What goes around, comes around and it looks like America has returned to its individualistic selfish roots which benefit only a favoured few.
(CALGARY, Alberta) - Bank robber Willy Sutton was allegedly asked why he robbed banks. He reportedly answered: Because that’s where the money is. If you were to ask the tens of millions of immigrants—legal, illegal and aspiring, why they want to go to America, they would answer in a chorus: Because that’s where the money is; nothing to do with the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, but simply because that’s where the money is. Poor people have a gratuitous need for money.
The nineteenth century belonged to Britain; the twentieth belonged to the U.S.; and the twenty-first will belong to China. Early in the 20th century, however, Canada’s Prime Minister, Sir Wilfred Laurier said, “The twentieth century will belong to Canada.” We missed that. Not enough nuclear weapons, I suppose.
Compared to the United States, Canada is a real country
Economically, Canada is in excellent shape (despite being, in the eyes of many Americans, a Socialist/Communist-leaning country—what with universal health care and no Second Amendment). As Fareed Zakaria summarized in Newsweek earlier this year:
“Canada has been remarkably responsible over the past decade or so. It has had 12 years of budget surpluses, and can now spend money to fuel a recovery from a strong position. The government has restructured the national pension system, placing it on a firm fiscal footing, unlike our own insolvent Social Security. Its health-care system is cheaper than America's by far (accounting for 9.7 percent of GDP, versus 15.2 percent here), and yet does better on all major indexes.”
§ Canada has the world’s second largest oil reserves, after Saudi Arabia.
§ With less than 1 percent of the world's population, Canada has about 15% of the world's supply of accessible fresh water. Much of this water is stored in lakes and wetlands that cover about one-fifth of Canada's total area.
§ About 90% of Canada’s 31 million people live in a narrow strip within about 200 kms of the U.S. border—an area making up only about one-tenth of Canada's total area.
§ Almost half of Canada's land area is covered with forest, the accessible portions of which provide abundant resources for lumber, pulp, and paper. Canada is the world leader in the export of pulp and paper and also exports large amounts of softwood lumber, mostly to the United States.
§ Canada has about one-sixth of the world's total installed hydroelectric generating capacity.
§ Canada has a national debt of about $450 billion; compared to a U.S. national debt of $12 trillion. The Canadian per capita debt is $15,000 compared to $39,000 in the U.S.
§ Home ownership in Canada is 68.4% compared to 68.0% in the U.S., despite the fact that mortgage deductions cost the federal government $100 billion a year
The decline of America on the world stage
I concluded Part 1 with: “On the basis of homicides, infant mortality, life expectancy, religious tolerance and security of the person, Canada is the safer, more tolerant and more civilized society—for all the many flaws this nation has. Many of the flaws, particularly here in Alberta, exist because of a distorting American influence.”
Here is an International Rankings table showing that America is, despite the objections from the patriotically indoctrinated, actually in decline on the world stage.
I first noticed the beginning of the decline in American world power in the late 1970s and presented my findings in a 1981 Maclean’s article where I reported that in 1969, American companies occupied 36 of the top 50 spots in the world accounting for nearly 80% of the total revenues. By 1980 the American representation had fallen to 22 companies accounting for 52% of the total revenue.
Now, in 2009, there are only 15 American companies in the top 50, accounting for only 33% of the total revenues. In forty years, 21 American companies have fallen off the listand the American proportion of revenues has fallen by nearly half.
The beginning of the decline could probably be pinpointed because the Fortune list goes back to 1955. But it’s ancient history, now, and hardly worth researching. My educated guess is that it began in the late 1960s, with the Vietnam War—another American war started under false pretences. Look up the Gulf of Tonkin Incident which didn’t happen, but enflamed Congress to pass legislation authorizing LBJ to begin the Vietnam debacle in earnest. Just like Bush’s WMD in Iraq. America broke the country, now they own it.
Ferdinand Lundberg in The Rich and the Super-Rich, written before the Vietnam War was really underway, described the power of American wealth which involved “the nation in cycles of ferocious wars that are to the interest of asset preservation and asset expansion but are contrary to the interest of the nation and the world”. Now we have both Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran next? ‘Nuff said.
