POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GARY MASON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Rise again?
You mean as in "The South will rise again"?
This is a silly piece.
First, no matter how badly hurt the US is, a place of that size and wealth is not disappearing. Will it be diminished? Yes, to a certainty.
Second, all of America's problems are self-inflicted. The wars, the financial crisis, the healthcare mess.
The real problem in America is its inability to govern itself, and it is truly starting to show like elbows through a frayed jacket.
In this it is very much like a huge corporation. When times are good and the operations side of the business is healthy, management appears good and is full of praise for itself.
But when unexpected twists come, when technological leaps forward have made your operations obsolete, or when your main source of wealth is depleted (as oil), management generally is revealed for what it mostly is: a set of well-paid strutters upon a stage.
Despite the horrific fears of financial disaster, amazingly few steps have been taken by the American government to assure a smoother future. Contrast to its insane over-reactions to every hint of terror.
And there are tons of problems yet to resolved. The defaults on mortgages are still going on. The huge cash payout to the financial industry served only as a temporary fix. The very payments to the investment banks really only were a dose of more of the same, spend now and don’t worry about tomorrow.
Obama has waited too late to limit the big investment banks, a step he has just announced. He should have promptly gone after increased regulation when they were down and shamed.
Now they will fight him every step of the way with tens of millions of dollars in lobby money and advertising.
And just look at the Supreme Court decision the other day, rescinding the last campaign-finance reform. It’s back to the jungle.
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“Paraphrasing Lincoln, America is still mankind's last great hope. What could replace it? Eurabia? China? Let's have a dose of reality.”
Lincoln was a sentimentalist, or at least indulged in sentimentalism while he built a throbbing war machine and crushed the South’s right to self-determination.
No one, including Americans, regards the country in that way anymore. It is a giant imperial complex with a veneer of democracy. Lincoln was, if you will, the father of what we call the military-industrial complex.
