THE U.S. IS BECOMING IRRELEVANT

As it slowly disappears into a financial black hole of debt from which its ordinary citizens are never likely to recover and the only source of power it has left falls from an aircraft and comes out of the end of a gun, the United States is steadily losing relevancy as an influential power on our planet.

The last ten years have seen the steady erosion of virtually all of its credibility as a ‘super-power’ as its actions have exposed the reality of American values; gross hypocrisy and utter self-righteous arrogance.

As its President struts his stuff around the planet in a fruitless effort to regain lost credence, the rest of the world looks toward itself to find a future. Come September, the Palestinian people will more than likely ask the international community through the United Nations to recognise a Palestinian state. The US president has arrogantly told the world that a Palestinian state will not be created this way meaning that the US will veto such a resolution at the UN Security Council. Right now Obama is lobbying European leaders on behalf of Israel asking the Europeans not to support Palestinian statehood. How successful his lobbying will be remains to be seen, but just the fact that the President of the United States has been reduced to lobbying on behalf of a foreign state indicates the extent to which American power has been eroded.

On the economic front, China has shown the way. China’s ability to simply trade with the world rather than threaten and invade nations that don’t cooperate has left the US economy staggering on its feet. When China wants something that it doesn’t have itself or needs more of from elsewhere, it doesn’t spend trillions on raising a military to invade; it simply sends an email asking ‘how much and which bank shall we transfer the money in to?’ Most countries – and Australia is a classic example – are then more than happy to dig up the bits of the country that China wants and ship it to them. China has found that its a lot cheaper to send the email, transfer the cash and let their trading partners like Australia do the work rather than have to raise a massive army and launch an invasion just to get at its resources. Those days are long gone for the Chinese; but not, it seems, for the US.

Soon, as China rapidly increases trade with potentially the world’s biggest markets, India, Pakistan and the rest of Asia, it will rely less and less on the need to sell to and trade with the US – especially as the US can’t pay its bills.

On the domestic front, US values have meant that a ‘dog eat dog’ and ‘every man for himself’ mentality has evolved which has resulted in millions not being able to feed themselves without food stamps and millions more not being able to find enough work to keep themselves and their families provided for. Meanwhile, a progressive deterioration in the nation’s economy has seen hundreds of thousands lose their homes while a few at the big end of town have had massive government handouts that they have corruptly squandered on themselves via huge bonuses and salary increases.

Trillions more have been handed over to arms manufacturers, the military and private military support service contractors in order to perpetuate wars against a media-created world-wide ‘terrorist enemy’ while the nations road systems, education, penal systems and health services erode and fail.

All America has left is the threat of using its military power; but, as the Taliban in Afghanistan and the resistance in Iraq and elsewhere have shown, even that has not been enough to subdue a determined people.

America has nothing left to offer the world. The ordinary folk of America are as disillusioned as the rest of the world has been in the past. And they are confused. ‘Why’, they ask, ‘if we are so exceptional, have we nothing left to show for our exceptionalism?’ They have no one to blame but their leaders who have lusted after personal power and wealth. They have fallen trance-like into the grip of a racist extreme right-wing foreign power and their American supporters who have conned them into believing that their interests and America’s are one and the same but who are now exposed as nothing more than criminals that have taken advantage of, and then expended, all of the sympathy that the world had for them at the end of the Second World War.

Now America is paying the price of their folly of supporting Israel. Not only is Israel a lost cause but it has taken America down the road to irrelevancy with it. The world is no longer impressed by what America has to offer. The world now knows that it is a collective world that looks after the interests of each other that is relevant today.

The US is becoming irrelevant. Its only hope now is that the American people rise up and demand an end to wars and an end to their futile support of the right-wing racist government of Israel.