New Hampshire voters have chosen warmonger clones of
Bush/Cheney for their party�s presidential candidates. The only candidates not
in Israel�s pocket are Kucinich, Paul, and Gravel, who have no chance for their
party�s nomination.
Obama, who provided some hope for change, undercut his
support on the eve of the New Hampshire primary by declaring that he would invade
Pakistan in order to protect America. It is a mystery why Obama thought
this message would motivate those inclined to support his candidacy.
This means change is unlikely. Neocon think tanks, media, evangelical
preachers, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and many other members of the
government have succeeded in turning a majority of Americans into scared
Islamophobes and in denying Americans any reliable information about the cause
of the conflict.
Unfolding economic events during 2008 are likely to increase
fear among the US population -- the fear that comes from recession and
indebtedness.
As the German National Socialists said, a fearful population
welcomes a savior. The Bush Regime has put into place all the necessary pieces
for rule by the executive.
The Greenspan Fed created money and low interest rates to
hide the effect on the US economy of job loss from offshoring.
The low prices, achieved by substituting low-cost Asian labor
for American labor, masked the inflationary impact of the Fed�s monetary
policy.
The low interest rates created artificial increases in home prices
by reducing the carrying costs of mortgages. Most people buy according to
monthly payment, not purchase price of the home.
Many homeowners refinanced to capture and spend the rise in
home equity produced by the low interest rates. This spending and the
construction boom misled people about the strength of the economy.
So did US productivity and GDP statistics. As Susan Houseman
has shown,
US statistics have not been adjusted for offshoring and include in US
productivity and GDP growth both the lower labor costs and the real output of
offshored goods that are in fact part of Asian GDP.
Performance-driven
executives at financial institutions were suckered into purchasing subprime
derivatives, which have crashed, leaving the financial system with serious
problems.
Bailouts require yet more liquidity, but the exchange value
of the US dollar has been reeling from US budget and trade deficits. Creating
more dollars makes holding existing dollar assets even less attractive to the
foreigners who finance US deficits.
The dollar has retained its reserve currency role
despite its loss of value, because there is no clear alternative. The euro is a
currency without a country, and might be adversely affected by differential
interest rates arising within the EU membership. The UK economy is
comparatively small and faces similar problems to the US. The rising Asian
economies are not ready to assume the role.
As I have documented repeatedly, job growth in the US has
been confined to domestic
nontradable services. The US is now far more dependent on imported
manufactured goods than it is on imported energy. Offshoring makes it
impossible for the US to balance its trade as offshoring turns US GDP into
imports.
Offshoring is now reaching beyond manufacturing into
high-end service jobs. Princeton University economist Alan Blinder, a former
vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, estimates that there are as many as 30
million US service jobs filled by college graduates that are susceptible to
offshoring.
As long as China continues its currency peg to the dollar,
lower prices from a continuation of offshoring can hide the new round of Fed
money creation. But can a new round of money creation create enough new
consumer spending by over-indebted consumers to mask the jobs lost to
offshoring with more employment for waitresses and bartenders, or will the new
liquidity be used up in saving the troubled financial institutions? Access to
more credit does not help people who are maxed out and cannot pay their bills,
especially when they are losing their jobs.
Studies by economists with the Economics Policy Institute report
that as of 2006, the most recent data, the typical American family�s
income remained $1,000 below its peak in 2000. Six years of "economic recovery"
were unable to put the real median family income back to its previous peak. The
combination of massive indebtedness, offshoring job loss, and recession is
likely to produce further decline in US living standards.
Last month (December 2007) the Congressional Budget Office
released its report on household incomes --[PDF].
The CBO data show that 80
percent of Americans have experienced a falling share of US income, and that
the top 1 percent of the income distribution has received almost the entire
income gain of the top 20 percent of Americans. Keep in mind that some of this
measured income gain is in reality phantom income, according to the research of
Susan Houseman.
An economy that concentrates its income gains at the very
top while wiping out high value-added jobs by sending them abroad, thus
dismantling the ladders of upward mobility, is an economy headed for serious
troubles even without subprime derivative and currency problems.
All of the presidential candidates currently in the running
have authoritarian personalities. America�s next president is likely to seize
upon rising domestic economic hardship and growing resistance abroad to US
hegemony to complete the dismantling of America�s constitutional system.
Paul
Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the
Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side
Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation
and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown:
Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the
co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The
Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the
Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter
Brimelow�s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of
prosecutorial misconduct.