The political destiny of the U.S. for the next 25 years is sealed.

Here’s how:

In the United States, the proportion of the population aged >65 years is projected to increase from 12.4% in 2000 to 19.6% in 2030 (3). The number of persons aged >65 years is expected to increase from approximately 35 million in 2000 to an estimated 71 million in 2030 (3), and the number of persons aged >80 years is expected to increase from 9.3 million in 2000 to 19.5 million in 2030 (3). In 1995, the most populous states had the largest number of older persons; nine states (California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas) each had more than one million persons aged >65 years (4). In 1995, four states had >15% of their population aged >65 years; Florida had the largest proportion (19%) (5). By 2025, the proportion of Florida’s population aged >65 years is projected to be 26% (5) and >15% in 48 states (all but Alaska and California) (5).

(source: CDC http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5206a2.htm )

Here’s how it looks graphically in one of those demographic pyramid charts I’m always ranting about. (Note that the axis scale changes; what’s important is the shape)

(click image for larger size)

(source: US Census Bureau)

The disaster of Japan’s demographics:

(click image for larger size)

Sources: Japan Statistics Bureau, Japan MIC, Japan Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare

Note the inverting demographic pyramid as Japan moves through time. The point is that there are not enough young workers to pay for the social cost of the aging, non-working population, especially health care. Northern and western Europe and Russia exhibit similar demographic pyramids.

The only reason the U.S. chart doesn’t look like Japan’s is immigration. Immigration is the only chance to have enough young workers to pay for the older population. If you strip out the immigrant population in the U.S., the demographic pyramid looks a lot more like Japan’s.

So, what’s the point of this as it relates to politics?

Older people tend to vote more conservatively.

Sources:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/106042/age-vote-more-strongly-related-obamamccain-matchup.aspx

http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/national-exit-polls.html

Older people tend to vote for older people.

Source: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1987.tb00318.x/abstract

Older people vote more than young people.

(click image for larger size)

Source: U.S. Census Bureau http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/elections/voting-age_population_and_voter_participation.html

Older people watch more television.

Sources:

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117988273

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/16/broadcast-tv-audience-agi_n_683009.html

http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/prime-time-tv-viewers-by-age-demog

Older viewers watch conservative news.

Sources:

http://www.pensitoreview.com/2009/05/05/average-age-of-fox-news-viewer-is-65/

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/blogs/live-feed/fox-news-oldest-cable-audience-54230

Older people are the fastest growing segment of internet users and blog more than younger age cohorts.

Sources:

http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/social-networking-rises-especially-among-younger-set-11886/pew-change-internet-use-age-feb-2010jpg/

http://www.pewinternet.org/Infographics/2010/Internet-acess-by-age-group-over-time.aspx

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1093/generations-online

There are 76 million baby boomers coming down the demographic pipe, 24.4% of the 2011 population.

Source: U.S. Census bureau

(click image for larger size)

Chart source: CDC

People in the U.S. are living longer.

(click image for larger size)

Source: World Bank

The boomers will be around for a long time: 1955 + 80 = 2035.

Source: elementary math

Political Implications:

As the rat of the boomers moves down the demographic snake and the U.S. population ages out, the U.S. will go through an extended period of conservative voting driven by an increasingly aging population that has little more to do than sit in front of the television and the internet.

In parallel to the aging out of the boomers and their increasing political conservatism and intellectual isolation and decline, the U.S. will go through an extended period of political, social and cultural crisis of confidence and identity as the rest of the world catches up economically and collectively threatens and attenuates the multi-faceted global dominance the boomers’ world view took for granted.

If geopolitics remain comparatively stable, the U.S. will remain relatively center-right politically when compared to OECD peers, as they also trend toward conservative politics driven by their own similar demographic shifts and perceived geopolitical and domestic threats.

Due to the demographics, there will be an opportunity for a radical shift in the U.S. to a far-right, ultra-nationalist political movement if a significant and extended crisis threatens “life as we’ve always known and remember it” in the U.S. Examples of disruption that could trigger such a move include: energy, food, climate, large-scale regional war, world war, financial collapse, etc.

Conclusion:

It is difficult to imagine any demographic or geopolitical scenario conducive to a sustained left/liberal political agenda in the U.S. for the next 25 years.

I read a good article on the radical re-making of the advertising market today: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/151/mayhem-on-madison-avenue.html

The article referenced a classic post by Clay Shirky that I’d read before, but was worth revisiting: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/

Clay, in turn, referenced a book by Joseph Tainter,  The Collapse of Complex Societies.

Tainter makes many compelling observations, as summarized by Shirky:

“Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.”

Although Shirky was using Tainter’s work to illustrate a point about the revolution in media and content production, specifically video, and it is perfectly applicable to the collapse of the old business models in advertising, it is also worth considering in Tainter’s original context: societies as a whole.

I’ve long had an essay simmering in my head regarding the brittle nature of the United States, as a pure reflection of that word: brittle, meaning very strong in compression but lacking the ability to resist stresses across its internal structure. For instance, if you put a brittle pane of glass on a flat surface, it will easily support a very large amount of weight placed upon it. However, if you support each end of that pane of glass and place even a small weight on the center, it will crack and shatter. The pane of glass, like the U.S. and most nation states, is capable of resisting huge amounts of external force when those forces are perceived as being placed uniformly against the entire structure of the nation. However, if those forces are applied unevenly, in a way that stresses the internal bonds of the structure, disunity results.

A similar situation is at work in China, where its recurring cycle of tension between the rich trading provinces along the coast and the still-mired-in-poverty interior provinces is placing stress on its internal bonds. China uses two primary means to maintain its internal coherence: rising economic prosperity and stoking nationalism via the boogey men of Japan, the West and the U.S., not necessarily in that order. When economic prosperity falters, there are coincidental, and certainly convenient, international incidents with Japan or other neighboring countries, often accompanied by a revisiting of Japanese WWII atrocities inflicted on China. If local conflict isn’t enough to incite unifying nationalism, then a few rounds of anti-West or anti-U.S. rhetoric or parallel international incidents usually does the trick.

You may or may not notice a similar pattern, with a reversed set of roles and leading villains, in the U.S. In geopolitics, stoking nationalism to increase internal cohesion and cement the political power of the ruling class is typically the first official act in the face of dis-unifying challenges. The U.S. is no exception to that rule.

I perceive a potential unhappy confluence of forces in the near- to mid-term in this regard.

It wouldn’t take much of Tainter’s reduction in circumstances to produce enough internal stresses to shatter a brittle U.S.

The only thing that could hold it together would be the same basic tools that China (and everybody else) uses: economic prosperity or supposed external threats to fuel cohesive nationalism. Excess economic prosperity sufficient to offset reduction in circumstances does not look to be likely in the U.S. in the foreseeable future. Lacking economic prosperity, there’s only one typical, basic, blunt tool remaining: artificially induced and inflated nationalism.

Since the rise of the nation state, inflated nationalism coupled with the perception of external threats has a direct correlation with negative outcomes.

Stay tuned.

We’ve got our own list of lessons learned from those travels here: http://www.hackneys.com/travel/index-lessons-byarea.htm

Gary Arndt, who spent the last three years doing the same, was recently interviewed by Tim Ferriss and gave his 20 lessons learned here: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/10/30/20-things-ive-learned-from-traveling-around-the-world-for-three-years/

I echo every one of Gary’s lessons learned.

I also encourage everyone to get out into the world so they can see these realities for themselves.

I compiled my thoughts on the primary challenges the United States faces in the coming decade, and ways to overcome them, here: http://www.hackneys.com/docs/facingthefuture.pdf

The primary focus in this collection is on domestic challenges, although some geopolitical issues are addressed.

.

Following is a good overview of a current geopolitical situation from Stratfor, a public domain intelligence analysis firm.

If you are interested in the particular issue and region at hand, Israel / Palestinians / rising Turkey / etc., you will probably find it of value.

However, its true worth lies in some pearls of geopolitical wisdom, some geopolitical universal truths, which are sprinkled within.

In particular, these excerpts are of value:

• Where knowledge is limited, and the desire to learn the complex reality doesn’t exist, public opinion can be shaped by whoever generates the most powerful symbols.
• … on a matter of only tangential interest, governments tend to follow their publics’ wishes, however they originate.
• It was not the truth or falsehood of the narrative that mattered.
• Public opinion matters where issues are not of fundamental interest to a nation.
• …they seem to think that the issue is whose logic is correct. But the issue actually is, whose logic will be heard?
• …this sort of warfare has nothing to do with fairness. It has to do with controlling public perception and using that public perception to shape foreign policy around the world.
• …controlling public opinion requires subtlety, a selective narrative and cynicism.

These constants, these irreducible facts, are applicable to both domestic and foreign policy. They are the fundamentals of geopolitics as it applies to public opinion.

If you grasp them, you can begin to understand what is happening outside the fishbowl.

If you come to appreciate the full scope and implications of this one: “Where knowledge is limited, and the desire to learn the complex reality doesn’t exist, public opinion can be shaped by whoever generates the most powerful symbols.” you can also begin to understand what is happening inside the fishbowl.

* * * * *

Flotillas and the Wars of Public Opinion

May 31, 2010

By George Friedman

On Sunday, Israeli naval forces intercepted the ships of a Turkish nongovernmental organization (NGO) delivering humanitarian supplies to Gaza. Israel had demanded that the vessels not go directly to Gaza but instead dock in Israeli ports, where the supplies would be offloaded and delivered to Gaza. The Turkish NGO refused, insisting on going directly to Gaza. Gunfire ensued when Israeli naval personnel boarded one of the vessels, and a significant number of the passengers and crew on the ship were killed or wounded.

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon charged that the mission was simply an attempt to provoke the Israelis. That was certainly the case. The mission was designed to demonstrate that the Israelis were unreasonable and brutal. The hope was that Israel would be provoked to extreme action, further alienating Israel from the global community and possibly driving a wedge between Israel and the United States. The operation’s planners also hoped this would trigger a political crisis in Israel.

A logical Israeli response would have been avoiding falling into the provocation trap and suffering the political repercussions the Turkish NGO was trying to trigger. Instead, the Israelis decided to make a show of force. The Israelis appear to have reasoned that backing down would demonstrate weakness and encourage further flotillas to Gaza, unraveling the Israeli position vis-à-vis Hamas. In this thinking, a violent interception was a superior strategy to accommodation regardless of political consequences. Thus, the Israelis accepted the bait and were provoked.

The ‘Exodus’ Scenario

In the 1950s, an author named Leon Uris published a book called “Exodus.” Later made into a major motion picture, Exodus told the story of a Zionist provocation against the British. In the wake of World War II, the British — who controlled Palestine, as it was then known — maintained limits on Jewish immigration there. Would-be immigrants captured trying to run the blockade were detained in camps in Cyprus. In the book and movie, Zionists planned a propaganda exercise involving a breakout of Jews — mostly children — from the camp, who would then board a ship renamed the Exodus. When the Royal Navy intercepted the ship, the passengers would mount a hunger strike. The goal was to portray the British as brutes finishing the work of the Nazis. The image of children potentially dying of hunger would force the British to permit the ship to go to Palestine, to reconsider British policy on immigration, and ultimately to decide to abandon Palestine and turn the matter over to the United Nations.

