The Decline and Fall of the America Empire: Part One 1945-2011

PR, this kind of honesty and realism is extremely rare these days in political/ideological discussion. I think it deserves to be complimented. Most people have too much ego to allow them to admit that they don't have the perfect solution to every problem.

I can think of these subjects in theoretical, ideological terms, but I rarely allow myself to do it because my role in the business world requires pragmatism. I have to come up with ideas that get measurable results.

Balbus, I think we should give PR the benefit of the doubt. It is possible for people to change. My boyfriend has changed a good number of his opinions in recent years, and I know it's for real. He can't fool me. Some of my views have evolved quite a bit too, especially in the areas of big business and banking. The world is evolving and changing faster every day, so you can't set your views in stone without quickly getting left in the dust. You have to look at new facts and re-evaluate everything all the time.

I know we tend to talk about business here strictly in terms of huge, multinational corporations, but small business has greatly increased its share of the American economic pie in the last two decades. Why? Mostly because it's easier for us to change with the times, and adapt to a transient world that has little in common with the structured business and political climate of 20 years ago.

 

Balbus can only see things in terms of labels, which is unfortunate.

 

Karen

If Rat really has changed his views then wouldn’t he have changed what his saying? Go and look at his recent posts and you’ll see he is still pumping out the same stuff he has in the past – just this time he claims he isn’t because he isn’t political anymore.

He is still labelling anyone with views to the left of his own brand of extreme right wing libertarianism as ‘socialists’ and he is still banging on about the evils of ‘big’ government etc.

So sorry if I’m a tad sceptical about his supposed ‘change’.

 

Rat

So basically you are saying you know the ideology you adhere to is useless and its ideas unworkable.

As Karen says it is interesting that you admit this, I mean I’ve been explaining to you for some years just how unworkable your ideas were and how and useless your ideology was, I glad you have now realised it for yourself.

But wouldn’t the rational thing to do upon this realisation be to find ideas that were not useless and unworkable?

I have a certain admiration for anarchist thinking and I have in the past defended them from attacks by you, so it is interesting you now claim to be one.

The thing is there are different branches of anarchism some are based on communalism and are about mutual aid and assistance of individuals working together for the benefit of all and that is the one I admire but there is a darker version based on self interest and Social Darwinist and neo-liberal principles where individuals compete with each other for resources in a totally unregulated ‘free market’.

 

Who said anything about the free market? I thought I have stated (numerous times now) that I am in opposition to monied systems. Your moronic attempts to pigeonhole me as some kind of political right-winger are failing once again. Is blatantly lying and putting words in people's mouths how low you're willing to go?

The difference between myself and idealistic morons on the left and right is that I have an idea of how the power structure works and how immense its propaganda machine is. So I believe there's no possibility for a real change to take place, and I make that clear, since too many people like yourself are so uninformed on real issues and know only how to spew partisan talking points designed to distract and divert attention from the truth. Too many people are also dependent on the type of nanny state system you advocate, which is not designed to help anyone, but rather create dependency, and out of that complete control. I am not going to advocate the status quo because it's the only thing we have to choose from, just like I don't vote for corporate stooges like Obama and fucking Mitt Romney because they're the only ones who can win.

NEXT.

 

Just because the term is often pronounced with venom doesn't mean I consider it a bad word.

Has there ever been a group of more than 20 people that was able to permanently get beyond using any form of money? Is there a real alternative for a large country?

Real change is taking place all the time, but too gradually for many to notice. I really should have brought this up earlier in the thread. It often appears that the future is going to be, like the past, all about the complex relationship that plays out between large national governments and large corporations that are vertically-integrated, heavily capitalized, and publicly traded on stock exchanges. We will always have some big companies building cars and airplanes and computer chips, but their importance in the grand scheme of things has already peaked. The numbers make that very clear.

Explosive growth in the service sector, especially in e-commerce, heavily favors small companies with only one or two levels of management. And nobody knows what the world will be like when we (the small companies) dominate the world economy to a much greater extent than we do now. We have a much different relationship with government and banks. We don't have a lot of influence. We aren't too big to fail. We don't get bailouts.

What does a superpower look like or act like when most of its economic activity revolves around a huge number of small businesses? Nobody has ever seen this.

Twenty years ago, a stereotypical picture of success in America was a group of cookie-cutter corporate employees, flying in a big jet to an important business meeting in some glass office tower with expensive furniture. These days, a cutting edge business meeting looks like a diverse collection of individuals from different specialty companies having a videoconference from their home office computers, or laptops if they are on the road. There is no big jet. There is no office tower.

Funny thing is, I don't think people in government spend much time thinking about us, and we sure as hell don't spend much time thinking about them. Especially at the federal level. We deal mostly with state and local regulations. And we have no dealings with Wall Street. We use regional banks.

It's almost like there are two completely separate capitalist systems out there. The old one is getting all the attention - the one that is barely clinging to survival.

 

Karen

I clearly haven’t explained myself properly.
I’ve tried to point out that one of the great problems I see with US political debate is that because of long party political, media and corporate propaganda many American seem to have come to the view that there are neo-liberal ideas one side and ‘socialism’ on the other.
For example someone on another thread put forward the view that the right winger Ron Paul should be seen at the centre position in politics the fulcrum that divides what is left and what right. Another who calls themselves a ‘Democratic Socialist’ also seems to think Ron Paul worth voting for.
It is not a matter of ‘socialism’ being a good or bad word or even a good or bad idea it is that many Americans seem to see anything to the left of very right wing ideas as being ‘socialist’ even when they are not (just look at the debate over US healthcare reforms). And for many Americans ‘socialism’ is associated with Stalin, gulags and a police state.

 

Karen

I admire your optimism but is it justified in the wider context – the thing is that for many the move to a service sector heavy economy has seen their living standards fall. It is not just a coincidence that the move to service economy over the last 30 odd years has seen the real term wages of those in the middle and lower sectors stagnate or drop. I mean many service sector jobs are badly paid or are only part time (although at the high end income can be very high). In other words it has increased inequality and reduced economic distribution.

(Also the problem with small businesses is that that is how big businesses started out and they have a habit of gobbling up or merging with other ‘small businesses’ on the way.)

And lastly e-commerce businesses are usually technology intensive rather than employee intensive industries. So again they are likely to increased inequality and reduced economic distribution.

 

I know all that, and I'm not saying that I disagree with any of it.

I have to be a bit of an optimist because I have to make a living in this economy, for many more years.

I wish I could claim to be a visionary and say that I saw all this coming, but in truth I preferred the small business world mostly because it bothered me so much that big corporations were so stuffy and uptight about things I considered to be unimportant. My career $ total up to this point might have been higher if I had gone with large companies exclusively, but I can't say that my quality of life would have been higher. (How would you like wearing 4-inch heels, 10 hours a day?)

I think the main point to consider about the ongoing economic shift is that it will impact the world in ways that are hard to predict, because we don't have any past history with large-scale post-industrial economies. We can't study how these things have played out before. In most public debates and published books on the future, people generally talk as if the world is always going to be all about heavy manufacturing and its interrelationship with governments. But you know that can't be quite right.

Maybe in the future people won't talk so much of empires and ranking countries against each other. I've already seen this come about in business. I'm in a field where there tens of thousands of competitors, nationally. Who ranks number one? I doubt if anybody knows, and nobody cares. It isn't useful information on the local or regional level.

Remember the old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.

 

Karen

WOW I’ve worked in a lot of places and meet a lot of women in my time and I’ve only meet one that had to wear 4 inch heels at work and she took them off when she wasn’t dancing around a pole.

 

Too bad I didn't live anywhere near one of those clubs when I was the right age to give that job a try. I think it would have been a fun way to make a lot of money for very little work.

Strip clubs are the only business institutions in America that are specifically designed for women to get men drunk and take advantage of them. I like to think of it as payback for the last 6000+ years of social history.

 

Indie posted in another post a reply to this thread, so I’ve moved it over and will answer here -

 

Indie

OK, lets see you think that the US was at its most ‘powerful and best’ just prior to 1913?

I’d have to ask who was it best for – in 1945 wealth was a lot more distributed with many rising into the middle class, where laws protected many from harm and where women had the vote, this can’t be said of say 1900.

The time you are championing (and would seem to want to emulate) was an incredibly unequal society and so of course one where wealth had great power and influence.

