The following article is written by Gregory R. Copley and was originally published at OilPrice.com.
Editor’s Note: If you continue to have doubts about where the United States, Europe and Australia are headed, Gregory Copley’s following article will be an eye opener. It’s bad enough that governments tax and spend during boom times. When they engage in these policies during a depressionary cycle like today’s, the results are anything but beneficial to the private sector. Rather than freeing small businesses and citizens from the chains of government, most governments around the world are doing exactly the opposite. For them, the goal is to centralize more control with the bureaucracy. The effects could very well lead to the demise of America as we have come to know it.
The New Civil Wars Within the West
by Gregory R. Copley
Internecine civil wars are underway almost everywhere within the West, and most virulently in the United States of America. They are not yet kinetic wars, but wars of grinding prepositioning, the kind which lead to foregone conclusions without a shot being fired. They are wars of survival, nonetheless, because the basic architecture for national strength is being altered incrementally or dramatically. And, in many cases, consciously.
Almost all of the strategic restructuring of states is occurring in large part as a result of an accumulation of wealth; an accumulation and value of which is seen as permanent. This has resulted in the hubris — expressed by those who did not earn it — of triumph in the Cold War. This is a Western phenomenon because the widespread growth of wealth, the creation of freedoms classically associated with democracy, resulted — as it must inevitably result — in complacencies which in turn led to a “vote too farâ€: the extension of the democratic franchise to those who do not help in the creation of wealth.
Once the voting franchise of the West reached the point where those who sought benefits outweighed those who created benefits, the tipping point was reached. The situation of de facto “class warfare†thus emerges automatically under such circumstances, and the envy of those who take against those who provide erupts into “rights†and “entitlementâ€. By deifying “democracy†above justice, the enfranchised non-producers could always outvote the producers. We are at this point. The result can only be collapse, or restructuring around a Cæsar or a Bonaparte until, eventually, a productive hierarchy reappears, usually after considerable pain.
The United States of America
Virtually every conscious step of the Administration of Pres. Barack Obama and the overwhelming Democratic Party majority in Congress has been to increase the size and role of government in the economy and society, and to decrease, limit, and control the position of private enterprise and capital formation. Given that this progressively contracts and ultimately eliminates production, and reduces the inherent asset base of the country — its raw materials and productive intellect — to a null value, the tradable value of the US currency will inevitably decline. We cannot be swayed by the enormous wealth of the North American continent. Almost all areas have an inherent wealth of some kind, but assets left idle in the ground or infertile in the brain define countries which fail, or are not victorious in their quest for unbridled sovereignty.
Thus, a decline in currency value is exacerbated, or accelerated, by the increasing supply of money, inextricably depreciating its value, particularly at a time of decreasing productivity in vital perishable and non-perishable output.
The US Obama Administration has focused entirely on an agenda of expanding government — the seizure of the envied (and often ephemeral) “wealth†of the producers — without addressing the process of facilitating the production of essential commodities and goods. Even the USSR and the People’s Republic of China, during their communist periods, focused — albeit badly — on the production of goods and services, when they realized that the “wealth†to be “redistributed†existed only as the result of production and innovation. The US, meanwhile, heavily as a result of policies of the former Clinton Administration, has “outsourced†production, and the State — that is, the Government — cannot easily, in the US, become the producer.
Pres. Obama has addressed the US’ economic crisis by expanding government, and government-related, employment in non-productive sectors, while at the same time blaming and punishing the private sector for all of the US’ ills. Empowered by the extended franchise, this was the politics of envy now becoming enabled.
Moreover, the populist, short-term response to the major oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico was clearly geared toward (a) transforming a crisis into an opportunity to pursue a green energy agenda by highlighting the evils of the fossil fuels on which the US remains dependent; (b) ensuring that the President was not blamed for the poor crisis response; and (c) ensuring that the Democratic Party did not suffer from the crisis in the November 2010 mid-term Congressional elections.
The result of all the Obama initiatives has been to expand government and reduce or absolutely control and tax the private sector, even though, without the private sector, the US has no viable export or self-sustaining capability. The net effect has been to mirror — and overtake — the situation in which, for example, Germany found itself a decade ago: without the ability to retain capital investment or attract new capital investment.
And in order to restrain capital flight from the US, the Obama Administration seeks to further control worldwide earnings of US corporations and citizens. For other reasons, the US, believing that it still dominates the technology arena, has imposed greater and greater restrictions on international exports of technology through its ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
All of this conspires to limit investment in US manufacturing and restrict foreign interest in US exports because the regulations are being enforced merely for political punitive reasons. The US is making itself increasingly unappealing to foreign investors and has, as this writer has noted, made the appeal of the US dollar as the global reserve currency evaporate, saved, for the moment, only by the lack of a ready alternative. That situation will change within a very few years.
Thus, the US has, in the space of a couple of years: (i) so dramatically inflated money supply that the value of the dollar is only shored up by the lack of international alternative currencies to act as reserve trading currencies; (ii) so dramatically inflated public debt, without stimulating economic growth, that US economic performance will continue to decline on a national and a per capita basis while competitive economies, such as the PRC and Russia, will grow, reducing strategic differentials; (iii) severely punished the private sector, thereby reducing the opportunities and incentives for strategic capital formation, and in particular punishing the industrial production and energy sectors, almost ensuring major dislocation to the delivery of US basic needs in the near-term; and (iv) so blatantly reduced its strategic capabilities through all of these actions and in its diplomatic and military posture as to guarantee a reduction in US strategic credibility. Concurrent with all of this is an increasingly punitive taxation framework.
The near-term impact will include rising domestic energy prices, possibly even before the November 2010 mid-term Congressional elections, which could result in the Democratic Party losing its substantial majority in both Houses. Even on this matter, Democratic Party ideologues have attempted to suggest that this is exactly what the country needs: expensive energy in order to facilitate change to “green†solutions. This defies the historical reality that pre-eminent powers must always have vast energy surpluses and use.
So much damage has been done to the US strategic posture in just two years (although building on a base of inefficiencies which have been growing since the end of the Cold War), in many respects equal to the 1917 Russian Revolution (but without the bloodshed), that it is difficult to forecast whether — because of a changing global environment — the US can, within a decade or two, recover its strategic authority and leadership.
Domestically, the massively statist and interventionist approaches of the Obama Administration have polarized the country, and the response will be reactive rather than innovative, inducing a period of isolation and nationalism, but with grave difficulty in rebuilding confidence from the international investment community.
Europe
Artificial, wealth-induced complacency following the end of the Cold War led to fury when economic collapse inevitably occurred in 2010, leading to draconian restraint in public spending in many societies, but particularly Greece and Spain. It is said that tourists are warned not to feed bears in Yellowstone National Park (in the US) because the bears do not understand when the tourists have run out of food. State-fed populations in Europe, the US, and Australia (see below) equally do not understand when the free ride is over, and work must recommence.
Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have begun the arduous path back to recovery, but the euro may, as a currency, have been irrevocably damaged, and the European Union itself may have spent the term of its virility. Clearly, the wealth-induced complacency, which had the compounding effect of allowing a decline in a sense of national survival and national identity among the European Union (EU) component states, has led now to a revived — but as yet unrealized — sense of nationalism.
This is beginning to lead to the recognition of the cohesive national efficiency required for survival and competitiveness. It can be said that the EU destroyed nationalism, without replacing it with any mechanism to create a new sense of social cohesion, thus removing Europe’s capability for economic competitiveness, self-defense, or ability to define a new culture (and identity) to replace the national identities.
Had the British Labour Party Government of outgoing Prime Minister Gordon Brown persisted in office with his slavishly doctrinaire governance — and demonstrably unworkable socialism, led by a privileged élite of Labour mandarins wallowing at the trough — it is possible that an economic recovery in the UK would have been problematic. It may still be problematic. And in this, Brown was a prototype Obama, with his rank sense of entitlement.
Even now, the British political psyche is fractured along geographic lines, and, wealth-induced, considers itself effectively “post-industrialâ€, and therefore beyond the need for a manufacturing (or even agricultural base). Thus, even though the UK is now far more dependent on a maritime trade base than at any time in its history, it is incapable of defending or projecting that maritime base; neither does it have the wherewithal to trade.
Australia
The Australian Government has — like the Obama Administration in the US and the Brown Administration in the UK — demonstrated its absolute lack of experience in management, economics, or real-life work skills. A decision by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to impose a new “super tax†of some 40 percent on resource companies — miners, who produce most of Australia’s export wealth — suddenly highlighted the reality that the mining companies did not need to put their investment into Australian projects.
This “tax and spend†approach so damaged Prime Minister Rudd’s popularity in the run-up to a November 2010 election, that his deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, an extreme left-wing feminist, mounted a rapid campaign within the ruling Labor Party to overthrow him. But apart from some temporary back-peddling on the Resources Super Profits Tax until the next election is out of the way, don’t expect incoming Prime Minister Gillard — the first Australian female head-of-government and the most left-wing ever — to back off her punitive stance against the private sector.
The Australian Government’s punitive tax approach, initiated by Rudd but likely to continue for as long as Labor governs, also highlighted the fact that foreign investors did not need to invest in Australia, and that capital could move — as it always does — away from draconian tax regimes. As Chilean Mines Minister Laurence Goldborne said in June 2010, “Just because you have resources doesn’t guarantee investment.†This is something which the governments of most African states know.