There was in fact a ship called Exodus, but the affair did not play out precisely as portrayed by Uris, who used an amalgam of incidents to display the propaganda war waged by the Jews. Those carrying out this war had two goals. The first was to create sympathy in Britain and throughout the world for Jews who, just a couple of years after German concentration camps, were now being held in British camps. Second, they sought to portray their struggle as being against the British. The British were portrayed as continuing Nazi policies toward the Jews in order to maintain their empire. The Jews were portrayed as anti-imperialists, fighting the British much as the Americans had.

It was a brilliant strategy. By focusing on Jewish victimhood and on the British, the Zionists defined the battle as being against the British, with the Arabs playing the role of people trying to create the second phase of the Holocaust. The British were portrayed as pro-Arab for economic and imperial reasons, indifferent at best to the survivors of the Holocaust. Rather than restraining the Arabs, the British were arming them. The goal was not to vilify the Arabs but to villify the British, and to position the Jews with other nationalist groups whether in India or Egypt rising against the British.

The precise truth or falsehood of this portrayal didn’t particularly matter. For most of the world, the Palestine issue was poorly understood and not a matter of immediate concern. The Zionists intended to shape the perceptions of a global public with limited interest in or understanding of the issues, filling in the blanks with their own narrative. And they succeeded.

The success was rooted in a political reality. Where knowledge is limited, and the desire to learn the complex reality doesn’t exist, public opinion can be shaped by whoever generates the most powerful symbols. And on a matter of only tangential interest, governments tend to follow their publics’ wishes, however they originate. There is little to be gained for governments in resisting public opinion and much to be gained by giving in. By shaping the battlefield of public perception, it is thus possible to get governments to change positions.

In this way, the Zionists’ ability to shape global public perceptions of what was happening in Palestine — to demonize the British and turn the question of Palestine into a Jewish-British issue — shaped the political decisions of a range of governments. It was not the truth or falsehood of the narrative that mattered. What mattered was the ability to identify the victim and victimizer such that global opinion caused both London and governments not directly involved in the issue to adopt political stances advantageous to the Zionists. It is in this context that we need to view the Turkish flotilla.

The Turkish Flotilla to Gaza

The Palestinians have long argued that they are the victims of Israel, an invention of British and American imperialism. Since 1967, they have focused not so much on the existence of the state of Israel (at least in messages geared toward the West) as on the oppression of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Since the split between Hamas and Fatah and the Gaza War, the focus has been on the plight of the citizens of Gaza, who have been portrayed as the dispossessed victims of Israeli violence.

The bid to shape global perceptions by portraying the Palestinians as victims of Israel was the first prong of a longtime two-part campaign. The second part of this campaign involved armed resistance against the Israelis. The way this resistance was carried out, from airplane hijackings to stone-throwing children to suicide bombers, interfered with the first part of the campaign, however. The Israelis could point to suicide bombings or the use of children against soldiers as symbols of Palestinian inhumanity. This in turn was used to justify conditions in Gaza. While the Palestinians had made significant inroads in placing Israel on the defensive in global public opinion, they thus consistently gave the Israelis the opportunity to turn the tables. And this is where the flotilla comes in.

The Turkish flotilla aimed to replicate the Exodus story or, more precisely, to define the global image of Israel in the same way the Zionists defined the image that they wanted to project. As with the Zionist portrayal of the situation in 1947, the Gaza situation is far more complicated than as portrayed by the Palestinians. The moral question is also far more ambiguous. But as in 1947, when the Zionist portrayal was not intended to be a scholarly analysis of the situation but a political weapon designed to define perceptions, the Turkish flotilla was not designed to carry out a moral inquest.

Instead, the flotilla was designed to achieve two ends. The first is to divide Israel and Western governments by shifting public opinion against Israel. The second is to create a political crisis inside Israel between those who feel that Israel’s increasing isolation over the Gaza issue is dangerous versus those who think any weakening of resolve is dangerous.

The Geopolitical Fallout for Israel

It is vital that the Israelis succeed in portraying the flotilla as an extremist plot. Whether extremist or not, the plot has generated an image of Israel quite damaging to Israeli political interests. Israel is increasingly isolated internationally, with heavy pressure on its relationship with Europe and the United States.

In all of these countries, politicians are extremely sensitive to public opinion. It is difficult to imagine circumstances under which public opinion will see Israel as the victim. The general response in the Western public is likely to be that the Israelis probably should have allowed the ships to go to Gaza and offload rather than to precipitate bloodshed. Israel’s enemies will fan these flames by arguing that the Israelis prefer bloodshed to reasonable accommodation. And as Western public opinion shifts against Israel, Western political leaders will track with this shift.

The incident also wrecks Israeli relations with Turkey, historically an Israeli ally in the Muslim world with longstanding military cooperation with Israel. The Turkish government undoubtedly has wanted to move away from this relationship, but it faced resistance within the Turkish military and among secularists. The new Israeli action makes a break with Israel easy, and indeed almost necessary for Ankara.

With roughly the population of Houston, Texas, Israel is just not large enough to withstand extended isolation, meaning this event has profound geopolitical implications.

Public opinion matters where issues are not of fundamental interest to a nation. Israel is not a fundamental interest to other nations. The ability to generate public antipathy to Israel can therefore reshape Israeli relations with countries critical to Israel. For example, a redefinition of U.S.-Israeli relations will have much less effect on the United States than on Israel. The Obama administration, already irritated by the Israelis, might now see a shift in U.S. public opinion that will open the way to a new U.S.-Israeli relationship disadvantageous to Israel.

The Israelis will argue that this is all unfair, as they were provoked. Like the British, they seem to think that the issue is whose logic is correct. But the issue actually is, whose logic will be heard? As with a tank battle or an airstrike, this sort of warfare has nothing to do with fairness. It has to do with controlling public perception and using that public perception to shape foreign policy around the world. In this case, the issue will be whether the deaths were necessary. The Israeli argument of provocation will have limited traction.

Internationally, there is little doubt that the incident will generate a firestorm. Certainly, Turkey will break cooperation with Israel. Opinion in Europe will likely harden. And public opinion in the United States — by far the most important in the equation — might shift to a “plague-on-both-your-houses” position.

While the international reaction is predictable, the interesting question is whether this evolution will cause a political crisis in Israel. Those in Israel who feel that international isolation is preferable to accommodation with the Palestinians are in control now. Many in the opposition see Israel’s isolation as a strategic threat. Economically and militarily, they argue, Israel cannot survive in isolation. The current regime will respond that there will be no isolation. The flotilla aimed to generate what the government has said would not happen.

The tougher Israel is, the more the flotilla’s narrative takes hold. As the Zionists knew in 1947 and the Palestinians are learning, controlling public opinion requires subtlety, a selective narrative and cynicism. As they also knew, losing the battle can be catastrophic. It cost Britain the Mandate and allowed Israel to survive. Israel’s enemies are now turning the tables. This maneuver was far more effective than suicide bombings or the Intifada in challenging Israel’s public perception and therefore its geopolitical position (though if the Palestinians return to some of their more distasteful tactics like suicide bombing, the Turkish strategy of portraying Israel as the instigator of violence will be undermined).

Israel is now in uncharted waters. It does not know how to respond. It is not clear that the Palestinians know how to take full advantage of the situation, either. But even so, this places the battle on a new field, far more fluid and uncontrollable than what went before. The next steps will involve calls for sanctions against Israel. The Israeli threats against Iran will be seen in a different context, and Israeli portrayal of Iran will hold less sway over the world.

And this will cause a political crisis in Israel. If this government survives, then Israel is locked into a course that gives it freedom of action but international isolation. If the government falls, then Israel enters a period of domestic uncertainty. In either case, the flotilla achieved its strategic mission. It got Israel to take violent action against it. In doing so, Israel ran into its own fist.

* * *

Reprinting or republication of this report on websites is authorized by prominently displaying the following sentence at the beginning or end of the report, including the hyperlink to STRATFOR: 

“This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR“  http://www.stratfor.com/

* * * * *

 Sources:

• Stratfor

As part of our effort to reintegrate into American society and its culture, we’re spending part of our summer in the air conditioned retreat of the Paramount, a faithfully restored theater originally built in 1915 to host vaudeville as the Majestic and transformed in 1930 into a Baroque Revival movie palace, its present form.

The theater provides a retreat from both the heat and day-to-day reality into the bygone eras of Hollywood and foreign film classics. The films are replete with villains and heroes defined by art direction, staging and dialog that shorthands races, roles, conflicts, attitudes and passions into nifty set-piece scenes. This foreshortening of life’s challenges and irresolvable conflicts into tightly packaged, neatly wrapped, emotionally digestible, bite sized chunks contrasts with later eras’ films that showcased, if not celebrated, the irredeemable flaws of humanity on individual, societal, planetary and galactic scales. This latter film genre, while undoubtedly more accurate and reflective of the true nature of life, is much more challenging material, and over time often leads to a retreat into the simpler, soft-focus, one-way pursuit of the nostalgia of a “simpler time.”

As tempting as the seductive, simple packaging of human and national characteristics in film classics can be, they can also serve as a useful lens through which to view our modern world. For instance, this weekend’s fare included the celebrated artistic convergence of producer / director Elia Kazan and a troupe of talented actors, writers, composers, cinematographers, art directors and production professionals: 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire and 1954’s On The Waterfront.

Since I often retain an outside-looking-in perspective on the U.S., I sometimes derive different views of cultural artifacts than others around me here in the United States. Consequently, the primary roles in the two films, viewed back-to-back as a double feature, couldn’t help but jump out at me as parallels of the roles the United States is often cast in by the various countries on the geopolitical scene where we’ve spent time during the last decade.

The world’s rapidly developing economies, such as Brazil and Russia, as well as the merely developing nations, often see the U.S. as Father Barry, the righteous priest, constantly goading others to do the right thing, as he defines it. At best, the developing nations  emphasize Father Barry’s courageous stand for virtue, freedom, honesty and integrity. At worst, they note that their labors in brutal conditions enable Father Barry’s institution its power, position and wealth.

Western Europe often casts the United States as Stanley Kowalski, the crude brute, ruled by his adolescent emotions, too immature for his physical strength, capable of little beyond browbeating, manipulation and abuse. Unequipped to rise beyond his commonness, he surrounds himself with equally low-life immigrants and rejects the only example of higher breeding, culture and lofty education he encounters.

Bombastic socialists, such as Hugo Chavez, popularize the identity of America as Johnny Friendly, the corrupt mob boss who rules his domain with an iron fist, brutally subjugating the masses through intimidation, economic marginalization, violence and death, while he and his henchmen wallow in wealth and power.

Other nations in Latin America are more nuanced in their casting of America as mobster. The rest of the region puts the United States in the role of The Boss of Bosses, who makes but a brief cameo appearance as the puppeteer behind the Johnny Friendlys of the world. In their view, America as The Boss of Bosses silently and mysteriously pulls the strings that control economies, rainfall and whether or not you have a flat tire on the way to work today through the omniscient, omnipresent and omni-powerful CIA.

