Thom Hartmann's "Independent Thinker" Book of the Month
April 7, 2005
Review by Thom Hartmann
In 1976 -- long before American conservatives would claim that
Ronald Reagan's 1980s debt-driven massive military spending
"bankrupted" the Soviet Union -- French demographer and author
Emmanuel Todd wrote a best-selling book titled La Chute finale
(The Final Fall), predicting the imminent fall of the USSR. He
based his projection, in large part, on a careful study of the
increase in infant mortality in that empire, one of the leading
indicators of the health of a nation.
Time proved him right, and hindsight tells us that Reagan and Bush
had nothing whatever to do with the fall of the USSR, con claims
notwithstanding. It rotted from within, something that I witnessed
in the 1970s and 1980s visiting bot! h the USSR and several of its
captive states, and living a year in 1986-1987 within 30 miles of
Soviet-dominated East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Any 70s or 80s
visitor to the USSR or its vassal sates, in fact, could have come
to the conclusion that -- barring a world war -- it was an empire
about to expire, and the CIA and others in the American, European,
Israeli, and Japanese intelligence services had been saying the
same thing since, in some cases the 1960s.
Yet it was Emmanuel Todd who captured Europe's attention by
explicitly saying that the Soviet Emperor had no clothes - and
doing so in a way that was widely discussed across Europe. Thus,
when my best friend and former business partner Jerry Schneiderman
and I found ourselves in Budapest in early November, 1989, the
week before the Berlin Wall fell, as East German refugees were
streaming into the country and the Soviets seemed helpless to stop
it, we discovered that the rea! ction of the Hungarian shopkeepers
and bartenders we talked with was a resigned shrug: "We knew it
was coming. Everybody knew it was coming." Other than, of course,
the average American.
Now comes Emmanuel Todd to predict the fall of another empire:
America.
In Apres l'empire ("After The Empire"), a runaway bestseller
across Europe and in Japan, Todd points out that many of the same
demographic and historic indicators that led him to boldly predict
the looming collapse of the Soviet system can now -- with some
variations that are even more alarming -- be applied to the United
States.
Every American should read this book. First, we must read it to
understand how Europe, Russia, China, and Japan (among others)
view us. Second, we must read it because its logic, facts,
statistics, and conclusions are unassailable.
The main thesis of Todd's book is that ! America is posturing,
playing the role of the leader of the "free world" and head of the
new American Empire, when, in fact, we are militarily,
economically, and morally bankrupt -- and the rest of the world
knows it. In fact, he suggests, much of the posturing is for the
consumption of the domestic American audience, as the rest of the
world (with the exception of a few dependent Third World nations)
knows we're already in decline and perhaps even ready to implode.
Economically, twenty-five years of conservative Reaganomics --
"free trade" elevated to a virtual religion (including complicity
by Clinton in signing GATT/WTO and NAFTA) -- and the massive
budget and trade deficits that have resulted from this, have
turned the United States from an independent manufacturing
powerhouse and the world's leading creditor into a bankrupt nation
with little manufacturing capacity left, dependent on other
nations for the imports that maintain o! ur unsustainable standard
of living. The result is that the US "has become the center of a
system in which its number one job is to consume rather than
produce."
"If the United States has greatly declined in relative terms as an
economic power," writes Todd, "it has nevertheless succeed in
massively increasing its ability to siphon off wealth from the
world economy. Objectively speaking, America has become a
predator; ... [and] is going to have to fight politically and
militarily in order to sustain the hegemony that has become
indispensable for maintaining its standard of living."
In his concluding chapter, Todd writes, "The United States is
unable to live on its own economic activity and must be subsidized
to maintain its level of consumption -- at its present cruising
speed that subsidy amounts to 1.4 billion dollars per day."
Referring to the "bizarre behavior" of the Bush administration's
America, Todd asks the q! uestion -- in italics for emphasis -- "How
does one deal with a superpower that is economically dependent but
also politically useless?"
In "The Fragility of Tribute" chapter, Todd suggests the world
won't -- or can't -- long continue to support our "parasitic"
lifestyle by loaning us money to sell us goods, while we export
our manufacturing industries and hollow out our internal
productivity. "The most likely scenario" he sees as a result of
this "is a stock market crash larger than any we have experienced
thus far that will be followed by a meltdown of the dollar -- a
one-two punch that will put an end to any further delusions of
'empire' when it comes to the US economy."
Our moral bankruptcy, Todd suggests, is the result of these same
economic and political policies emanating from the radical right
(neoliberals) in America, and are rapidly morphing our nation from
a democracy into an oligarchy.
