By Mort Malkin
There was a time the US was rich. We extracted coal from the ground, cut timber from our forests, and caught cod off New England and salmon from Alaska’s waters. We grew corn and wheat on the Great Plains, raised tobacco in North Carolina, made steel in Pittsburgh, autos in Detroit, movies in Hollywood, jokes in the Catskill resort hotels. The US was an exporter of the first order. Our balance of trade was positive, and the Dollar became the standard currency the world around. The US was wealthy in and of itself, and did not need colonies.
The paradigm continued through the day before yesterday. IBM started the electronic revolution, producing the first generations of mainframe computers. Steve Jobs was the first genius behind the Macintosh personal computers. Bill Gates parleyed Microsoft Word programs and public relations sharkery into an embarrassment of billions — he had to form a foundation and give away a few dollars.
Early on, there were warning signs. Despite our rich oil reserves, we were using ever more of the basic black. Trains, boats, and homes that once depended on coal were converted to oil. More cars were on the road, and the new interstates encouraged more truck traffic. Even though there were fewer kerosene lanterns, we were using oil faster than we were pumping it out of the ground. By 1970 the US was at Peak Oil — the point when total production reached its limit and began to decline. But, what could you expect with two powerful iron beasts in every garage. We kept using more oil and producing less ever since.
Connected to Big Oil by the belly button, the Chemical Industry was not declining. Despite Dr. Hubbert and Peak Oil, we entered the era of “miracles through plastic.” First there were nylon, dacron, and polyester for clothing and clotheslines. Then, plastic containers numbers 1 through 6 came into being for food. Not to worry — acid juices and fat containing dairy products are only slightly soluble in the plastic.
At the same time, Cyclopean Chemistry had bigger beasts to burden us with.
A far larger market, for pesticides and herbicides, was just waiting for us so we could start the next agricultural revolution (revulsion?). The trouble was that if a chemical was fatal to the insects, wouldn’t it also be a little toxic to children and pregnant women? CyclopsChem could always use delaying tactics with the USDA and FDA for a few years and then, when the particular chemical became to much of a risk in the US, it could be promoted for use abroad. Why shouldn’t the third world enjoy the benefits of capitalism? DDT had a long run in the 3rd World and Agent Orange was popular in Southeast Asia (courtesy of the Pentagon). You may remember.
Of late, the US balance sheet of assets and liabilities has reversed. We Americans may have more stuff (largely made in Asia ), but we are not rich. Everything is on credit — we are the greatest debtor nation in the world. Further, we are starting to act like a 3rd World country. A recent example from the chemical industry provides a good example: the EU decided that the herbicide atrazine was too risky and was banned, even in Eastern Europe. In 3rd world USA, though, it is still used widely on food crops to suppress weeds. [We certainly don’t want weeds to take away any of the nutrients from our neat rows of Swiss chard and artichokes.]
The same is true of genetically engineered (GE) corn and soy. European farmers and gardeners, several African nations, and many groups of growers in India won’t buy GE seeds from the American agriculture industry. Any packaged products containing GE ingredients sold in Europe must be so labeled. But, the 3rd World US public says little and buys products, half of which contain GE corn oil or high fructose corn syrup. No labeling required in the land of unregulated capitalism.
The political right is proud of America going its own way — they call it American exceptionalism. But, it is more accurate to call it Third World Nationhood. An example is US health care, a de facto privilege of wealth or Congressional employ. Meanwhile, the real 1st World countries consider health care as a right of all citizens. The results tell the tale. Our world rank in infant mortality (a key measure of national health) is around 30th, a few numbers worse than Cuba. Nor do we rank much better on the scale of healthy life expectancy among nations.
The US has lost its number-one-hood in disparate other areas as well. American ingenuity was once so dominant, the words were the definition of each other. Now, they are almost an oxymoron. Wait, there is one place where we excel. The ingenuity of our Wall Street investment banks in creating “derivatives” has been innovative beyond imagination. Only American capitalism — the French call it “sauvage capitalism” — could have created: collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, iron butterfly spreads, strangle options, and rolling turbos. All of these derivatives are still unregulated just as are hedge funds and CEO compensation. The US is number one in such creative illusions, dominant enough to bring the world’s economies to the brink. That’s power.
Symptomatic of both financial ingenuity and third worldity is the wide disparity of dollar wealth in the US. The rich are becoming super rich, and the ever larger numbers of the poor are further locked in poverty. It is much the same as the dictatorships and banana republics of the 20th century.
The Catskill Chronicle 
Gadfly replies:
Mr. Coopersmith — Voting is good, but why wait till election day? Candidates promise everything under the sun [though not the solar energy that falls on Arizona and Southern California incessantly]. [Please see the Gadfly essay “Promises, Promises”.] We must also call, write, and visit our elected public servants and talk sense into them. If that is insufficient, rallies and protests must follow.
As to homo sapiens dominating the planet, it was all a mistake when the Bible was translated from the Aramaic. In the Original it said we were given responsibility for the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and the creatures that moveth on the earth. But the scribe was paid off by McDonalds and Burger King to translate it as “dominion over.”
Autonomyacres — How curious that thearchdruidreport, in all seriousness, came to to the same conclusion as the fun & games of this Gadfly satirical essay. The US in the 21st century is on schedule to be even more ridiculous than the characters in Lewis Carroll’s world of Alice In Wonderland.
Mr. Flynn — Now that: the US has few forests left from which to cut down trees; the oil wells in Texas and Oklahoma are depleting out; an off shore well a mile underwater near the coast of Louisiana is spewing its black ooze directly into the ocean; the costs of using coal for power plants must be measured in explosions and lives, not pennies per kilowatt hour; the countries of the industrialized world are our friends (or our bankers) and we don’t need any more nuclear missiles; proposed new nuclear power plants can’t even pay their own way in capitalism’s open market — what better mousetraps can we make?
Well, we still have spectacular mountains, sea coasts that say “paint me,” vacation lakes, and a couple of rivers that still flow freely from source to sea. If only we didn’t discourage tourism so. Then, we have the power resources of the wind on the Great Plains, the tides of thousands of miles of our coastlines, and the sunshine from Southern California to the states along the Gulf of Mexico. Why are Denmark and Germany the leaders in wind turbine technology? The US, with a little help from the federal government, could excel in small turbines and distributed electricity generation. Small, underwater turbines powered by rivers and larger ones powered by tides could make coal a relic from the last century. Clean coal is a myth, according to the latest report in the journal Science. Even if some breakthrough technology appeared, the added costs would make coal less competitive than the sun. As to solar power, China is making solar panels faster
than they’re turning out clothing, toys and other stuff for Walmart. Let the US take the lead in thin-sheet, printed silicon panels and sell them to China for use in the Gobi Desert.
Re: a Cap & Trade scheme for controlling global heating (it’s beyond “warming”), please read the Gadfly essay “Cap ’N Trade Scheming” posted a couple of months ago. We had better be wary of anything the Wall Street banks are involved in.
Homo sapiens has developed wonderful technologies over the past century. The species certainly can evolve culturally from a philosophy of greed is good to one of community, cooperation, and sharing.
Peace and Parody,
Gadfly
Mort Malkin…thank you for an eye opening article.
So, we are not only a nation of entitlement, but now we can not even live off our own natural resources. Let’s see how has going green helped us or the economy? We save trees but lose jobs, we stop digging for coal, we lose more jobs, we stop drilling for oil, we lose even more jobs, we stop fishing, we lose more and more jobs. So we have become eco-friendly but we are losers. We have become strangled by environmentalists, and power hungry left politicians.
We “cut our nose to spite our face”. And we have learned (or better yet, gained) what from this experience? Obviously not much. Lets hope though, that in the long run we at least learned that cap and trade Will Not benefit us. The policy of redistribution of wealth is not in OUR best interest. We need to go back to the way we were… leaders not followers, leaders not beggars, leaders not debtors. The philosophy “every dog for himself” applies here because every other nation is looking out for their
own citizens, economy, and well-being. We should be doing the same and cleaning up our backyard before worrying about anyone else’s. India isn’t going to cut emissions because they have to increase their production for exports. What are we exporting? Hhhmmm? Is our government taking care of US (the people of the United States) or the world? us…US one and the same, not anymore. Let’s remember that we left Europe because we did not like the way they live, and now we are becoming Europe.
It seems that our local leaders are just as guilty of this complacency as our national leaders. Our local leaders are failing the county, our state leaders are failing the state, and our national leaders are failing the United States of America.
We need leaders for the people by the people not for personal or political agendas or earmarks.
Tom Flynn
Monticello
I was just searching WordPress for recent posts about peak oil and found yours. I enjoyed reading your ideas and think your ideas are on the right track. If you have not heard of or read The Arch Druid Report, I highly recommend looking at it. Here is a link to one of John Michael Greers February posts, about America’s decline into a third world country.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/02/becoming-third-world-country.html
Enjoy!
What to do when Americans can’t get off their collective asses to vote- a priviledge paid for in blood?
Tell me again WHY humans should dominate this planet?
Define; VIRUS…