Islamists portray the United States as Stella Kowalski, debauched and decadent, wife of Satan himself, ready and willing to bring forth further generations of depraved, bestial, godless Stanleys to further pollute the world. Stella, unable to resist the sinful allure of Stanley’s Satan, legitimizes all that is unclean and unholy and therefore has no place in a sanctified realm.

China and other nations, tribes and individuals vested in the current century’s geopolitical realities place the United States solidly in the starring role of Blanche DuBois. Blanche, born into unimaginable wealth, power and prestige, joined her forbears in squandering her remaining wealth. Relevant only in her own fantasy world, trapped in addiction and unable to face reality, she ends in a downward spiral of decay, denial and collapse.

People who view the United States in a positive light, and there are many more of them out there than the two dominant world-view narratives extant in America allow to be known, tend to cast the United States as Terry Malloy. Sure, Terry is simple minded, and he’s made some mistakes by choosing the wrong friends and being overly loyal to people he thought he could trust; but, then again, his is loyal and he is trusting and he is a guy who is willing to fight for, and lay his life on the line for, what he believes in. In fact, if Terry believes in you, he’ll lay his life on the line for you as well. Terrys are very rare on the geopolitical scene.

If Americans picked a role for the United States, they might pick good-hearted Harold “Mitch” Mitchell, who perhaps too late realizes he can’t go it alone and needs a partner, narrowly avoids being hoodwinked by a wily deceiver, but in the end stands up for his values and rejects his suitor as unworthy. That would be a fairly subtle reading of the role as applied to the United States, and Mitch is difficult to see as purely heroic.

Consequently, most Americans would probably also pick Terry Malloy, the closest role to purely heroic outside of the courageous, saintly Edie Doyle.

In the Hollywood ending to the movie On The Waterfront, Terry Malloy rises from his pummeling by Johnny Friendly’s gang, shakes off his injuries and triumphantly leads the newly independent dockworkers into a fresh, cleansed-of-past-sins era (cue swelling music in the Leonard Bernstein score).

In Budd Schulberg’s original screenplay and his subsequent novel version of the story, Terry Malloy is brutally murdered by the mob, the realpolitik power of the docks.

Only time will tell what role best suits the United States. And which ending will apply.

* * * * *

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

Cast (in credits order) verified as complete 

* * * * *

On The Waterfront (1954)

Cast (in credits order) verified as complete 

* * * * *

Sources:

Paramount Theater
History: http://www.austintheatre.org/site/PageNavigator/venues/paramount/history
Films: http://www.austintheatre.org/site/PageNavigator/shows_events/films

A Streetcar Named Desire
IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044081/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Streetcar_Named_Desire_(1951_film)

On The Waterfront
IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047296/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_waterfront

* * * * *

It’s often quoted folk-wisdom that climbing stairs adds years to your life. That’s interesting, since the goal of human civilization, once past the creation of the civilization itself and aside from war, has largely been the elimination of all possible effort associated with life.

From elevators to Google search, anything that eliminates effort is rewarded; from rotary dial phones to manual crank car windows, anything that adds effort is penalized. Day by day, year by year, more and more effort is removed from life, leaving more and more effortless life, more and more elevator rides through existence.

Is there a price to pay for that?

Does having a few staircases to climb every day add the level of striving and exertion required for humans to be healthy, both mentally and physically?

What about on a societal scale?

When societies have no major challenges to overcome, no credible common goal they are collectively striving to achieve, no literal or figurative staircase to climb, they inevitably disintegrate.

How many staircases can we eliminate before we as individuals, and collectively as a society, lose what we need to be healthy and stay alive?

Have we already collectively moved out of our 4th floor walkup? And, if so, how much longer before the effects overwhelm us?

Asked another way, if we’re no longer climbing the stairs of individual and collective challenge, are we instead fat, happy and riding the elevator, merely waiting to get off at a higher floor, unprepared for what awaits us? Or, are we instead hurtling down the elevator shaft to the depths below, blissfully unaware we’ve traded what we need to survive and thrive as individuals and as a society for the ease of an effort- free, ignorance-is-bliss, abbreviated existence?

The entrepreneur who told me of his father is 83. He’s looking for another startup. He wants to be climbing stairs. He wants a 4th floor walkup.

Which are you looking for: the stairs or the elevator?

Which is your country looking for?

The core of the story is an individual.

The first unit of human organization is the family.

The next unit of human organization is tribe.

Tribe is the fundamental unit of humans everywhere in the world except the United States. Tribes define the most essential social unit for almost everyone on the planet except for Americans. Tribes don’t exist in the U.S. because the nation is made up of immigrants who mixed together to create the society. Because true tribes do not exist in the U.S., it is nearly impossible for modern Americans to understand tribes and world events that are driven by tribal loyalties and conflicts.

In particular, Americans struggle to understand events in countries that were artificially formed by the colonial European empires, empires that created multitudes of artificial borders and entire countries by whim, thereby dividing ancient tribal lands and forcing disparate tribes, often ancient blood-enemies, into shared artificial nation-states.

From Kashmir to Kurdistan to nearly the entire continent of Africa, where there is trouble, it is almost always traceable back to European colonialism and the wreckage the modern world has inherited because of it.

The United States, however, avoided this trouble. From the beginning of the nation, aside from the remaining native Americans, there was no true tribe in America, so the fundamental groups-of-humans units were simpler and more conducive to a nation state with a strong national identity.

For most of its existence, the United States had a strong sense of overriding nationhood. Americans were Americans, first and foremost, because no tribal loyalties clouded or competed for the people’s identity.

That all started to change when the fundamental building block, the family unit, began to disintegrate in the mid to late 20^th century. As the multi-generational family unit weakened, stratified and crumbled it was replaced by pseudo-tribes.

As the family became less and less a reliable structure in American life, pseudo-tribes filled the very basic human need for identity, status and protection. As pseudo-tribes rose in prominence, the nation state diminished in importance in terms of identity and definition.

Pseudo-tribes, such as gangs, institutions, organizations, brands and technologies came to define Americans’ identity. People self-defined themselves as members of pseudo-tribes first and Americans second, third or a very distant fourth, if at all. For instance, people would commonly identify themselves as “gardener” or “Cubs fan” or “metal head” but you would be hard pressed to find someone who would self-identify first as “American.”

In today’s America, pseudo-tribes have been replaced in dominance by bi-polarization that seeks to separate every single person into two very easily defined types, either us or them.

In today’s world of us, meaning those who “get it,” those who understand, those who are paying attention, those who are aware, those who are tuned in, those who are in touch, and those who are true believers—and them, meaning everyone else—the nation has faded into insignificance.

Although both groups, us and them, regularly trot out the flag and claim exclusive rights to true patriot-hood, they both are merely dressing up in the costumes of Americans. Their vitriolic rants about being the only true patriots, the only true Americans, ring hollow. Despite their protestations to the contrary, it is obvious to any non-aligned observer that it has nothing to do with America; it has only to do with us and them.

It is clear that in today’s world, there are only two entities. The nation has ceased to matter for either polarized group, whose only real purpose is the destruction of the opposing camp.

This leaves the few people outside the warring camps as the only ones who have any sense of nationhood, the only sense of what it used to be like to be Americans before us and them took over.

It remains to be seen if those few who remain outside the warring camps can rebuild the nation after the polarized combatants treat the country as collateral damage in their efforts to annihilate their opponents. At the rate the nation is devolving into partisan warfare, there may not be much left to work with.

While there is little doubt that individual people will survive the conflict, it is unknown if they will be merely individual circles or if the nation will survive to encompass them.

As Europe slowly rebuilt from the ashes of war, the Islamic empires continued their long slumber, India scuffled through its often chaotic early democracy, Latin America swung wildly from far-right to far-left despots and China suffered unspeakable suffering under Maoist extremes, the United States bobbed cheerily along the sunny seas of prosperity.

During this time, the U.S. took on cost after cost, burden after burden, both domestically and internationally. From supporting the world’s largest, most expensive military, to feeding internal parasites that sucked economic vitality like a lamprey eel, America endured all the costs and burdens, yet kept on growing.

Once the Soviet Union fell, the United States stood well and truly alone atop the world, the sole superpower, capable, so the story went, of doing whatever it wanted, wherever it wanted, whenever it wanted.

During the decades from the end of WWII to the end of the century, the American population came to expect endless growth, ever-increasing prosperity, an always better life for their children and unchallenged global precedence.

Today, just 10 years into the new century, all of those expectations, and all of their accompanying assumptions, are being challenged. America is no longer the unchallenged global leader. America’s world standing and reputation have been severely dented. America’s prosperity has stopped, and in fact reversed, in the most severe downturn since the great depression. For the first time ever in its long history of endless optimism, a majority of Americans think their children will have a worse life than they did. And if that wasn’t enough, America can no longer afford many of the costs and burdens it currently bears financially, socially and politically.

There are many ways to decide what can be done to restore American prosperity and ensure a better life for our children and grandchildren. As a nation and as individuals, we can make those choices by any number of criteria. I believe the way forward consists of a very simple test: we can only keep what we can afford.

As a nation, we can no longer afford:

• Money in Politics

Money has irretrievably corrupted the political process in the United States. Elected representatives are now engaged in full time fund raising from the point they choose to run for office until the point they lose their last election. Actually governing the states and the nation were delegated to staffers and lobbyists long ago. The politicians do one thing and one thing only: pursue money. Nine billion dollars was spent in 2009 buying political influence in Washington, D.C., alone, to say nothing of what was spent at the state and local level.  

Under this system, we elect the people who can demonstrate they can best spend unlimited amounts of money. The more influence they sell, the more money they take in, the more they can spend. We end up with the people who know the least about how to manage money and the most about how to spend it. This fact goes a long way to explaining why our public debt and runaway spending on entitlement programs is destroying the country’s finances and undermining our economic and national stability.

It doesn’t need to be this way.

Wouldn’t it be better to elect people who demonstrate they can make the most of a fixed amount of money, a specific budget, very similar to how you run your household—making do on the money you have? This is how other successful industrialized countries run elections. Those countries give each candidate a fixed, specific amount of money and watch to see who can demonstrate they can make best use of that money. They elect people who are the most efficient at using the money they have available.

I believe that is the best way forward for America. We can no longer afford money in politics.

Give each candidate a fixed amount of public money. Outlaw all other money in politics: private, business, union, PAC, special entity, international, etc.

Yes, there will still be crooked politicians. Yes, there will still be individuals, businesses, unions and organizations who buy off politicians. We will still need to arrest and prosecute those people. It will still be better than it is today.

We can’t afford money in politics anymore; it has corrupted our political system. We must eliminate money in politics.

• Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is the process of creating distorted electoral districts at the state level to ensure that a particular political party will always win the elections in that district. The resulting rigged elections in American gerrymandered districts are no different than rigged elections in Putin’s Russia, Chávez’s Venezuela, or Communist China. Just as in those places, the winner in an American gerrymandered district has already been determined.

Gerrymandering ensures “safe” districts for one or the other of the two political parties. As long as gerrymandering continues, America is not run by the people, it is run by the political parties.

Gerrymandering means that there is no contest in the November elections, when most voters go to the polls. Instead, the winner of the spring primary elections determines who will win that district. The people that vote in the primary elections are predominantly party activists, extremists and fringe ideologues. Those extremists elect extremist, ideologue candidates. Gerrymandering guarantees that political extremist ideologues will be elected and dominate Congress.

