New Book: Why America Failed

Morris Berman has been a critic of America's current downward spiral.  In the below link, he talks about it in depth.  I feel he is right on the mark at a time when most Americans are oblivious to what is going on.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/WhyAmer

The Decline of the American Empire

Below is an interesting take on the decline of America from Al Jazeera English.  It is about 47 minutes long, and its worth viewing.

The decline of the American empire - Empire - Al Jazeera English

American Exceptionalism Has Become American Deceptionalism

By Paul Rosenberg

From the dawn of the colonial era, long before they even had a national identity, Americans have always felt they had a special role in the world, though the exact nature of American exceptionalism has always been a matter of some dispute.
Many have taken it to be a special religious destiny, but Alexis de Tocqueville, the first to consider it systematically, affirmed the exact opposite: "a thousand special causes ... have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects." Ironically enough, the exact term "American exceptionalism" was first used by Joseph Stalin, in order to reject it.  And yet, for 70 years American exceptionalism has been most prominently and consistently associated with imperialism ("benevolent", of course!), via the phrase "the American Century". It was coined by Time-Life publisher Henry Luce in February, 1941, 10 months before Japan's Pearl Harbour attack drew the US into World War II. The history of Luce's coinage provides a depth of resonance for a recent twist: a not uncommon, but particularly telling juxtaposition of four Time magazine covers from around the world this week.

In three editions - Europe, Asia and South Pacific - Time magazine's visually hot, tumultuous cover featured a gasmask-protected Egyptian protester, upraised fist overhead with a chaotic street background behind. The headline: "Revolution Redux". Not so in the exceptional American edition. There, the visually cool, wanna-be New Yorker-ish cover was a text-dominated cartoon against a light gray background: "Why Anxiety is Good For You."  Clearly, Time is whistling past the graveyard. As mostly Democratic mayors clamp down hard on Occupy Wall Street outposts across the land, it's obvious that the US' political class is having none of it. They do not believe that anxiety is good for them and they are doing their darnedest to keep a lid on things. Agitated citizens out in the streets are bad enough. Pictures of agitated citizens are simply too much.
Once upon a time, those pictures coming from a Third World dictatorship in a (hopefully) democratic transition would have been comfortably distant, even reassuring - exotic, other, subsumed in history, striving to become more like us, the transcendent ones at the "end of history."  That, after all, was part of the message of Luce's "American Century". But nowadays, everyone knows that the differences between Zuccotti Park and Tahrir Square are increasingly less significant than their similarities. They are matters of degree more than kind. There is no such place as "outside of history" anymore. Those making history know it, and those fighting history know it just as well.

Democratic mayors to the 99 per cent
In the US, the message from the mayors is simple: You've made your point. Now go to your room and shut up. We've got a lawn to keep up, and you've spoiled it. America's "grown-ups" as the political class likes to think of itself, have never had much patience when it comes to the "children", as its mere citizens are known. And yet, America's democratic revolutionary origins are at the very centre of a radically different vision of what American exceptionalism is all about.

The situation in Los Angeles is particularly exemplary. Although city officials welcomed Occupy LA at first, for weeks on end Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and others have been saying it's time to leave. Villaraigosa - like Obama - is a former progressive organiser turned neo-liberal politician. He was a teacher's union organiser when I first met him in the 1980s, as part of a progressive precinct network aimed at getting disaffected progressive voters to the pols.

Also within the coalition's core was the LA National Lawyers Guild's executive director. When Villaraigosa first took office in 2006, his first big battle was against the teacher's union he used to work for. He took them on with the backing of billionaire real estate developer and education "reformer" Eli Broad. Five years later, as he faces off against Occupy LA, the current NLG executive director, James Lafferty, is one of his major opponents.

With no sense of irony, Villaraigosa thought Thanksgiving weekend was the perfect time for an eviction. "It's clear that this mayor cares more about dead grass than a dead economy," Lafferty responded at an Occupy LA press conference. "The 99 per cent that have been thrown out of their homes, jobless, without proper healthcare and all the rest seem to be less important to him than that lawn."