There is a 51st State
The U.S. does, indeed, have a 51st state, but it’s not Canada, it’s the State of Denial covering all the land between Canada and Mexico and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Its exact population is a guess, but it’s at least tens of millions of people.
I have long critiqued the mythology of the Founding Fathers, but Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul makes my point very succinctly. He said:
“The only remaining great rational Utopian project of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the United States itself. Everyone else has moved on, for better or for worse. But the United States was frozen in place by its constitution early in the new rational movement. Its inherent wealth and constant growth have helped it avoid those moments of true rational reality when the whole edifice collapses. And so the structure of the benevolent, rational monarch remains, as does the late-mediaeval concept of balanced estates held together by rational structure, as do all the terrifying contradictions of a foundation constructed on the one hand of class and slavery, while on the other of equality and freedom.
Many other nations have Constitutions, but America is the only nation on earth that treats its Constitution as if it were carved onto tablets by God and brought down from Mt. Sinai by St. George.
Saul goes on to conclude:
“The obvious observation is: it works. The counter-observation would be that with such wealth and power anything works. The point, however, is not one of judgment. It is merely to show how a rational ideology locks a society into a logic so ferocious that it becomes impossible to think your way out of the contradictions.” (emphasis added) In other words, culturally, the U.S. acts and believes today, as if it is still the eighteenth century.
(Think about this: If the Founding Fathers had known about future weapons, like the AK47, Uzis, Saturday Night Specials and the wide availability of assault rifles, would the Second Amendment have been written so sloppily?)
Many Americans will deny this, arguing from what they have been indoctrinated to believe, beginning in elementary school, when they had not yet developed their critical and judgemental faculties, and not from real historical knowledge. Unless you understand the pervasive and overarching role of the Enlightenment in the foundation and evolution of the United States, you don’t know much beyond jingoistic sloganeering.
John Wain, in his biography of Samuel Johnson adds a little unacknowledged detail in the founding and growth of the United States. He says that
“while refusing to pay taxes, the colonists nevertheless continued to accept the protection of British naval power. It has always seemed to me that [Samuel] Johnson had a real point here. No country in history has gone through its teething period with so little interference from outside as the United States. During the century and a half in which the country grew up, the possibility of foreign invasion was simply not a problem. And the reason, or one of the reasons, must surely be the thoroughness with which the British navy policed the North Atlantic. A pretty handsome service to be had without paying a penny.”
Supplementing this point, Lundberg wrote:
“Whereas European royalty and nobility played profound integral roles in European history, the latter-day American rich were more like hitchhikers who opportunistically climbed aboard a good thing. They produced neither the technology, the climate, the land, the people nor the political system. Nor did they, like many European groups (as in England) take over the terrain as invading conquerors. Rather did they infiltrate the situation from below, insinuate themselves into opportunely presented economic gaps, subvert various rules and procedures, and, as it were ride a rocket to the moon and beyond, meanwhile through their propagandists presenting themselves, no less, as the creators of machine industrialization which was in fact copied from England and transplanted into a lush terrain.”
Americans believe they did it all themselves (aided by the “genius and prescience” of the founding fathers) when, really, they were mostly just lucky. We have similar logical distortions here in Alberta where we sit on so much oil wealth. To hear many Albertans say it, that’s what makes us great!
America as a nation, despite all its human and industrial wealth, has preferred to fritter it all away and live far beyond its means—partaking of what was believed to be an endless free lunch. If Americans wanted something now—instantly—they just put it on a credit card or, as a nation, borrowed from Japan or China. I remember in the recession of the early 1980s, Japan started buying up properties in the U.S. Time magazine even had a cover story on how foreigners were buying up the country. But, it was a seven day wonder and never followed up and actually addressed as an issue of national concern.
At the end of 2006, non-US citizens and institutions held 44% of federal debt held by the public. About 66% of that was held by the central banks of other countries, in particular the central banks of Japan and China. In May 2009, the US owed China $772 billion!
