The Rise and Fall of the USA

[Ernie]

Today I went looking for some info about how the USA compares to other world powers in the past. I found this article interesting.

https://www.greaterpacificcapital.com/t ... and-return

If you have other articles based on good history and not merely on personal hunches or predictions, feel free to post them here and discuss.

[Ken]

I read most of the article you posted. It is from pre-election 2020 so they basically end with Trump and don't discuss Biden. But they certainly take both the Bush and Trump administrations to task for squandering US influence in the world. For example...
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If you read to the end, what they basically argue is for the US to tighten an alliance with the EU and India to stand against China. That actually was more or less what the Obama-era TPP was trying to do. Create an alliance of Pacific nations to ally against China.

In any event, The US is still the wealthiest nation that has ever existed on the face of the earth, and has the most powerful military that has ever existed on the face of the earth. We have had about 75 years of economic and political hegemony over much of the planet and I'm not sure we have done very much good with it. Latin America and the Caribbean is a case in point. We have had complete hegemony over the Caribbean for a century yet look at Haiti. Perhaps a little decline in US power and influence is not such as dire prospect. Norway, the Netherlands, Chile, Korea, etc. are not dystopian nightmares.

[Josh]

This is pure globalisation nonsense; China is the biggest polluter and also biggest emitter of greenhouse gas. One wonders what "participating in Paris accords" even means.

And we see the real agenda under "Trade Leadership", which the authors are using to actually mean "No taxes or tariffs on imports". Rich globalists don't want to be taxed on things that make them rich, and unfettered global trade makes them rich (and everyone else poor).

They also hate nations, borders, and different cultures and want to merge us all into one giant globalist government (which them calling the shots, of course). As Ken points out, this is from pre-election 2020 - the exact same people now are very critical of China, since Xi Jingping is now also challenging the globalist agenda. Ironically, the globalist era seems to be coming to a close; free trade seems irrelevant when container ships can't get unloaded at ports in the first place.

[temporal1]

This is pure globalisation nonsense; China is the biggest polluter and also biggest emitter of greenhouse gas.

it boggles the mind to think how tight regulations are on “developed” countries, only to have trade flow openly from unregulated countries, who ship their (questionable/polluted junk) all over the world .. spreading pollution in countless ways ..

“what happens in China (India, etc.) does not stay in China” ..
it’s shipped all over the world on large cargo ships, freight carriers; invasive pests+disease on commercial airlines; not to mention, pollution in their waterways eventually makes it way into the world’s oceans ..

so, who are the elite globalists kidding with their expensive shell games, how long before the jig is up?

[Ken]

This is pure globalisation nonsense; China is the biggest polluter and also biggest emitter of greenhouse gas.

it boggles the mind to think how tight regulations are on “developed” countries, only to have trade flow openly from unregulated countries, who ship their (questionable/polluted junk) all over the world .. spreading pollution in countless ways ..

“what happens in China (India, etc.) does not stay in China” ..
it’s shipped all over the world on large cargo ships, freight carriers; invasive pests+disease on commercial airlines; not to mention, pollution in their waterways eventually makes it way into the world’s oceans ..

so, who are the elite globalists kidding with their expensive shell games, how long before the jig is up?

That would be easy enough to address with a global carbon tax structured as import duties that is based on the CO2 production of the producing country. Imports from China would be taxed at double the rate of imports from say Korea if their CO2 production is double. Or add a multiplier. For every x% the greenhouse gases go up, the tax goes up 5x% or 10x%.

Use the money earned to fund green energy projects around the world.

[Robert]

Use the money earned to fund green energy projects around the world.

Green energy will not solve the world needs. Nuclear is the only thing that can. Uranium or Thorium reactors are what will solve the future in costs and in pollution.

I found the chart you posted to be very biased in its projection of what was good and bad.

[Ken]

Use the money earned to fund green energy projects around the world.

Green energy will not solve the world needs. Nuclear is the only thing that can. Uranium or Thorium reactors are what will solve the future in costs and in pollution.

I found the chart you posted to be very biased in its projection of what was good and bad.

I'm a big supporter of nuclear and consider it to be green energy. The nuclear waste problem is purely political, not scientific.

The chart I posted was lifted straight out of the article posted by Ernie that started this thread. I was posted it to point out the political slant of the authors.

[Robert]

The chart I posted was lifted straight out of the article posted by Ernie that started this thread. I was posted it to point out the political slant of the authors.

I could clearly see that also.

[Bootstrap]

The Last Time Democracy Almost Died - Jill LePore

“Epitaphs for democracy are the fashion of the day,” the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, dismally, in 1930. The annus horribilis that followed differed from every other year in the history of the world, according to the British historian Arnold Toynbee: “In 1931, men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of Society might break down and cease to work.” When Japan invaded Manchuria, the League of Nations condemned the annexation, to no avail. “The liberal state is destined to perish,” Mussolini predicted in 1932. “All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal.” By 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann was telling an audience of students at Berkeley that “the old relationships among the great masses of the people of the earth have disappeared.” What next? More epitaphs: Greece, Romania, Estonia, and Latvia. Authoritarians multiplied in Portugal, Uruguay, Spain. Japan invaded Shanghai. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. “The present century is the century of authority,” he declared, “a century of the Right, a Fascist century.”

American democracy, too, staggered, weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation. “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy,” F.D.R. said in his first Inaugural Address, telling Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. But there was more to be afraid of, including Americans’ own declining faith in self-government. “What Does Democracy Mean?” NBC radio asked listeners. “Do we Negroes believe in democracy?” W. E. B. Du Bois asked the readers of his newspaper column. Could it happen here? Sinclair Lewis asked in 1935. Americans suffered, and hungered, and wondered. The historian Charles Beard, in the inevitable essay on “The Future of Democracy in the United States,” predicted that American democracy would endure, if only because “there is in America, no Rome, no Berlin to march on.” Some Americans turned to Communism. Some turned to Fascism. And a lot of people, worried about whether American democracy could survive past the end of the decade, strove to save it.

“It’s not too late,” Jimmy Stewart pleaded with Congress, rasping, exhausted, in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” in 1939. “Great principles don’t get lost once they come to light.” It wasn’t too late. It’s still not too late.

One of the essays in The Future of Democracy, which offers various points of view.