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American Exceptionalism Is on the Ropes and the End of the Petrodollar Is Nigh

June 21, 2020

American Exceptionalism Is on the Ropes and the End of the Petrodollar Is Nigh

From the border wall rhetoric to trade wars, Trump is effectively setting up the implosion of the dollar and couching it as pseudo nationalistic populism.

The pressure on the global economy imposed by the measures to curb the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to erode whatever confidence the world still has in the U.S. dollar as a viable reserve currency. A shortfall in U.S. domestic savings, dropping to 1.4 percent of national income, brought on by the drawn-out shutdowns and structural changes to the ways of doing business, such as the phasing out of brick-and-mortar business establishments and the substitution of human labor with robotics, may be the canary in the coal mine of the upcoming economic paradigm shift.

Among the visible signs that a global monetary reset is in the offing is the state of currency speculation markets, which are progressively moving away from the dollar as illustrated by the $1.5 billion slash in short positions in the previous week, the largest in six weeks. A more inconspicuous red flag might be the decreasing power of the U.S. Federal Reserve to affect markets as it has over its relatively short existence with a mere word here or the moving of an interest rate point there.

Just five days ago, Fed chair Jerome Powell declared in a press conference that the U.S. banking system was “so much better capitalized, so much stronger, better aware of its risks, better at managing its risks, [and] more highly liquid…”, that it represented a “source of strength” in this environment of widespread economic pain. In former years, just these words from the head of the U.S. central bank would have been enough to shore up any misgivings by market participants. But exactly the opposite occurred.

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The American Exceptionalism Myth and the Selling of U.S. Domination

June 11, 2018

The American Exceptionalism Myth and the Selling of U.S. Domination

I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.

– Barack Obama, 2015.

From birth, Americans are expected to believe in the notion of U.S. superiority over other peoples in other nations.

The daily school ritual of pledging allegiance to the flag and playing the national anthem at sporting events—whether the Super Bowl or a neighborhood swim meet—is a given. Americans are taught that they are intellectually, socially, economically, and morally superior to any other people on earth. We believe that we place a higher value on life than others do.

Most Americans are unaware of the amount of human suffering the U.S. government has inflicted on others throughout the world, especially post 9/11. We are incessantly told it is our duty to support the troops and our leaders who invade, bomb or otherwise intervene in other nations. The motives offered might be to stop genocide, to take down a maniacal despot, or to spread democracy and American values. Our government purportedly acts with reluctance as well as with compassion, respect for others, and good intent. We are told that the troops keep us safe and help spread the American way of life to a needy world. Why? It is because we are “exceptional.”

September 11, 2001

We are told the United States was brutally attacked by Al-Qaeda on 9/11. That it happened in real time, on our soil, live in our living rooms, made it seem even worse. But the real horror lay in the loss of the 2,977 victims.

Our response to this abhorrent crime should have been that of a just, democratic society, acting on the rule of law. Instead, it was completely out of proportion, becoming barbaric and grotesque. Yet our response was justified by those who believe that an American life is more valuable than the lives of all others.

The response

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Why The Empire Never Sleeps: The Indispensable Nation Folly

May 16, 2018

Why The Empire Never Sleeps: The Indispensable Nation Folly

Like the case of Rome before it, the Empire is bankrupting America. The true fiscal cost is upwards of $1.o trillion per year (counting $200 billion for veterans and debt service for wars), but there is no way to pay for it.

That’s because the 78-million strong Baby Boom is in the driver’s seat of American politics. It plainly will not permit the $3 trillion per year retirement and health care entitlement-driven Welfare State to be curtailed.

The Trumpite/GOP has already sealed that deal by refusing to reform Social Security and Medicare and by proving utterly incapable of laying a glove politically on Obamacare/Medicaid. At the same time, boomers keep voting for the GOP’s anti-tax allergy, thereby refusing to tax themselves to close Washington’s yawning deficits.

More importantly, the generation which marched on the Pentagon in 1968 against the insanity and  barbarism of LBJ’s Vietnam War have long since abandoned the cause of peace. So doing, boomers have acquiesced in the final ascendancy of the Warfare State, which grew like topsy once the US became the world’s sole superpower after the Soviet Union slithered off the pages of history in 1991.