America's exceptional democracy
As indicated above, the idea of American exceptionalism was always a contested one. But it's hard to deny that the New World in general was seen as a land of opportunity, and the American colonies were the place where the most opportunity was seen for people to actually settle in significant numbers. Yet, the way most people managed to get to this new land of opportunity and freedom was through indentured servitude, and when that failed to provide enough labour, the African slave trade was "Plan B".
The land itself came courtesy of the earliest stages of America's centuries-long series of genocidal wars. And when the American Revolution came, it was lead in large part by slaveholder advocates of freedom - men like Washington, Jefferson and Patrick Henry, whose influence only expanded as the new nation was established.
Although their primary arguments were grounded in universalist appeals, the actual rights-holding subjects of their political system were a relatively tiny minority of well-to-do white males. The promise of rights-based liberal democracy was intoxicating to all, but forbidden to most. Equality was for gentlemen only. And yet, those excluded would not be denied. Scattered state and local battles coalesced into a national abolitionist movement by the 1830s, which in turn spawned a women's rights movement in the 1840s.

In Europe, the US example spawned the French and Polish revolutions, followed by more than a century of struggles in which the example of the US' existence powerfully transformed the Old World in combination with Europe's own internal modernising forces.
And even though the United States itself embarked on an imperialist course sparked by the Spanish-American War in 1898, its example as the first anti-colonial revolutionary regime inspired colonial revolutionaries as well. It was no accident that Ho Chi Minh approached Woodrow Wilson for his support at Versailles after World War I, before turning to communism as his second choice in seeking to rid his country of French colonialism.

From exceptionalism to deceptionalism
But the US had a hard time keeping up with itself, or with the world that it helped create. The European welfare state was a direct response to popular demands for a better, more just, less arbitrary life, demands that were sparked in part by the very existence of the US as an alternative.
As the US itself became more like Europe - more industrialised, more urbanised, less composed of small farmers and more composed of urban workers - the resistance to learning from European advances became increasingly irrational, and at odds with American pragmatism. Our political system lagged behind as well, lacking the fluidity and inventiveness that made parliamentary systems the dominant form of democracy elsewhere around the world.

This perverse refusal to learn from others who have been inspired by us in the political realm is strikingly at odds with Americans' grassroots improvisatory traditions. From food to music to everything in between, Americans have always adopted diverse influences, mixed them together and made them their own, based on the sole criteria of what works.  Yet, with far too few exceptions, we Americans have spectacularly failed to do this in the realms of economics and politics, where powerful elites have emerged to repeatedly stifle the US' spirit of ingenuity. Not only that, they have successfully blinded us as well. Under the growing influence of the 1 per cent, American exceptionalism has become American deceptionalism: a perverse refusal to see what others have done - often inspired by our own earlier examples - and use that knowledge to continue advancing ourselves.

The US' patch-work welfare state is the prime example of this dysfunction. But our lack of industrial policy is even more bizarre, given that we used to believe in it so. Indeed, the same could be said about the welfare state as well. Universal public education was an American idea - outside the South, of course - before catching on elsewhere around the globe. What's more, most of the US was homesteaded through a subsidised process of free or cheap land, supported by public infrastructure - or, in the case of railroads, publicly-subsidised infrastructure.

But when it came to an industrial welfare state, suddenly, everything changed. It's not so hard to understand why: the original industrial workforce was largely immigrant and culturally "other" - Irish at first, then central and southern European, predominantly Catholic or Jewish. It was not until the Great Depression pushed the US economy to the wall that we began to even partially catch up with Germany, which had created its welfare state half a century earlier.  Even then, it took another 30 years for us to add universal health care, but only for senior citizens. The results of creating Medicare were dramatic: Within a decade, American seniors went from being the age-group with the highest poverty rate to the lowest. But that was nearly 50 years ago, 130 years after Germany established its universal healthcare system. Since then, conservative resistance to America's welfare state has stiffened dramatically. Cultural differences between whites of European descent are nothing compared differences with people of colour - which moved dramatic to the fore as legal segregation was finally being dismantled.

Welfare in the US
A 2001 paper from the Brookings Institute, "Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?" found a direct correlation between welfare state spending and the size of minority populations - the more minorities, the lower the levels of spending. This held true both internationally (comparing more than 60 different countries) and nationally (comparing all 50 states). The paper did not argue that racial animosity was the sole reason for the US' fragmented and under-sized welfare state. It also cited the US' backwards political institutions - such as our lack of proportional representation - which in turn have roots in our history and geography.  The report stated, "Racial animosity in the US makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters. American political institutions limited the growth of a socialist party, and more generally limited the political power of the poor."

Among other things, the report offered comparisons across time, which showed the US lagging decades behind Europe throughout the 20th century. The size of subsidies and transfers in the US in 1970 was roughly the same as that in the European Union in 1937. US figures in 1998 roughly matched the EU in 1960.
While American conservatives have long been hysterical about the welfare state in the US, two major points need to be stressed.

