The
breathtaking saga of victory and defeat that has shaped
Black America
since Mississippi marked its first majority white census
in 1950 has unfolded entirely within the context of relentless
expansion of global U.S. power. The uneven yet generally
ascendant trajectory of African American mobility – geographic,
social and economic – was predicated on a never before imagined
fluidity within U.S. society as a whole. This national dynamic
opened more spaces, more quickly, than Jim Crow could possibly
restrict, revealing portals to freedom through which heroic
Black men and women marched. Today’s Atlanta, for example,
could not have been possible under Jim Crow; however, absent
the explosion of economic growth, Jim Crow might have stood
his ground a lot longer.
The
conditions that allowed Black people to stand on their
feet were hitched
to a larger reality: much of the globe lay at the feet of
America, the post-World War Two superpower. Believing themselves
to be super-smart but actually made invincible by super-weaponry
and the super-dollar, which had become the world currency
by default, American corporations penetrated every non-socialist
region of the planet. A considerable portion of the riches
gained through superpower advantage were repatriated to the
home country, creating for a time the highest national living
standard in all of human history. In the presence of such
grand domestic possibilities, was it any wonder that African
Americans would rise up to demand a piece of “The Dream” – or
that white folks would grudgingly back off and allow Blacks
room to breathe? After all, imperial prosperity had created
lots more space for white people; they could afford it.
Never
having really been more than cosmetically patriotic, corporate
America
put on world-class clothes and eventually began playing against
the vibrant domestic economy that had given it birth. The
old military-industrial/energy complex combined with predatory
finance capital – now the controlling faces in corporate
boardrooms – men who create nothing and hold allegiance to
no nation, but rather, seek the ultimate advantage of world
monopoly. In 2000 these Pirates captured Washington, DC with
the plainly stated goal of subduing the globe by military
force and intimidation.
It
is at this point that the Dream Period ended, definitively,
for Black America.
There will be no return in the foreseeable future to the
times of robust and general domestic growth. Instead, the
era of American decline is well underway, and is likely to
be punctuated by abrupt, dramatic, and extremely dangerous
social dislocations, during which we will learn the fuller
meaning of living “in the belly of the beast.”
Global Public
Enemy
As history will
tell, and as events daily demonstrate, the piratical decision
to upset the global game board in order to impose a New American
Century without rules, has united the world in revulsion
against the United States. Like a strange name called out
in the bedroom, the specter of American madness cannot be
erased from planetary memory; even if George Bush is ejected
from the White House in November, this society has shown
its horrific ass to the rest of the species. America writhes in
flagrante (literally, “in blazing crime”) in Iraq, caught
in the global gaze like a rutting dog unable to disengage
itself from the object of its lust. (Those who are offended
by such images are simply unaware of how the U.S. appears
to people outside the American corporate communications bubble
that envelops the nation in narcissistic, racist delusions.)
Polls
show that majorities of Europeans believe the U.S. is roughly
as great
a danger to world peace as North Korea and Israel – an astounding
result in the historical heartland of colonialism, among
people who one would think had become inured to imperial
excesses as practiced by some of their own governments. Much
more ominous are the clear signals that global elites are
quietly drawing red lines around the United States. These
are the people who convene and attend the innumerable meetings
on countless trade and finance issues that keep a wired planet
in some semblance of stability. A general consensus has been
reached that the U.S. is the primary source of global instability.
The
world’s elites
are seeking to position their institutions and nations as
far from the American axis as is feasible, while carefully
avoiding economic catastrophe in the process. It is like
planning a divorce from an insane, violent spouse who also
has a key to the safety deposit box. The divorce will unfold
in stages – or, under further provocation from the U.S.,
in earth-shaking spasms. But there is now no doubt that the
U.S. is fated to shrink as the world withdraws from successive
layers of entanglements with the madman. Black America must
therefore prepare to marshal its collective assets for a
long period of retrenchment.
The
world is a very different place than it was in 1954 and
1955, when the U.S.
Supreme Court and Rosa Parks, respectively, dealt fatal blows
to Old Jim Crow and the U.S., then producer of nearly 30
percent of world output, positioned itself to assume neo-colonial
control over disintegrating European empires. The era of
American expansion is over.
“It had become clear
by the late Nineties that America's artificial advantages
were in danger of collapsing, and with them, the sources
of nonproductive Pirate wealth.” (See , “Conspiracy
Theories,” April 17.) “Now accounting for [only] 21
percent of world output, and with no Soviet Union to keep
the other capitalists cowering under a U.S. umbrella…American
rulers face the prospect of head-on competition from their
former allies and a developing world that demands full rights
as planetary citizens.”
Not only did the
world outgrow any rational economic basis for U.S. hegemony,
but Washington repeatedly abused its paramount position for
narrow U.S. corporate and dollar-gaming ends, wreaking havoc
on the development plans of emerging elites around the globe
while disregarding the sovereignty of all other nations.
