After dominating the world since 1945, the US is an empire in rapid decline. In 2024, the US for the first time began paying more than $1 trillion in interest on its $35 trillion debt. Imports are twice exports. Since 2000, the US trade deficit has averaged an annual $600 billion. China and BRICS now amount to nearly 40% of the world’s population compared to 7% represented by the G7. China has built 400 schools in Iraq and airports in Africa. The GDP of the BRICS countries has surpassed the GDP of the G7. “When we call China, we get an airport (or sewage treatment facilities). When we call Germany or the US, we get a lecture,” said the Nigerian-born head of the WTO.
Economic security does not mean annexing Greenland, Panama or Canada. Economic security means qualitative growth and redistribution`, reversing exploding inequality, building affordable apartments and transitional shelters, and building community centers as in Vancouver Canada. The poor and displaced need resources, free community colleges and medicare for all, not lectures or vague promises. In 1933, FDR averted a devastating depression through an activist government. The state is not a business or a Swabian housewife but can become indebted to help present and future generations. Social security, minimum wage legislation, state jobs building roads, bridges, libraries, irrigation systems and airports marked the first hundred days of the New Deal. Public spirit and optimism returned.
Economic security is thrown to the wind when only the super-rich are enriched and the poor and house-less are ignored and made invisible. Taxes on the rich and windfall taxes are vital so the state need not choose between food and housing assistance. In the 1960s, corporate taxes financed 40% of federal spending; in 2024, corporate tax revenue only represented 7% of federal spending. “Taxes are the price we pay for living in community,” said Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Public expenditures on highways, hospitals, police, and fire departments make community a concrete reality. Affordable apartments are impossible today without massive state investment`because of the higher costs of material and labor.
The ice-storm and the Los Angeles fires show the helplessness of a war-addicted country that has spent $10.4 trillion on unwinnable wars since 2002. As the Internet and digital publishing are examples of the impossible becoming possible, Vancouver’s 26 community centers enable working and unemployed to find an anchor in the fast changing modern world. As war is too important to be left to the military and retired generals, public welfare cannot be left to the “self-healing market” or the idolatrous myth of profit-maximization. Shriveling the financial sector and expanding the public sector should be “no-brainers” and lessons from the 2007-2008 financial crash. The public sector is an antidote to the atomization, commodification and depression of our hyper-materialist and hyper-individualist society.
China has 85% of rare earth (e.g. lithium), a well-trained manufacturing workforce, and a reliable supply chain. The hope of making the US into a manufacturing powerhouse will take years or decades. To China, existence means co-existence. China has learned, not stolen Western technology. Our challenge today is to become multicultural and multi-polar cooperative partners, to see the future as regional, decentralized and demilitarized. We must resist the hate preachers, the Russia-haters, the China-haters, the chauvinists, xenophobes, and homophobes who see tolerance, compromise and interdependence as only weaknesses. Humility is the true human strength, not mud-throwing, name-calling or scapegoating!