First: German conservatives established the first comprehensive welfare state, under Chancellor Bismarck in the 1880s. Second, the American welfare state is the smallest and least comprehensive in the Western world. While American conservatives denounce the welfare state for supposedly strangling capitalism, Germany's welfare state has been crucial to its long-term prosperity, even as the US' incomplete welfare state has harmed us considerably. For example, without a national system, healthcare costs built into American cars were a crucial factor leading up to the bankruptcy crisis of 2009.

Nearly a half-century after Medicare, the US was finally ready to take a modest half-step forward toward expanding healthcare coverage. But President Obama's approach was so compromised, and so poorly argued that it's now opened the doorway for a massive reversal that could actually eliminate Medicare - a major decimation of the US' welfare state that would plunge millions of seniors into abject poverty, deprive them of healthcare and subject them to premature death.

Grand bargains
Obama is obsessed with trying to strike a series of "grand bargains" with conservatives, even though they keep rejecting him. As a consequence, he repeatedly begins his negotiations with positions that conservatives have supported in the past, hoping they will support those positions again. At the same time, he refrains from making energetic arguments for the liberal position.
As a result, his stimulus programme was roughly 40 per cent tax cuts (even though they're less effective in creating jobs than direct spending is) in a vain attempt to get Republican support. And when it came to health care, his approach was based on Republican proposals from the 1990s, developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation. It was the same foundation used by Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts.  Obama never used the popularity, efficiency and overall success of Medicare to argue for a government-centered approach, either an immediate full-fledged socialisation, aka "Medicare for all", or a gradualist approach - a public option for those currently without private insurance. Indeed, Obama collaborated with conservative Democrats in the Senate - most notably Max Baucus - to silence those who advocated for these approaches.  Medicare-for-all advocates were reduced to shouting from the audience and getting arrested, despite representing a substantial body of public opinion. Support for the more gradual public-option approach hovered around 60 per cent or more throughout the year-long legislative process. And yet, these proposals - tried and true in the rest of the industrialised world - could not even get a serious hearing.

Such is the power of American deceptionalism: No one else's experience in the world matters to the American political system.  Less than two years after Obama's Republican healthcare plan passed, its very modesty is being used against it. Although it did involve considerable long-term cost reductions, it was nothing remotely close to reducing costs to full-fledged welfare state levels. For example, calculations by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research show that, for example, if we Americans could get our per-capita health-care costs down to the level of most central European nations, we would have a budget surplus of around 10 per cent in 2080, rather than the current projected deficit of over 40 per cent.
By ignoring the example of other countries, the American political class has spun itself off into an alternate reality in which nothing short of catastrophically bad choices remain. (The situation of global warming denialism is an instructive parallel, in which facts have become entirely irrelevant.) And so, fuelled by an obsession with long-term deficits decades in the future, and ignoring the sky-high level of the unemployed, the US congress may well be about to drift toward abolishing Medicare as its so-called "solution".

Of course, Republicans like Congressman Paul Ryan, who originated the plan, won't come right out and say that. And neither will Democrats, now rumoured to be thinking of joining them in search of yet another "grand bargain". Ryan and company say they want to "save" Medicare by replacing it with a voucher system. As one wag put it, it's like killing my dog named Spot, and giving me a cat named Spot instead, then telling me you haven't killed Spot. But a variety of studies have stripped all the pretense away.

Most significantly, the vouchers ("premium support" in Orwellian Newspeak) would come nowhere near to paying the cost of health insurance for seniors, and the shortfall would only grow more severe over time. So instead of the government going broke, the people would. That's the anti-government Republican plan! But at least the plan would keep the private insurance companies making money hand over fist as they deny you coverage.  And since they're private companies, that counts as a win, according to the rules of American deceptionalism. Even if there is no real competition involved, and Adam Smith would have a heart attack if he saw what was being done in his name.

I've concentrated here on healthcare as a key welfare state component. But the same pattern of delusionary grand bargaining can be seen wherever you care to look. Consider "education reform". "America's schools are failing!" we're told. We have to privatise, voucherise, give parents more choice - that alone can save us.
But none of this is supported by evidence, certainly not the evidence of other countries, whose systems are more centralised and less privatised than those of the United States. The US accounts of nearly half of military spending worldwide. The only folks whose overspending ever came close to us was the Soviet Union, and we sure didn't learn anything from them. On the drug war? Don't even think of thinking about it!

