The businessman president’s lasting legacy might be plunging America into economic misery
|
|
| ||||||||||||
 |
When I was a young wire service police reporter in the early 1960s in corrupt Chicago, one of my favorite books was Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West. The novel was published in 1933, and West died young in a car crash with his wife in 1940. It’s about a young guy who writes an advice column for a New York newspaper and answers letters in his column from readers living through the desperation of the early days of the Great Depression. Every night he pours out his heart every night after work to a bartender. One evening the issue is a letter he received from a sixteen-year-old girl:
I don’t know what to do and would appreciate it if you could tell me what to do. When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids on the block makeing fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nites, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose—although I am a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes.
I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I cant blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she crys terrible when she looks at me.
I’m no longer a police reporter, but I’ve spent decades reporting on corrupt and idiotic wars and presidents—Democratic and Republican—who’ve thrown away billions of dollars on wars that could not be won, did not need to be fought, and cost millions of lives. Sometimes the job makes me feel a bit like Miss Lonelyhearts.
And today we have a malicious childlike president who is bankrupting the United States with the war he started in Iran and who ignores one possible off-ramp after another. I was chilled this summer during a visit to Europe when an old friend who understands the world of oil and finance and is not given to dramatics told me that unless there are immediate changes, America will soon enter a recession that will equal or surpass the Great Depression. Trump is playing with the future as he borrows and borrows and leaves an unmanageable debt for future presidents.
The economic horrors to come are the subject of a recent column by Martin Jay, a frontline British foreign correspondent who over thirty years has reported for American, British, German, Russian, and Arab media. In 2016, he was awarded the UN Correspondent Association’s gold medal for outstanding reporting. Jay’s argument is the same one I’ve heard from my friend at the heart of the international oil industry.
Jay’s essay begins with a scene from a recent gathering of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a Eurasian security group with ten member states. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Indian Prime Minister Nahendra Modi were caught on video sharing a moment of levity, a clip that went viral internationally. “What was the joke?” Jay asks. He speculates that they might have been talking about Donald Trump: “the more the US president does intentionally, the more of a joke he becomes universally around the world. The US president is literally a comic figure—a clown who amuses world leaders who are embracing a new multipolar world order which has found a new system of world trade that surpasses the US altogether.”
Jay points out that BRICS, the international trade collective of Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates, has like the SCO, which recently took in Iran, Pakistan, and India, been expanding and that the SCO might soon start its own development bank. So many countries exiting the US financial system and cutting ties with the IMF and the World Bank may spell the end of US dollar hegemony, no little thanks to Trump.
That dominance for decades allowed the US to push smaller countries around despite its military failures in places like Korea and Vietnam. It was the great expense of the Vietnam War in part that spurred Nixon to decouple the dollar from the gold standard in 1971. The idea, Jay writes, was “that future wars could be fought with freshly minted dollars with no side effects,” but in actuality “subsequent wars—certainly Iraq and Afghanistan—were fought using money which was essentially borrowed from Global South countries, even China, through treasury bonds—basically loans given to countries backed by the US government.” Since Trump started his war with Iran, economists are now speculating that the days of the US borrowing without limit from the Global South may be coming to an end. If SCO and BRICS set up a financial zone separate from the dollar, demand for US Treasury bonds could crater, and, Jay writes, “a surplus of dollar around the world which not many people want only means one thing: inflation.”
It’s long been known that weakening the dollar is part of Trump’s strategy to strengthen US manufacturing by making US exports cheaper, but Jay argues that he’s neglected “the downside to a weaker dollar”: “that only works when you have real control over the world’s economy and central banks, like in Nixon’s day. ‘It may be our dollar, but it’s your problem,’ one of Nixon’s advisers is quoted as saying to Europeans in the early seventies at a conference which explained how he planned to weaken the dollar and keep the hegemony.” Trump is still trying to have it both ways, but the hegemony, largely due to his own reckless foreign policy, is slipping away. These processes have long been underway, but Jay emphasizes that the current president has accelerated them: “The delusional antics of Trump are leading America to ruin at a speed most thought unimaginable.”
As we Chicago kids used to say about the proven corruption of the most infamous ballplayer on the White Sox: “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten