【Text/Richard Wolff Translation/Observer Network by Guan Qun】
The defeats in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan exposed the inadequacy of the American Empire, which could not solve the problem even if it lasted 20 years. The failure, which lasted so many years, shows that the main driver of these wars is not geopolitics, but the domestic political situation and the financing of the military-industrial complex. For the narrow interests of political and economic minorities, empires could die out of overextending and broad sacrifice of social goals.
The U.S. population accounts for 4.25 percent of the world's population, but the number of Americans who have died from COVID-19 accounts for about 20 percent of global outbreak deaths. A wealthy global superpower with a highly developed healthcare industry has proven unprepared and unable to respond to an outbreak.
Debt levels for governments, businesses and households are all at or near record levels and are still rising. The Fed's years of quantitative easing have supported rising debt levels.
The highest-ranking officials are currently debating whether they can issue trillions of dollars worth of platinum coins, allowing the Fed to issue the money as a new line of credit to the U.S. Treasury to increase government spending.
The goal has long been not to settle the political debate over the national debt ceiling, but to allow the government to inject a larger amount of new money into the capitalist system at will in order to maintain it in unprecedented difficult times.
The Fed recognizes that since the capitalist system has recently experienced three collapses (2000, 2008, and 2020), it is now necessary to implement monetary stimulus measures of this magnitude to maintain it. A desperate empire is embracing a version of modern monetary theory that not so long ago its leaders ridiculed and rejected.
Extreme inequality has become a salient feature of the United States, and the pandemic has exacerbated it. This inequality exacerbates poverty and fosters a social divide between the rich, the poor and the increasingly anxious "fake rich".
Homeless Americans sleep on the streets
Employers are trying to recover the profits they lost during 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic and the collapse of the capitalist system, which has led many employers to put additional pressure on their employees. This sparked a variety of formal and informal strikes that ran through the reviving labor movement. On a personal level, the worker resignation rate has reached an all-time high.
The persistent inflation that is now plagued the empire also reflects employers trying to recover the profits lost over the past two years. Employers price the products they sell. They know that the Fed's injection of new money into the market will increase potential purchasing power.
Consumer demand, suppressed by the pandemic and the economic collapse, will support inflation (at least for some time). But even if temporary, inflation will further exacerbate income and wealth inequality, plunging the United States into the mire of the next collapse. Since the beginning of the new century, the United States has collapsed three times (2000, 2008, and 2020), and each time it has become more serious than the last, and the next may be more serious collapse will plunge the American capitalist system into a life-and-death situation.
Fires, floods, hurricanes, droughts: these climatic catastrophes (not to mention that the damage they cause is rising rapidly) reinforce the impression that the end is coming, which has been felt by previous signs of imperial decline. In this regard, much-needed social action to address this issue has also been successfully blocked or postponed by a handful of leaders in the fossil fuel industry.
When the empire is accustomed to serving a small elite for a long time, the empire ignores those moments of the survival of the system, and is unable to sacrifice the interests of these elites, even temporarily, for the sake of the system.
For the first time in more than a century, the United States has encountered a real, significant, and rising global competitor. The British, German, Russian, and Japanese institutions never reached this status. And the People's Republic of China has now done it.
As a result of internal divisions in the United States and the phenomenal growth that China has achieved, none of the established U.S. China policies have proven feasible. Political leaders and "defense" contractors found it in their favor to attack China. Condemning China has become a common tactic used by many politicians across the board and is a reason for the military to demand an increase in defense spending.
However, large companies have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in China and China-related global supply chains. They don't want their investments to be damaged. In addition, China's workforce in recent decades has been the lowest-cost, highly educated and disciplined in the world, and it is also the world's fastest-growing capital market and consumer goods market.
Winning U.S. companies believe that for global success, their companies need to lay the groundwork in the world's most populous, labor-costly, and fastest-growing markets.
All faculty and students in the College of Business support this view. As a result, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes the trade/tariff war initiated by former President Donald Trump and now opposes President Joe Biden's blatant attacks on China.
The United States has no way to change China's basic economic and political policies, because it is these policies that have brought China to the envy of the world today, becoming a competitor to such a superpower as the United States. At the same time, China is expected to catch up with the United States in terms of economic scale by the end of this century.
The problems of the American Empire are growing, the United States remains divided, and no major change can be achieved unless there is armed conflict and an unimaginable nuclear war.
When the empire declines, it can fall into a self-reinforcing spiral. This downward spiral occurs when the rich and powerful use their social status to pass on the costs of the decline of the empire to the masses. The inequalities and divisions that led to the decline in the first place will only become worse as a result.
The downward spiral has begun. Moreover, attempts to distract an increasingly anxious public have led to demonization of immigrants, scapegoating China and waged cultural warfare, but these actions have become less and less effective. The decline of the empire continues, but this decline is still widely denied or ignored, as if the decline did not matter.
The old rituals of traditional politics, economy and culture continue to be held. It was only the tone of the ceremony that became deeply divided society, fierce mutual recriminations, and ubiquitous blatant attrition. All this has confused many Americans, but they still have to deny that American capitalism is plagued by crises and that the American Empire is declining.
(Observer.com translated by Guan Qun from Asia Times)
This article is the exclusive manuscript of the observer network, the content of the article is purely the author's personal views, does not represent the platform views, unauthorized, may not be reproduced, otherwise will be investigated for legal responsibility. Pay attention to the observer network WeChat guanchacn, read interesting articles every day.