Are you a US-based citizen? Are you worried about your country's future?
Understand this: whether you voted for him or not, Obama is not the problem.
The problem is that your country is an empire, and this empire is dying.
No, the reason isn't the recent implosion of the Bubble. The reason is the long-term structural decline of the power-plant of Empire – or what sociologists call US-style monopoly capitalism.
This is a systemic issue, which has been festering for the bulk of the 41 years I've been on this planet. Simply, the US economy is choking on its own accumulated legacy costs. Here are the seven biggest legacy costs of Empire:
1. Wall Street's oligopoly on finance has made its investment bankers rich. However, this oligopolistic structure channels capital into unproductive bubbles which eventually implode, requiring hideously expensive public bailouts.
2. Neoliberal ideologues have long promoted the holy trinity of private car ownership, private education and private home ownership. For a time, this made GM, Yale and Citicorps rich, but it also generated hideous pollution and traffic jams, an increasingly decrepit system of public education, ecologically unsustainable suburban sprawl, and a destructive housing bubble.
3. The US has long denied its citizens the most basic organizing and union rights found in all other First World countries. This has padded the profit margins of US corporations. But these same policies have also created a low-skill, badly educated workforce, unable to produce world-class goods.
4. The US military-industrial complex created millions of secure middle-class jobs, and enabled the Empire's ruling elites to run huge swathes of the planet for more than five decades (1945-2000). But over time, this same military-industrial complex rotted the Empire from within, very much as excessive military spending destroyed the USSR. American firms win military contracts based on their Washington lobbying skills, not their technical excellence or productivity, to the point where most of today's $1 trillion annual military budget is sheer economic deadweight.
5. The US has a mass media system utterly owned and dominated by a few giant oligopolies (public broadcasting makes up less than 1% of the US media market, as compared with 20-25% in most European countries and Japan). When the US was the center of the world film, TV and media industries, this didn't seem to matter. But the long-term result is that Americans are some of the most poorly informed and badly educated people on earth, easily manipulated by devious corporate propaganda and completely unaware of the fact that the rest of the planet creates and watches its own TV shows, films and media.
6. The US has a broken health system, which makes a few insurance oligopolies extremely wealthy at the expense of patient care and access – 40 million Americans have no insurance at all. Millions more have insurance, but are bankrupted each year by illnesses. The US has fallen to 38th in the world in infant mortality and 40th in life expectancy, and it will continue to plummet in the rankings, thanks to the creation of large-scale health and social security initiatives in many nations of the semi-periphery. (The Obama healthcare bill won't change this. It will force millions of Americans to buy health insurance coverage they can't afford, but does not address the root cause of the problem – the fact that the US system is dominated by health insurance companies. They make money by charging as much for care as possible, and providing as little of that care to patients as possible.)
7. Finally, the US has a broken political system, which runs on billion of dollars of campaign donations and legions of permanent lobbyists, busily cutting deals for their Wall Street masters at the expense of ordinary taxpayers
Any one of these legacy costs would seriously impair any modern economy. But the US is being dragged down by all seven of them, simultaneously.
That's the bad news. The good news is that the multipolar world is here, and there's no going back to the past. Sooner or later, the US will have to throw its Empire on the scrap heap of history – and the sooner, the better.
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