The Great Unraveling Of US Global Power
The Black Commentator
04/25/03
Centuries of lording it over slaves, butchering Indians, and pushing aside
Mexicans have ill-prepared white America to live in civilized company, much
less to act as maestro for the globe. As Johnny Cochran could tell them, those
gloves don't fit. Easy victories over weak, captive or Stone Age adversaries
served to teach all the wrong lessons, creating a perverse set of American
family values. Unlimited resources, right there for the stealing; fertile fields,
awaiting unpaid labor; fragile southern neighbors available to be mauled for
sport and profit - a heady brew swilled sloppily, on a mean drunken binge of four
hundred years.
Entitlement is a word the Bush men abhor. Nevertheless, it is the essence of
their distilled, white American sense of themselves as entitled to each bloody
slab of meat they can gouge from the baggage or body of the unwary. Ever
since there has been such a thing as American popular culture, predation has
been celebrated. Killer cowboys, killer soldiers, killer cops, killer business
tycoons. John Wayne played all of these roles, which is why he is the
quintessential white American actor. The parts he played, the ease with which
he dominated, reverberate through centuries of cultural memory and
idealization, a birthright bequeathed in full to the children of more recent white
immigrants.
People die all around white Americans, an historical fact that is also reflected in
exaggerated popular cultural forms. White Americans are entitled to live, and
live well. Others are not. Others means non-whites, in the nation that invented
whiteness to subsume into a melting pot "all the races of Europe" while
separating out the Others as non-entitled, nonwhites. It was only yesterday that
these social relationships constituted the most inviolable laws of the land -
capital punishment was instantaneously imposed on those who offended the
birthright privileges of white Americans.
Privilege and Predation
Like advantageous traits in biological evolution, the human social organism -
through culture -retains those behaviors and worldviews that work. Aggression
against Native Americans worked for the European settlers - it brought them
free land. Slavery made them kings and queens and princes and princesses,
and rich. Foreign conquests of weaker, darker people made them respected
among Europeans. Except in the Civil War that they wished they had not fought
and treated until just yesterday as a great tragedy, relatively few white
Americans were killed in these conflicts. Predation was a good trait. It worked.
Armed and extremely dangerous from the day they set foot on North American
shores for the express purpose of claiming title to everything within range of
their imaginations, white Americans "learned" that they were admired by the
survivors among the people they preyed upon and enslaved. They gained this
knowledge from each other, the only people whose opinions counted. Their
overwhelming arsenals brooked no objection to the self-evident fact of their
innate superiority and... goodness. Who would disagree?
In this closed, continental conversation a worldview was refined that has grown
so fundamental to white American methods of thought, so perfect in its
affirmation of self-serving assumptions, so automatically corrective of unwanted
information, that the social organism is all but impermeable to disagreeable
facts. Outside of the centuries-old American cocoon, much of reality simply
does not compute.
Propelled by very special circumstances resulting from World War II, the United
States stepped to the center of the world stage with all of its previous
advantages, plus nuclear weapons and the only intact economy on the planet.
(See "Conspiracy Theories," April 17.) By default, the dollar became the global
currency. Newly tapped oil, priced in dollars, fueled a world of post-war growth,
much of it to the direct benefit of the United States. By the Fifties, pundits had
declared the 20th Century to be the American Century.
Fifty years later, the Bloomberg financial service's Tokyo bureau reports:
Pertamina, Indonesia's state oil company, dropped a bombshell
recently. It's considering dropping the U.S. dollar for the euro in its
oil and gas trades.
With war unfolding in Iraq and a mysterious pneumonia spreading
around Asia, few noticed. News that Indonesian government
officials favor the euro also fell through the cracks. Yet it could have
major implications for the world's biggest economy....
Indonesia's rationale: The dollar may be the world's reserve
currency but it has become too volatile. "One thing is for sure, the
adoption of the euro as an alternative means of payments could be
an effective solution to speculative dollar-oriented dealings,''
Indonesia's Vice President Hamzah Haz said last month.... What if,
for example, the U.S. began setting the stage for another
pre-emptive attack in the Middle East or East Asia?
Even so, 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. Last September, Asian and European
leaders formed a task force to help Asia boost euro currency
reserves, issue more euro-denominated debt and use the single
currency to settle trade bills.
The news from Tokyo, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur is no flash in the pan, not a
temporary case of the jitters, but dramatic evidence of the growing, global recoil
from the United States, a nation that learned nothing from its half century at the
top except that which reinforced its own delusions. It has fouled the common
well of trust - or at least, some measure of predictability - among nations.