The list could be extended indefinitely. There is not a single area in which Republicans won't condemn anything foreign just for being foreign (unless, for some reason they like it, the way Michele Bachmann likes Chinese slave labour). And there's not a single area where Democrats won't be defensive about thinking outside the box that Republicans have put them in.

If all this leaves you feeling anxious, relax. After all, as Time will tell you, "Anxiety is good for you!"
 
Paul Rosenberg is the Senior Editor of Random Lengths News

America: The Grim Truth

Looks like the word is getting out.  Read this one young man's account of The Decline of America.

http://americathegrimtruth.wordpress.com/

Americans, I have some bad news for you:

You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.  If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.

I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.
I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.

Consider this: you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once: your illness and the fear of financial ruin. Millions of Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills, and tens of thousands die each year because they have no insurance or insufficient insurance. And don’t believe for a second that rot about America having the world’s best medical care or the shortest waiting lists: I’ve been to hospitals in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Singapore, and Thailand, and every one was better than the “good” hospital I used to go to back home. The waits were shorter, the facilities more comfortable, and the doctors just as good.

This is ironic, because you need a good health system more than anyone else in the world. Why? Because your lifestyle is almost designed to make you sick. 

Let’s start with your diet: Much of the beef you eat has been exposed to fecal matter in processing. Your chicken is contaminated with salmonella. Your stock animals and poultry are pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics. In most other countries, the government would act to protect consumers from this sort of thing; in the United States, the government is bought off by industry to prevent any effective regulations or inspections. In a few years, the majority of all the produce for sale in the United States will be from genetically modified crops, thanks to the cozy relationship between Monsanto Corporation and the United States government. Worse still, due to the vast quantities of high-fructose corn syrup Americans consume, fully one-third of children born in the United States today will be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes at some point in their lives.

Of course, it’s not just the food that’s killing you, it’s the drugs. If you show any sign of life when you’re young, they’ll put you on Ritalin. Then, when you get old enough to take a good look around, you’ll get depressed, so they’ll give you Prozac. If you’re a man, this will render you chemically impotent, so you’ll need Viagra to get it up. Meanwhile, your steady diet of trans-fat-laden food is guaranteed to give you high cholesterol, so you’ll get a prescription for Lipitor. Finally, at the end of the day, you’ll lay awake at night worrying about losing your health plan, so you’ll need Lunesta to go to sleep.

With a diet guaranteed to make you sick and a health system designed to make sure you stay that way, what you really need is a long vacation somewhere. Unfortunately, you probably can’t take one. I’ll let you in on little secret: if you go to the beaches of Thailand, the mountains of Nepal, or the coral reefs of Australia, you’ll probably be the only American in sight. And you’ll be surrounded crowds of happy Germans, French, Italians, Israelis, Scandinavians and wealthy Asians. Why? Because they’re paid well enough to afford to visit these places AND they can take vacations long enough to do so. Even if you could scrape together enough money to go to one of these incredible places, by the time you recovered from your jetlag, it would time to get on a plane and rush back to your job.

If you think I’m making this up, check the stats on average annual vacation days by country:
Finland: 44
Italy: 42
France: 39
Germany: 35
UK: 25
Japan: 18
USA: 12

The fact is, they work you like dogs in the United States. This should come as no surprise: the United States never got away from the plantation/sweat shop labor model and any real labor movement was brutally suppressed. Unless you happen to be a member of the ownership class, your options are pretty much limited to barely surviving on service-sector wages or playing musical chairs for a spot in a cubicle (a spot that will be outsourced to India next week anyway). The very best you can hope for is to get a professional degree and then milk the system for a slice of the middle-class pie. And even those who claw their way into the middle class are but one illness or job loss away from poverty. Your jobs aren’t secure. Your company has no loyalty to you. They’ll play you off against your coworkers for as long as it suits them, then they’ll get rid of you.

Of course, you don’t have any choice in the matter: the system is designed this way. In most countries in the developed world, higher education is either free or heavily subsidized; in the United States, a university degree can set you back over US$100,000. Thus, you enter the working world with a crushing debt. Forget about taking a year off to travel the world and find yourself – you’ve got to start working or watch your credit rating plummet.

If you’re “lucky,” you might even land a job good enough to qualify you for a home loan. And then you’ll spend half your working life just paying the interest on the loan – welcome to the world of American debt slavery. America has the illusion of great wealth because there’s a lot of “stuff” around, but who really owns it? In real terms, the average American is poorer than the poorest ghetto dweller in Manila, because at least they have no debts. If they want to pack up and leave, they can; if you want to leave, you can’t, because you’ve got debts to pay.

