Bush administration left the nation wrecked.......

by Jacqueline Marcus

After the election, we believed President Obama would wind things down in the Middle East, and diplomatic solutions would replace costly military operations. For nearly 10 years, we've tolerated inexplicable excuses for invading Iraq and Afghanistan -- all in the name of a vague and meaningless term: terrorism. We invade and bomb people we've never met and then we're surprised that they want to fight back. For eight long years, we've watched the Bush Administration spend billions and billions of our tax dollars for the Iraq invasion that was never connected to the September 11 attack.


(Many of us did everything we could to prevent said horrors and stop them once they began. We in no way tolerated it nor did we support it. We protested in every way we could within the law, except for non-violent acts of civil disobedience.)

In these last nine years, what did the invasions accomplish? The illegal and indefensible occupation of Afghanistan and the expansion to Yemen have only served to increase hate and anger against the U.S. Perhaps if we provided bread instead of dropping bombs on these extremely poor people, rebels would have no reason to plot against us. Nine years later, it has now cost Americans over a trillion dollars to shut down a few hundred Islamic radicals. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost as a result of the U.S. military invasion in this poor region of the world. 


(I do not buy that the whack-jobs known as Al Qaeda are dirt poor Muslims who hate America because they are dirt poor. Osama bin Laden is one of the wealthiest terrorists ever known. The men who allegedly flew air planes into the WTC were all middle class in their countries. The latest nut-job activity was attempted by the son one of the biggest bankers in Nigeria. He was not some poor kid from Jenna. However, it's for damn sure that the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq did more for Al Qaeda than anything Osama bin Laden and his religiously insane comrades could have ever dreamed of doing in the near decade which has followed 9/11/01.The same can be said for the Gitmo debacle, Abu Ghraib, the U.S. gulags in Eastern Europe and the policy of torture which was employed. These terrorists are dangerous and no one should doubt that.Thanks to Bush and Cheney, they are more dangerous now than they were on 9/12/01.) 

Voters are boiling mad at both parties because they want these wars to end. They want their tax dollars to help them. They are sick and tired of a war economy that wrecked and shattered American businesses like a domino effect. Resorts are empty. Shopping malls are empty. The housing market is an endless sea of foreclosure signs. There are more homeless people than I've ever seen in my entire life. Fact: when unemployment rises, so does crime. Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" comes to mind. "As there is always more misery at the lower end than humanity at the top, everything was given away before it was received." Our pro-war Congress gave our entire public treasury away to military spending. It's been reported that the number of Americans on food stamps rose by 50%. We can no longer brag that we're the richest country in the world. The war profiteers destroyed the foundation of our middle-upper class economy, which was once a beacon to the world.


(Amen!)

In November, while in Maui for my struggling solar business, I visited my friend who was staying at one of the Wailea resorts. This luxury resort looked evacuated. There were a couple vacationers from Japan and China, but very few Americans. We could sit in the hot tub or lounge around the pool without seeing a soul; and although it was great to have the entire resort to ourselves, it was rather eerie and frightening.

(The only Americans with the real money don't go to the same luxury resorts that you do. Most people cannot not fathom the kind of places where the Wall  Street crooks vacation.)
  
President Obama seems to feel that he must answer to the war criminal, Dick Cheney, the man who loves to torture prisoners before they're found guilty of the crime. I say this because we know there were many innocent Afghan farmers swept up in the al-Qaeda net, in the wrong place at the wrong time. No matter to Dick Cheney: waterboard them. Well it's time for the media and for the president to remind Cheney that 9/11 happened on the Bush/Cheney watch. It's time to put Dick Cheney on the defense for a change: how many millions did he make from this perpetual war via Halliburton? How many secret, offshore accounts, if any, does he have in his family's names? How many servants does he have? How many cars? How many homes and what are they worth during the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression? 


(Questions we would all like an answer to. Sometimes I think that Dick Cheney believes that he is still in jeopardy legally. A U.S. attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, said publicly that there was a legal cloud over the office of the V.P. Cheney believes that the best defense is offense. That should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention at all in the last 8 years. His whole damn family is trying to protect him and their inheritance of his war profits. Other Republicans are afraid to say anything against him. THEY ARE AFRAID OF HIM!)


The other day, I was at the local hardware store and I happened to notice a soldier standing in line behind me. I mentally debated whether or not to ask him if he's been abroad, and if he could clarify the "mission" to me. Finally, I turned around and said, as politely as possible, "Thank you for serving." He nodded his head. I then asked if he was in Iraq or Afghanistan.

He told me he's been sent several times to both Iraq and Afghanistan. He confessed that "they fixed it so that we would never leave." I asked what he meant. "We've invested too much to just walk away: military bases, equipment, we want the oil…we want control. They say 'stabilize' which really means U.S. control… but they (Afghans-Iraqis) definitely don't want us there." 


