CHERFUL,We are headed for that new dark age unless we all get up off our backsides and become politically active.Obama and Bush have set in train via the Patriot Act,Preventative Dentention,legalised assasination and the National Defence Authorisation Act, for all this to happen.

Notice that neither of our major parties confront this loss of human rights.Fascism is at our door step.

Australia is no longer a democracy. It is a country run by the rich purely for the benefit of the rich.

Our politicians: Greens, LABOR and Coalition, are self-serving ideologues with low intelligence and few morals. They all worship the Citadel of Greed and Killing found in Washington.

These infantile articles by Bishop give the Australian people the finger! Then our mediocre politicians are giving us all the finger!

How much longer do we have to put with with her insults and those of her clan to our intelligence?

Far from being some sort of "miracle" the global economy has been just a huge Ponzi Scheme, created and co-ordinated mainly by the US for its own interests.

A history of toppling democratically elected regimes that do not bend to its will has finally created nothing for the US but a growing list of enemies.

While all attention has been on the Euro, the real problem is in the USA.

Forget the $16 Trillion deficit, the real total US debt is 20% higher than the entire annual Global GDP which means it will be in eternal debt - unless it creates a new currency for itself or we have a vast global conflict that will create temporary wealth from rebuilding whatever is destroyed.

I fail to see how cheering them on while ignoring their past failures will somehow create a better future when what is really needed is a complete global economic restructuring.

Historically the collapse of empires have always been the result of unserviceable debt and happens quite quickly once it begins. If the US dollar ever loses its global oil currency status it has nothing of value to back it up.

Saranian wrote:

>>You say "while you do not subscribe to the theory that the US is in an irreversible decline" It is.>>

Is it?

I don't think so.

On the contrary it looks to me as if America is going through one of its periodic and messy bouts of re-invention. No country seems to re-invent itself as frequently as the USA.

America's politicians are awful but the politicians are not America.

Nothing is forever but to me it looks as if the USA will be number one in the world for quite a few decades yet.

Sorry America-haters.

This piece in The Economist sums it up rather well.

Comeback kid
America’s economy is once again reinventing itself

http://www.economist.com/node/21558576

Some quotes:

>>….Led by its inventive private sector, the economy is remaking itself .. Old weaknesses are being remedied and new strengths discovered, with an agility that has much to teach stagnant Europe and dirigiste Asia.

[…]

America’s sluggishness stems above all from pre-crisis excesses and the misshapen economy they created….

…[however] in the past three years …has proceeded fast. America’s houses are now among the world’s most undervalued….And because the Treasury and other regulators, unlike their euro-zone counterparts, chose to confront the rot in their financial system quickly, American banks have had to write off debts and raise equity faster than their peers. (Citigroup alone has flushed through some $143 billion of loan losses; no euro-zone bank has set aside more than $30 billion.) American capital ratios are among the world’s highest. And consumers have cut back, too: debts are now 114% of income.

New strengths have also been found. One is a more dynamic export sector. The weaker dollar helps explain why the trade deficit has shrunk from 6% of GDP in 2006 to about 4% today. But other, more permanent, shifts—especially the growth of a consuming class in emerging markets—augur well. On the campaign trail, both parties attack China as a currency-fiddling, rule-breaking supplier of cheap imports (see Lexington). But a richer China has become the third-largest market for America’s exports, up 53% since 2007.>>>

American housing undervalued? They are still building new ones!
Perhaps those builders are operating at a loss, as a tax saving measure?
Australia has the highest median priced housing in the English speaking world; at least 60% overvalued, a bubble saved from bursting, by policies that ensure supply never keeps up with demand.
[The lunatics are running the asylum?]
We currently under-supply the local market by around 140,000 units PA.
Money for nothing?
Say like 26 billions PA in middle class welfare; or, paper shuffling brokerage firms or tax practitioners, who do little or no productive work, yet expect superior rewards?
We could halve the cost of living almost overnight, by factory-direct sales, that simply exclude the profit demanding middleman!
We are mired in the patently false belief that we need foreign capital?
The Australian dollar is way over valued due to our robust economy.
We should also note that both Spain and Ireland had quite robust success story economies, until foreign debt laden speculators oversupplied the domestic housing/property market!
And gormless govts spent billions of taxpayers' dollars trying with spectacular non success, to bail them out!
The way forward is through long overdue bipartisan cooperation and social credit, that is used to build income earning assets we/they still need. Once the performing asset is created, it cancels out the debit used to create it.
It's too easy, that's why myopically focused, blame shifting Pollies, never get it?
What won't work is the creation of (a) much smaller economic pie(s), and then handing out larger slices to a privileged few! [Austerity!]
We need to invest in our own people and their better ideas. Ditto, USA.
We need to invest in total energy independence. Particularly, if the local product produces FOUR TIMES LESS CARBON, than that which we import, [thanks to the GREEN blockade,] with increasingly scarce export dollars.
Having effectively tied up our own low carbon fuel supplies, [the Coral sea, the Great Barrier Reef,] the GREENS tell us we must reduce carbon!
As the Lamb chop munching Sam (kick-a-ball) Keckovitch would say, "you know, it just makes sense"!
Rhrosty.

Rhrosty wrote:

>>American housing undervalued? They are still building new ones!
Perhaps those builders are operating at a loss, as a tax saving measure?>>

Taken as a whole American housing may in some sense be under-valued. I wouldn’t know. There is no doubt that housing prices in the US have plummeted.

However, in case you had not noticed, houses are mostly immobile. A glut in some areas does not preclude a need for more housing in others.

CHERFUL wrote:

>>I think we all get the feeling that the days of the mighty Western Empire is drawing to a close>>

I'm not sure what the "Western Empire" is. I certainly do not have a feeling of a "Western Empire" on the point of collapse.

What I do see is the emergence of a sort of global civilisation. It will not be a smooth process. These things never are. But it seems to be happening.

Within that global civilisation I expect the USA to be at the very least a "first among equals" for quite a long time. (See my previous post)

Spindoc wrote

>>Now we have a bunch of well educated but not intelligent whiners running things.>>

Well, yes. But I think their time is nearly over. To me it seems that the youngsters of today – ie people under 35 – are far more savvy than my generation, or even the next generation, was at that age.