In the 2010 election, 331 of the 435 House seats, 76 percent, are considered “safe” or gerrymandered. Those “safe” seats will go to unyielding ideologues that are incapable of the compromises required for governance. If they compromise with the few remaining moderates in their own party, much less the opposing party, they will lose the next primary election. Gerrymandering guarantees a gridlocked, non-functioning government.

We can’t afford gerrymandering anymore. It has created a Congress filled with extremist ideologues incapable of governance. We must eliminate gerrymandering.

• A Permanent Ruling Class

In exchange for the material and social success of the latter half of the 20^th century, the American people abdicated governance to a fixed, permanent political class. This political class almost all hailed from the same families, neighborhoods, social circles, elite colleges, law schools and informal and formal networks. As long as the prosperity kept flowing and the good times kept rolling, the American people let the ruling political class have their way with running the government and the country. Although elections were held and the token outsider occasionally slipped into office, the same group of people, the ruling political class, ran the show. They were, and are, the undisputed drivers of the American bus.

The inevitable outcome is not unexpected and is reflected of the maxim, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The longer the ruling political class stayed in power, the more the country was shaped to ensure their continued power and economic success.

America was founded by a ruling political class of wealthy, white, male land owners. It remains a political ruling class primarily of wealthy, white men. While only about one in a hundred Americans is a millionaire, more than 44 of every hundred congress members are millionaires. The average net worth of a member of Congress is more than $6.3 million dollars, more than ten times the average net worth of an American citizen. Women make up 51 percent of the U.S. and only 18 percent of Congress. Minorities are 34 percent of the U.S. but only 16 percent of Congress.

The same permanent ruling political class has been running the United States for a long time. Their priorities have put the country exactly where it is right now. No one else is more responsible for where we are as a nation than this small group of people. They can’t point the finger at anyone else—they’ve been driving this bus for generations. Where we are now is nobody’s fault but theirs.

The ruling political class thinks they deserve to run the country because of birthright. Their parents ruled the United States, so they believe they deserve to rule the United States. The United States was founded on the principal that no one gets anything, least of all political power and control, due to birthright. We fought a war with a ruling King to establish that principal, enshrined in our country’s independence.

The ruling political class thinks they deserve to run the country because they are elites, residents of the pinnacles of society. They attended all the right schools, they obtained all the right degrees, they worked at all the right places, and they know all the right people. The U.S. is, theoretically, a meritocracy, where people earn their place in life due to their abilities and their efforts. The U.S. is, theoretically, where one can be smart and rise up through society all the way to the top, including positions of political power and control.

The ruling political class thinks they deserve to run the country because they are so smart. Firstly, if they are so smart, how did we end up where we are right now? Secondly, there are plenty of smart people in the United States, of which the vast majority are outside the ruling class.

The permanent ruling political class has been controlling America for generations.

They put us in the position we are now. They had their chance and this is what they made of it.

I believe we should give some other smart Americans an opportunity to drive the bus.

We can’t afford a permanent ruling class anymore. We need a different set of bus drivers.

• A Nation of Lawyers

One negative effect of a fixed, permanent ruling political class is that the United States became more and more a tangled web of laws and regulations that ensured that the ruling political class’s dominant profession, lawyers, were required for even the most trivial engagement with business or society. Fewer than one half of one percent of Americans are lawyers while more than 38 percent of Congress are lawyers. More than half of all presidents, including our current president, have been lawyers. Over its history, the United States slowly but inevitably transitioned to a nation of the lawyers, by the lawyers, for the lawyers.

The solution does not lie in a Shakespearian outcome, as in, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” – Dick, the butcher, Henry VI, part II, act IV, scene ii, lines 83–84.

We need laws. We are, after all, theoretically a country of laws, not men. With no laws, we have no civilization.

We need lawyers to provide service within those laws. We cannot function without lawyers.

In my view, it is wrong to paint all lawyers with a broad brush as the source of all of our problems. Not all lawyers are inherently evil. In fact, one of the people I admire most is a lawyer. Over my career I have worked with many lawyers of very high merit, character and integrity.

The solution is not in a blanket condemnation of lawyers. The solution is in a society that is not run for the ongoing, structurally entwined and integrated, nearly exclusive, benefit of lawyers.

American doctors state that more than 30% of surgeries, testing, procedures and prescriptions in the United States are done due to “defensive” medicine to protect doctors and hospitals from lawsuits. The U.S. spent $2.4 trillion dollars on health care in 2008. You can do the math.

Various studies estimate the overall cost to the U.S. economy due to its excessively litigious environment related to legal liability at 10 to 20 percent. In 2009 the U.S. gross national product was $14.462 trillion. You can do the math.

There was a time when the U.S. economy was so robust and growing so fast that we didn’t notice, much less care, that we were spending 30 dollars out of every hundred of health care costs and 10 to 20 dollars out of every hundred in the entire economy on out of control litigation, or in colloquial terms, on ambulance chasing lawyers.

We are no longer in those times when we didn’t notice and it didn’t matter.

We can no longer afford a country of the lawyers, by the lawyers, for the lawyers. We must reign in the lawyers and end excessive litigation.

• Foreign Oil

In 2008 the United States sent $1,024,483,750 per day overseas for foreign oil. That’s more than $1 billion dollars—per day—every 24 hours—sent overseas.

That’s one billion dollars a day that could be improving our country and fixing our problems. Instead we sent one billion dollars a day to other countries.

In all of 2008 we sent $373,936,568,750, that’s $374 billion dollars, overseas to buy oil.

Included in that year’s total amount was more than $201billion dollars sent to Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela, the countries that make up the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Iran is also a member of OPEC, but we don’t currently buy any oil from them due to U.S. economic sanctions.

The nations of OPEC control 76 percent of the world’s proven reserves of oil. The nations of OPEC also enjoy the receipt of $201 billion dollars in oil revenue a year from the United States. That revenue buys power and control for the despots and royal families that control nearly all of the OPEC countries.

In exchange for this extraordinary wealth and the military protection provided by the United States over the oil rich countries of the Middle East, some of those autocrats and royal families have been very friendly and helpful to the U.S.; others have been publicly helpful, but dubious to antagonistic to outright hostile behind the scenes. Some, such as Iran, are openly hostile.

It is alleged that some of the OPEC countries use a portion of their oil income to fund terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda, a group committed to the destruction of the United States, its society and its people. Among the OPEC members in our own hemisphere, Hugo Chávez, strongman ruler of Venezuela, has called for the outright destruction of the United States as we know it, while his protégé, Rafael Correa, president of Ecuador, a fervent anti-yanqui nationalist, supports him in his efforts while initiating his own.

In 2008, the U.S. sent more than $80 billion dollars to the Persian Gulf oil countries, of which an unknown amount was diverted to people doing everything they can to kill every last American.

In 2008, the U.S. sent more than $40 billion dollars to Hugo Chávez, who leads the world in anti-American zealotry and vitriol, and $7.5 billion dollars to his South American sidekick in America bashing, Rafael Correa.

In addition, in 2008 the U.S. sent more than $15.7 billion dollars to our old Cold War foe and resurgent world power, Russia, to buy their oil.

All told, in 2008 the U.S. sent $143.2 billion dollars to people who in one way or another, to one extent or another, to one degree or another, are trying to kill us.

We are the first civilization in the history of mankind to fund its own destruction.

We can no longer afford to send over one billon dollars a day overseas to buy foreign oil. We can no longer afford to fund our own destruction. We must end our dependence on foreign oil.

• Partisanship

“…it doesn’t make a damn whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican if you’ve forgotten you’re an American” – former Senator Alan Simpson (Republican, Wyoming)

The two American political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, have held power in this country in their present form for over 150 years. For good or for ill, they have created the nation we live in today.

In recent times, thanks to gerrymandering, both parties have drifted towards their respective radical fringes, becoming little more than holding tanks for extremist ideologues. Having lost nearly every moderate member, the parties are no longer capable of finding common ground with each other. The ideologues that control the parties are incapable of seeing the world in any way other than pure black and white. In the view of the extremists, the world is divided between party loyalists who drank the Kool-Aid and will march to any tune the party leadership calls and 100 percent deserve-to-die, evil enemy.

There is little, if any, social interaction between members of the opposing parties in Congress. There is little, if any, meaningful cooperation between members of the opposing parties. There is little, if any, concern for anything other than achieving and retaining power for their party’s sake between members of the opposing parties. There is little, if any, effort put into governing the country they were elected to serve versus extending power and control between members of the opposing parties. 

Protected by their safe, gerrymandered districts, extremist ideologues have seized control of the two political parties that control the United States. These hard-line extremists cannot compromise or they will be voted out in the next primary election, thus they are incapable of anything but hard-line agendas. Since they cannot compromise in any form, by any means, these politicians are not equipped to function in the real world of politics, which is, by definition, the art of the possible, not the realm of the rigid.

Increasingly solidified into distant, opposing camps incapable of communication, much less governance, preoccupied by plotting the downfall of their rivals above all other concerns, the parties have abandoned the helm. The ship of state has been set adrift, free to be blown upon the rocks by the winds of a rapidly changing world and battered into splinters by the crashing waves of our country’s enemies.

The two parties, as they have amply demonstrated over the last decade, are incapable of addressing, much less overcoming, the major threats the country faces, such as the economy, public debt, annual deficits, energy, education, effective financial regulation, health care costs, etc.

Because they are incapable of the compromises required to govern in any form short of a totalitarian dictatorship, the parties have proven themselves unsuited to participation in the representative democracy used in the United States.

The two parties must reform or be replaced. The politicians of the two parties must rediscover that they are not elected to serve their parties, they are elected to serve their constituents, and all of their constituents at that. The two parties must break from their current operating credo of “Destroy the other party at all costs, including the country if required,” and return to a mission of being Americans first and party members second.

We need a functioning government. We have serious, existential threats to this country that must be overcome in this decade. We cannot afford gridlock.

We cannot afford the two parties in their current form. Partisanship must be ended. 

• Couch Potatoes

Starting in about 1970, the U.S. food industry enthusiastically adopted High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). They liked it so much they basically stopped using real sugar in processed food and drinks. Until recently, HFCS was the only sweetener used in non-diet soft drinks, e.g. sport drinks, fruit juices, cola, pop, and soda. It is also widely used in other food products such as soups, condiments, deserts, crackers, cereals, etc. In fact, it is often challenging to find a single processed food that does not contain HFCS.

 HFCS is cheaper than sugar and it tastes much sweeter. That was a powerful combination for the food and beverage industry and the American consumer. So powerful, in fact, it proved irresistible.

Consequently, average annual per-capita consumption of HFCS in the U.S. went from zero in 1970 to over 60 pounds (27.22 kilos) today. That means that every single American you know consumes an average of over 60 pounds (27.22 kilos) of HFCS every year.

In 1988 Taco Bell introduced unlimited soda refills and 7-Eleven unveiled the 64 ounce “Double Gulp.” Consumption volume of drinks and other processed foods skyrocketed as a consequence of these and similar “super-size” market offerings.

Since the introduction of HFCS and the “super-sizing” of food and drink portions, obesity in America has more than doubled.

More than one third of adults in the United States are obese.

