Posted inPolitics: National

The new world order

The Republicans are on a roll, or so the conventional wisdom goes. The American public, with the memory of a kicked dog, is ready to re-entrust power to the Party that Wrecked America. It certainly has the eye-candy for horny white male voters, such as the comely-but-stupid Christine O'Donnell and the leggy half-term Gov. Palin. It has billions of dollars thanks to the Supreme Court's ruling on corporate campaign spending (corporations are people, you see, except when they break the law). And it has issues: Gays and Muslims are taking over the country, along with Obama's "socialism" — such as the big giveaway to the for-profit health-care sector, the rescue of the casino on Wall Street and continued funding of the for-profit national security economy. Issues such as that the Constitution is sacrosanct, with its mandated theocracy, that evolution is a "theory" (like gravity) and should not be taught, that stem-cell research is, like all science, of the devil and we should just incinerate all those embryos, that tax cuts and no regulation will solve every ill, that brown people cutting your lawn are the biggest threat to American civilization.

America has become like Arizona: Ignorant, fearful, disconnected from and hostile to the commons, inordinately dependent on gub'ment dollars even as it rails against gub'ment. And, most of all, locked in a clueless feedback loop trying to avoid reality. But the real world moves on.

A new world order is crashing down on us whether we like it or not. And it's not the new world order of Glenn Beck's paranoia or George H.W. Bush's optimistic post-Cold War vision.

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Posted inUncategorized

The biggest issue no one wants to discuss

Financial Times pronounced the recent Davos conference the gloomiest in its history. The "global agenda" of world leaders has crumbled. With the Doha round of trade liberalization in shambles, "protectionism" is seen on the rise. This is one thing that happens during historic economic collapses: old arrangements, particularly unsustainable ones, crash down. This is what happens when an old order enters an pivot point of discontinuity, where the future will be profoundly different from the recent past.

Dangerous destabilization is headed our way. This is why Dennis Blair, the national intelligence director, said this week that the global economic collapse is the biggest threat to the United States, bigger than al Qaeda. The more we try to deny the current reality, or return to the bubbles of the past decade, the worse the reckoning. This is also true of trade. The "free trade" regime that has coalesced since 2000 has hugely benefited the swells and oligarchs that attend Davos, especially by increasing their personal wealth thanks to cheap labor in developing countries.

But the millions of Americans who have lost well-paid manufacturing jobs as a result, with nothing to replace them but a collapsed housing bubble, don't do Davos. They are not all blameless, to be sure. Like all Americans, they are blissfully unaware of the consequences of their consumer decisions. So they happily shopped at Wal-Mart as their jobs went away. No matter. Beware the meme that facing this, as in an abortive House attempt to put a "buy American" provision in the stim package, is "protectionism." Going forward, a new world trade arrangement is essential. It is the biggest issue facing the country that no one in power wants to discuss.

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