The American economy is skating on thin ice and has been for sometime.
As long as it keeps skating it wont fall through.
For this to happen America needs to control the ice space and not be impeded in the direction she wants to travel.
Whilst the most powerful nation on earth she could get away with it.
The U.S has had a success of sorts that easily beguiled less powerful poorer nations.
Which was her intention and an essential part of the game plan.
Confidence and trust, no matter how undeserved is necessary for business to continue.
But the success she has enjoyed for some time is as two dimensional as the Hollywood sign itself.
Like a driver who always tail gates but never suffers a front end shunt she lived in a fools paradise.
Its an old story. She was the runaway success, the market leader, forever expanding year on year, splashing out on all the trappings heedless of all the costs and the pain she was storing up for herself that one day must be felt.
In short America has become the Great Gatsby skating through a world of the unpunished error.
She remade Descartes well known maxim to read:
I spend, therefore I am rich.
Now, looming over the horizon appear some immovable objects that look likely to resist her irresistable force.
First is peak oil.
When it going to happen, has it happened already?
if, and its a big 'if' anyone actually knows they are keeping it close to their chest.
Now the Big Junkie heedless of her first fix lost back in time begins to fear that there will be a last one.
Secondly as has been pointed out by Ratcatcher her economy is also partly sustained by the sale of oil in dollars.
Saddam amongst others began to sell at least some oil in euros.
Even with him gone this trend will continue weakening the dollar.
So in order to give out stupid tax breaks to the already rich a plan to pay for them had then to be enacted.
(incidentally, the war in Iraq through the no bid Halliburton contracts has seen the largest ever sums of money transfer from the American public economy back via Iraq back into the hands of private American corporations.
To which one can only say - Smooth Move Ex-lax!)
And now to Iraq itself.
Everybody thought that Uncle Sam only had eyes on what lay beneath the ground there.
Not So.
It hadn't been missed inside the beltway that lots of the profit in manufacturing had headed east to China and the pacific rim.
The 'Reconstruction' of Iraq was going to look after that.
Paul Bremmer introduced a law allowing foreign corporations to come in buy up all of Iraqis Nationalised Industries, renovate them and ship all profits free of tax out of the country.
Following them would have come the Nikes and Gaps of this world using Iraqi labour rather than Chinese.
Instead of working for the neighbourhood wise guy the average worker would now find himself working for the capo de capo.
But the plan didn't work.
Lawyers for the corps looked at the small print in the Geneva Convention and saw that an occupying force could not re appropriate and occupied territories goods and chattels.
An immovable object had appeared the irresistible force was stopped.
The corporations didn't come, reconstruction did not begin, but insurrection began.
Then Bremmer wished to take Iraq out of of OPEC refurbish the oil plant and turn on the taps full blast reducing the oil price and splitting up OPEC whilst the cheap oil price would boost the U.S. economy.
(incidentally there have been no metering devices on the lines since the Americans arrived so only god knows how much has been pumped out of the ground.)
But the oil companies looked twice at this arrangement and saw their shipping costs rising and profit margins dropping and the also didn't like a constant price fluctuation going on.
So they didn't go along with that and so the America economy didn't get the hoped for boost.
Another immovable object meeting an irresistible force causing heat friction and of course more war.
And soon China's home market four times larger than the U.S's will begin to mature then China will begin like Henry Ford in his day to make the largest profits selling to its own.
I read it on arrse that there shortly will come a time when Americans can no longer afford to shop at Wal Marts!
I believe this to be credible.
In the smirk of the chimp one can read America's nemesis and standing by its side the ever faithful idiot mute butler, the British Jeeves unable even to say
"Are you sure you want to do that sir?"
(on life in the U.S. financial smelting rooms read
'Liars Poker, Rising from the Wreckage on Wall st.' by Michael Lewis)