All this begs the question: Why would anyone put up with this? Ask any American and you’ll get the same answer: because America is the freest country on earth. If you believe this, I’ve got some more bad news for you: America is actually among the least free countries on earth. Your piss is tested, your emails and phone calls are monitored, your medical records are gathered, and you are never more than one stray comment away from writhing on the ground with two Taser prongs in your ass.

And that’s just physical freedom. Mentally, you are truly imprisoned. You don’t even know the degree to which you are tormented by fears of medical bankruptcy, job loss, homelessness and violent crime because you’ve never lived in a country where there is no need to worry about such things.

But it goes much deeper than mere surveillance and anxiety. The fact is, you are not free because your country has been taken over and occupied by another government. Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is the real government of the United States. You are required under pain of death to pay taxes to this occupying government. If you’re from the less fortunate classes, you are also required to serve and die in their endless wars, or send your sons and daughters to do so. You have no choice in the matter: there is a socio-economic draft system in the United States that provides a steady stream of cannon fodder for the military.

If you call a life of surveillance, anxiety and ceaseless toil in the service of a government you didn’t elect “freedom,” then you and I have a very different idea of what that word means.
If there was some chance that the country could be changed, there might be reason for hope. But can you honestly look around and conclude that anything is going to change? Where would the change come from? The people? Take a good look at your compatriots: the working class in the United States has been brutally propagandized by jackals like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Members of the working class have been taught to lick the boots of their masters and then bend over for another kick in the ass. They’ve got these people so well trained that they’ll take up arms against the other half of the working class as soon as their masters give the word.

If the people cannot make a change, how about the media? Not a chance. From Fox News to the New York Times, the mass media in the United States is nothing but the public relations wing of the corporatocracy, primarily the military industrial complex. At least the citizens of the former Soviet Union knew that their news was bullshit. In America, you grow up thinking you’ve got a free media, which makes the propaganda doubly effective. If you don’t think American media is mere corporate propaganda, ask yourself the following question: have you ever heard a major American news outlet suggest that the country could fund a single-payer health system by cutting military spending?

If change can’t come from the people or the media, the only other potential source of change would be the politicians. Unfortunately, the American political process is among the most corrupt in the world. In every country on earth, one expects politicians to take bribes from the rich. But this generally happens in secret, behind the closed doors of their elite clubs. In the United States, this sort of political corruption is done in broad daylight, as part of legal, accepted, standard operating procedure. In the United States, they merely call these bribes campaign donations, political action committees and lobbyists. One can no more expect the politicians to change this system than one can expect a man to take an axe and chop his own legs out from underneath him.

No, the United States of America is not going to change for the better. The only change will be for the worse. And when I say worse, I mean much worse. As we speak, the economic system that sustained the country during the post-war years is collapsing. The United States maxed out its “credit card” sometime in 2008 and now its lenders, starting with China, are in the process of laying the foundations for a new monetary system to replace the Anglo-American “petro-dollar” system. As soon as there is a viable alternative to the US dollar, the greenback will sink like a stone.

While the United States was running up crushing levels of debt, it was also busy shipping its manufacturing jobs and white-collar jobs overseas, and letting its infrastructure fall to pieces. Meanwhile, Asian and European countries were investing in education, infrastructure and raw materials. Even if the United States tried to rebuild a real economy (as opposed to a service/financial economy) do think American workers would ever be able to compete with the workers of China or Europe? Have you ever seen a Japanese or German factory? Have you ever met a Singaporean or Chinese worker?

There are only two possible futures facing the United States, and neither one is pretty. The best case is a slow but orderly decline – essentially a continuation of what’s been happening for the last two decades. Wages will drop, unemployment will rise, Medicare and Social Security benefits will be slashed, the currency will decline in value, and the disparity of wealth will spiral out of control until the United States starts to resemble Mexico or the Philippines – tiny islands of wealth surrounded by great poverty (the country is already halfway there).
Equally likely is a sudden collapse, perhaps brought about by a rapid flight from the US dollar by creditor nations like China, Japan, Korea and the OPEC nations. A related possibility would be a default by the United States government on its vast debt. One look at the financial balance sheet of the US government should convince you how likely this is: governmental spending is skyrocketing and tax receipts are plummeting – something has to give. If either of these scenarios plays out, the resulting depression will make the present recession look like a walk in the park.