Tectonic shifts
There is even more happening below the surface than is indicated by the public
statements of Prime Ministers. The American problem is not a case of bad
manners, but of unfitness. No sensible people, of any social sector, will place
their treasure and futures in the hands of a nation formed of people who see no
reality other than their own. Much of the world has already decided that the dollar
is the umbilical that has become a potential noose, and must be severed.
Bloomberg's founder is the Mayor of New York, the financial capital of the world.
The last thing on Bloomberg's institutional mind is to rattle financial markets. If
anything, it is American analysts who slept the "tectonic shifts," as reporter
William Pesek put it, that may be at work.
The great irony is that the Bush men launched their attack on a world order that
had privileged the United States for generations in order to preempt a politically
motivated switch to the euro by angry Arab oil producers, or rebellious
Venezuela. Instead, their bald, openly declared policy of global hegemony has
accelerated a trend that might have taken decades to unfold. Shock and Awe, in
the form of threats to global stability, has caused nations to seek safety from,
rather than safe haven in, America. As we wrote in, "They Have Reached Too
Far: Bush's road to ruin, for himself and his Pirates," March 13: "Every plan and
project of individuals and nations will be shaped by having witnessed a racist
America raining fire on a weaker people - and reveling in the crime."
It is not as though the U.S. had been a fit guardian of capitalism, prior to the
Pirate's ascension to power, January 2000. As rulers of an entitled nation,
American governments abused their world currency trusteeship for short term
political and economic ends, oblivious to the interconnected fortunes of other
countries, including allied elites. Washington derides Malaysia's Prime Minister
as "unstable," when the opposite is true. Pesek continues :
One reason leaders like Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia favor the
euro: It lacks a domestic agenda. Washington has proven quite
adept at steering the dollar up and down depending on economic
needs. In the early 1990s, a lower dollar was favored to boost
growth. Later in the decade the White House favored a rising
currency to attract foreign capital. Since 12 countries use Europe's
single currency, it may be less susceptible to unpredictable political
agendas. Also, the European Central Bank, not politicians,
manages it.
Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan regularly huddles with the
political honchos of whichever administration is in charge, fiddling with the
world's currency to make the occupants of the White House look good to the
American elite and electorate.
U.S. behavior, consistently self-consumed, has long bedeviled the global trading
system. However, national planners and central banks crave stability most of all.
No one relished the dislocations that even a modest break with the dollar might
bring, much less the prospect of American retaliation - the U.S. is known as a
nation that kills simply to eliminate inconveniences.
Inertia became increasingly untenable as it dawned upon the world that the
Bush men were really serious about The New American Century, that the
Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld crew were not just another brand of bullying, oafish
American cowboys, and that the frenzied American behavior following
September 11 was more like civilized inhibitions giving way than a cry of
national pain.
Euro-talk became more commonplace after Bush's growling "with us or against
us" speech in November 2001, followed by the war declaration-like "axis of evil"
2002 State of the Union address. International bankers who considered
themselves reasonable and cautious spoke of oil transactions in a "market
basket" of currencies. But the U.S was intent on enshrining the dollar as a
monopoly currency - forever. The Pirates believed that seizure of Middle
Eastern oil fields would ensure continued denomination of oil in dollars, and that
the ritual mauling of Iraq would teach the world not to mess with the dollar.
Shouting out reality
The Pirates were wrong. World revulsion is near universal, beyond emotion, and
fast translating into concerted action in collective defense against the madman.
Indonesia and Malaysia are simply speaking more frankly than other nations.
The Bush men cannot comprehend that their systematic, transparent assault
on international stability is unpardonable. And they don't know what it feels like to
be hurt. This, too, will come as a surprise - their Shock and Awe.
"Punish France, ignore Germany and forgive Russia," urges Condoleezza Rice,
thereby guaranteeing that these potent powers will deepen their conspiracy to
facilitate the isolation of the U.S.
Use "psychological leverage" in the breathing space before the next armed
assaults, barks Founding Pirate William Kristol. Keep up the "political attack" on
Syria and Iran, screams Michael Ledeen, of the Pirate incubator American
Enterprise Institute.
The Bush men think this is diplomacy, a gift that the world should appreciate as
a respite from Washington's wrath. The international community - in which the
U.S. is no longer a true member but, rather, a dangerous presence - struggles
to work around the Americans as new structures of trade and cooperation are
created.
The Pirates believe they hold the trump card: half the world's military under one,
super-tech command. It is a blunt instrument, with a narrow range of uses. The
real bomb ticks under America's porch, and will devastate the dollar in a spasm
of millions of individual and institutional decisions to run in the other direction.
Stability is what attracted the world's capital to the United States. Now, the Bush
men have transformed the U.S. into a dreadful engine of instability. The Pirates
scream threats at the snow bank on top of the mountain. Delusional, they will be
amazed when it comes down on top of us.
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