After America

“Sales plunged across most categories on shrinking consumer spending.”¹⁰⁷

That’s great news, isn’t it? After all, everyone knows Americans consume too much. What was it that then Senator Obama had said on the subject only a few months before? “We can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world’s resources with just four percent of the world’s population, and expect the rest of the world to say, ‘You just go ahead, we’ll be fine.’”¹⁰⁸

And by jiminy, we took the great man’s words to heart. SUV sales nosedived, and 72 is no longer your home’s thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand the president’s logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume 4 percent of the world’s resources. And in his first year in office we made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans were driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely, the Obama administration wasn’t terribly happy about the Obamafication of the U.S. economy. The Democrats immediately passed a bazillion dollar “stimulus” package to “stimulate” us back into our bad old ways, and, when that didn’t work, Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve printed another gazillion dollars in “quantitative easing” to lure us back into the malls.

And how did the rest of the world, of whose tender sensibilities Senator Obama was so mindful, feel about the collapse of American consumer excess? They were aghast, and terrified—as you would be if you suddenly found yourself strapped into a nightmare ride on a one-way express elevator into the abyss.

They didn’t put it that way, of course. Economics correspondents instead penned erudite thumbsuckers about how the global economy needed to restore aggregate demand. Which is a fancy term for you—yes, you, Joe Lardbutt, the bloated, disgusting embodiment of American excess, driving around in your Chevy Behemoth, getting two blocks to the gallon as you shear the roof off the drive-thru lane to pick up your $7.93 decaf gingersnap- mocha-pepperoni-zebra mussel frappuccino, which makes for a wonderful thirst-quencher after you’ve been working up a sweat watching the 78” TV in your rec room with the thermostat set to 87. The message from the European political class couldn’t be more straightforward: if you crass, vulgar Americans don’t ramp up the demand, we’re kaput. Unless you get back to previous levels of planet-devastating consumption, the planet is screwed.

“Much of the load will fall on the U.S.,” wrote Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, “largely because the Europeans, Japanese and even the Chinese are too inert, too complacent, or too weak.”¹⁰⁹ The European Union has 500 million people, compared with America’s 300 million.¹¹⁰ Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain are advanced economies whose combined population adds up to that of the United States. Many EU members have enjoyed for decades the enlightened progressive policies that Americans didn’t find themselves on the receiving end of until the Obama-Pelosi-Reid era. Why then are these advanced societies so “inert” that their economic fortunes depend on the despised, moronic Yanks?

Well, that’s globalization. All the stuff that used to be made in America is now made somewhere else. But the people who buy it are still Americans.

That part hasn’t changed.

So, if Americans don’t make any of this stuff, where do they get the money to buy it?

By borrowing it. Once you’re paying what citizens of free societies do in taxes, what’s left barely covers room and board. So life’s little luxuries—or cheap plastic Chinese-made luxuries—have to be paid for through debt.

So Americans buy toys that so enrich the Chinese they can afford to lend huge amounts of money to America to help our government grow even bigger so that Americans will have to borrow even more money for the next generation of cheap Chinese toys.

Hey, it’s globalization. What could go wrong?

Entire countries—not just the Third World assembly plants, but G7 members such as Canada—have economies overwhelmingly dependent on access to the U.S. market. “Globalization,” translated out of globaloney, means the American shopping mall is all but singlehandedly propping up living standards from Ontario to Indonesia. In 2010 U.S. consumer debt (that means us: not the spendaholic rulers but the spendaholic subjects) was about $2.5 trillion, or the combined GDP of Canada and India.¹¹¹ That seems like a lot of money to borrow in order to buy electronic amusements for a lifestyle we can’t afford.

But the Chinese are smart guys. They must know that, right?

Undoubtedly. But the dollar is the global currency and so, unlike Zimbabwe or even Iceland, America gets to borrow money in its own bills, which it has the exclusive right to print as much of as it wants. So, even if there’s a decline in value, for foreigners there is perceived to be a limit to the risk: buying U.S. debt is not like buying Zimbabwe’s debt.

Yes, but why is the dollar still the global currency if America’s the biggest debtor nation?

That’s about image, too: America is seen as the guarantor of global order.

But, as noted earlier, when money drains, so does power—and very quickly, as the British learned after World War II. Today, money is draining across the Pacific. China Minmetals is a Fortune 500 company owned and controlled by the People’s Republic.¹¹² By the way, read that sentence again and imagine what an H.G. Wells time traveler from the early Sixties, from the time of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, would make of it. Yet in the Fortune Top Ten there are three Chinese companies against two from the United States.¹¹³ And China Minmetals is serious business: they own the Northern Peru Copper Company in Canada,¹¹⁴ and the Golden Grove copper, lead, zinc, silver, and gold mines in Western Australia,¹¹⁵ and the mining rights to a huge percentage of Jamaican bauxite.¹¹⁶ China’s Sinopec bought up Calgary’s Addax petroleum¹¹⁷ and 9 percent of the Alberta oil sands business Syncrude,¹¹⁸ and have massively expanded oil production and development in Sudan and Ethiopia. China’s Sinochem took over Britain’s Emerald Energy.¹¹⁹ You remember all the “No Blood for Oil” chants back in 2003? Relax, it’s our blood, their oil. The biggest foreign investor in post-war Iraq is the developer of the Ahdab oil field, the China National Petroleum Corporation.¹²⁰

Think of it as the first settlers did vis a vis the Indians: the ChiComs sell us trinkets in exchange for our resources. Lenin boasted that “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” His fellow Communists in Beijing inverted the strategy to lethal effect: they sell us the rope, and sit back to watch us hang ourselves.

And, where money flows, power follows. Having turned resource nations in Africa into de facto protectorates, China has moved on to the developed world, and bailed out Portugal for $100 billion in exchange for significant stakes in their national utility companies.¹²¹ Beijing is also the biggest foreign investor in post-bailout General Motors: they bought 18 percent of the Obama administration’s IPO in 2010.¹²² If the Obama-approved Chevy Volt isn’t environmentally friendly enough for you, wait for the new Chevy Rickshaw. Can you still, as Dinah Shore sang, see the USA in your Chevrolet? The Chinese can.

Like America, China has structural defects. It’s a dictatorship whose authoritarian policies have crippled its human capital. It has too many oldsters and not enough youth, and among its youth it has millions of surplus boys and no girls for them to marry. If China were the inevitable successor to America as global hegemon, that would be one thing. But the fact that it is incapable of playing that role is likely to make things even messier, more unpredictable, and far more destabilizing.

They have our souls who have our bonds. In their decadence, much of the western elite now think the answer to our worsening problems is not merely Chinese money but Chinese-style dictatorial government. If you support Bush’s “Patriot Act,” you’re endangering civil rights. But if you support eco-totalitarianism, it’s totally groovy.

In 2008, David Suzuki, Canada’s most famous environmentalist, suggested that “denialist” politicians should be thrown in jail.¹²³ Mayer Hillman, senior fellow at the Policy Studies Institute in London, thinks democratic dissent from conformocrat-enviro-hysteria needs to be suppressed: “When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it. This has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not.”¹²⁴ If the people are too foolish to vote as their betters instruct, then it will have to be “imposed.” The earth is your fuhrer. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute, agrees on the inadequacy of America’s “democracy” (his scare quotes) and argues that (to quote the article he wrote for the South China Morning Post) “Chinese Leadership Needed to Save Humanity.”¹²⁵

The New York Times’ Great Thinker Thomas Friedman regularly channels his inner