Since 1980, the prevalence of obesity has tripled among school-age children and adolescents.

More than three in ten American children are overweight or obese.

Health effects of obesity include high blood pressure; diabetes; heart disease; joint problems, including osteoarthritis; sleep apnea and respiratory problems; cancer; metabolic syndrome; and psychosocial effects. Most of these conditions are chronic and can more than double the lifetime cost of health care compared to a non-obese citizen. Long term, obesity nearly doubles the rates of debilitating, high cost chronic diseases and disability.

Due to their poor overall health, and specifically due to high rate of obesity, citizens of the United States face a drop in average life expectancy for the first time in the nation’s modern history.

We can no longer afford a nation of overweight, unhealthy adults and children. We can’t afford the loss of productivity among working adults due to chronic health conditions brought on by poor health. We cannot afford the costs of health care for an unhealthy nation, now, or in the future.

We cannot afford a nation of couch potatoes. Poor health and high obesity rates must end.

• Agriculture Subsidies

The United States spends more than $20 billion dollars per year on farm crop programs, including direct subsidies. However, this amount dramatically understates the total cost of artificial pricing and subsidy programs because it does not include other costs and economic effects.

Primary forms of agriculture subsidy include: 

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  • Direct payments to farmers and landlords
  • Price supports implemented with government purchases and storage
  • Regulations that set minimum prices by location, end use, or some other characteristic
  • Subsidies for such items as crop insurance, disaster response, credit, marketing, and irrigation water
  • Export subsidies
  • Import barriers in the form of quotas, tariffs, or regulations

In total, the average rate of “producer support estimate” for the heavily supported commodities in the United States ranges from about 55 percent of the value of production for sugar to about 22 percent for oilseeds. For the less-supported commodities the rate is usually below 5 percent.

Direct subsidy programs typically transfer income from consumers and taxpayers to farm operators, especially to owners of farmland and other resources used in farm production. Farm subsidies stimulate additional production of government-favored commodities by raising incentives to use land and farmer resources on some crops rather than on others.

Farm subsidy programs distort markets by creating false pricing levels for products, creating surpluses of subsidized crops and creating false demand, thus driving overproduction of targeted crops and underproduction of others. These effects are not limited to the domestic market alone.

Perhaps the most unfortunate and illogical manifestation of agriculture subsidies is their harmful effects on developing economies. Developing nations cannot move their economies and their people directly from subsistence farming to designing and manufacturing televisions and airplanes. The first step up the ladder for an economy is from subsistence farming, where the farmer produces only enough to feed their family, to surplus farming, where the farmer produces more food than their family needs.

When a farmer achieves surplus, the farmer can sell the surplus crops to market, thus generating cash. It is the first step in a market based, cash economy. That cash economy creates and sustains a merchant class, which supports a tax base, which can pay for building a country.

Domestic U.S. crop subsidies create false low prices for American crops such as corn and cotton. Coupled with the efficiencies of modern agriculture production, the direct and other forms of crop subsidies put American crops onto the world market at artificially low prices, lower than they actually cost to produce. In the case of cotton, world prices are as much as 20 percent lower than it costs to grow and market the crop due to U.S. cotton subsidies. Even a cotton farmer in West Africa who lives in a hut cannot compete with those prices.

Since that West African farmer is competing head to head with American cotton selling for a lower price than he can produce cotton, even with his extremely low costs, he cannot compete in the cotton market. Since he cannot sell any cotton, he cannot generate any cash from the market. Since he has no cotton sales, he cannot use his cotton sales cash to buy any other goods from the market. Since the farmers have no cash for the market, the merchant class remains constrained. Since the merchant class has very little money, there is very little tax base to grow and develop the country. Consequently, that farmer and his nation stay stuck in a cycle of endless poverty, generation after generation.

American foreign policy views that continuous cycle of poverty as a negative condition that can foster a sense of hopelessness that often leads directly to political instability, revolution and terrorism. As a result, the U.S. pours billions of dollars of cash and food aid into the farmer’s country. When the U.S. aid cash pours out of the sky, it is often pocketed by strong-man leaders, creating a permanent cycle of corrupt regimes. Normally, very, very little direct cash foreign aid ever reaches the people on the ground, people like the cotton farmer.

To make matters worse, the food aid the U.S. provides by the boat load is, of course, free, so it destroys whatever local market price there was for locally grown food crops. Now the cotton farmer, who could not compete with artificially low-priced American cotton, can not even use his land to grow food crops that he could sell at market. Those food prices have also been undermined by all the free American food being distributed.

Usually, the cotton farmer gives up and joins the long stream of migrants heading for the steaming, swarming slums of the cities to seek a better life, leaving his productive land, land capable of producing good crops of market-grade cotton, to bake in the sun.

In our current system, the United States taxpayers pay for direct cash payments to American farmers, the taxpayers pay higher prices for food and other products protected by U.S. trade barriers and the taxpayers pay industry subsidies to distort agricultural markets. As a result of these same policies, farmers, merchants and markets in developing nations are bankrupted, crippled and/or destroyed, leading to U.S. cash and food aid, which engenders permanent corruption, ensconces despots and cultivates terrorism.

Americans pay taxes that fund cash payments to large agriculture corporations to distort markets, Americans pay higher consumer prices for tariff affected goods, Americans pay taxes to support foreign aid to save the rural farmers destroyed by the artificially low prices our domestic subsidies create, Americans pay taxes to purchase food to ship to suffering countries destroyed by our domestic agricultural policies, Americans pay taxes to fund foreign financial aid diverted to the corrupt dictators we create by showering them with money, and, often, Americans pay taxes for the military and covert operations needed to suppress the terrorists that arise out of the same, now crippled, developing economies. Those terrorists are often created from the very farmers destroyed by the agricultural subsidies in the first place.

This logic only makes sense to agriculture lobbyists, short-sighted agricultural interests and American presidents, senators and representatives who sell their influence to the agricultural lobbyists and the interests they represent.

We cannot afford the direct costs of agricultural subsidies, or the short-, medium- and long-term effects those subsidies have on our world. Agriculture subsidies must end.

• Drug War

“You can never reveal my name, but I can tell you that what we’re doing doesn’t work and never will work.” I was speaking with a retired FBI field agent and former FBI / DEA liaison who spent most of his FBI career working with the DEA in South American drug producing countries. He grew up in a U.S. / Mexico border city and started his law enforcement career as a policeman there. “It was open warfare when I was a cop,” he continued. “It was us against the bike gangs, who were making millions moving speed.”

The retired FBI agent’s drug wars with the motorcycle gangs took place decades ago, not all that long after President Richard Nixon declared the “War on Drugs” in 1969. That war has raged non-stop ever since. It is estimated the United States federal government currently spends over $15 billion dollars a year on the drug war and that does not include spending by state and local governments, which carry the primary burden.

Like any other market, the illegal drug market consists of two components: demand and supply. As proven throughout human history, as long as there is a demand, if there is enough profit to justify meeting that demand, there will be a supply.

When the FBI agent referred to “speed,” he was not referring to velocity, he was using the street term for amphetamines and methamphetamines. These illegal drugs have long been popular and widely available in the United States. They are difficult to eradicate, methamphetamine in particular, because it can be produced in an inexpensive portable kit that easily fits in a bathroom. The cost to produce a batch of methamphetamine is very low and its street price is very high, leading to profit margins of thousands of percent, and thus, high motivation to participate in production and distribution.

The 2007 wholesale price for a kilogram of heroin in Afghanistan ranged around $2,405; in Colombia, a kilogram of heroin no. 4 typically sold for $9,992 wholesale in 2006; in the United States in 2007, a kilogram of heroin no. 4 cost an average of $71,200 wholesale. That’s a gross margin per kilogram of between $61,208 and $68,795 depending on the source.

In 2004, a kilogram of cocaine in Colombia typically sold for $1,713; in Peru in 2004, a kilogram of cocaine typically sold for $1,000; in the United States in 2004, a kilogram of cocaine typically sold for $23,000. That’s a gross margin per kilogram of between $21,287 and $22,000 depending on the source.

The United States is the world’s largest market for cocaine and Colombian and Mexican heroin. Obviously, there is enough potential profit to justify the risks inherent in supplying the demand.

And, like any other market, if demand remains constant and you reduce supply, then the price increases.

The U.S. spends most of its money attempting to diminish supply. In fact, since 2002, the portion spent on reducing demand has fallen from nearly half (45.6 percent) of all money spent to about one third (34.3 percent). The current administration continued that trend, lowering the amount spent on demand reduction from 35.1 percent in 2009 to 34.3 percent in the 2010 proposed budget.

In 2010, the U.S. will spend $10 billion dollars at the federal level to reduce the supply of illegal drugs. In the last nine years the U.S. spent $71.6 billion dollars to reduce the supply of illegal drugs. Again, that does not include the money spent at the state and local level.

If the U.S. was successful in reducing the supply of illegal drugs, just as in any other market, prices would steadily increase. However, despite more than $71.6 billion dollars spent to reduce supply, prices for illegal drugs have not increased. For instance, between 1990 and 2003, wholesale prices for cocaine sold in the U.S. fell by two thirds in constant dollar terms (adjusted for inflation), a broad trend that continues today.

In addition, if the money the U.S. spends on the drug war, domestically and internationally, was effective, then the size of the world’s overall market for illegal drugs would shrink, both due to shrinking demand and diminishing supply. The opposite is true. The number of people using and producing illegal drugs has not diminished in absolute or relative terms over the last few decades.

If it has had no material effect on the demand for or the supply of illegal drugs, what has the War on Drugs yielded the United States?

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  • Up to half of all police officers convicted as a result of FBI-led corruption cases are convicted for drug-related offenses.
  • In 2007 the individual states spent a total of $6.2 billion dollars a year to incarcerate drug offenders.
  • In 1982 the justice system employed approximately 1.27 million persons; in 2003 it reached over 2.3 million, nearly doubling in size.
  • In the 16-year period 1987-2003, the total of judicial and legal employees grew about 101% to over 494,000 persons.
  • The total number of state and federal inmates grew from 403,000 in 1982 to over 1.4 million in 2003. The number of local jail inmates more than tripled from approximately 207,000 in 1982 to over 691,000 in 2003. Adults on probation increased from over 1.4 million to about 4.1 million persons. Overall, corrections employment more than doubled from nearly 300,000 to over 748,000 during this same period.
  • The number of people in state prisons for drug offenses has increased 550 percent over the last 20 years, from 1989 to 2009.
  • The percentage of offenders incarcerated for drug offenses accounted for the largest percentage of total growth in prison population, 49 percent, between 1995 and 2003.
  • At the retail level, in 2005 the global illegal drug industry was larger than the gross domestic product (GDP) of 88 percent of the world’s nations. At the wholesale level, illegal drugs were a larger market than global exports of ores and other minerals.
  • In 2009, over 15 million people used illicit opiates (opium, heroin and morphine) annually. The value of the global opiate market is estimated at US$ 65 billion.
  • In 2008, an estimated 994 metric tons (2,191,372 pounds) of cocaine was produced in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, most of it bound for the United States. At typical wholesale prices, that represents about $22 billion dollars in gross margin for the drug cartels for cocaine sales alone.
  • In 2008, an estimated 5,249 metric tons (11,571,945 pounds) of marijuana was grown in the United States out of the estimated 98,681 metric tons (217,552,133 pounds) grown worldwide. At typical wholesale prices, that represents about $23 billion dollars in U.S. sales to the drug cartels, not including what is smuggled in across the borders. 
  • And, despite the efforts of the retired FBI agent fighting the motorcycle gangs along the border early in his career, in 2007 global production of amphetamines and methamphetamines was estimated at 435 metric tons (959,001 pounds), with an estimated 3.8 million regular users in North America alone.