The White House estimates that the government’s debt servicing will be more than $700 billion a year by 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if there are substantial cuts in annual budget deficits. The White House also estimates that the government will have to borrow about $3.5 trillion more over the next three years. In addition, the Treasury has to refinance a huge amount of short-term debt that was issued during the financial crisis. Treasury officials estimate that about 36 percent of the government’s marketable debt—about $1.6 trillion—is coming due in the next few months.
No country can sustain the haemorrhaging of such national wealth for long and keep its independence.
If I was an American, I would have trouble sleeping at night. As William H. Gross, managing director of the Pimco Group, the global bond-management firm says: “What a good country or a good squirrel should be doing is stashing away nuts for the winter. The United States is not only not saving nuts, it’s eating the ones left over from the last winter.”
We’re not out of the woods yet in terms of further global dislocations, but Canada is in a better position than most other industrialized nations to weather it. In fact, as Fareed Zakaria wrote:
“Canada has done more than survive this financial crisis. The country is positively thriving in it. Canadian banks are well capitalized and poised to take advantage of opportunities that American and European banks cannot seize. The Toronto Dominion Bank, for example, was the 15th-largest bank in North America one year ago. Now it is the fifth-largest. It hasn't grown in size; the others have all shrunk.”
A view from the North American attic
Catherine Ford, retired Calgary Herald newspaper columnist and editorial writer, said:
“If there is a basic, easily stated difference between Canadians and Americans, it is in the philosophy of personal privilege: Americans believe unless they are specifically prohibited against doing something, it’s their right to proceed; Canadians believe exactly the opposite. It is the supremacy of the individual over the collective in the United States and the opposite in Canada.”
Sterling Lyon, former Premier of Manitoba:
“This business of rights, that's not our concept of government. We know what our rights are. We enjoy them. We don't have to state them. This rather American approach to it is really not ours. We don't worry about things like that. We do what's right.”
Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye: “The central fact of Canadian history is the rejection of the American Revolution.”
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the one term Sec-Gen of the United Nations said:
"It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy.…The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States."
The United States, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, did not like Boutros-Ghali's independent-minded leadership and blocked his bid for a second term in 1996.
As writer Colin Wilson observed: “Rome typifies what can go wrong when human evolution is restricted to the purely material level.”
Like Rome, America is a society based primarily on material and military might. There are some Americans who argue that Canadians never fought to have a country, making us a second class nation to the American warrior. Au contraire says Roger D. Hall in Encyclopaedia Britannica
“The War of 1812 can largely be traced to the Anglo-U. S. rivalry in the fur trade. British traders and soldiers had supplied Indian tribes and afforded them moral support in their contest with the advancing U.S. frontier. Britain had surrendered the western posts by the Jay Treaty of 1794, but the cause of the Canadian fur trade and of the Indians remained the same: preserving the wilderness. Certainly, apart from single-ship actions and privateering, the war was fought for the conquest of Canada and elimination of the British as an ally of the Indians. In the end, the war was a stalemate and closed with no concession by either side. However, it did push back the Indian frontier, increase the breach between the United States and the British North American colonies, and confirm the U.S.-Canadian boundary. It also gave Canadians a stake in their land; they had fought for it, sometimes English and French together, and successfully staved off invasion.”
Fear and loathing in Canada
Many Canadians fear the United States. I am one of their number.
If America covets something, like Canada’s abundance of oil or fresh water, we will be powerless to resist. I know individual Americans, fine people all, who would dispute this statement, but they are not the Americans in charge. Reading Steven Kinzer’s book Overthrow is a chilling read for non-Americans as Kinzer describes the thirteen legitimate, many democratically elected governments the U.S. has overthrown or undermined over the last century. American actions, in its own business, interests have resulted in the poverty, death and condemnation of millions of people—including its own citizens. American leaders are ruthless.
In 1776, Adam Smith published Wealth of Nations, coincidentally, in America’s founding year. Smith had written: “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons.”
Smith was talking about the business class. This is the class of people who actually run America. The ethic applies as much today, as it did then.
It’s okay, even psychologically liberating, to be anti-American
I’ve been trying to figure out why it feels socially unacceptable to be anti-American. I think I’ve figured it out. It’s because Americans are supposed to be the good guys, and to be anti-American is to somehow be opposed to motherhood and apple pie—the American icons of goodness.
