When the history of 2014 is written, it will take note of a large fact that has received little attention: 2014 was the last year in which the U.S. could claim to be the world’s largest economic power. China enters 2015 in the top position, where it will likely remain for a very long time, if not forever. In doing so, it returns to the position it held through most of human history…..Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States then made two critical mistakes. First, it inferred that its triumph meant a triumph for everything it stood for. But in much of the Third World, concern about poverty – and the economic rights that had long been advocated by the left – remained paramount. The second mistake was to use the short period of its unilateral dominance, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of Lehman Brothers, to pursue its own narrow economic interests – or more accurately, the economic interests of its multinationals, including its big banks – rather than to create a new, stable world order…….The rise of China also shines a harsh spotlight on the American model. That model has not been delivering for large portions of its own population. The typical American family is worse off than it was a quarter-century ago, adjusted for inflation; the proportion of people in poverty has increased. China, too is marked by high levels of inequality, but its economy has been doing some good for most of its citizens. China moved some 500 million people out of poverty during the same period that saw America’s middle class enter a period of stagnation. An economic model that doesn’t serve a majority of its citizens is not going to provide a role model for others to emulate.the fact that capitalism obeys its own inexorable dynamic, based on maximization of profit and the concentration of capital in an oligarchy, whose profits are maximized by war, and depend on the military-industrial complex, the oil industry and imperialism. To sustain this irrational and inhumane system, torture is necessary, not as a means of extracting information to “protect” its citizens, but as a means of intimidating its citizens and insuring their submission to this brutally unjust economic order which protects the privileges of the most rapacious and unscrupulous. Unable to change, it can only resort to domination and confrontation with any economic system which, by contrast, provides a more just and equitable economic model.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 19:03:14 +0000
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