Mickey Walker

The Short Run is Here: China, Russia, Brazil, and India Are Knocking at our Door

By Mickey Walker-November 1, 2009

The following brilliant article by Dr. Steve Jonas says much about what us Americans would rather ignore and remain in de Nile about while sipping a fruity alcoholic drink and living for the moment.  Note:  Dr. Steve Jonas’ “Extinction Distinction.”  

Could the United States of America become a statistic and join the likes of Rome as a former great and powerful nation that bit the dust?  It could.  Best to procrastinate and look the other way when the future is continually being trashed by Big Corporations in the name of Money.  Never mind that tattered and torn dollar backed not by gold or silver, but by a 12 Trillion Dollar Debt!  Like in IOUs held by the rest of the solvent nations of the world who are getting to be mighty nervous.  The short term has arrived.  We have been sold down the river and can never swim back upstream and against the current of a 12 Trillion dollar debt, and counting.  No way, you say. Meanwhile the Chinese continue to rule the world in manufacturing prowess and a world wealth of money surpluses.  A strong China policy is to continue to buy up the world's resources.  China continues to grow, year to date in 2009 at 8.5%!  All over the globe China is buying gold, copper (for green windings for wind power windmills), oil, real estate, farm land, and water.  When push comes to shove and the US and other countries which act sometimes like perpetual hippies on LSD, might finally have to wake up to find that we no longer can sustain our country, our needs, or our future existence as nations.  Without resources, mainly oil, we are but a brief but giant blip on the screen of history.  Without oil, we won’t even have the gasoline to drive the jeep to the missile silo so the first sergeant can push the button.  No oil, no planes, no tanks, no potatoes and beef, no Kroger, no Winn-Dixie, no Swine Flu vaccine, no nothing.  At least in a world that is familiar to all of us since birth.  But it will never come to that.  We all correctly suspect that somebody will have to challenge the oil greedy China before giving up and resigning ourselves to just doing without oil, the life’s blood of any civilized nation. And if  Russia, the new kid on the block with massive deposits of oil suddenly courts and coaxes the Chinese to forget America and join them in the drill of starvation by OIL, will both nations succeed in bringing us Yanks to our knees?  As Russia and China collude with other world producers of goods, i.e., Brazil and India, will anyone remember our kindnesses to them in years past when they were but fledgling third world countries?  Probably not.  Will they continue to attack our dollar and harp to get it replaced as the world currency standard it has managed to maintain for many decades now?  Or might they insist on a new world currency to replace the American dollar as it continues to crumble to dust like the post-WW I German Mark? 

A country, be it the USA or France or Germany, cannot live without oil.  If someone cuts it off or even constricts the supply in the future, countries would find it necessary to shut down their business and affairs of state.  I cannot envision that happening.  If it gets that serious there has to be blood.  So who will fire the first missile?  When France alone could destroy the world with its nuclear arsenal, what will they do if shut out from oil and other natural resources necessary for them to survive and to function as a sovereign state?  How will France fly their jets and propel their ships and missiles without oil?  What will America do?  And will China back down?  Will Russia form an alliance with China?  Interesting century ahead.

Even Michael Moore’s fine new movie, “Capitalism, A Love Affair,” though brilliantly done, will probably see little box office receipts compared to the new digital special effects blockbuster thrillers that turn on audiences all over America.  With Americans, Escape tends to go better with popcorn than Reality. And when a movie is fraught with stark truths about our nation and what we must do NOW to preserve our democracy, how we must rise to the challenge and change our ways, sometimes it proves too much for Americans to bear.  Heck we want to be entertained.  And if we want to be rebuked for our follies, maybe we would rather go to church rather than watch a Michael Moore movie.  Though Moore shows gut-wrenching, tear-jerker scenes of American families run over by the iron Caterpillar of Capitalism without a regard for the common man, Moore has been magnificently demonized by Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, the GOP,  the ultra right, so much so that many Americans are ashamed to say that they have seen one of Moore’s movies.  Even Sean Hannity joked about how he wore a disguise so that nobody would recognize him attending a Michael Moore movie.  Moore basically shows how Capitalism, in the wrong hands can ruin a good country what with all the deregulated greed and corruption in corporations that are the life’s blood of Capitalism and the US government which has taken to collaborating in pure dishonesty to feather the nests of a select few corporate cronies while throwing the rest of us, our jobs, our retirement pensions, our Social Security, Medicare, and other pro-people government programs to the dogs.  They vowed they would drown all the people programs that benefit the working man in the bath tub, and they are succeeding rapidly.  So Michael Moore is made out to be a kook, a rabble-rouser, and his message is never seen by millions of Americans because of the money that propels the mandible and hot air of the likes of Limbaugh who takes shots at Michael Moore every chance he gets.  And too few Americans care to go see the movie anyway and see for themselves.  Dancing With the Stars, and the NFL Sunday game get a higher priority.

The gist is simply that the big dogs of Capitalism in this, our beloved America, have sold us out for immediate gain.  They have stolen our pensions, our former reasonable group health plan policies that covered our families and us and didn’t cost us an arm and a leg.  Our jobs got shipped overseas where cheap labor would manufacture cheap goods that could and would come to crush other world markets for the same items.  And the dogs of Capitalism who sold us out got multi-million dollar bonuses and golden parachutes without wincing or feeling the least twinge of guilt.

So now, as the economic vultures of BRIC circle overhead, what will become of us, a nation that led the world in production, ingenuity, science, software, and high academic and intellectual pursuits for the betterment of man, as we seem to be still frozen like a deer in the headlights awaiting our own extinction?  We have never been a nation to give up and to wait flippantly for rigor mortis to set in.  But are we the same America that built ships and planes to defeat Hitler, Mussolini, and Hiro Hito back when the world depended upon us?  Do we have the same deep fiber and sand in our souls that would never say die when adversity, economic or from being attacked at Pearl Harbor or at New York at the Twin Towers, that renders us undefeated as Americans, the best country and countrymen that ever lived?  I think we are still cut of that same cloth, of that same mitochondria, that same DNA that sets us apart from the others who have to date, been a mere flash in the pan.  We need to show them the way.  We can start by gearing up and going green.  We need to use the technology and the expertise we have to do vast solar fields of giga-watt production of electricity in the desserts of Arizona and New Mexico.  We need to give our own Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, massive funding for their magnificent photo voltaic solar research in solar furnaces and other solar devices to help the world make clean green energy. Note:  Sandia Laboratories great new solar discoveries.

We need to continue to research and conduct balls to the wall research and mass production of wind devices to produce much of the nation’s electricity on land and on the ocean where floating platform technology assures a virtual unlimited placement of wind generators on our shores.  Note:  Floating Wind Farms

Our dollar is torn and tattered, and our country loses jobs daily.  We need to suck up our guts.  And do what we do best:  to perform when the chips are down.  We are the underdogs and will not lay down and die while the Chinese pick our bones like vultures.  We have the technology to do it.  The world cries out for energy and green energy to set us free from oil and having to use foreign oil.  Let’s get with the program and have floating in the sky, by 2020 a million MARS helium-filled air balloons each of which can power 400 homes.  Note:  MARS Floating Balloon Generator

We Americans are not ready to become extinct.  It appears at times that all is left is the wake of America and for rigor mortis to set in.  But we aren’t ready to give up.  William Faulkner said it best:  “They mought uv kilt us, but they ain’t whupped us yit.”  TPJmagazine

print     email article