ENERGY INDEPENDENCE
Our local newspaper, on November 30, 1979 reported the following:
Al Mavis, energy coordinator for the Illinois Department of Agriculture, said Monday that the goal of his department is to have 1,000 alcohol-for-fuel stills in operation in the state by 1985 and, hopefully, the goal can be met by 1983. He said the nation has the potential to produce enough alcohol to make the U.S. energy independent.
What happened to this plan for energy independence? Globalism has come into full fruition, that's what. The global village has become a reality during the last twenty-five years. Not only are we not energy independent, we are more dependent on foreign oil imports than we ever dreamed possible back in 1979! What's worse — a lot worse — we are no longer independent in any significant industrial field. Dependence, under the guise of international economic interdependence, under the enlightened direction of free global market system, has become our national policy. Brilliant planning on the part of our so-called national policy makers! When our trusty leaders signed us up for the new international economic order, they signed onto a national economic suicide pact. It ought to be abundantly clear by now, but none of our national leaders have admitted it yet, nor are they likely to. The message we receive is always the same, "Throw more oil on the fire!", "We need more free trade", "We cannot build a wall of isolation around our nation", "All we need to do is to sell more to the rest of the world — capture that 95% of the global consumer market that is still out there just waiting for us to satisfy its needs."
In other words, there's no turning back to the economic and political policies that once made this a great nation. We cannot resume getting things right. All we can do is continue to open our borders and our markets, and apply more steam to the engine that has been destroying our nation. Our train of progress is heading for a brick wall at full steam ahead!
In spite of our increasingly national dependence on foreign oil, foreign labor, foreign consumer products, foreign ships to carry out our trade, astronomical levels of national debt, trade deficits, an increasingly debased and weakening dollar, and all the ills that come of dropping the national ball, we're assured that we, as the world's only remaining superpower, rule the world. We hear rhetoric indicating that America is the New International Imperial Power, and the light of continued peace and prosperity for all is just a little further down the tunnel.
The greatest, most prosperous, most productive, most militarily powerful, and once freest, nation in the world has become a very large paper tiger, and the whole international system that we have helped foist upon the rest of the world, has begun to eat us for breakfast. And it serves us right for being so dumb.
Right now our national leaders are contenting themselves by bringing peace, democracy, and prosperity to Iraq, using all the military means at our disposal except, perhaps, our most destructive weapons of mass destruction.
In other words, while our nation approaches the economic precipice, with its specter of massive economic and social chaos, we're still building our vision of a New World Order, one rogue nation at a time. Today we're working on Iraq, and it has proven to be a problematic chore.
The rest of the world, which had until relatively recently looked to us for global leadership, and fell into lockstep with our "new international economic order," looks on in stupefied amazement and growing alarm. Our vision of a New World Order is losing its luster to the rest of humanity.
More and more people in the world want the United States to fail. They no longer look at us as their salvation, leader, or international role model. They see us as the greatest threat to world peace and prosperity of any nation in the world. Yet they know that if we do fail, the global ramifications will be catastrophic. What would happen if all of a sudden the the American consumer market collapsed? Many nations, most especially in the West, must now be positioning themselves for such an eventuality. America's only real function in the New World Order is to serve as the primary dumping ground for the production of the world's mushrooming productive capacity, especially that of Asia.
This places the rest of the world into a serious dilemma because so many nations have a large stake in the American economy. For example, there is no other nation that would rejoice more at the failure of America than Red China. This communist giant is undoubtedly still committed to burying us under the rubble of our own system. Yet China has committed a tremendous amount of its growing productive capacity to satisfying the American market. Conventional wisdom is that a collapse of the American market would spell disaster for China's new economy too. But would it? Could it be that China has thought ahead, and actually has some long-term plans by which it intends to come out on top? Could it be that China is preparing itself for what it knows is almost certain to happen? Are we, in fact, much more vulnerable than China is with regard to our balance of trade?
CHINA'S ECONOMIC ONSLAUGHT
Thus far, China has managed to outsmart us. Of course, that wasn't very difficult to do, because we're the only major nation in world history that has obviously, and determinedly, gone out of its way to undermine its own economic viability and make itself vulnerable to "others, elsewhere." It's the only country in the history of great nation states to actively commit national suicide on a wholesale level, and make that commitment a national priority.
Certainly, in the short term, China has hedged it bets by tying its own currency firmly to the American dollar. (This little matter has actually got some of our trusty leaders a little worried, and they are now trying to get China to relent and let its currency "float" against the dollar and other currencies.) This means, that even as the American economy and consumer market sinks, Chinese goods will remain more than just competitive in the American marketplace, and America will continue to become more and more dependent on China for more and more of what American consumers need. As the American dollar sinks in value in relation to the Euro, Yen, and most other major currencies, the Chinese Yuan sinks with it, and Chinese goods will continue to flow into the American market, as well as other markets, in ever larger quantities.
In the long term, China has its own vast market to tap into. As the American cash cow expires, Chinese production can be diverted to where it will do China the most good for the Chinese — the vast Chinese market. After getting America's money, its technology, and productive expertise, it will simply begin to satisfy its own growing consumer market — and that market dwarfs the American market.
They very idea that American production will ever tap into and "exploit" the Chinese domestic market in a serious way is mere smoke, with nothing as substantial as a mirror anywhere around. The actual cost of Chinese labor is now said to be a mere 4% of the cost of American labor. How long is it going to take to make American labor competitive against those odds? The only answer should be more than just obvious. It's simply never going to happen! And if it ever does happen, it will be because we have traded places with what was once a backward China.
No doubt, the Chinese leadership has become familiar with American history and knows what it was that made America the world's greatest, most prosperous, and powerful nation. They have undoubtedly studied at the schools of Lincoln and Ford and others, and realized what has to be done to make China the heir of the power that was once ours.
The Chinese economy will eventually swallow ours, and it may even do it while saving us from ourselves, or our national leadership, by continuing to provide for our consumer demands even as the American consumer becomes increasingly impoverished and disenfranchised. In the process, however, America will become China's economic vassal, a position our own trusty leaders and economic gurus have very short-sightedly facilitated.
If our national leaders had not abandoned national leadership in favor of global leadership, and then made us "subservient" to a New World Order, none of this would have been possible. Had all of our national leaders remained loyal to the United States Constitution, and our representatives continued to represent the interests of the American people rather than international capital and a "new international economic order" designed by foreign interests, our nation might have continued to be the great nation it started out to be — and the entire world would have continued to benefit from our enlightened example as we continued to perfect ourselves as a people and a nation. But we have failed to heed the lessons of world history, and we have abandoned all the lessons of our greatest minds and our own national history.
Twenty-five years ago, foreign energy dependence was our only major trade related economic problem. Since then, America has ceased to be anything like an independent nation by any measure, economic or political. The American people have simply been had — sold down the river by their own leaders, all for the short term gain of global fat cats.
The following link is a to an investment promotion site. Pridger is not including it as part of the promotion, nor is he endorsing the product, but merely pointing to it as a point of interest — a place to get an encapsulated overview of the vulnerability of the American economy, thanks to totally inept and wrongheaded leadership in Washington D.C. and elsewhere for a matter of decades.
http://www.agora-inc.com/reports/DRI/chinaB33/
China is not the "real" enemy, of course. The Chinese leadership is merely doing what it sees as best for China — something our leaders should have done on America's behalf but haven't. Whether the the web-site is overly alarmist in an effort to sell you something remains to be seen. In the mean time, be forewarned as to possible eventualities.
John Q. Pridger