What has the drug war yielded?

•  
  • It has yielded the United States having more people in prison than any other nation; on any given day more than 2 million people are incarcerated in the United States, almost one in every hundred Americans. Over the course of a year, 13.5 million people spend time in prison or jail in the U.S., over four percent of the population. Most of them are there for drug related offenses, including the property crimes committed to purchase drugs.
  • It has yielded a prison recidivism rate of 67 percent of former prisoners rearrested within three years of their release and 52 percent re-incarcerated. After attending “criminal college” in prison, about a fourth of those initially imprisoned for nonviolent crimes are sentenced for a second time for committing a violent offense.
  • It has yielded a global market that pumps more than $8 trillion dollars a year into drug cartels and organized crime. Those same drug cartels have used that $8 trillion dollars a year to destabilize governments in every major drug producing and transshipment country in the world, institutionalizing corruption and undermining human rights and democracy.
  • It has yielded insidious corruption among U.S. federal, state and local law enforcement departments, agencies and personnel.
  • It has yielded U.S. federal, state and local bureaucracies, case loads and expenditures that dwarf those for any other aspect of crime or criminal behavior.
  • It has yielded no material effect on either the demand for illegal drugs or the supply of illegal drugs.

We can no longer afford to enrich the drug cartels and organized crime, as well as undermine governments and human rights in drug producing and transshipment countries.

We can no longer afford to spend more than five times as much on failed drug enforcement as we do on drug treatment, the only thing that can reduce drug abuse, drug crime, arrest and incarceration. We must aggressively intervene with drug treatment to reduce demand in the only sustainably possible way.

We can no longer afford to incarcerate, and then quickly re-incarcerate, almost one percent of our population in an endless cycle of creating, indoctrinating and producing an ever more violent class of criminal.

We can no longer afford to have illegal drugs, something we can never stop, pass unregulated and untaxed through our economy. We must tax illegal drugs, we must regulate illegal drugs and we must create a taxed and regulated international market that directs the money in this market to foreign governments, not foreign drug cartels and organized crime.

We can no longer afford the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs must end.

• Exceptionalism

 “I do not think so much of America. You make movies and music. And you have the big military. After that, what?” This quote is from a German traveler I interviewed in South America. The comment reflects a common attitude amongst many of the Europeans I have known and interviewed.

This comment and outlook is diametrically opposed to the principal of American exceptionalism that has defined U.S. foreign policy and domestic culture since the days of Alexis de Tocqueville. During America’s brief reign at the top of the world’s pecking order after WWII, American exceptionalism has been used as a sword, a shield, a fig leaf and, most recently, been redefined in ways to nearly make irrelevant its orthodox historical meaning.

Historically, American exceptionalism was the principal that the United States was uniquely different from other nations and cultures due to its principles and beliefs, historic origin, natural resources and multi-racial, multi-cultural makeup. Due to the country’s founding by religious puritans, there were often divine attributes and mandates that were intertwined with the concept of American exceptionalism.

In recent history, a neo-exceptionalism has arisen that supplanted the traditional definition of American exceptionalism with a strident, often outright jingoistic version used as a generic rationalization for international unilateralism and cultural arrogance.

American exceptionalism, in both its traditional and neo- variation form the boundaries and foundation for many popular media touchstones in American culture. In music, in folklore, in movies and in television, the principals of America’s superior virtues are introduced at an early age and continuously reinforced throughout childhood and adulthood. Thus, the concept of inherent American superiority is deeply ingrained within its citizens.

There is little to no perceived need to question what is part and parcel of the American experience, and attempts to do so can be branded as both heresy and treason by those who lean toward neo-exceptionalism.

In addition, Americans have very little external perspective on their country or their culture. Only 27 percent of Americans have valid passports. Of those Americans who do travel outside their own country, the majority take short vacation trips to Canada, Mexican and Caribbean vacation resorts and, at a much lower rate, the United Kingdom (U.K.) and France.

Again by large margins, Americans prefer international destinations that require as little cultural adjustment as possible, such as Australia, the U.K., Ireland, Scotland and Canada. Because American vacations are typically limited to two weeks, there is often an attempt to cram as many tourist destinations into as little time as possible. Tourist destinations very rarely offer the opportunity to truly learn about foreign cultures or interact in a meaningful way with the people of other nations. As such, of the Americans who do travel internationally, extremely few have the opportunity to gain a representative outside perspective of their own nation and culture.

Given the deeply rooted and repeatedly reinforced theme of American exceptionalism and the widespread lack of external perspective, it can be no surprise that policies and actions taken under the mantle of exceptionalism are viewed by most Americans as not only justifiable, but just.

However, if you step outside the fishbowl that is the United States and view the concept of American exceptionalism from an external perspective, it is possible to arrive at a different conclusion.

America is indeed unique in many ways. It is alone among nations in being a nation of immigrants. That attribute, in fact, is one of the nation’s primary differentiators and sustainable global competitive advantages. The United States, historically, has been an unsurpassed engine of innovation. That innovation is due, in no small measure, to the mix of cultures and ideas that springs from the “nation of immigrants” characteristic, as well as the free enterprise economic system and the concept, if not reality, of a national meritocracy. The U.S. is also viewed by the people of the world as the fountainhead of opportunity, the single best place where anyone can, with hard work and commitment, achieve success. To a greater or lesser extent, historically, America has also been viewed as the nation that best reflected its bill of rights and freedoms enshrined in its Constitution.

The challenge America faces is that these unique attributes, these characteristics that can form the basis of a moderate, positive form of American exceptionalism, are not those that dominate the popular and current conception of exceptionalism. Instead, in recent form, American exceptionalism has been debased into a variation of jingoistic hyper-nationalism and hyper-patriotism, often rooted in divine rights and mandates.

In the 1950s, things were different for the U.S. than they are now. U.S. Representative Charles Wilson (Democrat, Texas), of Charlie Wilson’s War fame, said of 1950s America, “We were undisputedly the kings of the world, and everybody knew it. We were arrogant sons of bitches.” The world has changed since the 1950s, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union squared off in a geopolitical battle of good versus evil, black versus white, capitalism versus communism. In today’s world, the U.S. is not the rock-solid superpower, the towering, dominating geopolitical, economic and cultural force, or the stable and reliable touchstone that it was then. In the 1950s, it was easy for most Americans to form and sustain a view of the U.S. that was indisputably exceptional in nearly every way.

But this is not the 1950s. The world is very different now, as is the United States. In many ways, the rest of the world has caught up or is gaining rapidly. In many ways, the U.S. is not as inherently exceptional using the same metrics as those which formed the basis of Americans’ exceptional view of their country in the 1950s.

America remains exceptional in that it is the world’s only immigrant nation. America remains exceptional in that it is the world’s hotbed of innovation. America remains exceptional in that it is the best place to achieve prosperity, to reach goals, to achieve a dream. America remains exceptional in that it is still an ongoing experiment in representative democracy of the people, by the people, for the people.

People in totalitarian countries, those recently freed from the yoke of oppression and those fearing the same tend to continue to view America as exceptional for the principles, rights and freedoms embedded in the Constitution of the United States. People in other countries, especially those who have no cultural memory of living under the bootheel of oppression or who have geopolitical reasons to oppose the U.S., often insightfully observe that American exceptionalism is limited to America’s popular media and its military power, viewing the remainder as a hollow shell of boastfulness and hype.

America’s challenges are that its internal cultural view of what forms American exceptionalism, typically the 1950s version, is often at odds with those national characteristics that remain exceptional, and that much, if not most, of the rest of the world holds a very different view of contemporary America’s unique characteristics than the typical American.

Blanket American exceptionalism, especially neo-exceptionalism, leads to an ever more isolated and insular America. An insular U.S. is increasingly prone to both economic and cultural isolationism and over-reaction to perceived international lack of cooperation and hostility. A neo-exceptionalism America is, by definition, predestined to disastrous foreign policies and unilateral actions. 

In an ever more integrated, increasingly level-playing-field world, we cannot afford to be insular, isolated, or over-reactive.

We cannot afford 1950s American exceptionalism, especially neo-exceptionalism. Neo-exceptionalism and 1950s American exceptionalism must end.

 ***

 As citizens, as an electorate, there is a long list of things we can no longer afford, including, but not limited to: 

• Quick-fix solutions
• Short term thinking
• Blind materialism
• Business as usual
• Simple solutions to complex problems promoted by those with vested interests

 While each of these, in and of themselves, could spell our doom as a society, none threaten us as much as abdication.

• Abdication

As a people, we have abdicated governance to a permanent, corrupt ruling class. We have abdicated thought to a craven, hyper-partisan media. And, most damaging of all, we have abdicated personal responsibility in its entirety.

During the long era of prosperity between the end of WWII and the recent great recession Americans couldn’t be bothered with worrying about government and public policy, there was too much fun to be had, leisure time to be enjoyed and money to spend to waste time on how the society was formed and governed. We just didn’t have the time, energy or interest to spare on what was really going on with government and what was really happening with all the billions of dollars that flowed into our state capitals and Washington, D.C. to buy influence. With gadgets, endless forms of entertainment and ever busier lives, who had time to care about such things as who owned our elected representatives and what they did with all that power and influence.

That time is now over. It is no longer a time when things are so good we don’t need to pay attention. The world we face today requires our full and undivided attention, and that includes our government.

We can no longer afford to abdicate governance to a permanent, corrupt ruling class. As citizens, we must reclaim governance.

America has long depended on authority figures to explain how the world works and how it affects them. Whether it was the pastor in the pulpit, the local newspaper editor or the nightly newscaster, Americans trusted their authority figures, especially those in the media, to boil down the issues and challenges of the day into understandable, bite size chunks that were both palatable and easily digested. Unfortunately, that journey has digressed to the point that the only palatable and digestible chunks of information America can handle consist of “It’s not your fault,” and “The other side are idiots.”

As a consequence, America is now left rudderless in the sea of information, with no one at the tiller of the ship and no way to steer it if there was. Americans still turn to the media for guidance, but now find the cupboard stocked only with ultra-partisan fare, tasty only to those who seek one flavor of information: that which tells them they are super-smart for thinking the way they do and that anybody who thinks differently is today an idiot and tomorrow is likely not to be worthy of living.

The media is no longer equipped to interpret and communicate the events of our time. The media is no longer capable of providing unbiased content valid for forming even-handed opinions and policies.

We can no longer afford to abdicate thought to the media. As individuals, we must seek out facts and form our own opinions, make our own decisions and determine our own fates.

