Force secretly overseesits on-going unmanned drone wars.
The count also does not include any sites in Iraq where, as of August 2009, there were still nearly 300 American bases and outposts. Similarly, U.S. bases in Afghanistan -- a significant percentage of the 400 foreign sites scattered across the country -- are noticeably absent from the Pentagon inventory.
Counting the remaining bases in Iraq -- as many as 50 are slated to be operating after President Barack Obama’s August 31, 2010, deadline to remove all U.S. “combat troops” from the country -- and those in Afghanistan, as well as black sites like Al-Udeid, the total number of U.S. bases overseas now must significantly exceed 1,000. Just exactly how many U.S. military bases (and allied facilities used by U.S. forces) are scattered across the globe may never be publicly known. What we do know -- from the experience of bases in Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea -- is that, once built, they have a tendency toward permanency that a cessation of hostilities, or even outright peace, has a way of not altering.
After nearly a decade of war, close to 700 U.S., allied, and Afghan military bases dot Afghanistan. Until now, however, they have existed as black sites known to few Americans outside the Pentagon. It remains to be seen, a decade into the future, how many of these sites will still be occupied by U.S. and allied troops and whose flag will be planted on the ever-shifting British-Soviet-U.S./Afghan site at Shinwar.
While the rest of the world increasingly adopts policies of peaceful accumulation, the US is still trying to tell the world what to do based on its military power. Only the world isn't listening. The rest of the world is going its own merry way not fighting wars and using the money instead to buy up natural resources. The US didn't even get its money's worth in Iraq. While the US is terrified over terrorism, most of the terrorism takes place outside the US in Russia, for example, where a recent subway bombing claimed the lives 39 people. Yet the US spends billions fighting ragtag groups of supposed terrorists half way around the world while other countries have had far more incidents of terrorism. Osama bin Laden's policy of bankrupting the US seems to be working . Home made IED's costing a few dollars are blowing up military assets worth millions. Something's wrong with this cost/benefit ratio.
The day will come when the US will not be able to keep borrowing trillions of dollars and the US government budget will consist of little more than paying interest on the national debt. When that day comes, the military-industrial complex will have to be dismantled as well as the far flung network of military bases. Needless to say there won't be any money for social programs either. The rich will flee the country for comparably more sunny climes as the US infrastructure breaks down and there is no money to repair it. Sort of a Katrina on a national scale. US exceptionalism will have been replaced with the knowledge that one more empire has failed.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
