The New American Century - Part Two - Just charge it?

A satire...The economy tanks but the Republicans decide to put world conquest onto their Visa Card...

The following is a continuation of an earlier discussion of the New American Century, the Republican plan written by high officials in the current administration in the year 2000, describing how America would conquer the world and rule it for a hundred years, beginning first with the conquest of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

Now this will of course cost money, and money isn't something America has a lot of right now. As for passing the hat, like they did during that first Gulf War, well that doesn't seem to be something that is going to happen this time, especially since both France and Germany have woke up and ‘smelled the coffee' as it were, and after getting over their dazed shock, now realize that those crazy Yankees are really serious about proceeding step by step with that plan for world conquest of theirs, a plan which does not include sharing the spoils of victory with two second rate old provinces like France and Germany.

Now France and Germany and Russia, the trouble makers at the moment, cut a deal with Saddam a few years ago to divide up a trillion bucks worth of oil, on the condition of course that they bust the sanctions against Iraq. This was back in the days when Saddam was trying to drive a wedge into the United Nations by bribing France and Germany and Russia and it worked too. You might recall how several years back France and Germany and Russia, just fresh from signing on for a trillion bucks worth of oil, started talking about how maybe it was time to ease up on the sufferings of the Iraqi people under those sanctions.

Well the Americans have made it quite clear to all three of those countries that they are going to rip up those deals - null and void, and you can understand how thoroughly pissed off France and Germany and Russia are now. Not only that but they have been constantly insulted by the Americans, who lecture them about signing on for every resolution, rubber stamping all the stuff they get sent by New Rome, and then maybe they might get cut in on some Iraq oil later. Sure it won't be the full trillion bucks they were expecting, but it will be better than nothing, and it will be their payoff for giving the Americans the diplomatic cover they are looking for. Well, you might recall that in the United Nations this week, the position of France was that someday France might be in favor of invading Iraq, but not right at this moment, since there were still some questions surrounding international issues that needed to be settled. Basically what the French ambassador was saying, and what France and Germany are saying by being really stubborn and using a veto in Nato, and threatening a veto in the United Nations is that its not the right time to invade Iraq until they get that whole business of that trillion dollars in oil deals straightened out with those Yankee interlopers. After all a contract is a contract. Of course France and Germany have very little influence, not being great military powers capable of facing down the United States, but they do read American polls which show that in no way do the American people want to go it alone, and they also want the U.N. involved. Therefore, using the only tools at their disposal, their threat of ripping the diplomatic cover off of the American invasion of Iraq using their veto power, the French and the Germans and the Russians are trying to do some hard bargaining for more of that Iraqi oil. Sure, they must be realistic right now, and understand that there is no way in hell they are going to get the whole trillion bucks worth once the Americans get in there, but they are certainly going to do some hard bargaining and get as much out of that deal as they can. Until then they are going to start pressuring the Americans by vetoing every idea those Americans put out.

As for the Americans they have already told the United Nations that if they want to be a rubber stamp and thus pass every resolution Washington needs, well that's fine, they can appear on television to be very relevant and pass resolutions, but if they don't want to play ball well then they can go to hell. As you can see American threats to make the U.N. ‘Irrelevant' are themselves irrelevant since the Americans have as much told the United Nations that they are irrelevant. They can pass every resolution the right way, the way they are told, or they can worry about how to pay their bills when the Americans just go and do all that stuff they are planning anyways and cut off funding to the United Nations. As for NATO, if they want to get stubborn, well they can go to hell as well.

So you can see here, that with the Americans going around pissing everyone off, and dropping out of every treaty and every organization, well there is little hope of passing the hat to help pay for the new American Empire and thus Americans will just have to pay for conquering the whole world by themselves. This will be tough, because the economic policy of this administration is the economic policy of Ronald Reagan, or as I call it ReaganHawkonomics, which means that you cut taxes, and this does leave one to wonder how that New American Century is going to be paid for, since once Washington gets through pissing off the world, passing the hat won't be an option.

Now how can one characterize the ReaganHawkonomics, this Reagan prescription being, after all, the economic policy of the Republicans now that they are back in office again, so its relevant to ask the question. Perhaps you could describe Republican economic policy as ‘don't tax and then spend'. This would be compared to the less desirable ‘tax and spend' policy that the Republicans have always accused Democrats of pursuing, to the ruin of the entire nation. Now during the Reagan years the don't tax and spend economic policy produced massive deficits, which are still around to this day, being so huge that paying them off isn't really on the table, and therefore it is required to cut lots of social programs and talk about ditching Social Security for old widows and Medicare for orphans just in order, in the future, when the day of reckoning is coming we are told, to be able to pay the interest on that massive Reagan debt.

If one wanted to characterize Republican economic policy perhaps you could compare it to a household, where they were earning about 1,000 dollars a month, and they decided to take a pay cut, and then max out the credit card, on the theory that if you do it that way by the time your done you will wind up increasing your earnings potential greatly by the way you will stimulate your income. This, of course, just won't work in a household, but once those Republicans make it to Washington well they figure that they can pull it off somehow if they try that approach on an entire country. If it didn't work the first time, well I guess they figure that they'll have better luck this time. This is in spite of the fact that all that happened the last time they tried it is that they got a large deficit.