There was a time in the United States when personal responsibility was not the exception; it was the social norm in American society. In that era, people were expected to stand up and take responsibility for their actions. In our current times, Americans are most noted for dodging personal responsibility. America is no longer known as a place where people stand up and take responsibility for their actions, now it is known as a place where we sue the people who sell us hot coffee when we spill it on ourselves. America is known as a place where we expect the schools to teach our children values and morals. America is known as a place that no matter what the situation, no matter what the circumstances, it is always somebody else’s fault—somebody else’s responsibility. America is known as a place where it is a newsworthy event, the rare exception, when a person takes responsibility rather than eludes it.

This long, slow slide from responsibility has delivered us to a place where every single American has an adamant and fiery sense of entitlement to what they believe they are guaranteed regardless of if they have done nothing personally to earn it. Every single American believes they are entitled to everything from free speech to clean water to a chicken in every pot, but very few Americans actually put themselves on the line to produce or ensure those things. What Americans do instead is sidestep that line, hedge that line, dance around that line, do anything but step up to that line of personal responsibility for their choices and their actions.

 We can no longer afford to abdicate responsibility. As individuals and as a country, we can no longer evade responsibility for our choices and our actions. We must step up, stand up and take responsibility.

 *****

As a nation and as individuals we need to face reality as it is, not as it was or as we wish it to be.

The coming challenges in this decade require us to make hard choices. The first of those choices must be to keep what we can afford and eliminate that which we can no longer afford.

Choose what we can afford.

*******

Notes:

• Cost of foreign oil is based on average cost of imported oil per barrel at the refinery.
• Full disclosure: I grew up in Iowa, an agricultural state in the United States. Many of my family were farmers or directly or primarily dependent on the agricultural sector of the economy. I currently own farmland in Iowa that is used to produce grain. Members of my family are directly affected by agriculture subsidy programs.

Sources:

• United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
• United States Department of Commerce
• United States Department of Energy
• United States National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
• United States Department of Justice (DOJ)
• United States Department of State
• United States Government Accountability Office (GAO)
• United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
• Executive Office of the President of the United States
• United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
• Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
• National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University
• Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons
• OXFAM
• Library of Economics and Liberty
• Center for Responsive Politics www.opensecrets.org
• American Bar Association
• RAND
• New England Journal of Medicine
• American Psychologist
• New York Times

The challenge is to be aware of the upsides of the United States without becoming defiantly hostile to any discussion of specific shortcomings or ways the U.S. could improve, or, conversely, becoming so immersed and versed in America’s downsides as to become blind to the unique positive capabilities, characteristics and opportunities the U.S. offers.

When you live in the United States, it often seems as if the U.S. is either all bad or all good depending on which political party is in power and which talk radio station, screaming cable channel or hyper-partisan web site or publication you are feeding into your head at the moment.

In addition, the United States has a long cultural history of and peculiar cultural affection for jeremiads, mournful and often bitter lamentations about the state of society and government. If you spend any time exposing yourself to discussion or media concerning public or foreign policy, it won’t be long before you come across one form of jeremiad or another predicting the imminent doom of the country, accompanied by a long list of complaints and depressing statistics. However, as they say about paranoia, just because a jeremiad shouts that the sky is falling doesn’t mean it isn’t true. The challenge is to sort out the real threats from the partisan fueled hyperbole and opponent bashing.

Faced with so much hyper-partisan ideology and agenda-advancing content, it can be difficult to establish and maintain an assessment of where the country actually is relative to the rest of the world, much less where it needs to go.

Here are some objective facts to help achieve that goal.

Upsides:

• The U.S. leads the world in innovation, which provides incalculable benefits for everyone else on the planet. The modern world is filled with technology that was invented in the United States, from the personal computer to the laser. In addition to general technology, it is estimated that 8 out of 10 inventions and advancements in medicine and health care in the last 50 years originated in the United States. Just as American general technology innovations are used to drive productivity growth worldwide, American health care inventions and advancements are used by every country on earth to improve the health care of their citizens.

At the same time they are reaping the benefits of increased productivity and reduced costs, those countries have not needed to invest in the education, science, facilities, supporting infrastructure, tax credits and research and development that brought about those advances. In effect, the United States subsidizes the entire world by funding the invention and development of new technologies that are used worldwide to advance societies and increase productivity.

In addition to technologies, life saving drugs developed in the United States are often sold here for many times higher prices than elsewhere. We pay higher prices for those drugs to pay the pharmaceutical companies for the $500 million to more than $1 billion dollars required to discover, develop and bring a new drug to market. Other countries get those drugs for low prices, essentially getting all the research and development required to develop new drugs for free. The same is true for medical devices, such as diagnostic imaging, and medical procedures. In these ways, the U.S. effectively subsidizes health care for the entire globe. Consequently, other countries, especially the European Union, have enjoyed relatively low societal costs of health care relative to the United States.

• The U.S. leads the world in military spending, by a huge margin, spending nearly eight times as much as the next closest country, China. The U.S. spends nearly half of the world’s total military spending at 45 percent. The upside of all of this spending is that it has guaranteed peace and security for countries from Europe to the oil producing Gulf states in the Middle East. The latter, maintaining stability in the Middle East, is often used as a negative example of American intervention, but the fact remains that nearly every oil importing nation in the world relies on Middle Eastern oil, and those oil dependant nations include most of America’s harshest critics on this score.

The inherent threat of America’s military muscle has enabled it to settle disputes between upstart nations, rogue regimes, regional enemies and global powers. Perhaps most significantly, it provided a shield that allowed multiple generations of Canadians and Europeans to grow and prosper within an artificial bubble that has never known conflict or war.  This enabled Canada and Western Europe to build their nations while spending a tiny portion of their budgets on their military forces.

In the case of Europe, the money they would have otherwise spent keeping the Russians at bay went instead to building very generous welfare states, including cradle to grave benefits. As such, it is impossible to compare those societies, which have rebuilt or grown within the bubble of America’s security shield, to the United States, especially in terms of social benefits and economic structure. Those European economies that have profited from the protection of the United States have never been required to have an economy that could fully support themselves, they have all been subsidized by American military spending. That American military spending not only negated the need for those nations to buy a viable and effective domestic military, but also subsidized the local economies through direct injection of billions of dollars via American bases, contracts and procurement. The colloquial version of this reality is the paraphrase of Margaret Thatcher’s comment on socialism, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” In this case, the other people’s money has been and continues to be provided by America’s free market capitalist economy, a system often roundly derided by the very Europeans who have been profiting from its subsidies for generations.

The United States also is a leading nation in the world on multiple additional objective measures:

• Universities, 1^st in the world with 18 of the top 25 and 31 of the top 100 ranked institutions. In the top 100, the U.S. ranks ahead of (2) United Kingdom (UK) with 18 in the top 100, (3) Australia with 8, (4) Canada with 4 and (5) China with 3.
• Top 500 businesses, 1^st in the world with 140 of the world’s top 500 companies, leading (2) Japan with 68, (3) France with 40, (4) Germany with 39, (5) China with 37, (6) United Kingdom (UK) with 26, (7) Switzerland with 15, (8) Canada with 14, (9) South Korea with 14 and (10) Netherlands with 12, including the world’s largest company, Royal Dutch Shell.
• Top 100 software companies, 1^st in the world, with 74 of the top 100 companies, leading (2) Japan with 8, (3) France with 4, (4) United Kingdom (UK) with 4, and (5) Germany with 3.
• Internet hosts (a computer connected directly to the internet), 1^st in the world with 338 million, leading (2) Japan with 47 million, (3) Germany with 24 million, (4) Italy with 22 million and (5) Brazil with 16 million.
• Aid to developing countries (official direct aid (ODA)(2008)), 1^st in the world at $25.4 billion, leading (2) Germany at $13 billion, (3) United Kingdom (UK) at $12 billion, (4) France at $10 billion and (5) Japan at $8.3 billion. Note that these numbers do not reflect direct private giving to charity, a category in which the United States leads the world, by far. 
• Kilometers of railroad track, 1^st with 226,427 kilometers ahead of (2) Russia with 87,157, (3) China with 77,834, (4) India with 63,327, (5) Canada with 46,688, (6) Germany with 41,896, (7) Australia with 37,855, (8) Argentina with 31,409, (9) France with 29,213 and (10) Brazil with 28,857. Note that the railway systems of India, Argentina and Brazil were largely built during their colonial period with widely varying levels, often very low, of investment in maintenance since.
• Airports (airports or airfields recognizable from the air, may be paved or unpaved), 1^st with 15,095, leading (2) Brazil with 4,000, (3) Mexico with 1,744, (4) Canada with 1,388, (5) Russia with 1,216, (6) Argentina with 1,130, (7) Colombia with 992 and (8) Bolivia with 952. Note that Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia are heavily involved with the production and shipment of illegal drugs, thus leading to a very high density of airfields relative to their population and geographic size.
• Roadways (kilometers of paved and unpaved roads), 1^st with 6,465,799 kilometers, leading (2) China with 3,583,715, (3) India with 3,316,452, (4) Brazil with 1,751,868, (5) Japan with 1,203,777 and (6) Canada with 1,042,300. Note that many roads in the developing world, such as India and Brazil, are not what most Americans would term a road. Also note that Japan’s roadways represent an extraordinary amount for such a limited geographic area, highlighting the hyper-developed nature of that country.
• Market value of publicly traded shares (price per share multiplied by the total number of outstanding shares, cumulated over all companies listed on the particular exchange on December 31 of the noted year), 1^st at $19.95 trillion dollars (2007), leading (2) European Union at $15.57 (2008), (3) China at $6.23 (2007), (4) Japan at $4.45 (2007), (5) United Kingdom (UK) at $3.86 (2007), (6) France at $2.77 (2007), (7) Canada at $2.19 (2007), (8) Germany at $2.11 (2007), (9) India at $1.82 (2007) and (10) Spain at $1.80 (2007).
• Gross Domestic Product (GDP), purchasing power parity basis(PPP), 2^nd  with $14.26 trillion dollars, trailing (1) European Union at $14.52 and leading (3) China at $8.77, (4) Japan at $4.14, (5) India at $ 3.55, (6) Germany at $ 2.81, (7) United Kingdom (UK) at $2.17, (8) France at $2.11, (9) Russia at $2.10 and (10) Brazil at $2.02.
• Fixed telephone lines, 2^nd with 150,000,000, trailing (1) China with 365,600,000 and leading (3) Germany with 51,500,000.
• Imports (exchange rate basis), 2^nd with $1,445 billion dollars, trailing (1) European Union with $1,690 and leading (3) Germany with $1,022, (4) China with $ 922, (5) France with $ 532 and (6) Japan with $490.
• Movies produced annually, 2^nd with 611, trailing (1) India with 946 and leading (3) Japan with 310, (4) China with 212 and (5) France with 203.
• Annual household Income (purchasing power parity (PPP) adjusted), 2^nd at $50,233, trailing (1) Switzerland at $60,288 and leading (3) Canada at $44,000, (4) New Zealand at $41,000, (5) United Kingdom (UK) at $39,000 and (6) Australia at $38,000. Note that this metric can be difficult to compare as the value of various social programs may or may not be included in the source data for each country.
• Mobile (cell) phones, 3^rd with 270,000,000, trailing (1) China with 634,000,000, (2) India with 427,300,000 and leading (4) Russia with 187,500,000, (5) Brazil with 150,641,000, (6) Indonesia with 140,578,000 and (7) Japan with 110,395,000. 
• Oil production, 3^rd at 8,514,000 barrels per day (bbl/day) (an oil barrel is 42 U.S. gallons or 159 liters), trailing (2) Russia at 9,810,000 and (1) Saudi Arabia at 10,780,000. The U.S. leads (4) Iran at 4,174,000 and (5) China at 3,795,000, (6) Canada at 3,350,000 and (7) Mexico at 3,186,000. The total North American oil production of Canada, Mexico and the United States is 15,050,000 bbl/day, although due to very low re-investment in equipment and exploration by their state owned and operated oil monopoly, Mexico’s production has dropped dramatically in the last few years and will continue to dwindle until significant investments are made.
• Exports (exchange rate basis), 4^th with $995 billion dollars, trailing (1) European Union with $1,952, (2) China with $1,194, (3) Germany with $1,187 and leading (5) Japan with $516 and (6) France with $ 457.
• Steel production (2009), 4^th with 58.142 million metric tons, leading (5) India at 56.608 and trailing (3) Russia at 59.940, (2) Japan at 87.534 and (1) China at 567.842. In 2009, China produced 47 percent of the world’s steel.
• GDP per capita, (PPP basis), 10^th at $46,400. In this ranking the U.S. trails, (1) Liechtenstein $ 122,100, (2) Qatar $ 121,400, (3) Luxembourg $ 77,600, (4) Bermuda $ 69,900, (5) Norway $ 59,300, (6) Jersey $ 57,000, (7) Kuwait $ 55,800, (8) Singapore $ 50,300, and (9) Brunei $ 50,100. Note that aside from the U.S., all of these countries except the city-state of Singapore are either oil producers, tax havens or off-shore banking centers often used to launder money for criminal activities and tax evasion. In the sense of normal nation-state economies, the U.S. leads this ranking.

