*Bush on World Tour…

Selling America…

—at Discount Prices!

On  September 20^th, 2007,   DI Foreign Policy Editor, Dusty Schoch, wrote an article captioned:

Is a  Depression and Collapse of America in our Offing?

You can bet Barbie’s Butt it is. 

The “China Syndrome” Revisited on 9/11/07

The below-featured essay by NY Times columnist,  Maureen Dowd, © NY Times, 1-20-07 (all rights reserved NY Times) up-dates DW’s gloomy forecast on American economy, confirming (belatedly as the media always does) the existence of recession in America as a probable precursor to Depression. Also confirmed is the complicit responsibility of Corporate America and its puppet in our oval office for the precipitous plunge we’re in. America has been not only betrayed by its dollar-driven ruling class and administration exporting war and selling off…everything else; America, in a very essential sense, (i.e., ownership and control) is being very rapidly sold piecemeal  to the fat cats in other nations, chiefly Arabian sheiks and Industrial China, all totally non-democratic and totalitarian regimes. When we exported sufficient industry to Japan, enabling them to purchase substantial portions of  America’s assets (and real estate), we were melding our nation with an arguably reformed and militarily-benign ally. China and the sheiks of the Middle East, on the other hand, are more like Democracy’s heart of undermining darkness.  China looks at us as a future base of operations under their dominion, a subidiary nation of dependent and addicted consumers;  The sheiks—as they always have-- view us as “infidels”  about to perish on our own swords (of greed and aggression).   Dowd talks about this in unfortunately glib terms as a “Red, White and Blue Tag Sale”, where in fact it is a  vividly-painted portrait of our nation’s economic and industrial surrender and foreseeable collapse.

Jan. 22 , 2008

Red, White and Blue Tag Sale

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: January 20, 2008

When President Bush finished doing his sword dances and Arabian stallion inspections, when he finished making a speech in Abu Dhabi on the importance of freedom that fell flat, when he finished lounging in his fur-lined George of Arabia robe in the Saudi king’s tent, he came home.

Or he came to what was left of home.

A Washington Post cartoon by Tom Toles summed it up best: “Great to be home,” W. enthuses on Air Force One, heading toward the East Coast. “Anything interesting happen while I was gone?” Hanging on the skyline of New York is a sign reading: “U.S.A. Now a Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Foreign Investors.”

Wherever he went, W. seemed dazzled by the can-do spirit of the J. Pierrepont Finches of the new Middle East. “It’s important for the president to hear thoughts, hopes, dreams, aspirations, concerns from folks that are out making a living,” he told Saudi entrepreneurs.

In Dubai, he commended young Arab leaders, saying, “The entrepreneurial spirit is strong.”

In Abu Dhabi, he marveled at the royal family’s plans to build a city based entirely upon renewable energy. “Amazing, isn’t it?” W. said.

You know you’re in trouble when your Middle East oil pump is greener than you are.

Even as W. played cheerleader for Arab business, the Arabs were cleaning our clocks — then buying them. Our addiction to oil has allowed our pushers in the Persian Gulf to go on a shopping spree to snap us up.

Hillary Clinton was right when she said it was “pathetic” that President Bush had to beg the Saudis to drop the price of oil.

One cascading rationale he offered for invading Iraq was the benign domino theory, that bringing democracy to Iraq would sway the autocrats in the region to be less repressive.

But when W. visited Saudi Arabia and Egypt last week, he did not have the whip hand. He could not demand anything of the autocrats in the way of more rights for women and dissidents, much less get the Saudis to help on oil production. He needs their help in corralling Iran, which has been puffed up by the occupation of Iraq.

So he was a supplicant in Saudi Arabia. The American economy is a supplicant, too.

Two decades ago, we fretted that Japan was taking over America when Sony bought Columbia Pictures and Mitsubishi bought a chunk of Rockefeller Center. But they overpaid for everything.

Now, because of Wall Street’s overreaching, our economy depends on foreign oil and foreign loans to stay afloat.

China and Arab countries have a staggering amount of treasury securities. And the oil-rich countries are sitting on so many petrodollars that they are looking beyond prestige hotels and fashion labels and taking advantage of the fire sale to buy eye-popping stakes in our major financial institutions.

Like the president, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch came with tin cups to Middle Eastern, Asian and American investors last week, for a combined total of nearly $19.1 billion, after the subprime mortgage debacle blew up their books.

Citigroup, which raised $7.5 billion from Abu Dhabi in November, raised another $12.5 billion, including from Singapore, Kuwait and Saudi Prince Walid bin Talal. Merrill Lynch gave $6.6 billion in preferred stock to Kuwait, South Korea, a Japanese bank and others.

(While the great sage Bob Rubin was advising Hillary Clinton on sound fiscal policy, he seemed to be asleep at the Citigroup switch.)

As Warren Buffett has said, we are giving ourselves a party to feed our appetite for oil and imported goods and paying for it by selling off the furniture, our most precious assets.

When the president got back Thursday night from a trip that made it clear he has no clout overseas, he had to rush the ailing economy into intensive care.

Next to the cool, strong euro, the dollar is a comparative runt in the world’s currencies. The weak dollar lets foreigners snap up real estate in Manhattan.

It is striking that the Bush scion, who has tried so hard to do the opposite of his father, also ends up facing the prospect of a recession in his final year in office.

Maybe if the president had spent the trillion he squandered on his Iraq odyssey on energy research, we might have broken the oil addiction.

Now it’s a race between Iraq, stupid, or the economy, stupid, to see which one will usher out W.

The country is engaged in a fit of nativism and Lou Dobbsism, obsessing about the millions of Mexicans who might be sneaking across the border when billions in foreign money are pouring into Citigroup. You figure out what might be a bigger problem.

The national boundaries that really matter are the financial ones: Who’s going to own the American economy?

Postscript by Len Carrier

Dick Cheney famously said that deficits don't matter. On that premise our government debt ballooned from $5.3 trillion in 2000 to more than $9.1 trillion today. Where did our government incur most of that debt? At least $500 billion so far went toward waging aggressive wars, other tens of billions went toward giving 1% of our population huge tax cuts. Why didn't we notice? It was because China and Japan bought our paper, so we were able to continue our lifestyles as if each of us--300 million of us--didn't already owe the government more than $30,000. And there is more to come. Defense-related spending has increased so much that for 2008 it is estimated to reach $1 trillion for the first time in history.

Deficits might not matter in the short term, as long as the funds are used to put people back to work in the way that FDR did-- stimulating the economy by devoting money to improving education, health care, and our infrastructure. But that's not where our deficits were incurred. Our deficits were largely incurred by feeding the maw of the military-industrial complex--something Eisenhower warned us about long ago.

Unfortunately, FDR's programs have been eviscerated by 40 years of Republican administrations, along with Bill Clinton's policies of "go along to get along." President Bush's irresponsible warmongering, along with his ill-begotten view that we need to enrich the wealthy in order for it to trickle down to the poor, has put us in a terrible fix.  Suddenly Bush seems to get it.  He has now put forward a tax rebate scheme to pump money back into the economy.  And the Federal Reserve, after sitting on the sidelines, has crafted an emergency stimulus by cutting the Federal Funds rate by .75%. But it might already be too late. The wolf of recession is upon us, and  Bush's suggested rebate program would put money only in the hands of those who need it least--the very corporations whose insatiable appetite has got us into the fix we're in.. We are no longer the richest country in the world, with the EU being first in GDP, and China a close third.  In trade deficits we rank 163rd, just ahead of a country such as Australia, which depends heavily on imports. As a hangover from the Cold War, we have been operating on a war economy, expecting defense contractors to bail us out. Now our profligate ways are catching up to us, and the chickens have come home to roost.  By the time we get a responsible administration in place, the chickens will probably have flown the coop.

Len Carrier