By Bryan Newbury
January 21, 2008
The United States became a debtor nation in 1989. It was the first time the U.S. could be so classified since World War I. From that point to the present, the red ink has ebbed and flowed, but largely expanded to the point where some economists and social scientists are predicting the kind of flood we saw in New Orleans a few years back. Your family’s share of the national debt is a cozy $90,000 and growing. The Chinese are holding the note, and, as William Greider wrote in 2004, “[t]he poker game ends when one major player or another decides it has gotten the last dollar off the table and it’s time to go home. Creditor nations naturally have the upper hand, like any banker who can call the loan when he sees the borrower is hopelessly mired.†How did we get to this point?
Maxed Out doesn’t examine the foreign and economic policy big picture as much as it illustrates the situation through the credit problems of individual Americans. The parallels are unbearably odd, though the motivations and manipulations don’t correspond. As a debtor nation, we are seemingly going out of our way to leave ourselves vulnerable. As a matter of domestic policy, our leaders identify with the creditors (their American paymasters) leaving the working and middle class to the rapacious vultures of the banking and credit industry. Given this dichotomy, it would be nigh on impossible for the most skillful filmmaker to weave a coherent narrative connecting the debt crisis affecting Main Street Americans with the multi-trillion dollar deficit crunch of our government. Read the rest of this entry »
Near the end of January 2002, President Bush delivered a speech, and within it a line, that would shape the American psyche for some years to come. By declaring an “Axis of Evil,†the groundwork was laid for a public to be motivated by fear and hyperbole. Were it not for a number of brave people, make no mistake that the United States would be bombing Iran as this is written. Of course, the Iranians haven’t the capability – likely, they don’t have the desire – to manufacture a nuclear weapon. Even if they did, they would be unable to detonate the device anywhere near American soil, unless one counts the colony of Iraq. That hasn’t stopped us before.
