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The World's Indispensable Nation needs Third-World Investment

April 6th 2006

The decision of Dubai Ports World to withdraw its bid to operate several American ports has inspired speculations that the decision will have negative consequences for the American economy.

"At a time when America is living on borrowed foreign credit and endangered by offshore competition and outsourcing, most foreign investments can and should be seen as a Good Thing," wrote Christopher Deliso of balkanalysis.com, an independent provider of news and analysis in the Balkans.

"The US Treasury and corporations that are increasingly dependent on investment from overseas, particularly from cash-flush Arab oil exporters, are anxiously awaiting the aftershocks, as well," added Jim Lobe of the Interpress Services in Washington, D.C.

The points of Deliso and Lobe have been in development for more than a decade. Pat Buchanan, in The Great Betrayal, published in 1998, documented that in 1997 the New York Stock Exchange dropped 192 points in one day because Japan's prime minister hinted that Tokyo might cash in their US securities. More recently Buchanan, in a review of America's trade relations with Mexico (The fruits of NAFTA, World Net Daily, March 10) pointed out that, "From 1999 through 2005, the US trade deficit with Mexico grew every year, from $27 billion in 1999 to last year's $54 billion....NAFTA delivered some $400 billion in cumulative US trade deficits." A large part of that deficit is 700,000 autos Mexico sends to the US every year compared to less than 500,000 this country exports to the entire world annually.

Mexico, however, is not the biggest exporter to the US. That title belongs to China which boasted a $202 billion trade surplus with the US shared last year. To be sure, President Bush is not going to allow China go without facing some stiff competition. During his recent trip to India he recognized that, "...the middle class of India is 300 million people large. That's larger than the entire United States. And when America looks at India, America ought to look at India as a strategic partner...with whom to trade."

The important point to recognize in the president's statement is that India has a population of over one billion. Consequently, unless India has a huge upper class, the nation has over 700 million lower class laborers--and judging from the flood of outsourcing of tech jobs to India, those low wage laborers are lusted after by global industrialists. Furthermore, the dwindling and indebted American middle class is becoming less attractive to the same.

Perhaps the greatest warning sign that America is facing a serious economic collapse is the viciousness with which the political and economic ruling classes are attacking opposing views. "America rejects the false comfort of isolationism," so pronounced President Bush in his 2006 State of the Union Address. Later he added, "Isolationism would not only tie our hands in fighting enemies, it would keep us from helping our friends in desperate need," and, "American leaders -- from Roosevelt to Truman to Kennedy to Reagan -- rejected isolation and retreat, because they knew that America is always more secure when freedom is on the march (there is some interest that Bush's reference includes liberal icons)."

The president is not alone in labeling detractors of America's international military and economic excursions. PBS and New York Times commentator David Brooks said of the opponents to the Dubai Ports bid, "This Dubai port deal has unleashed a kind of collective mania we haven't seen in decades ... a xenophobia tsunami ... a nativist, isolationist mass hysteria ... God must love Hamas and Muqtada al-Sadr. He has given them the America First brigades of Capitol Hill. " Thomas Friedman, also of the Times, added that opposition to the Dubai deal was, "borderline racist ... There's a poison loose ... If we go Dark Ages, if we go down the road of pitchfork-wielding xenophobes, then the whole world will go Dark Ages."

In other words, if the American economy suddenly tanks the blame will fall on those who stood in opposition to one international transaction regarding a handful of ports--not on those benevolent souls who have been engineering the sell out of American workers to encourage indebtedness and consumerism for more than three decades.

In years passed the US boasted of, "The highest standard of living in the world." Hard work devoted to a single employer over a lifetime offered passage into the middle class and self-sufficient family life. Those days are gone as native born Americans are not only competing for wages with $20 a week serfs throughout the world, but also find job markets glutted at home by floods of both legal and illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, the national government is usurping responsibilities from the state governments, but leaving the tab to them. Record deficits of the conservative government are making the nation dependent upon third world dictatorships for loans to prop up the currency. Worse yet, the national economy is almost totally dependent upon consumer debt which is reaching it limit because of an ever-growing number of private bankruptcies.

Once the foreign investors in America see that the consumer market is tapped out, the money will stop flowing and they will call in payment of their loans. America will face consequences similar to those of the German Wiemar Republic of the 1920's. At that time the job of restoring American culture will return to those of us who have a vested interest in the welfare of our neighbors. The work won't be easy, but we should know, by that time, who we can trust.

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