As Bloomberg’s Tokyo
bureau reported in April of this year, “there's no ignoring
Asia's desire to reduce U.S. influence in the region. Leaders
here wonder if scrapping the dollar might expedite the process.” America
and its local allies are viewed as politically bankrupt throughout
the Middle East and the whole of Latin America. (Africa is
another story, so drenched in misery that conventional political
descriptions do not apply.)
Not so big
and bad, after all
Long
before 9/11 and Bush’s obscene 2002 “with us or against us” speech,
American parochialism and compulsive advantage-taking inflicted
unbearable
insult on nations already overburdened with the necessity
to earn dollars to pay their bills on the international market.
Oil, the (unfortunate) lifeblood of economic growth, has
been priced entirely in dollars since 1974.
“More than two-thirds
of national foreign exchange reserves are denominated in
the U.S. dollar,” according to an April 12 article in The
Hindu, of India. “About 40 per cent of the dollars issued
by the U.S. are held outside the country by non-U.S. nationals
and entities. All this makes the U.S. currency the most powerful
one in the world; the de facto international currency. This
power is in part a reflection of U.S. economic supremacy
during 1950-75. The global power of the dollar has continued
for other reasons, a reflection, especially since 1990, of
U.S. political and military supremacy.”
The
American currency stranglehold, no longer based on economic
but on military
might, allows Washington to print megatons of currency to
paper over an annual half-trillion dollar trade deficit.
However, the artificiality of the dollar’s dominance makes
the U.S. vulnerable to the political will of foreign governments
and elites, most of which would welcome a way out of the
dollar trap, if one could be found.
In
the wake of the Iraq invasion, these elites are actively
exploring strategies
to expel the dollar from its central, dangerously destabilizing
position in the world economy. The euro fits the bill, as
we wrote on April 17.
Despite
all the “recovery” hoopla
from the American corporate media, foreigners are increasingly
avoiding further cash entanglements with the U.S. – a clear
indication of the deeply political nature of the investment
recoil. On December 2, Bloomberg.com quoted Michael
Woolfolk, senior currency strategist in New York at Bank
of New York: “What's bedeviling the U.S. dollar now is the
perception that the current-account deficit is not being
adequately financed by inflows of foreign investment into
U.S. securities.''
Foreign
capital hangs back from U.S. capital markets despite returns
on American
stock investments of 12 percent – three to four times what
can be earned in a sluggish but sane Europe. That the euro
rises to record heights (as has the British pound) in defiance of
market “fundamentals” is evidence of profound recoil from
the U.S. by foreign elites.
“What if all the
funds parked in the U.S. are pulled out? What if this flow
of capital dries up?” asked The Hindu writer in his April
commentary. “The effect on the U.S. economy would be cataclysmic
since the amounts involved are huge. Robert Brenner, [a]
U.S. economist, estimated that in end 2000, foreign ownership
of the U.S.' gross assets were equivalent to as much as 67
per cent of GDP and argued that ‘any serious attempt to flee
these assets would put enormous pressure on the dollar.’”
No
one wants an apocalyptic crash of the World Order that
is currently so
enmeshed with the dollar. But it is Bush’s Pirates who represent
the greatest threat to the system as it now exists. And who
can say that in the next year or during a second term in
the White House Bush will not unleash another horror on humanity
that provokes just such a disaster for the U.S. and the world?
This is the nightmare that haunts the foreign elites on whom
the U.S. economy depends.
Redlining
is insidious, operating in the phantom world of things
undone and, therefore,
not subject to measurement. The lasting impact of the shock
Bush’s Pirates have deliberately inflicted on the world psyche
through their declaration of War on Order will be hidden
in the realm of negatives: development projects launched
in China, Indonesia or Brazil with little or no American
participation; office towers in Baltimore or Chicago that
fail to garner foreign investor backing.
For
true catastrophic drama, one must ponder the effects of
an OPEC switch to the
euro. Russia, the world’s second largest energy producer,
will almost certainly ease its way into euro-denominated
oil and gas transactions in the relatively near future. As
we wrote in our Cover Story, “The
Global Redlining of America,” October 16, “A switch to
the euro ‘is really possible,’ according to Russian economist
and Putin advisor Yevgeny Gavrilenkov. ‘Why not? More than
half of Russia's oil trade is with Europe. But there will
be great opposition to this from the United States.’”
Middle
East OPEC members also do a lot more business with Europe
than with
the United States, yet they fear the unknown. After considering
discussions on the prospects of switching to the euro or
a “market basket” of currencies for oil sales, cartel President
Abdullah al-Attiyah of Qatar announced on December
12, "I don't think we will discuss it. I don't think
it is the right time to discuss it because we believe it
is not easy to switch from currency to currency. Yes, I am
concerned about the weaker dollar but we believe we should
be pragmatic, that we cannot switch because it is very complicated."
Instead,
OPEC continued its policy of keeping oil prices high to
offset the fallen
dollar – an unsustainable strategy, according to United Arab
Emirates economic analyst Dr.
Mohammad Al Asoomi: