Global Economic Crisis

For over a year, while the U.S. economy was mired in recession and exporting its economic disasters globally, the senior political and business leaders of the American establishment proclaimed to the American people that all was well, that the fundamentals of the economy were “strong,” while they threw taxpayers money at corporations and financial institutions “too big to fail” in a vain and desperate attempt to keep the floodtide of financial failure from inundating the whole economy. The collapse of Lehman Brothers exposed the fragility and rot for all to see and now the entire world is mired in a Global Economic Crisis that more and more economists are labeling as a second Great Depression.

While no one can predict with exactitude what the ultimate outcome will be after the world’s economies have completed their march through Calvary, it is likely that the denouement of this economic and financial apocalypse will see the end of American power as the hegemony-driven master of the planet.

America’s superiority was based on its military infrastructure, and the capability to project power thousands of miles from its shores, inflicting “shock and awe” on any foreign entity that inspired its ire. However, that military industrial complex required a massively productive and successful economy to maintain itself. During the last eight years, while America replaced its ability to create goods that the world needed with complex financial instruments and securitized mortgages as its primary export product, it relied on foreign creditors to subsidize the American military establishment and the cost of the foreign wars it was engaged in. That bubble is now in the process of bursting with tectonic force.

The U.S. government managed to double its national debt during the last 8 years, even before the onset of the Global Economic Crisis. Since then, the government has borrowed $700 billion for the TARP Wall Street Bailout, and is projecting a budget deficit of over one trillion dollars in 2009. That is before the Obama administration passes its own stimulus package after it takes office, possibly boosting the deficit to the stratospheric level of over two trillion dollars! With foreign countries America relies on to finance its deficit now about to embark on their own massive stimulus spending based on deficits, that source of credit will either dry up or become costly beyond tolerance. A few years more of multi-trillion dollar deficits and the single largest item in the federal budget will be the servicing of the national debt. When that happens, it will be fiscally impossible for the United States to maintain its current military outlay, which equals if not exceeds the rest of the world combined.

At present the U.S. pours roughly a trillion dollars into its military industrial complex. What must be understood about the U.S. defense budget is the depth of its deceptive architecture. While the official Pentagon budget is in the range of $600 billion, it excludes other expenditures scattered throughout the line items of the federal budget that properly belong under the category of military allocations. For example, the official defense budget excludes nearly two hundred billion dollars of unfunded (meaning borrowed) spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It excludes military benefits for veterans, intelligence gathering and other national security activity. Most deceptively excluded is most spending on nuclear weapons, measured in the tens of billions of dollars, which is clearly a military allocation, but is budgeted under the Department of Energy.

The smoke and mirrors is about to be shattered, as the Global Economic Crisis gathers momentum. The U.S. will lose its capacity to finance its military establishment, unless it replicates the example of the once-mighty Soviet Union, which placed its military first and civilian economy last, ultimately leading to the implosion of both.

We are truly witnessing a global economic trauma that will also radically reorder the geopolitical configuration of our planet. What is uncertain is if America will emerge as a constitutional, democratic republic at peace with the world, or as a desperate actor that will grasp at retaining its once invincible economic and military power no matter the cost to its future generations.