As for the so called ‘Reagan Miracle', well that turned out to be two things - first and foremost it was a giant stock market bubble, and due to the deregulation, all kinds of crime and crooked book keeping. Second, the Reagan Miracle was a ‘free trade' miracle, in that by opening the economy to sweat shop imports it allowed profit margins to temporarily soar, thus causing Republicans to boast that even if that other stupid idea of theirs of ‘not taxing and spending anyways' didn't work out at all, at least they accomplished a profit miracle by exporting jobs overseas to low wage sweatshops.

On the down side, now the Americans are left with a sagging, flabby collapsing economy, you know, since so many jobs were lost that no one could afford to buy all that stuff anymore, thus leading to a surplus of goods, thus leading to more cuts in production and more job losses and so on, accompanied by all sorts of nervous talk about the fears of deflation, which makes that great big debt even more expensive, as well as reduces profit margins, and just generally wrecks the economy.

Somehow, it seems a form of poetic justice, that, just when those same Republicans were getting back into office, the effects of that ReaganHawkonomics really began to catch up with the economy. You see, Republican economic policies don't destroy the economy right away, and based on what I have seen here it would take about 15 years or so for the damage to really work its way through the economy, I say 15 years, because companies didn't really have any profits for several years before the stock market bubble finally burst, but with all that shifty accounting that was going on all the time, no one knew since with all that deregulation and all that ‘trusting in the goodness of human nature' that Reagan proposed as an alternative to regulations, well how could you ever find out, right, since no one was checking up on things. Its called totally free market capitalism, unregulated, unbridled, totally totally freed up unleashed capitalism, and after sending jobs over seas and wrecking profits a totally freed up capitalism will, naturally, have to cook the books for a few years, until finally that doesn't work anymore and they just simply go bankrupt with a loud bang.

All this is relevant because once again the United States is doing more of that ReaganHawkonomics, and this even before the country has had 20 or 30 years to heal itself from the last time it tried something so stupid. Let's just say if the ‘don't tax and then spend' and ‘export our jobs to sweat shops free trading' policies of the Republicans caused this much damage the first time, and the country still hasn't healed, well its positively frightening to think about how much destruction is going to be caused by doing the same thing again, while the economy is still wrecked from the last time it was done. Strangely enough, no one seems to be worried about it, because it seems they take a casual attitude towards the possibility of living through the great depression again. They'll just ride it out for ten or twenty years and then everything will be fine. If the economy had 20 or 30 years to heal, and then Republicans got in again and destroyed the place, well at least the nation would be falling from a height, instead of dropping through the hole in the floor like they are now.

Republicans like to insist that Democrats ruin the country, and at the present time, that is probably true, since today the Democrats are Republicans themselves, Democrats having gone extinct a long time ago. However, despite what Republicans say, during the highly regulated, progressively taxed ‘welfare state' that existed in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, the United States economy experienced its most dramatic growth in its history. Nevertheless, Reagan did scream bloody murder about those policies, but it could not be because you can't have an economy and have those policies, because it is obvious, from history that you can, but rather what really pissed Reagan off and a lot of other people as well was that when you do that, you have to pay taxes, and so they came up with that other idea that Greed is Good, that if you don't tax and then spend, you wind up increasing your revenues. Lots of people fell for that profound Republican economic argument, as is obvious, since they let Reagan do it, and soon it became like a Religion, and so the IMF started forcing poor countries around the world to do it as well, the only difference being that the United States gets to run huge deficits whenever they want, but poor countries just aren't allowed to do that. They have to do their ReaganHawkonomics straight up, without diluting it, on the grounds that the poorer you are the more intense the Reagan treatment will have to be if those poor countries are ever to have a hope of getting onto their feet.

And all this is relevant to the discussion of the war against Iraq, the vital first step in the plan for the New American Century, since if those Republicans are going to go through with that plan of theirs to conquer the whole world, well that conquering and ruling the whole world thing doesn't come cheap. And with their economy all flabby and sagging like the way it is, well its not like the Americans can exactly afford to conquer the whole world right now, either. Now I know that the Republicans are following a carefully constructed plan that they crafted in 2000, before the economy tanked on them, but one would think that given that plunge into bankruptcy and ruin thing that just happened to them, well you would think that rather than just going ahead and proceeding step by step with that plan of theirs for the New American Century and methodically going about conquering the world, well you would think they could be a little less dogmatic now that they can't afford to conquer the world anymore, what with the economy being in the tank and all, and that maybe they could just postpone ruling the world and leave the project for another Republican Administration, say in 2020 or 2030, or however long it takes a country to recover from the policies of Ronald Reagan.