Whether the collapse is gradual or gut-wrenchingly sudden, the results will be chaos, civil strife and fascism. Let’s face it: the United States is like the former Yugoslavia – a collection of mutually antagonistic cultures united in name only. You’ve got your own version of the Taliban: right-wing Christian fundamentalists who actively loathe the idea of secular Constitutional government. You’ve got a vast intellectual underclass that has spent the last few decades soaking up Fox News and talk radio propaganda, eager to blame the collapse on Democrats, gays and immigrants. You’ve got a ruthless ownership class that will use all the means at its disposal to protect its wealth from the starving masses.

On top of all that you’ve got vast factory farms, sprawling suburbs and a truck-based shipping system, all of it entirely dependent on oil that is about to become completely unaffordable. And you’ve got guns. Lots of guns. In short: the United States is about to become a very unwholesome place to be.

Right now, the government is building fences and walls along its northern and southern borders. Right now, the government is working on a national ID system (soon to be fitted with biometric features). Right now, the government is building a surveillance state so extensive that they will be able to follow your every move, online, in the street and across borders. If you think this is just to protect you from “terrorists,” then you’re sadly mistaken. Once the shit really hits the fan, do you really think you’ll just be able to jump into the old station wagon, drive across the Canadian border and spend the rest of your days fishing and drinking Molson? No, the government is going to lock the place down. They don’t want their tax base escaping. They don’t want their “recruits” escaping. They don’t want YOU escaping.

I am not writing this to scare you. I write this to you as a friend. If you are able to read and understand what I’ve written here, then you are a member of a small minority in the United States. You are a minority in a country that has no place for you.

So what should you do? You should leave the United States of America.

If you’re young, you’ve got plenty of choices: you can teach English in the Middle East, Asia or Europe. Or you can go to university or graduate school abroad and start building skills that will qualify you for a work visa. If you’ve already got some real work skills, you can apply to emigrate to any number of countries as a skilled immigrant. If you are older and you’ve got some savings, you can retire to a place like Costa Rica or the Philippines. If you can’t qualify for a work, student or retirement visa, don’t let that stop you – travel on a tourist visa to a country that appeals to you and talk to the expats you meet there. Whatever you do, go speak to an immigration lawyer as soon as you can. Find out exactly how to get on a path that will lead to permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the country of your choice.
You will not be alone. There are millions of Americans just like me living outside the United States. Living lives much more fulfilling, peaceful, free and abundant than we ever could have attained back home. Some of us happened upon these lives by accident – we tried a year abroad and found that we liked it – others made a conscious decision to pack up and leave for good. You’ll find us in Canada, all over Europe, in many parts of Asia, in Australia and New Zealand, and in most other countries of the globe. Do we miss our friends and family? Yes. Do we occasionally miss aspects of our former country? Yes. Do we plan on ever living again in the United States? Never. And those of us with permanent residence or citizenship can sponsor family members from back home for long-term visas in our adopted countries.

In closing, I want to remind you of something: unless you are an American Indian or a descendant of slaves, at some point your ancestors chose to leave their homeland in search of a better life. They weren’t traitors and they weren’t bad people, they just wanted a better life for themselves and their families. Isn’t it time that you continue their journey?

An American Celebrates Life....In Romania

I was born in Los Angeles and lived the typical southern California suburban life of isolation. Being a child from divorced parents, I learned early on what America meant. Something always bothered me about the society in which I lived and where as when I was younger I couldn't quite define it, as I grew older it became more and more clear that modern American Society had an overlaying artificialness to it. I got the impression that I was living in some kind of experiment and that everything was temporary in nature and not intended to be lasting like the civilizations of the past.

I remember how I loved to watch Little House on the Prairie and feeling such an attraction to that family. I wondered why it was so different from what were claimed to be families all around me. Almost all kids at school came from divorced families and many were also victims of abuse. It seemed that most women with which I came into contact with growing up in America were hostile and belligerent and Southern California was probably the capital of alternative lifestyles and divorce and the traditional family life was viewed as the enemy. My only contact with traditional family values as a child growing up in America was again, Little House on the Prairie.

