When you're hot, you're hot and when you're not, you're not

The US is poised to lose its role as a global financial “superpower” in the wake of the financial crisis, Peer Steinbrück, German finance minister, said on Thursday as he called for a regulatory crackdown on financial markets. “The US will lose its status as the superpower of the world financial system. This world will become multipolar” with the emergence of stronger, better capitalised centres in Asia and Europe, Mr Steinbrück told the German parliament. “The world will never be the same again.” Financial Times

Remember the mood music of eight years ago. The greatest power the world has ever seen. Rome on steroids. An international system said to be unipolar, and Washington's unabashed embrace of unilateralism. The US as "Prometheus unbound", according to the neoconservative commentator Charles Krauthammer. Wall Street investment bankers bestriding the financial globe as Pentagon generals did the military globe and Harvard professors the soft power one. Masters of the universe. Timothy Garton Ash - Guardian

My bills are all due and the baby needs shoes and I'm busted
Cotton is down to a quarter a pound, but I'm busted
I got a cow that went dry and a hen that won't lay
A big stack of bills that gets bigger each day
The county's gonna haul my belongings away cause I'm busted. "Busted" - Ray Charles

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I think now that the USA is really going to be down and out, I'm going to stop kicking it.

What I hate is the stupidity of imperial hubris, the bloated idiocy of it all. I think that most of us, or at least me who writes and you who read this blog, are hurt and angry at being identified with all of the swollen, bullying imbecility and not one bit in contradiction with our language or culture, curious religious habits or the smell of our earth.

There was a wonderful Spanish song about a woman that wanted to be "the bride at the wedding, the child at the baptismal font, the cadaver at the funeral", just so that she could always be the star of the show. I think that is what all the world and even many Americans are mortally tired of... I know I am.

I am panting for a multipolar world: one where the shops smell differently in one country from the shops in another country, where the hotels don't look the same... different odors, different tastes, different sounds.

I detest it that everyone everywhere tries to speak our language and knows so many useless (for them) things about our "way of life". I envy people like Romanians who can speak their mother language on a crowded bus without anyone else understanding them... Small countries, whose local dishes are family secrets, private pleasures waiting to be accidentally discovered and not unhealthy travesties pitifully and methacrylicly replicated on street corners all over the planet.

What could sound more foreign than the following phrase:

"Down with the empire, long live America!"

World, forget you ever knew us.

I'll drink to that. DS

Scowcroft puts the fox among the chickens

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If you peel off all the national security rhetoric from Brent Scowcroft's Op-Ed in today's New York Times, the message is: America's support of Israel is endangering America's hegemony in the Middle East, which in turn endangers America's control of the world's energy supplies. To save what is left of America's power and prestige, a face saving solution is needed for Iraq. No solution can be found for Iraq without the cooperation of its neighbors. Because of America's support of Israel the population of those countries would not tolerate cooperation with the USA and that support would not be forthcoming. Therefore the Palestinians must be satisfied in order to extract the USA from Iraq. Very neat. Really what General Scowcroft's analysis shows is how desperate the situation and with it America's position in the world have become. If the United States had imposed a Pax Americana on Israel and Palestine at the zenith of American power at the end the First Gulf War, this would have been seen as America's acting from strength: power imposing justice. Very Roman. At this point the message that is being sent is that the armed resistance of irregular Arab fighter is forcing the United States to abandon Israel. Certainly this will encourage others to resist American power everywhere in the world. It also means importing the same tribal politics that poison the Middle East directly into the heart of America's political discourse. Can you imagine AIPAC's reaction to Scowcroft's proposals? Jimmy Carter with Mearsheimer and Walt are a Hadassah kaffee klatch compared to Brent Scowcroft. The Israeli, defense and energy lobbies will be at each others throats and we may see the rise in "deep America" of a Borat-like isolationist populism tinged with antisemitism. However unfortunate it may be though, General Scowcroft's analysis is the correct one: this is the only way out. It is also an epitaph for America's empire and the beginning of a "Baghdad-like" political climate in Washington. DS

Getting the Middle East Back on Our Side - Brent Scowcroft - New York Times
Abstract: An American withdrawal before Iraq can, in the words of the president, “govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself” would be a strategic defeat for American interests, with potentially catastrophic consequences both in the region and beyond. Our opponents would be hugely emboldened, our friends deeply demoralized. Iran, heady with the withdrawal of its principal adversary, would expand its influence through Hezbollah and Hamas more deeply into Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Jordan. Our Arab friends would rightly feel we had abandoned them to face alone a radicalism that has been greatly inflamed by American actions in the region and which could pose a serious threat to their own governments. The effects would not be confined to Iraq and the Middle East. Energy resources and transit choke points vital to the global economy would be subjected to greatly increased risk. Terrorists and extremists elsewhere would be emboldened. And the perception, worldwide, would be that the American colossus had stumbled, was losing its resolve and could no longer be considered a reliable ally or friend — or the guarantor of peace and stability in this critical region. To avoid these dire consequences, we need to secure the support of the countries of the region themselves. It is greatly in their self-interest to give that support, just as they did in the 1991 Persian Gulf conflict. Unfortunately, in recent years they have come to see it as dangerous to identify with the United States, and so they have largely stood on the sidelines. A vigorously renewed effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict could fundamentally change both the dynamics in the region and the strategic calculus of key leaders. Real progress would push Iran into a more defensive posture. Hezbollah and Hamas would lose their rallying principle. American allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the gulf states would be liberated to assist in stabilizing Iraq. And Iraq would finally be seen by all as a key country that had to be set right in the pursuit of regional security. Arab leaders are now keen to resolve the 50-year-old dispute. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel may be as well. His nation’s long-term security can only be assured by resolving this issue once and for all. However, only the American president can bring them to the same table.(...) What is at stake is not only Iraq and the stability of the Middle East, but the global perception of the reliability of the United States as a partner in a deeply troubled world. We cannot afford to fail that test. READ IT ALL