(Didn't Junior tell his friends from Houston, who visited him in the White House, that he had fixed things so that the in-coming administration would not be able to withdraw from the war? I seem to recall that his friends returned to Houston with real concerns for his mental health. This was found in a Houston Chronicle article.)

He was pretty candid about it. I asked one last question before thanking him and wishing him well: Are they building a lot of prisons over there? He laughed, "Oh yeah, they call them schools." His tone was somewhat sarcastic. 


(OMG!)

Think about it: What is the difference between a street gang killer and an al-Qaeda terrorist? 


(Street gangs do not have major oil reserves, nor do they threaten Israel or offer areas of strategic logistics in the middle east.)

Answer: No one gives a damn about the street gang member or how many people are killed (there are hundreds of gang related U.S. deaths every day). If he's caught, he'll do time in prison -- whereas, the latter, the al-Qaeda member, is worth billions and billions of dollars in terms of military defense contracts and operations. War is a big business, just ask Dick Cheney, but only for the few, war profiteering elite.


(Let's add up all of the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil by our own religious and conservative far right. Tim McVeigh, the Olympic 1994 bomber, killings of so called "abortion doctors" and so on and so on. The flu kills more people every year than died in all the Al Qaeda attacks. More people die in car accidents. The list is endless. Nevertheless, it would not benefit anyone in the Bush/Cheney White House or Congress to whip up the fear about these killers.) 

We do nothing to end the poverty that leads to desperation, crime, and daily killings in our own cities. There are drive-by shootings every night in Washington DC, Chicago, LA, NYC, Honolulu -- across the country. Imagine turning on your TV and listening to the 24/7 media coverage on national security while bullets are blasting your windows and doors. There's no money for that problem. But there's an endless Pentagon budget worth billions of dollars for a hundred or so al-Qaeda rebels thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, hiding somewhere in the mountains. Go figure. 


(I am beginning to think this will never change. I'm sure it won't until we take Eisenhower's warning about the military/industrial complex, now the military-industrial-security complex, seriously. Until we demand publicly funded elections, the war profiteers and other corporate psychopaths will run the country.) 

No one is talking about the once wealthy business men and women who've been losing their shirts in this war economy. I remember reading in The New York Times that a real estate woman was making up to $180,000 dollars a year. Now she's on food stamps. Why should Cheney care about them? He and his family are sitting pretty with plenty of big bucks. Here's a flash for Dick Cheney: Everyone, including Republican voters, is sick of hearing about national security, especially when Americans are out of work and losing their homes.


(The economy of the country is a big part of national security. Doesn't anyone get that? Bush and Cheney ran this nation into the dirt, including trying to run to wars off the books, so that no one would know just how much the war debacles were costing. The SEC under the Rethugs was totally emasculated. The minute those clowns were elected with a rethug congress, the corporate officers, from sea to shining sea, knew it was party time.)  

Meanwhile, India is building some of the best engineering universities in the world while young American students can hardly read and write. That's what happens when a crooked government gives all the public funding to defense contractors for endless wars that make the few super rich.


(The dumbing down of America is intentional. It's not merely the funneling of big bucks to the Pentagon.) 


If President Obama's goal is to diminish al-Qaeda plots or attacks, then he should withdraw our troops from their countries. That's what Middle East citizens want there, and that's what Americans want here. Otherwise, it's time to start taking third party candidates seriously, candidates who want to end the wars and this war economy that has created the worst depression in our modern history. 


(That won't happen until we have public funding for elections and stringent laws about lobbying along with major jail terms and fines for violation. The corporate special interests will not allow a third party let alone a 4th or 5th.)

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

Jacqueline Marcus' book of poems, Close to the Shore, was published by Michigan State University Press. She is a regular guest contributor to BuzzFlash.com. She taught philosophy at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, California, and is the editor of http://www.ForPoetry.com. She is currently promoting green technologies (solar & wind) on the island of Maui. www.GoSolarMaui.com. She is currently working on a new book: Corporate Media and the Erosion of a Civil Society.




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Let The Sun Shine In......

They Are Pissed! United Airline Flight Atendants

As well they should be. 


Does anyone know how much the corporate officers are making?


by Carl Finamore 

Pioneering women at United Airlines (UAL) organized the world's first Flight Attendant (FA) union in 1945. The carrier quickly recognized them as the official bargaining representative when the CEO said "they need a union." Today, these same workers stand last as the lowest paid among all the major airlines and are hardly getting any notice from management. Negotiations have stalled.