But, in too many obvious ways over the last half century that I have been observing, Americans are not the good guys. This leads me to the awareness that there are at least three, perhaps several, Americas—all different, yet occupying the same space and time. The term anti-American has subtleties.
America is not so much a country, as an ideology. “UnAmerican” is a real concept in the minds of many Americans, suggesting that there are specific American ways of thinking and acting and anyone outside those boundaries is unAmerican. Except in occasional passing, I can’t think of another modern nation where Un— as a prefix is seriously used. UnCanadian? Not in our lexicon.
Anti-American, to me, means anti— the ideology.
It also means I am opposed to certain classes of American citizens: Business leaders, and that great grouping who have gathered under the tent of Republicans and the religious right and the millions of unthinking sycophants of those groups.
There are millions of American citizens who are good people. The tragedy for them is that they have no influence on the national stage or any say in the direction of the country.
The future?
Forty-odd years ago, when I was in high school, one of the poems we learned in Literature class was Shelley’s “Ozymandias”. At the time, America was the colossus in the world; Russia merely a communist threat held at bay by the U.S. It only came to light later that the arms race was started by the U.S. who falsely reported that there was a “missile gap” with the Russians. The result was psychological terror across the continent (and the world) and billions in profits to the arms industry.
Today, in that poem, I see the potential, even likely future, of America. My heart goes out to all the good people in America who had no hand in creating America’s vast global dysfunctionality—other than through their passivity.
There can be a better future for America
Writing in the New York Times, in a column titled "Advice From Grandma", Thomas Friedman considers the future of America.
America’s future strength, Friedman says, is its people's imagination compared to China and its authoritarian culture which stifles imagination.
He lists the six factors paralysing America today:
§ Too much money in politics
§ Through gerrymandering, politicians never have to appeal to the centre
§ The cable TV culture has destroyed civility
§ Permanent presidential campaigning leaves little time for governing
§ The positive potential of the internet has opened the door to “digital lynch mobs”
§ “A U.S. business community that has become so globalized that it only comes to Washington to lobby for its own narrow interests; it rarely speaks out anymore in defense of national issues like health care, education and open markets.”
“The standard answer is that we need better leaders ,” he says, but goes on to say that “the real answer is that we need better citizens. We need citizens who will convey to their leaders that they are ready to sacrifice, even pay, yes, higher taxes, and will not punish politicians who ask them to do the hard things. Otherwise, folks, we’re in trouble. A great power that can only produce suboptimal responses to its biggest challenges will, in time, fade from being a great power—no matter how much imagination it generates.”
It was the great American jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes who said: "I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization." By hating and refusing to pay taxes, we see what Americans have actually bought.
Herein lies the crunch. Globally, America is so far behind the eight ball—as I’ve shown with international comparisons—that it will take a great national effort—greater even, than the Manhattan Project—to first, regain global parity, and then learn how to make a positive contribution towards the advancement of mankind—beyond the material realm.
(The obvious example here is the great effort undertaken to put man on the moon—then, despite today’s rhetoric—never going back. The Chinese will probably be the next people on the moon.)
This means that the American people are going to have to publicly and consciously decide to live within their means and significantly reduce their standard of living. They can no longer get away with their disproportionate gobbling of the earth’s resources. The other peoples they share the planet with will no longer tolerate such destructive selfishness.
David Brooks, also writing in the New York Times, in a column titled "The Values Question" says that
“During the first many decades of this nation’s existence, the United States was a wide-open, dynamic country with a rapidly expanding economy. It was also a country that tolerated a large amount of cruelty and pain—poor people living in misery, workers suffering from exploitation.”
What goes around, comes around and it looks like America has returned to its individualistic selfish roots which benefit only a favoured few.
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Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which is why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class—a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue. From 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman, Canada’s top business writer (notably a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting. He gave up journalism in the early 1980s because he had no interest in being a hack writer for the mainstream media and became a software developer and programmer. He retired from computers last year and is now back to doing what he loves—writing and trying to make the world a better place
The Canadian Comparison: Speaking Truth to U.S. PowerSalem-News.com