Empire Death Watch: Iran turns from dollar to euro in oil sales - The Times (London)

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As any true American knows from birth, the US Dollar is the ultimate, visible and tangible manifestation of God's will on earth and his chosen instrument for expressing it... or so we have always believed... if not in thought and word, surely in deed. So, the subtext of this article could be summed up as, "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin," which Jimmy Cox once rendered into American English in the following manner:

Once I lived a life of a millionaire,
Spent all my money, didn't have any cares.
Took all my friends out for a mighty good time.
Bought bootleg liquor champagne and wine.

Then I began to fall so low,
Lost all my good friends, had nowhere to go.
If I get my hands on a dollar again,
I'll hang on to it 'til that old eagle grins.

'Cause no, no, nobody knows you
When you're down and out.
In your pocket, not one penny,
And as for friends, you don't have any.

When you get back on your feet again,
Everybody wants to be your long lost friend.
I said it straight without any doubt,
Nobody knows you when you're down and out.

"Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"
Words & Music by Jimmy Cox (1923) - Recorded by Eric Clapton, 1992

Iran turns from dollar to euro in oil sales - The Times
Abstract: Iran is selling more of its oil for payment in euros than dollars as it seeks to shift its foreign currency reserves away from the depreciating currency of its political enemy, the United States.(...) Gholanhossein Nozari, the managing director of National Iranian Oil Company, said that 57 per cent of Iran’s income from oil exports was now received in euros. The move reflects a political desire for less reliance on the dollar, as well as a need to avoid further depreciation in currency reserves. Iran’s dollar holdings are thought to have fallen from 40 per cent of currency reserves to just a third.(...) Iran’s decision to switch currencies extends a trend among big oil exporters moving from the dollar as they seek protection from a continuing slide in the petrocurrency’s value.(...) The dollar’s slide protected non-dollar oil importers from the escalation in the price of fuel early this year. Oil was $63 per barrel at the beginning of January, rose to $74 at the start of July and has fallen back to $63 per barrel this month. However, translated into euros, the rise is less impressive — from €53 a barrel to a peak of €58 before a sharp decline to €48. The fall in the dollar against major currencies has had a dramatic impact on the revenues of oil exporters and has exacerbated the rumbling anti- American feeling in the Gulf. Although Gulf Arab states are predominantly dollar export earners, they mainly purchase in euros and yen, buying food, consumer goods and manufactured products from Europe and the Far East. READ IT ALL

American Raj: how it felt

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Among the very few conservative American political commentators that can be read with fruition and without retching is the ever civil and always civilized George Will. In today's Washington Post he gives a very good description of how America of the 1950s felt. This was when the USA was really and truly the world's only superpower. When did it end? It felt like it ended when Kennedy got shot, but it probably ended on August 15, 1971 when Nixon took the dollar off gold. Few countries have declined so fast, without losing a world war. Those who lived the period will recognize the accompanying illustration, and those born in a less innocent era may think there is even a porno reference. Times change. DS

Abstract: In 1951, when the average American ate 50 percent more than the average European, Americans(...) controlled two-thirds of the world's productive capacity, owned 80 percent of the world's electrical goods, and produced more than 40 percent of its electricity, 60 percent of its oil and 66 percent of its steel. America's 5 percent of the world's population had more wealth than the other 95 percent, and Americans made almost all of what they consumed: 99.93 percent of new cars sold in this country in 1954 were U.S. brands. By the end of the '50s, GM was a bigger economic entity than Belgium, and Los Angeles had more cars than did Asia -- cars for a gadget-smitten people, cars with Strato-Streak engines, Strato-Flight Hydra-Matic transmissions and Torsion-Aire suspensions. The 1958 Lincoln Continental was 19 feet long. And before television arrived (in 1950, 40 percent of Americans had never seen a television program; by May 1953 Boston had more televisions than bathtubs) America made almost a million comic books a month. Consider what was new or not invented then: ballpoint pens, contact lenses, credit cards, power steering, long-playing records, dishwashers, garbage disposals. And remember words now no longer heard: icebox, dime store, bobby socks, panty raid, canasta (a card game). In 1951 a Tennessee youth was arrested on suspicion of narcotics possession. The brown powder was a new product -- instant coffee.(...) The '50s did have worries. When a contestant on a TV game show said his wife's astrological sign was Cancer, the cigarette company sponsoring the show had the segment refilmed and her sign changed to Aries. You could get 14 years in an Indiana prison for instigating anyone under age 21 to "commit masturbation." And to get a New York fishing license, you had to swear a loyalty oath. READ IT ALL