Firstly, thanks for the feedback on Part 1:
1/ It had completely slipped my mind that Coleman was from MINNESOTA. so to whoever suggested he might take legal action over the baseball game, touche
2/ To those who point out that since the fall of the USSR, Russia has come out stronger than before, that will be exactly my point regarding the possible future of the (blue) territories of the present USA.
Please be patient as I make my case.
Readers of Part 1 will recall my reference toKevin Phillips who may have invented the so-called Southern Strategy, and who appears, in later life, to have become totally dismayed by the outcome of his work of "genius" as a young man. I want to particularly refer to three of his books "The Cousins' Wars" (1999), American Theocracy (2006) and Bad Money (2008). As I read him, I understand him to have three major theses relevant to this discussion:
In the last 500 years of Western Civilization, hegemony has been held sequentially by four powers, namely Spain, Holland, Great Britain and the USA. Each of these hegemons has been brought down by a combination of overfinancialization of the economy and lazy, triumphalistic religion.
The USA can be effectively divided into two cultures, namely Greater New England (more or less the blue states) derived from East Anglia, the fens region and the major cities and ports of England and the Greater South (more or less the red states) derived from the northern and rural counties of England and, especially, the Scottish borders. These cultures have been at war on and off since the parliamentary revolt of 1642 and the execution of King Charles in 1649. ( The reason the British Isles are at peace now is because the English republicans migrated en masse to New England following the restoration of 1660).
Somewhat like Germany during the Thirty Years War, but unlike other countries such as France, Canada and Australia, conflict in the USA has a primarily religious rather than socio-economic basis, making conflict harder to resolve by political processes and more likely to result in wars like 1861-65, in which hundreds of thousands of people are killed. (I know the French revolution was violent, but by orders of magnitude less than the English or American civil wars or the War between the States).
In this diary, I will look at the first proposition, as it relates to the list of factors I outlined in Part 1 as reasons the USA might be under mortal threat. In Part 3, I will look more closely at the other two propositions, as well as discussing possible solutions.
Overfinancialization of the economy: As British Prime Minister Disraeli once said, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. With that commonsense caveat, let us recognize that the financial sector makes up at least 20 percent of the US economy (charts and graphs abound in Bad Money). Given that anyone depending on a 401(k) plan for retirement income in the USA is up to their eyeballs in the financial sector, most readers would sense that these figures are likely to be accurate. (We have a similar system in Australia, for which the jargon is "superannuation") However, unlike Australia, the USA also has a major industry in "securitization" of various debt instruments, such as mortgages to buy houses (we have the mortgages, but not the securitization, thank God).
Now the point is that 20 per cent of an economy can easily represent control. Two issues present themselves:
1/ If the financial industry forms coalitions with the health industry, which represents 17 per cent of the US economy, the defence industry at 7 per cent (one trillion dollars out of 15 trillion dollars of US GDP, the criminal justice systemat href="50 billion per year (one per cent of GDP) and agribusiness at least $500 billion per year (3 per cent of GDP, it has over 50 per cent of the US economy stitched up, which, in anyone's language, is a powerful blocking coalition against reform.
2/ It may sound old fashioned and moralistic, but earning money by shuffling money and paper is inherently a less moral way of earning a living than making things or performing services that actually help people.
By this way of thinking, recent excesses, such as the bonuses paid to executives of failing finance companies, exposed by Andrew Cuomo in New York are not an accident. Because the financial industry is so powerful, it is arrogant enough to think it can get away with it. Because it is inherently morally challenged, it is less restrained by conscience or shame from what is, frankly, grand theft of stupendous proportions.
And conscience and/ or shame are essential in the preservation of any society. Relying on laws will not suffice. How can you expect a legislature to have the foresight to pass watertight laws against every conceivable, and hitherto inconceivable, antisocial behavior, which is what would be required in a society where elites lack internal restraint? But internal restraint in the elites is precisely what is lost in a society where religion is lazy and triumphalistic, due to the twin excesses of legalism (anything that is not explicitly illegal is alowed)and antinomianism (I am a Christian, everything is permisible to me), both of which are rampant in America.
Phillips also makes the point that hegemonic nations tend to be leaders in whatever is the current state of the art energy technology, whether that be wind for Holland, coal for Great Britain or oil for the USA. The dominant energy industry, at a time of decline, also tends to coalesce with the financial industry to block reform and ossify the economy. The adoption of aggressive mandatory renewable energy targets in the European Union, particularly Germany, while proposals for emissions trading in the US limp along in Congress, in my opinion gives some clues as to where world leadership might go in the 21st century. Indeed, I have been told that, in Germany, more people are currently employed in renewable energy than in auto manufacture, so, in case of conflict between the two, what industry do you think would win out in that country? or in the USA?