"We are working at 1994-wage levels after suffering wage cuts, staff reductions, and rising health care costs," Chris Black told several hundred flight attendants and other union supporters picketing on January 8 at UAL departure gates at San Francisco International Airport (SFO).

Black is SFO Council 11 President, Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA), and it was her national AFL-CIO union that organized protests on the same day their contract became amendable. A preliminary count by the AFA is that over 1,800 participated at airports all over the world.

Contracts negotiated under the Railway Labor Act do not actually expire but rather become "amendable" with terms remaining "status quo" throughout negotiations overseen by the National Mediation Board. So, while the system does retain contract protections during negotiations, extremely long delays lasting several years have become commonplace.

In ordinary times, this means workers fall further and further behind rising living expenses as talks drag on. But the 2002-2006 bankruptcy of UAL forced even more extremely onerous concessions that substantially compounded the normal burden of delayed negotiations.

Union spokeswoman Sara Nelson said that "after the airline went bankrupt several years ago, the union accepted cuts of more than $3 billion in pay, working conditions and health care, along with the termination of workers' pensions.

"We were promised the cuts would remain in place for a certain amount of time, but we continue to live under these concessions while executives have rewarded themselves with millions of dollars in bonuses."

As one example, UAL CEO Glenn Tilton's bonus upon exiting bankruptcy was by itself sufficient to provide a 10% bonus for all 15,000 FAs then on the payroll.

Race to the Bottom has Hit Rock Bottom

Attempting to achieve early settlements, each of the six unions currently in talks with UAL now have contract clauses providing for the commencement of negotiations several months before the amendable dates.

The AFA, for example, has been bargaining with UAL since April 6, 2009. But to no avail. According to an AFA press statement, "members are angry that management has not discussed the improvements envisioned, seeming only interested in delaying…."

United, now dropped from first to the world's third-largest airline, claims that a weakened economy, rising fuel costs, and fluctuations in demand has enormously reduced profits. We heard this argument during bankruptcy when prominent union financial analyst Dan Akins estimates airline workers suffered reductions in wages and benefits totaling $11 billion.

This could actually be a low figure. A Government Accountability Office report estimated a "loss of $3.2 billion to [UAL] participants" alone just from the pension default.

In any case, everyone realizes the airline industry has always been characterized by intense competition, high fixed costs such as fuel, cyclical demand, and vulnerability to intermittent economic lows. We also know from experience that whether in good times or in bad times, carriers have continuously sought concessions.

But with the enormously rising fuel costs since the Gulf War, United embarked on an even more dramatic and sustained burn and slash program of service, route and fleet reductions combined with unprecedented employee layoffs.

For example, the Company reports that its workforce fell from 100,000 in December 2000 to 46,000 in December 2009 with FA numbers at 23,000 and 13,000 in that same period.

However, cutting back is an extremely controversial and unproven method of returning airlines to profitability.

Union leaders explain that reducing passenger capacity is not the answer. It is passengers that pay the bills and it has been shown historically that eliminating routes and laying off employees in fact lowers passenger-generated earnings more rapidly than reducing stable fixed costs.

Reducing the operation is a discredited shortcut that utterly fails to increase revenue and therein lies the problem.

"Cutting its fleet of airplanes does not address the larger cost problems that continue to beleaguer this airline," said then UAL Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) chairman Captain Steve Wallach back in 2007. "Instead of doling out hundreds of millions of dollars to shareholders and pocketing millions of dollars in bonuses and salary increases, perhaps management should reinvest that money into our operation."

His comments are still relevant today. They are echoed by the current UAL ALPA chair, Capt. Wendy Morse, who commented on the day of the AFA picketing that "United's tactics to shrink to profitability has proved disastrous."

Simply put, when airlines cut back, earnings generally fall more rapidly than costs.

With United management flying in the wrong direction, it is likely to be a tough round of negotiations for flight attendants. But there is some relief in sight. Airlines have made millions from their numerous increased fees. Fuel costs have also stabilized at around $80 a barrel from the high of well over $100. Even Wall St. analysts are cautiously optimistic.

"To sum up," writes airline analyst Michael Derchin in the November 30, 2009 Yahoo Finance report, "we are looking for 2010 to be a modestly profitable year for the industry [even if fuel goes to $90 a barrel], setting a stage for a nicely profitable year in 2011 and beyond, assuming the global economy continues to recover."

In fact, there are already signs of deep-pocket business travelers returning to the soft, cushy, leather recliners in the front.

These trends should provide some bargaining leverage for FAs and other UAL employees who want to recover from their losses of recent years. But, of course, it is the collective solidarity of all the six unions currently bargaining that will be the most important factor influencing management.

The AFA set a good example by beginning to mobilize members and to reach out to other unions. This is a winning combination. As one Machinist union Local President commented to me wishfully, "we may be negotiating separately but we should be fighting together."

