Zimbabwe. (Website for this image)
At the UK's Financial Times, James Mackintosh has explained that the USA's wealthy elite got good news on 7 December 2010. (The Short View - Good news comes in threes)
On that day it was announced that the tax cuts for the super-rich would continue.
The US has "abandoned any pretense" that it is trying to balance the books.
Inflation is likely to rise.
"The total cost of the tax cuts will be $1,000bn over two years."
"A coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could conceivably forge a single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at all." - Professor Alfred McCoy (Four ways the doomed American empire could collapse) - see below
According to Li Daokui, an academic member of China's central bank monetary policy committee:
"The fiscal (government spending) situation in the United States is much worse than in Europe.
"In one or two years... US Treasury bonds and the dollar will experience considerable declines." (US fiscal health is worse than Europe's: according to a Chinese central bank adviser)
Detroit - Website for this image
America's decline could be seen to have started when the military-industrial-narco complex embarked on the Vietnam War or the Iraq War.
Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
On 5 December, at alternet.org, Professor McCoy wrote about Four ways the doomed American empire could collapse
Among the points made:
1. The US Empire could collapse within 15 years.
The following empires, after things started to go badly wrong, ended as follows:
Portugal within one year.
Soviet Russia within two years.
The UK within 17 years.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 may be the start of America's downfall.
2. China may be top nation some time after 2020.
By 2020, "China's global network of communications satellites, backed by the world's most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of space and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe."
3. Historian Paul Kennedy prophecied that the USA was going to fail as a result of losing control of its economy and becoming overextended.
4. American jobs have been heading overseas.
5. Australia and Turkey are using their American weapons for joint air and naval maneuvers with China.
6. By 2008, the US had already fallen to number three in global merchandise exports, behind the European Union and China.
7. American leadership in technological innovation is on the decline.
The World Economic Forum ranked the United States 52nd in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010.
8. The dollar may cease to be the world’s reserve currency.
Big US deficits have been caused partly by continual wars.
9. The US may be forced to pull U.S. forces back from hundreds of overseas bases.
10. Russia and Iran control much of the world's gas and oil.
The US has done too little to develop alternative sources.
11. A New World Order?
"A coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could conceivably forge a single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at all.
"While denationalized corporations and multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural wastelands."
12. Reform?
"The American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country's role and prosperity in a changing world."
Early in 2010, "Assange met with Israeli officials in Geneva" and struck a "secret deal."
Documents about the Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Gaza "were removed and possibly destroyed by Assange....."
The sources of the report are said to be former WikiLeaks volunteers. (WIKILEAKS STRUCK A DEAL WITH ISRAEL OVER CABLE LEAKS)