Observing these traits in society, I naturally began to associate America with them. America to me meant, divorce, abuse, fighting, neglect and above all, isolation. In fact, as I got older, I came to notice that the situation was more like a lack of society rather than a bad society. What do I mean? Well, first of all, there was no contact between people. There was no walking in the streets and no open markets and stores. People simply entered their cars from the garage attached to their house, opened the garage door and drove to the store or work and never came into contact with another human being. Where was society? What is the definition of society? I detected something very wrong with America and the endless uniformity and dullness of Southern Californian suburbs seemed to be the chief example of this fact. No matter how many times we visited the same grocery store, the employees there never would recognize us. Years would go by without a single word being exchange with a neighbor. My female teachers hated my mother. Even my cub scout troop was dissolved because one of the mothers sued after a fall in the snow on our first field trip. Every little girl who lived on my street was sexually abused and their stories horrified me. Between experiencing these things I also got to enjoy the constant fighting between my parents over child support checks and who's turn it was keep me on the week end. O how I longed for Little House on the Prairie where everybody worked together, went to church together and helped and supported each other through hardships, harvests and barn raising. This was the America I thought must have been just an invented myth.

Due to my mother's line of work, I was exposed to many emigrants from a wide variety of places such as Iran, Turkey, Armenia, Poland, Romania, Croatia, Argentina, Vietnam and India. There was something special about these people and I noticed it even as a child. What was it about them that attracted me? Why did they seem to be so content and hardworking? They seemed to benefit from a force or energy that I could see was totally lacking in the society in which I lived. What was it? The answer was FAMILY in the traditional sense. Though they were living in America like me, they had transferred their sense of family and society from their country and were still enjoying the benefits while being surrounded by the social misery. Somehow they lived unscathed in pockets of healthy family lives they themselves emitted. For me, happiness was being around these people and I would enjoy pretending that I was a part of their family as well. I would learn everything I could about their countries, cultures and foods and they would be so pleased to see my interest. The highlight of my childhood was when my mother would be invited to one of their homes for one of their holidays and I'd get to bask in the light of family life such as being seated at the dinner table together and listening to people actually talking to each other relating stories and experiences of the old country. I could see that the hardships and poverty they went through actually strengthened them and was the source of their great work ethic and family values.

I remember one girl from Romania who worked with my mother. She had swam across the Danube to escape from communism and tyranny and somehow made it to America. She came with just the shirt on her back and immediately started working with house cleaning and taking night classes in English. Her strong faith in God and her exceptional morals and ethics allowed her to flourish and reap the benefit of the opportunities in America. The same opportunities that Americans seemed to be unable to benefit from. Could a lack of traditional family values and morals be a factor? Why was it that emigrants always seemed to find success while native born Americans drowned in debt and misery?

She worked hard and worked her way up to becoming a manager. Eventually she got a degree and opened her own business. Only after years of work and after the fall of communism did she go back to Romania and get married to a Romanian man then returned.

Seeing her wonderful value as a beautiful, feminine and traditional women, I fell in love with Romania and wanted to get to know as much as possible about this country. Something about modern American women repulsed me and I absolutely refused to have a girlfriend or anything to do with them while in high school. Based on my experience as child growing up in America, I could not separate divorce with the American women. The two things seemed to go hand in hand. I remember making the concrete decision as a teenager that I would never marry a girl from a divorced family and that I had to marry a foreign girl no matter what. I started corresponding with girls as pen pals from Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Russia. There were no proms, dances or parties for me. I was attracted to everything that was traditional, religious and moral. Though it was sometimes lonely, I knew I was holding out for something of value and meaning. One girl in Romania particularly caught my attention by her femininity, shyness and goodness and we wrote to each other for two years. After two years of junior college, I decided to go to Romania to meet her in person and she was everything I imagined. We were married after spending six months as a guest of her family. I was 20 and she was 18 and we were both virgins. Sixteen years later, we're still married and have a beautiful family.

We did eventually come back to America where she, independently of my own opinion, noticed the same flaws in American society as I. She didn't like it and couldn't quite adjust to it. Living several years in California refusing to go into debt and fall into the "American Trap", we lived very simply but never flourished. As I grew in knowledge and understanding, I could see the writing on the wall that the American system was not sustainable. I could see that economic collapse was inevitable and soon all the debt, credit cards, stock market casinos, leases, and housing speculation would all come crashing down. The wars pretty much sealed the fate of America and I knew that we could not continue to be a part of it and incur the consequences of a system we never supported. I did not want my children growing up in such a system nor did I want them to reap what American foreign policy would shortly bring to the homeland. I could just sense that something dark was coming and on August 11, 2001 we moved to Romania.