Another huge area of ossification in the USA is health care reform. The current American health care system is, of course, frankly insane. For this discussion, I want to concentrate on two points:
If working families rely for health insurance on their employer, this represents an extra cost of doing business in the USA of fantastic proportions, which is not incurred by competitor businesses anywhere in the world. So it might make sense to manufacture cars, washing powder etc in America for domestic consumption, due to proximity to domestic markets, but not for export. So the contribution of "good old fashioned American know how" to the balance of trade to pay for essential imports, like oil, is nil. So the US dollar progressively loses value, import prices rise and people become poorer, both in absolute terma and by comparison with folk living in Europe or Asia.
If a self employed person can't get health cover for a pre-existing condition, innovation in the economy is stifled as people aged 40-59, who are at their creative peak in many ways, but might be on tablets for high blood pressure, can't use their creative talents to set up innovative businesses in America, for fear that, if anything goes wrong with their health prior to their 65th birthday, when Medicare kicks in, they are f@#*%&. (This is so crazy that, at first, I thought they were making it up. But it's true.)
But the point is, health reform has never been achieved easily, not the NHS in Britain, not universal Medicare in Australia and, for all I know, not in Canada either. However, it may yet prove to be impossible to introduce meaningful reform in the USA, due to the powerful coalition of vested interest against all meaningful reform described above. BTW, although I have never set foot in Montana, North Dakota or Nebraska, and may, therefore, be talking total bullshit at this point, I do think the problem is far greater than three individuals, Senators Baucus, Conrad and Nelson, threatening to block reform. I mean, give them credit for knowing, as senators elected repeatedly in red states, what their particular electorates might be in favor of. It's the system that is flawed, more so than the individuals.
That brings up the key issue of science, and wilful ignorance thereof by sections of the US elite. The fossil fuel industry sponsored nonsense about climate change has been discussed so frequently and in depth on DailyKos that I will not add to that discussion. Instead, some observations on the health status of Americans, the causes thereof, and the economic and social implications thereof.
That there is an epidemic of obesity in the USA is beyond dispute. Obesity is actually part of what medical science refers to as the metabolic syndrome, leading in turn to a greatly increased risk of circulatory obstruction. Of particular sociological and political interest is the increased risk of cerbrovascular disease, presenting with intellectual sluggishness and difficulty with learning new facts and adjusting to new situations. In my view, it is not ridiculous to postulate that no small part of the attentional deficits frequently seen in older American (and, true enough, other Western country) voters and citizens is due to metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome may well end up playing a similar role in the decline of the US as lead poisoning is supposed to have done in Ancient Rome.
Two perhaps obscure points, but I hope to convince readers they may be important. Firstly, the suggestion that fructose(derived in large part from corn syrup) is a particularly potent cause of metabolic syndrome. The science, though not yet conclusive, is troubling. Stopping the use of corn syrup to sweeten soda drinks in America might just prolong life expectancy significantly, as well as saving the taxpayer a fortune by reducing health expenditure (but adversely affect the bottom line of American agribusiness).
Secondly, the possible connection between metabolic syndrome and sleep disturbance. And note, research is moving beyond saying, if you get fat, your breathing at night will obstruct, you will snore, and your obesity will somehow get worse (sleep apnea syndrome). The suggestion is that shift work and sleep deprivation due to pressure of the workplace may be directly adversely affecting one's insulin resistance and, ultimately, the healthy functioning of one's brain. So there is an issue of workers' rights potentially involved.
The thing is, though, that discussions about "health costs" and how to reduce them, comes more easily to me as an Australian who pays for health care out of taxes than it would for an American of comparable socioeconomic status, for whom, I assert, considerations that health care is an industry, with health stocks listed on the NYSE, whose share price affects my 401(k) loom into consideration. Can one see a potential conflict of interest?
So why discuss science in the media, and risk out of control public debate threatening to reduce share prices on Wall Street and reduce revenues for agribusiness and the health industry? Why not divert public attention with ad nauseam reportage of Michael Jackson's doctor's possible misdemeanors? Meanwhile, Americans are dying at a faster rate than residents of 41 other counties, including freaking Jordan.
So much for the first part of Kevin Phillips' thesis. Part 3, with discussion of the second and third parts of the thesis, and discussions about ways forward, follows