They could then call it the New American Half Century since they could conquer the world sometime around 2040 and then rule the world from 2050 to 2100. It wouldn't be as good as conquering the world right now and then ruling the world for a whole century, and granted the New American Half Century doesn't sound as good as the New American Century, but it would be the next best thing, and who knows, by 2040 they might actually be able to afford it. As it stands I don't think the Americans should be bothering with conquering the whole world right now because, let's be realistic, they simply can't afford it. That doesn't seem to be stopping them however, because they seem to be thinking that even though their economy is the crapper, they can still conquer the world and they can just put the whole thing on their American Express Card. You know, ‘just say Charge It!'

Now someone correct me if I am wrong, but I don't recall the Americans ever voting for the conquest of the whole world. That whole New American Empire thing just doesn't ring a bell with me as being the big election issue that finally swept the Republicans into power in 2000. And given what a big job it is, and how worried Americans are about paying off both their interest payments on their Reagan debts and affording Social Security and Medicare and maybe even a much reduced welfare program, well you would think that the New American Empire would be the subject of serious debate, and even come to dominate an entire election campaign, because, let's face it, once the American people sit down with a calculator and figure out just how much its going to cost to conquer the whole world, well they might find themselves having second thoughts about the whole idea. Consider the last Iraq war that cost somewhere between 60 and 80 billion dollars, and then of course you have to add on the cost of bombing Iraq every week and sometimes every day for the next ten years, and it all adds up, and they weren't even invading Iraq and setting up an occupying army and staying for years, so you can just imagine how expensive conquering even just one small third world country is going to be, and there is still the rest of the planet to be conquered and policed by the planets new cop. Now some estimates put the cost of occupying Iraq and then fixing all the damage at anywhere up to one trillion dollars, and that is also what some estimate Iraq is worth in oil, so its possible that at least for that one world conquest the Americans might break even, and hell, if they don't fix the place up but just renege on the deal like they are doing in Afghanistan, they could even turn a profit, maybe even squirrel enough away to conquer Iran, which also has lots of oil and lots of gas too, which could then finance the invasion of North Korea. That would be where it would end, because the only thing North Korea exports is missiles and the Americans are selling missiles to the whole planet already so its not like they are going to be gaining much by conquering North Korea. They won't be turning any profit on invading North Korea, so in this case, it will just have to be enough of a reason that they were doing the planet a favor and saving people from tyranny that one time, and if it isn't, well then perhaps they can invade two or three more countries that actually have something worth selling and thus get themselves back into the black so that they can afford to carry on and conquer the rest of the world.

I just offer this reasonable approach to world hegemony as a much more reasonable alternative to what seems to be the plan of the Republicans, which is to just put it all on their American Express card, and then maybe send away for a Visa, a MasterCard, and a Diners card as well, and get those things maxed out as well. This would seem to be the plan, and since those Republicans are right back at the don't tax and then spend policy of theirs, well it really hasn't been explained how they are going to afford to conquer the world, so I can only assume that they plan to charge the whole deal and then pay it off later in installments, or maybe just make the interest payments like they are doing right now.

Sooner or later, however, those Republicans will have to give up on that don't tax and then spend policy of theirs, since those interest payments will just keep growing and growing, and once they have finally ditched social security and medicare, and everything else they can find, well that only leaves defense spending to be cut so they can make their interest payments, and I am quite certain that no Republican even wants to consider the option of cutting that program, for with them it is always don't tax and then spend and spend and spend on the defense budget, this sort of thing being the kind of sensible fiscally responsible conservative money management those Republicans have been trying every time they get in. This is what Republicans are famous for, or so we are told, their sound money management policies, and their strictness and sensible approach to the budget.

Now I could be missing something here, something top secret, something that explains it all so it all makes sense. Now we know that ‘tax and spend' policies do not in fact destroy the economy, nor do they inhibit economic growth, since these policies that were destroyed by Reagan were in place during the boom years in the United States. The ‘don't tax and then spend' policies of Reagan did not create the ‘Reagan miracle', but rather the slave trade that was opened up by ‘Free Trade' was the important element involved in that particular (temporary) ‘miracle' that brought in so many temporary profits. It should be obvious that don't tax and then spend will never work, and if any Republican wants to argue about the point, I invite them to try that one at home some time, and then maybe in a year or two we'll talk. Slave trading works, temporarily, anyways, and thus it is possible that in some dark secret den where people talk in the top secret way they actually have some equally devious plan like the one Reagan cooked up which will also, being devious and wrong after all, provide some temporary relief, only to come back and haunt everyone later. That whole free trade concept of ‘exporting my job to the low wage slave trade' idea isn't on the table, because that sinful thing has already destroyed the economy enough, and isn't likely to bring the required improvement in earnings required to conquer the world in the New American Century. But, who knows, perhaps in some dark, secret den right now powerful people are discussing all the ins and outs of some other type of scheme that might pay for the whole deal, and since it couldn't possibility be that slave trading free trade concept, which has run its course, maybe its something even worse like thieving off of countries and just stealing their stuff and then selling it yourself. That could work. Its called colonialism. The advantage of doing that is that you don't wind up destroying jobs in your own economy, and it is after all how all the rich northern countries got to be so rich in the first place, and so it is a proven success, and this makes it the most likely scenario for saving the slumping, sliding ruined American economy, or so one might think...