America’s insatiable appetite for oil is leading to her own ruin and endangering the whole world. The United States produces only 10% of the world’s oil but consumes 25% of it. This tremendous gap helps to create the mighty and growing American fiscal and trade deficits which skew the world’s economy in a way which is unsustainable. It also makes a highly disproportionate contribution to global warming and distorts American foreign policy into preemptive aggression, thereby jeopardizing security and stability throughout the world.
In parallel to this growing threat, and considerably exacerbating it, is the full-blown emergence of forces which now dominate political life in America and control what the administration in Washington does. These forces include the influence of huge corporations, especially in the drafting and implementation of energy and environmental policies, the neocon ideology which rejects contemptuously international organizations and international treaties and conventions, the military philosophy which favours unilateral, preemptive ventures, the escalating influence of evangelical religion on domestic and foreign policy and the growing divide in America along relentlessly hostile and partisan lines. Rancorous elements like the Tea Party absurdists cannot see the tree for the leaves, far less the wood for the trees.
And amidst all this, growing like a lethal cancer, the greatest financial and banking scandal of this or any century has developed. As a correspondent in the New Yorker, Hendrick Hertzberg, has recently put it: “…financial deregulation, along with cybernetic chicanery, defective and incomprehensible financial ‘products’, and banking greed unmoored from social, personal, and fiduciary responsibility, created a monstrous ‘debt machine’ that turbo-charged inequality of wealth, inflated bubbles, diverted talent and investment from making things to making bets, bilked millions on the edge to enrich thousands on the heights and ended – if it ended – by pushing the poor, the middle-class and the real economy into the abyss.”
The coming together of these developments in the present era makes the world an infinitely dangerous place. For the world just to survive, much less to grow into a better, safer, more stable and more uniformly prosperous place, is going to need imaginative and enlightened leadership of the highest order. What is more, an important, perhaps even main, quotient of such leadership will have to come from the United States since that nation is, and will remain for some time, the preeminent power on earth. But, given the current situation, it makes one despair to think what a major shift in policies and fundamental change of heart and mind it will take to bring forth leadership in America equal to the challenge of the times. The generation of great American statesmen and far-seeing technocrats who led the way in putting the world together after the Second World War has been succeeded by a generation of impure politicians not up to the challenge of world leadership. A weak President Obama, of whom so much was expected, has been consistently hobbled and frustrated by the special interests which completely dominate America today.
Special interests have taken over the running of America. Over fifty years ago, towards the end of his presidency Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, warned against the growing influence of the “military-industrial complex.” Now such interests have become vastly more powerful in Washington and are consistently capable of blocking all efforts to find long-term solutions to their own national and to world problems.
An important indication of the immense power of corporations in America is their astonishing success in getting the government to delay or deflect action on well-informed scientific predictions about universal problems like the destruction of the environment and the increasing impact of global warming. With exorbitant American energy consumption now added to the rapidly growing energy needs of China and India, it has become clear that oil will become scarcer and more expensive sooner than previously expected, with huge and devastating economic and social consequences throughout the world. Far from summoning the decisive leadership in striving to conserve energy and rapidly find and develop alternatives to oil on a worldwide scale, the US government, at the behest of corporate interests, is busy covering up the facts – and belittling the seriousness of the situation and is merely nibbling at the outer edges of a problem which threatens the world.
Just as frightening a problem is global warming. It is absolutely apparent that this phenomenon is a huge threat to the universal natural habitat as we know it and to human society. Yet even the current American administration, originally well-intentioned, under the direction of corporate interests blind to all concerns but instant profit balks at doing anything significant even to slow down global warming. Ignorant men in denial: let the future generations look after themselves! Confronted by a giant problem what we have is pygmy thinking at its worst.
Like it or not, America remains the central pole of the world tent. If it badly fails, as it is now in the process of doing, everyone on earth will be hurt in the collapsing structure. I am not a pessimist by nature but as things stand in the world I am full of fear for my children and grandchildren.