Yet there is a reason why the end of the 77-year world war which incepted with the “guns of August” in 1914 did not enable the world to resume the status quo ante of relative peace and prosperous global capitalism.

To wit, the hoary ideology of American exceptionalism and the Indispensable Nation was also, ironically, liberated from the shackles of cold war realism when the iron curtain came tumbling down.

Consequently, it burst into a quest for unadulterated global hegemony. In short order (under Bush the Elder and the Clintons) Washington morphed into the Imperial City, and became a beehive not only of militarism, but of an endless complex of think-tanks, NGO’s, advisories and consultancies, “law firms”, lobbies and racketeers.

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Venezuela: Revenge of the Mad-Dog Empire 

February 21, 2018

Venezuela: Revenge of the Mad-Dog Empire 

Photo by Diariocritico de Venezuela | CC BY 2.0

Only in the world of comic-book fantasies is the United States a friend to the oppressed in Africa or anywhere else on the planet. In the real world, the U.S. is a predator, colonial/capitalist nation. But like the imagined nation of Wakanda, in the latest cultural assault on critical mass consciousness, “American exceptionalism” and “make America great again” – two slogans representing both sides of the imperialist coin, ruling class interests are obscured and the people are reduced to working against their objective interests and being accomplices to imperial lawlessness.

In every part of the world, the United States is engaged in maniacal, criminal assaults on democracy, basic human decency and common sense.  From its support for armed jihadists groups in Syria and its illegal occupation of that nation, transferring heavy military equipment to its puppet regime in Ukraine, supporting unending war in Afghanistan, to the military invasion of African, the commitment to maintaining U.S. global dominance has moved war and militarism to the center of U.S. strategy.

But nowhere is U.S. criminality more apparent and unrelenting than right here in the Americas where the Pan-European project was born in 1492. That was the year “Europe” was born, emerging from its relative cultural backwardness using with terrifying efficiency the only advantage it had over the more civilized people of the region—armor protection and steel weapons—to slaughter the people, take the land and begin the 500-hundred-year nightmare the people of the world have suffered ever since.

Today, the barbarism of the Pan-European project continues under the tutelage of what history will record—if humanity survives—as the most violent, racist, oppressive human experience ever to have emerged in the short span of human existence on Earth: The United States of America.

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America the Pariah

February 5, 2018

America the Pariah

Female masked members of the Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, protest President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. (Adel Hana / AP)

We proclaimed a dream of an America that would be a Shining City on a Hill.
—President Ronald Reagan, 1984

I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.
—President Barack Obama, 2014

It has become obligatory. To be taken seriously in American politics, one must kneel before the altar of “American exceptionalism”—the messianic notion that the United States is a constant source for good in the world with a unique mission to spread its particular values.

At times, this manifests itself in absurdist minutiae, such as then-presidential candidate Barack Obama sparking controversy when he was seen without the requisite American flag pin on the lapel of his suit jacket. Gasp. Lambasted in the press for this unpatriotic symbolic gaffe, Obama soon sported the compulsory pin. He sported it safely through the presidency.

Both major political parties have long since reached a consensus of sorts on extolling America’s messianic global mission. To even question the contours of that crusade—despite 17 years of failing military quagmires—is to commit political suicide and be relegated to the margins of public life.

For once, the mainstream politicians might be right. A rigorous look at the United States of 2018 (or 2002, or 1850, for that matter) indicates that America may well be exceptional—only not in the ways most of its citizens think. On many issues and several levels, America’s culture of militarism (both at home and abroad) stands out as the unique dark side of the exceptionalist project. We are, in fact, extraordinary among the family of nations. Unfortunately, that which makes us exceptional is the dogged militarism that consistently brands the U.S. as an international pariah.

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Hearing the Russian Perspective

January 3, 2016

Hearing the Russian Perspective

The neocons and liberal hawks who dominate the U.S. foreign policy and media establishment are pushing the world toward a nuclear showdown with Russia as few people hear a comprehensive response from the other side, an imbalance that a new Russian documentary addresses, writes Gilbert Doctorow.