We bought a beautiful apartment in downtown Bucharest for $19,000, bought a used car for $300 and a fertile piece of land with a peasant house fifty kilometers outside of Bucharest for $15,000 and now live completely debt free. How many Americans live debt free? The taxes on our house is about $30!! In the city we live in a normal urban setting where there is contact with other people in the streets, the markets and the people in stores know us personally and greet us. We're on friendly terms with our neighbors and visit each other. We have very efficient public transportation in the form of subways, trams and buses. We have our children's school right next door and have one of the biggest public parks and youth centers within walking distance. The Christian religion is taught in the public schools and our children are taken to church for communion. A priest comes to teach them about morals and ethics. There is even a civics class where the children learn the value of honesty, altruism, helping the needy, forgiveness and overall good social ethics. I can detect no dark or perverse agendas being forced on our children and being an American, I logically would be a good judge of this.

On the land we have in the country; together with my wife's family, we grow all our own food. We have fruit trees, grape vines and a yearly garden that provides all the family's needs through the winter. Making preserves in jars basically makes us independent. Having chickens provides us with a steady supply of natural eggs as well. The country house has its own deep well and so its independent of municipal water and the heating is wood burning. It's a great satisfaction for a product of an American suburb like myself to have gone back to a natural lifestyle with an intimate relationship with nature and the traditional way of life. Most of the villagers still go around with horse drawn wagons so in a way, I did eventually find my very own "Little House in the Prairie".

In closing, I'd like to encourage any Americans who are not satisfied with the society they live in to take the necessary courage and try moving to a place where they can find a simpler, more natural way of living, free of debt and free from the consequences of a diabolical foreign policy and a collapsing economy. It doesn't cost as much as you might think and it all starts with a dream. Hold your ideal in your mind at all times and eventually you will manifest this ideal in your own life. Never accept anything that does not reflect your ideal and it will never touch you. There is no utopia and every place has its own unique problems but never underestimate the power of your own ideas and dreams. The Kingdom is within you and you can live it in the place of your choosing. Spiritually speaking, we're all citizens of that Kingdom and we're all linked together in this shared principle of family, morals, Love, Truth and goodness. Simplicity is the key and the simpler you live your life, the more you will enjoy it. If you don't fear evil, you render it powerless against you and it disappears as darkness disappears when you turn on the light switch. Cultivate your spirituality and your ideal and you will find your very own promised land; your very own "Little House on the Prairie" no matter what you've been through. Now go find it!!

This piece is from the website SaveTheMales.ca

The Coming Collapse of the Dollar, Part 2

This is the second part for those so inclined....

A Layman's View of What Went Wrong With Our Economy.

I am not an economist, but I am versed enough in the discipline to gloat that I was correct back in the 1990's even. I know many will not agree with my version of what went wrong, but many others will.

The first blunder we made was our head-first foray into the global market frenzy. I was skeptical even when NAFTA was the flavor of the month. The open market model was a way for companies to sidestep manufacturing in the US in favor of using third world labor. Their gains were our losses. Now, the US produces very little and it has become a service based economy. Sure, labor unions have priced American laborers out of work, but the demise of the US Manufacturing sector was hastened by globalization.

Next, the US stock market has functioned as a promoted and regulated Ponzi scheme. The early in and out investors will and the late comers (usually the greater portion) lose money. The Fed manipulates interest rates to keep investment flowing, and the media (CNBC, Bloomberg, etc.) constantly cheer lead and promote stocks. I recall one anaylist touting AOL as a long term great investment due to the growth potential and the internet as a more important vehicle. Then the dot-com bubble burst and AOL was reduced to shreds a few months later.

Before the current market 40% downturn, I recall various financial pundits proclaiming how attractive "valuations" were for stocks. After the 40% drop they were still using that rationale to attract more stock investment. What they know deep down is that "valuations" mean nothing but a numerical correlation that is used to justify promoting more investment. Stock prices are more influenced by sentiment than valuation and no amount of value analysis will make stocks an attractive investment to spooked investors.

Finally, Americans and our industries became addicted to OPM (other people's money). OPM financed our McMansions, our 4 flat-screen TV's, our SUV's, and our yearly iPod model upgrades. Companies relied on bond issuances, and investors to finance their ventures. When recession comes to rear its head, we are at a loss to pay back OPM. That's what we face now.

What is the solution? I wish I knew, but I feel that we as a nation must expect job loss, economic uncertainty, and saving to be inevitable parts of our futures. I'm a fan of market forces fixing our problems, but market forces are undermined by bailouts, interest rate manipulations, cash infusions, and stimulus plans proposed by our government representatives. These are temporary measures that might provide short term relief, but long term consequences. I feel that the federal government just wants to prod Americans to buy, buy, buy, again just to get the juices of consumption flowing again. However, this is no resolution to the undiversified economic model we have grown into.

Adam Smith must be turning in his grave.