Undoubtedly. But the dollar is the global currency and so, unlike Zimbabwe or even Iceland, America gets to borrow money in its own bills, which it has the exclusive right to print as much of as it wants. So, even if there’s a decline in value, for foreigners there is perceived to be a limit to the risk: buying U.S. debt is not like buying Zimbabwe’s debt.
Yes, but why is the dollar still the global currency if America’s the biggest debtor nation?
That’s about image, too: America is seen as the guarantor of global order.
But, as noted earlier, when money drains, so does power—and very quickly, as the British learned after World War II. Today, money is draining across the Pacific. China Minmetals is a Fortune 500 company owned and controlled by the People’s Republic.112 By the way, read that sentence again and imagine what an H. G. Wells time traveler from the early Sixties, from the time of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, would make of it. Yet in the Fortune Top Ten there are three Chinese companies against two from the United States.113 And China Minmetals is serious business: they own the Northern Peru Copper Company in Canada,114 and the Golden Grove copper, lead, zinc, silver, and gold mines in Western Australia,115 and the mining rights to a huge percentage of Jamaican bauxite.116 China’s Sinopec bought up Calgary’s Addax petroleum117 and 9 percent of the Alberta oil sands business Syncrude,118 and have massively expanded oil production and development in Sudan and Ethiopia. China’s Sinochem took over Britain’s Emerald Energy.119 You remember all the “No Blood for Oil” chants back in 2003? Relax, it’s our blood, their oil. The biggest foreign investor in post-war Iraq is the developer of the Ahdab oil field, the China National Petroleum Corporation.120
Think of it as the first settlers did
And, where money flows, power follows. Having turned resource nations in Africa into de facto protectorates, China has moved on to the developed world, and bailed out Portugal for $100 billion in exchange for significant stakes in their national utility companies.121 Beijing is also the biggest foreign investor in post-bailout General Motors: they bought 18 percent of the Obama administration’s IPO in 2010.122 If the Obama-approved Chevy Volt isn’t environmentally friendly enough for you, wait for the new Chevy Rickshaw. Can you still, as Dinah Shore sang, see the USA in your Chevrolet? The Chinese can.
Like America, China has structural defects. It’s a dictatorship whose authoritarian policies have crippled its human capital. It has too many oldsters and not enough youth, and among its youth it has millions of surplus boys and no girls for them to marry. If China were the inevitable successor to America as global hegemon, that would be one thing. But the fact that it is incapable of playing that role is likely to make things even messier, more unpredictable, and far more destabilizing.
They have our souls who have our bonds. In their decadence, much of the western elite now think the answer to our worsening problems is not merely Chinese money but Chinese-style dictatorial government. If you support Bush’s “Patriot Act,” you’re endangering civil rights. But if you support eco-totalitarianism, it’s totally groovy.
In 2008, David Suzuki, Canada’s most famous environmentalist, suggested that “denialist” politicians should be thrown in jail.123 Mayer Hillman, senior fellow at the Policy Studies Institute in London, thinks democratic dissent from conformocrat-enviro-hysteria needs to be suppressed: “When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it. This has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not.”124 If the people are too foolish to vote as their betters instruct, then it will have to be “imposed.” The earth is your führer. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute, agrees on the inadequacy of America’s “democracy” (his scare quotes) and argues that (to quote the article he wrote for the
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