In Australia, the realization of the over-reaching greed — and envy-inspired approach of the proposed new tax laws — in turn led much of the ruling Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the profoundly leftist Australian media to begin their drift away from Rudd, leaving him with the prospect that he could either be abandoned as party leader before the late-2010 general elections, or be faced with the prospect of becoming Australia’s first one-term Prime Minister.
Gillard’s unbridled ambition also saw to that. The question remains as to whether she will be able to win the November 2010 general election. A more important question remains, however, as to whether the markets will still be there when the ruin of trust in Australian export and investment reliability is addressed by a future government. The People’s Republic of China (PRC), Australia’s major export client state, and Russia are now developing vast iron ore reserves on their mutual border, possibly — in the near future — obviating the need for much of what Australia exports.
In the meantime, both Kevin Rudd and the opposition Liberal Party have essentially embraced the move by Australia to see itself as a pseudo-post-industrial society, gradually eroding the independent and innovative manufacturing sector which had been a hallmark of Australian economic growth. A pseudo-post-industrial society is one which believes that it can live solely on the intrinsic value of its currency, without the necessity to sustain a balanced agricultural and industrial base to preserve sovereign independence. A true post-industrial society — something thus far a utopian dream — can produce all of its food and goods with a minute fraction of its population, which would largely be left to address intellectual pursuits.
Australia, thus, faces a major challenge to its comfort, wealth, and security when value perceptions, investment, and clients evaporate. We see, then, in the very deliberate acts of envy and entitlement politics, the seeds of national collapse in Australia, the US, and Western Europe.
Conclusions
Some of the Western powers have slumped before, and recovered. The United States has yet to demonstrate this resilience. Other Western societies have slumped, and have yet been protected by a strong regional system so that their societies could prosper under foreign protection. The Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal, for example, retained stable and individual prosperous societies and yet never recovered their strategic leadership, relying, instead, on the power of their region for economic and security protection. States which remain dependent on others for their protection never fully regain their wealth and freedom.
States such as New Zealand depend on their greater neighbors for protection. But wither New Zealand if Australia fails? Wither the Netherlands today if the European Union fails? And wither the United States if its fortunes erode? Re-birth is, as Britain has found through history, as did Rome, more arduous than that first, pure flush of strategic victory.
The West is at its watershed, not because of a threat from a less-productive society. The collapse of the West is not because Islam is at the gates. Islam is at the gates because of the collapse of the West.
Analysis. By Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs.
(c) 2010 International Strategic Studies Association, www.StrategicStudies.org
The political environment in Washington DC is a carcinogen infecting the entire country.Until people remove themselves from the Republican Party and the Democrat Party ‘game’ , nothing will change.
The American People are so divided as to what needs to be done to fix this problem, nothing constructive will happen until it is too late to do anything. I’m quite certain that if every American stopped paying their bills and taxes for one month that we, as a nation of people united, would begin to see how powerful we really are. Alas, this will not happen because the collar of obedience to one party or the other is so tight around so many necks. And this cuts off the oxygen rich blood their brains need to think clearly. If corporate America is calling the shots in Washington DC, depriving them from a months worth of profit will rattle their cage as well.
I’m optimistic about the result in November creating “Change WE can believe in”, but certainly not holding my breath. If the incumbents aren’t thrown into the street and the rookies don’t get to work dismantling this monolith we are destined for a fate much worse than austerity.
Traitors did this to us…….”A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague…….
by:
Marcus Tullius Cicero
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
As for iSlam at the gates….*spit* Â Â That DEATH CULT, passing itself off as a religion, in my opinion, has NO RIGHT TO EXIST, outside the SH*T HOLE COUNTRIES it came from.
Here is one American, that will fight to the death, before ever summiting to shari law, and that death cult…just saying
Well written and insightful article. Change is coming to the US in November for sure, which will eliminate once and for all this disasterous experiment in Obama socialism. But will that change be enough to get America back on the right track?
The basic system is broke because of the Rules under which Congress operates and the incestuous relationship between Congress, the Fed, International Banksters, Lobbyists, and the Military Industrial Complex.
Until there is reform in all of these areas no real progress will be made in restoring individual liberty, competitive markets (think health care), separation of banking and investment banking, fair taxation, and a halt to the invasion of the USA by Mexico and Latin America.
If these issues are not properly addressed to the benefit of the American taxpayer, American worker, and small business, the economy will fail, not fall. The dollar will continue to depreciate lowering the living standards of all Americans while nuturing the basis for a New American Revolution, that might indeed, end in violence.
The Powers That Be must see that their leadership has failed the country; and in failing the country they have failed themselves. Their lust for power is so excessive and their personal greed so insatiable, that they killed the goose that lays the golden eggs through their own selfishness. The CEO’s of America have raped the American worker, taxpayer, and their own shareholders with their massive greed.