By Gilbert Doctorow

Without mincing words, the new Russian documentary World Order is a devastating critique of U.S. global hegemony justified in the name of “democracy promotion” and “human rights” ever since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992.

It is directly in line with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first repudiation of the American unipolar world issued in his speech to the Munich Security Conference in February 2007 and his further, ever more explicit exposés in a succession of speeches that challenged specific manifestations of “American exceptionalism.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin taking the presidential oath at his third inauguration ceremony on May 7, 2012. (Russian government photo)

Russian President Vladimir Putin taking the presidential oath at his third inauguration ceremony on May 7, 2012. (Russian government photo)

World Order, which is now posted on YouTube (in Russian) and at another site (with English subtitles), illustrates through graphic footage and the testimony of independent world authorities the tragic consequences, the spread of chaos and misery, resulting from U.S.-engineered “regime change” and “color revolutions,” of which the violent overthrow of the Yanukovich regime in Ukraine in February 2014 is only the latest example. (Some of the highlights from Putin’s interview are translated into English hereand here.)

The title of the film follows on Putin’s address to the 70th anniversary gathering of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015 which had as its central message that world order rests on international law, which in turn has as its foundation the UN Charter.

By flouting the Charter and waging war without the sanction of the UN Security Council, starting with the NATO attack on Serbia in 1999 and continuing with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 up to its illegal bombings in Syria today, the United States and its NATO allies have shaken the foundations of international law.

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Europe’s Complicity in Evil

June 26, 2015

Europe’s Complicity in Evil 

Sovereignty or Imperialism?

On September 5, 2009 I addressed an international conference in Austria on the subject of Europe’s subordination to the US and, thus, the absence of any constructive criticism of US foreign and domestic policies. Karel van Wolferen, whose website is http://www.karelvanwolferen.com, kindly reminded me of my address to the conference when he he sent it to me with his supportive response. Both are available below. You can see from my address and from Karel’s response that the reckless direction of US foreign and domestic policy has been known for many years. Yet the recklessness continues

Europe’s Complicity in Evil
[An address by Hon. Paul Craig Roberts, Ph.D., Chevalier, Legion d’Honneur, to Mut zur Ethik Conference, “Sovereignty or Imperialism,” Feldkirch, Austria, September 5, 2009]

There is a widespread supposition that Obama, being black and a member of an oppressed race, will imbue US foreign policy with a higher morality than the world experienced from Bush and Clinton. This is a delusion.

Obama represents the same ideology of American “exceptionalism” as other recent presidents. This ideology designates the United States as The Virtuous Nation and supplies the basis for the belief that America has the right, indeed the responsibility, to impose its hegemony upon the world by bribery or by force. The claim of American exceptionalism produces a form of patriotism that blinds the US population to the immorality of America’s wars of aggression.

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Challenging American Exceptionalism

April 28, 2015

Challenging American Exceptionalism

President Barack Obama stood behind the podium and apologized for inadvertently killing two Western hostages – including one American – during a drone strike in Yemen. Obama said, “one of the things that sets America apart from many other nations, one of the things that makes us exceptional, is our willingness to confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes.” In his 2015 state of the union address, Obama described America as “exceptional.” When he spoke to the United Nations General Assembly in 2013, he said, “Some may disagree, but I believe that America is exceptional.”

American exceptionalism reflects the belief that Americans are somehow better than everyone else. This view reared its head after the 2013 leak of a Department of Justice White Paper that describes circumstances under which the President can order the targeted killing of U.S. citizens. There had been little public concern in this country about drone strikes that killed people in other countries. But when it was revealed that U.S. citizens could be targeted, Americans were outraged. This motivated Senator Rand Paul to launch his 13-hour filibuster of John Brennan’s nomination for CIA director.

It is this double standard that moved Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu to write a letter to the editor of the New York Times, in which he asked, “Do the United States and its people really want to tell those of us who live in the rest of the world that our lives are not of the same value as yours?” (When I saw that letter, I immediately invited Archbishop Tutu to write the foreword to my book, “Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.” He graciously agreed and he elaborates on that sentiment in the foreword).

 

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