Without irony, he notes, ! "It is a surprising return to the world
of Aristotle in which oligarchy may succeed democracy." As
"American society is changing into a fundamentally unegalitarian
system of domination..." he notes that this turnaround of
increasing rule by the rich in America and a wiping out of our
middle class "explains the strained relations between the United
States and the rest of the world. The progress of democracy around
the world is masking the weakening of democracy in its birthplace
[America]." The result? "...the United states is beginning to lose
its democratic characteristics..."
Because America has become a "parasitical" nation of importers of
oil and goods from around the world, paying with debt, Todd says,
"From now on the fundamental strategic objective of the United
States will be political control of the world's resources."
Thus we have had to invent a "myth of global terrorism" so we can
convince ourselves that our projection! of power into oil-rich
regions of the world is to "save" both America and the world from
"terrorists." Because our military power is insufficient to take
on any serious foes, we rattle sabers, proclaim "Axis of evils,"
and attack essentially defenseless nations, while proclaiming our
efforts great military victories comparable to the defeat of the
Third Reich in World War II.
The world, Todd notes, isn't buying it. And they're getting tired
of our constant hectoring about "democracy" even as we cut back on
civil liberties and economic opportunity at home, support
"strategic" dictators abroad, and are increasingly ruled by
oligarchic families.
Which brings us to his third conclusion -- that we have become
militarily impotent. Todd notes that, "In the childlike universe
of Donald Rumsfeld, for example, only physical force matters."
Thus, we stir up problems in the militarily weak (but oil rich)
Arab world, destabilizing the entir! e planet. This is not a
situation European and Asian powers take lightly. Europe, Todd
notes, "cannot accept indefinitely the continuous disorder in the
Arab world sponsored by the United States..."
The result is clear, he says. "But make no mistake, all the
ingredients are there for a serious conflict between Europe and
the United States in the near future." Such a conflict could be
devastating to the US.
Dissecting -- and dismissing -- numerous American "strategic"
books like Zbigniew Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," Todd
notes that our leaders in the post-Carter world have always taken
the lazy way out, rather than building the strategic alliances and
offering the moral leadership that would have been necessary to
maintain America as the moral, economic, and political
international leader we were before Reagan began the destruction
of the traditional American way of life.
In part, this has been the result of the captu! re of our political
system by oligarchs, powerful rich interests including
multinational corporations with little allegiance to America (or
any nation). "This is why," he notes, "the United States' export
of its specific model of unregulated capitalism [necessary to
sustain oligarchy] constitutes a danger for European societies, as
well as for Japan...."
The result of our export of privatization, deregulation, and
unrestrained oligarchic capitalism (called "the liberal model" in
Europe) is that "the constant attempts to foist the liberal model
onto the strongly rooted and state-centered societies of the Old
World is in the process of blowing them apart -- a phenomenon that
can be observed nowadays in the regular gains of the far right in
a number of recent elections. Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium,
France, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria have all been affected."
Rush Limbaugh/Newt Gingrich politics have led to the rise of a
n! eofascist right in America, and our export of these ideas are
inspiring the return of right-wing politics in Europe, threatening
to tear apart the social fabric of that continent.
Todd notes that Portugal and Spain are the least affected by these
ideas, because of their recent experience with Franco's fascism.
But our increasing moral bankruptcy (detention without trials,
phony war on terror), economic bankruptcy (living on debt borrowed
from Europe, China, and Japan, along with the dramatic oligarchic
trends in America toward richer rich, poorer poor, and the loss of
the middle class), and military impotence (leading us to loudly
attack relatively defenseless countries to create "show victories"
and a "bloody vaudeville show" in Iraq) are causing many in Europe
to reevaluate their relationship with -- and support of --
America.
If they decide to throw their lot in with Russia and Iran instead
of the US -- and Todd suggests thi! s is a growing probability --
then the result is "easy to predict."
"The United States," he says, "will then have to live like other
nations, notably by reigning in its huge trade deficit, a
constraint that would imply a 15 to 20 percent drop in the
standard of living of the population."
And this, he suggests, may be a good thing, long term. "What the
world needs is not that America disappear but that it return to
its true self -- democratic, liberal, and productive."
One can only hope that America will return to the ideals we held
prior to Reagan, and do so with a minimum of damage to our working
class. Reading Emmanuel Todd's book "After The Empire" will help
crystallize in your mind so many of these issues, and help provide
a roadmap for Americans to a return to domestic and international
political sanity, hopefully as soon as the 2006 elections...
---> GET YOUR COPY HERE <---
* * *
Thom Hartmann (! thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored
Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally
syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com His
most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight,"
"Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft
of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America,"
and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
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