A new American revolution to re-establish the fairness that America once represented, can only be accomplished by massive civil disobedience. When the “barbarians” are climbing over the fence of the gates of their “too big to fail mansions” TPTB will finally get the message. But with their warped sense of entitlement they will blame the violence on the starving masses instead. And the irony of it will be that all of those invaders that have infiltrated the country with the blessings of the PTB will be the ones climbing the fence.
I’m lucky. I got mine while the getting was good. Get yours while you still can. Its going to be a rough ride for some.
The only thing going to come out of the November elections is a bumper crop of pompous assholes blowing their own horns. Â Even if the r’s manage to get control of both houses of congress (REALLY BIG stretch), the only thing that will happen is total paralysis (at best). Â At worst, the r’s will do what they always do, give more huge tax-breaks to their rich campaign contributors.
The super rich will do what they always do with these huge windfalls of money. Â They’ll use it to pay for the expenses involved in shutting down operations in the USA, and opening operations in China and India. Â It used to be that tax cuts got the economy going. Â That was two decades ago.
The American worker, and all other Americans not in the top 1% of wage earners (that includes all of us reading and posting on this site) are totally fucked. Â No one is interested in helping Americans. Â We exist only to be robbed and financially raped.
We have to help ourselves Jonny V. We have to adapt or die. At least we know what to expect. We know what is coming. That gives us a tremendous advantage.
The super rich ( I am afraid I am one jonny V, at least on paper with real assets: PM. But I am a little short on cash, can you spare a dime?) will have no clue until the barbarians are climbing the fence. They will cling to their possessions and lose their lives in the chaos. They are too busy getting more, doing more, being somebody, not realizing that somebody is nobody. They will look up and look around one day and the world will be crashing down on them and they will not know what to do. They will need your help Jonny V to survive.
Do you really think Trump has any extra toilet paper, mac’n cheese, or peanut butter and jelly lying around? I don’t think so.
Trump can come trade me some silver coins for the rice, beans, and medical supplies I have vacuum sealed in bags. Â That’s my plan for getting rich.
Although I will agree that the November elections will be won by conservative/tea party friendly candidates, but, once these folks get into Washington they will be disappointed to find out that not all people who favor “cutting spending and borrowing” will actually continue to endorse that mantra when it becomes evident that the cuts in spending will effect them. Not in my backyard. Cut someones elses program, not mine! The people have now figured out how easy it is to get a “free lunch” just by voting for the right candidate. Saying “NO” to these people will prove to be impossible. Nothing will change until after the collapse.
the master class has plans to outsourse 25% more american jobs to india and china.
this will eventually reult in america being such a poverty ridden  decedent slum that even the islams won’t want any part of it.
The problem with the tea partiers is that the tea party is owned and  operated  by Dick Armey.  He’s as entrenched as they get, and has no use for regular Americans.  Dick Armey is one of the head honchos of the “move jobs to China” crowd.  If you’re waiting and hoping for the tea party candidates to save you, then you’re just as ignorant as the liberals who thought Obama was gonna save them.  None of these jack off politicians gives two shits about the people anymore.  We’re on our own, and the sooner we start acting like it, the better off we’ll be.
Ah, johnny v spouting his R vs D BS again. No, the current crop of democrats aren’t helping any of their rich/connected buddies, like bankers and unions. Get a clue assclown, both sides are corrupt and funnel tax money to whoever funnels campaign money to them.
We need to stop feeding the looters and moochers no matter who is in power. Since 1994 I have made as little money as I had to survive and store up reserves. I intentionally did this to stop paying a lot of taxes or creating riches they could loot.  It is time the producers go on strike. Tell Atlas to Shrug.
Oh yeah Half-wit, I’ve been real easy on the pussy democrats. Â Maybe you should check into Hooked on Phonics and learn how to fucking read.
This is horrible, what is going to happen to all of the mid-level managers in America?
Comments…..Thank you Scar…
Until America rids itself of the powers that control the privately owned “Federal Reserve”, MSM, the income tax system, and Wall Street, nothing will EVER be accomplished. Â We may have a few months or years of hard times, but the benefits of cleansing the system and starting over will be well worth it!
It’s on the news today folks! Â Seems the Chinese workers don’t like being fucked over either, and prices are going up big-time in ching-chang land……Maybe there will be some jobs around HERE again one of these days.
lostinmissouri
As for iSlam at the gates….*spit*   That DEATH CULT, passing itself off as a religion, in my opinion, has NO RIGHT TO EXIST, outside the SH*T HOLE COUNTRIES it came from.
Here is one American, that will fight to the death, before ever summiting to shari law, and that death cult…just sayin
That sure sounds like what a “certain” group of “people” (I use that term VERY lightly) from Israel might say. It looks like this site still has its share of dis-informant agents. Give it up dude! More and more folks are figuring out who the REAL enemy is and IT’S NOT THE MUSLIM. Keep on-rockin with your BS. It’s SO bad, it’s not hard to see right through it.