In addition to these objective measures, the United States leads the developed world in diversity, integration of immigrants, and opportunity for upward mobility. The U.S. is among the world leaders in creativity, discovery and innovation as measured by patents, Nobel Prizes and other recognitions of scientific and creative achievement. Perhaps the most telling measure of all is that the United States leads the world in aspiration. More people perceive the United States as the best place to live than anywhere else on the planet. More people want to come to the United States to realize their dreams of prosperity and advancement for themselves and their families than anywhere else in the world.

But as we know, all is not sweetness and light in America. The United States has shortcomings, downfalls and persistent unresolved issues. Among them are:

Downsides:

• Oil consumption, 1^st at 19,500,000 barrels per day (bbl/day) (an oil barrel is 42 U.S. gallons or 159 liters), leading (2) European Union at 14,440,000 bbl/day, (3) China at 7,999,000, (4) Japan at 4,785,000, (5) India at 2,940,000 and (6) Russia at 2,800,000. Of these nations, only Russia produces enough oil to meet its current domestic needs. Both China and India are experiencing high growth rates in net oil imports. China and India’s foreign oil dependency will be 61 percent and 85 percent respectively in 2010, meaning China will depend on foreign oil imports for 61 percent of their oil needs while India will depend on foreign imports for 85 percent of their needs. Due to limited domestic oil resources, both percentages are expected to rise as their respective economies continue to grow. By 2030 India will pass Japan to become the fourth largest consumer of oil.
• Science knowledge by 15 year olds (2006), 21^st at 489, trailing (20) Iceland at 491, (19) France at 495, (18) Denmark at 496, (17) Poland at 498 and leading (22) Slovakia at 488, (23) Spain at 488 and (24) Norway at 487. The top scoring country was (1) Finland at 563 trailed by (2) Canada at 534.
• In percentage of citizens living below the poverty line, the U.S. ranks 22^nd at 12 percent, trailing (21) Syria at 11.9 percent and leading (23) Slovenia at 12.9 percent. Among developed nations, the U.S. trails (20) Germany at 11 percent, (18) Canada at 10.8 percent, (17) Netherlands at 10.5 percent, (8) Ireland at 7 percent, (6) France at 6.2 percent and (5) Austria at 5.9 percent. Note that many countries use different methodologies to establish the poverty level, so these statistics are not viewed as necessarily reliable or “apples to apples” comparisons, especially by global organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank. In addition, some countries statistics are viewed as unreliable and unrealistic, especially in the developing world.
• Infant mortality rate (deaths per 1,000 live births), 6.22, ranking 44^th, trailing (43) Northern Mariana Islands at 6.00 and (42) Cuba at 5.82 and leading (45) Faroe Islands at 6.32 and (46) Croatia at 6.37. The next highest ranking developed nation above the U.S. is Italy, at 5.51. Singapore holds the best ranking, 1^st, at 2.31 and Sweden is 3^rd with 2.75. Note that the infant mortality rate in some countries is skewed lower (better) due to forced abortions of suspected flawed fetuses, such as in Cuba.
• Life expectancy at birth, 78.11 years, ranking 49^th behind (48) Portugal at 78.21 among developed nations. The leader is (1) Macau at 84.36 years with (3) Japan holding the top developed nation spot at 82.12 years.
• Education expenditures as a percent of GDP, tied with Jamaica and Belize at 5.3 percent with a ranking 57^th, trailing (54) Ghana, (53) South Africa and (52) Austria at 5.4 percent. (16) Iceland leads the developed nations at 7.6 percent followed by (20) Norway at 7.4 percent.
• Public debt as a percentage of GDP (PPP basis), 64^th at 39.70 percent, leading (65) Dominican Republic at 41.50 percent and trailing (63) Yemen at 39.60 percent. The last spot is held by (129) Zimbabwe at 304.3 percent, with the worst developed nations trailing at (128) Japan at 192.10 percent, (123) Italy 115.20 percent, (122) Greece 108.10 percent, (120) Iceland 100.60 percent, (119) Belgium 99.00 percent, (114) France 79.70 percent and (113) Germany 77.20 percent. Note that the purpose of the purchasing power parity (PPP) adjustment is to create a common unit of comparison between economies of different value. The public debt as a portion of GDP represented here is valid for some comparisons between disparate economies, but it is not related to the direct, unadjusted ratio of U.S. public debt to GDP commonly used in U.S. government departments, congress or the media.

On a non-PPP basis, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that under the current proposed budget, debt held by the American public would grow from $7.5 trillion (53 percent of GDP) at the end of 2009 to $20.3 trillion (90 percent of GDP) at the end of 2020. As a result, net interest would more than quadruple between 2010 and 2020 in nominal dollars (without an adjustment for inflation). Net interest payments on the public debt would expand from 1.4 percent of GDP in 2010 to 4.1 percent in 2020.

• In income distribution, a measure of the degree of inequality in the distribution of family income in a country (using the Gini Index, a United Nations (UN) metric, best = 0, worst = 100) the U.S. ranks 92^nd at 45.0, trailing (91) Cameroon at 44.6 and leading (93) Uruguay at 45.2. The U.S. trails, by relatively modest margins, communist or recently communist countries, countries that would, at least in theory, be closest to to the ideal score of zero by government and social structure design. Those current or recent communist countries include (81) Russia at 42.3, (79) China at 41.5 and (57) Vietnam at 37.0. Among non-communist developed economies, the U.S. trails (61) Japan at 38.1, (43) United Kingdom (UK) at 34.0, (37) France at 32.7, (35) Canada at 32.1 and (12) Germany at 27.0. Sweden leads the world at 23.0. Note that these results show that the goal of universal social equality that is the basis of communism has not been achieved by any country that uses or has used that political system. The closest to that ideal has been achieved by the democratic socialist countries of Western Europe, all of which have enjoyed subsidies from the U.S. in the form of technological innovation, health care innovation (drugs, products and procedures) and military protection.
• In gross fixed investment as a percentage of GDP, the measure of total business spending on fixed assets, such as factories, machinery, equipment, dwellings, and inventories of raw materials, which provide the basis for future production, the U.S. ranks 144^th at 12.50 percent. Rapidly growing economies rank highly, such as (3) China at 42.60 percent. More mature economies come in lower, such as the (98) European Union at 19.70 percent.
• Aid to developing countries as a percentage of GDP (PPP) (Official Development Assistance (ODA)), dead last, 22^nd at 0.18 percent. The U.S. trails (21) Greece at 0.19 percent, (20) Japan at 0.20 percent and (19) Italy at 0.23 percent. (1) Sweden leads at 1.35 percent, trailed by (2) Norway at 1.32 percent and (3) Denmark at 1.29 percent. Note that these figures are official government ODA aid only and do not include direct private contributions to charity, of which the U.S. leads the world at $307.6 billion in 2008. Adding allocations of private charity donations targeted to international aid to U.S. government ODA yields a ranking for the U.S. of 17^th at 0.33 percent, leading (18) New Zealand at 0.30 percent and trailing (16) Canada at 0.36 percent.
• For weights and measures, the United States ranks dead last. The U.S. is the last meaningful economy to integrate with the way the world weighs and measures things using the easy to teach, easy to lean and easy to use metric system. The United States is one of three countries that have not officially adopted and implemented the metric system, the other two being Burma (Myanmar) and Liberia, two countries whose combined GDP is less than Delaware’s. More than six billion people use the metric system for weights and measures. The citizens and companies of the United States operate at an ongoing disadvantage of familiarity and extra costs required to comply with the global standard.

The loss of a $125 million dollar NASA mission to Mars because U.S. measurements were incorrectly mixed with global metric measurements is the best  known cost for clinging to the arcane inch / pound system. However, that $125 million dollars is merely the tip of the iceberg. Based on other developed countries’ experiences converting to metric, the U.S. spends an additional $1.28 trillion annually in excess costs to maintain dual measurements in the production of private sector goods and services. That’s $1.28 trillion a year that could otherwise be invested in science, research and development, new life saving drugs, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, education, etc. That $1.28 trillion in annual costs does not include additional expenses related to public sector goods and services, such as the duplicative costs to public education in teaching every single pupil in the country two measurement systems.

In addition to these objective comparisons, the United States has its fair share of subjective and relative failings and shortcomings, including, but by no means limited to, cultural insularity, lingering racism, declining academic performance, deteriorating infrastructure, relentless federal deficits, skyrocketing public debt, inadequate financial regulation, massive illegal drug demand, dependence on foreign oil, declining public health, hyper-partisan political polarization and a paralyzed, ineffective government incapable of addressing, much less overcoming, the range of major challenges the country faces.

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In summary, the United States is just like any other human or group of humans. The U.S. has its strengths and weaknesses, just like every other nation. The U.S. is neither as ideal and blameless as its most ardent supporters claim, or as degenerate and malevolent as its most shrill detractors assert.

One of its undeniable strengths is that the nation as a whole has proven again and again to have incredible powers to adapt to changing circumstances and rise to meet common challenges.

The question now is whether the nation, or more specifically, the people of the United States, can recognize the speed and scope of the changes and, even more of a challenge, reach common consensus on how to overcome those challenges.

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 Sources:

• United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
• Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
• National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA)
• Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
• Gallup
• Xinhua News Agency
• International Energy Agency
• World Steel Association
• U.S. Metric Association
• USA Giving
• Metrication Matters
• US News and World Report
• Fortune
• CNN
• Internet Movie Database (IMDB)
• Wikipedia