It was the time of the trusts and monopolies the time when most people worked very long hours for very small wages, in often dangerous and unhealthy conditions, and where many children worked in similarly bad conditions. A time when there was little or no social provision for those injured at work of suffered from the many bouts of unemployment. A place where many lived in overcrowded slums, where avoidable disease such as cholera and typhoid were commonplace. And time when most people were dead before they reached 50 years of age. A time when the crackpot ideas of Social Darwinism, promoted by wealth, were often accepted as true.

I mean I can see why it would appeal to you many of these things you would seem to want but why would most people want this back again?

To me many of the things that have helped to improve the quality of life of the majority have come about by those opposing how society was structured in 1900. Better working hours, decent wages, health and safety laws, welfare provision, minimum working age laws, etc etc.

 

Balbie:
None of the things you claim as improvements to the quality of life, with the arguable exception of welfare, came about as a result of the 3 items I mentioned.
And it's not the 'time period' I champion, but the laws applicable to retaining freedom of the people, and their control of the government.

 

Indie

But that’s my point – I’m talking about the majority’s quality of life, the things I talk about made it possible for people to be free from exploitation, free from the harm of bad working conditions, to be free from having to work so many hours that life was a drudge, freedom to live in a clean environment and so on and so on. (Including in here the expansion of the voting franchise)

Tangible benefits many of which you seem to be in favour of removing (or at least reducing) and instead you think ‘freedom’ is about as far as I can tell –

Not having a Central Bank? Although it was set up because the US kept having financial crises, with an especially bad one in 1907. Now I’m not saying its perfect, but on the whole a Central Bank can be very useful if used correctly.

You don’t want the popular election of Senators but instead want them appointed by the State’s legislature? So basically you want a power removed from the majority and given to a few, a return it to a system that was often seen as corrupt and would seem to favour the interests of wealth?

You want a tax cut that would very much favour wealth?

 

Time for Part Two anyone?

 

except the majority of strip clubs are owned by men.

 

If that's the measure, I'd say the picture is complicated. 1913 would be the Taft Administration, noted for its frequent interventions to prop up or overthrow Latin American governments and hostility toward progressive antitrust and conservation measures. Only a diehard conservative curmudgeon would pick that as our golden age. Of the post WW II presidents, Truman was a genuine champion of the working man, but also used the bomb. Eisenhower is fondly remembered as a father figure, stood up to McCarthy, and used the National guard against the segregationists, but made many questionable international interventions and alliances in the course of Cold War politics and capitalist profit. Kennedy gave us charisma and paid lip service to worthy causes, which LBJ was able to bring to fruition. LBJ gave us major civil rights legislation and the War on Poverty, but LBJ's Vietnam war used the poor as cannon fodder, made Americans aware of the fallibility of their leaders, and shook their previous self-concept as moral and invincible. Nixon gave us the EPA, major environmental legislation, and recognition of China and declared himself a Keynesian, but tarnished the presidency with Watergate. Carter brought a level of morality to the White House approximating Mother Teresa's, but was basically ineffectual--dithering about malaise in his cardigan sweater while we tried to cope with stagflation, the energy crisis, and the Iran hostage crisis.. Reagan, idolized by many, helped to destroy the unions, undermined environmental legislation, secretly engaged in an arms deal with Iran to support the Contras. Bush 41 was a true statesman and an honest man, but was out of touch with the economy and the average working person. Clinton left us with a budget surplus by the end of his administration, but recession was already brewing. He also laid the foundations for globalization with his neo-liberal trade deals and perfected a political style of insincerity by embracing Dick Morris' strategy of "triangulation"--always one moist finger in the air to tell him what his convictions were. G.W. gave us two wars, torture, and the great recession of '08, although otherwise he seemed like a nice guy. So hard to choose.

I personally think Reagan is the winner in doing the most to push us over the edge on the road to destruction. His tax cuts for the rich, borrow and spend policies running up the debt and thwarting social reform, assault on environmental programs, and use of his charm and acting skills to sell all of this to the American public set us on a course which has yet to be undone. The fact that he was such a likeable guy made him all the more destructive by becoming a revered icon. But he was still better than Trump.

 

How the fuck were you granted a mod position?

I love this site.