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

Carl Finamore was a UAL baggage handler at SFO and former President (ret), Air Transport Employees, Local Lodge 1781, AFL-CIO. He can be reached at local1781@yahoo.com.




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Let The Sun Shine In......

TFR Is At It Again: Slandering Buddhism

As a scholar of Comparative religion, I can honestly say that the Family Research Council's take on Christianity, not to mention Buddhism, is way off the mark.

By Hoetsu

We are pleased to welcome Barbara Hoetsu O'Brien as a guest front pager, and to provide a platform for her to respond to the Religious Right agency, the Family Research Council. She is the guide for the Buddhism section at About.com. Her writing can also be found at Mahablog. -- FC When Brit Hume told Fox News Sunday viewers that Tiger Woods should convert to Christianity to know forgiveness, I published a response to Hume's snub of Buddhism on my Buddhist website -- "Let's Forgive Brit Hume." But then the Family Research Council quoted me, out of context, to argue that even Buddhists agree Brit Hume was right. Um, no.

Arguing for the superior forgiveness/redemptive powers of Christianity over Buddhism,  Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council wrote,

Has Brit Hume slandered Buddhists by mischaracterizing their theology? Not really. Barbara O'Brien, author of "Barbara's Buddhism Blog," admits, "Mr. Hume is right, in a sense, that Buddhism doesn't offer redemption and forgiveness in the same way Christianity does. Buddhism has no concept of sin; therefore, redemption and forgiveness in the Christian sense are meaningless in Buddhism."

From here, Mr. Sprigg proceeds to slander Buddhism by mischaracterizing our "theology."

Sprigg describes Buddhism as a religion without faith or grace in which people are perpetually working off karmic debts:

The problem is, if Tiger Woods now gets out of this life what he's put into his moral life, he's in a heap of trouble. Buddhism is not tolerant of sexual libertinism--even Barbara the Buddhist Blogger agrees that it's "fairly plain that Mr. Woods's conduct has been falling short of the Third Precept." If Buddhism is true, not only is there no redemption for him in this life, but because of reincarnation, Woods will be paying a price in the next life as well. According to Eerdmann's Handbook to the World's Religions, in Buddhism, "[G]ood works automatically bring about a good rebirth, bad works a bad one."

But Eerdmann, whoever he is, doesn't know Buddhism from spinach. The Buddha explicitly rejected the belief that the karma of one life determines one's fate in another life. For that matter, there is no "reincarnation" in Buddhism as the word is commonly understood, but that's another lecture.

A problem with side-by-side comparisons of the relative merits of Christianity versus Buddhism is that the two religions are understood and practiced within very different conceptual frameworks. For example, Sprigg and other conservative Christians persist in extolling redemption as an essential feature of their religion that Buddhism lacks. But to Buddhists, this is irrelevant. It might be said of Buddhism that it is a means to perceive, deeply and intimately, why we don't need to be redeemed.

So, Mr. Sprigg, I wish you well with the redemption thing, but some of us are doing fine without it.

Of course, it's perilous to make judgments about things one doesn't understand. I have the advantage of having been a devout Christian earlier in my life, and I retain a reasonably good understanding of Christian theology. And I still genuinely respect Christianity, in spite of the best efforts of the Brit Humes and Peter Spriggs of the world to make it look bad.

But Christians -- westerners generally, in fact -- carry around in their heads a conceptual framework of what religion is supposed to be that doesn't apply to Buddhism. (This is one reason so many people argue that Buddhism is not a religion; I say it is, and the framework is flawed.)  So to say that Christianity is superior to Buddhism because it offers redemption and Buddhism doesn't is a bit like saying birds are superior to horses because they have feathers and horses don't. It's nonsensical.

As for grace and faith -- faith is enormously important in Buddhism, although in Buddhism faith is defined more as "trust" or "confidence" than as "belief." I agree that the standard definition of grace -- as the favor of God bestowed freely on humans -- does not apply to Buddhism. Yet in Buddhism I have experienced a different sort of grace, a grace at least as powerful, even though we Buddhists might differ with Christians about how grace comes to us.
Peter Sprigg and many other conservative Christians have taken the position that criticism of Brit Hume for dissing Buddhism is actually a viscous and hateful attack on Christianity.
Although I marvel at the mental gymnastics required to flop around to that perspective, I still feel compelled to attempt a correction.

I say with all kindness to Christians that you don't help yourselves by claiming an exclusive right to promote your religion over others. In my experience, such proselytizing alienates at least as many people as it persuades. This is especially true if you have to tell lies about other religions to argue that yours is better.

And, if I may say so, bearing false witness against another religion seems un-Christian.

IN ACCORDANCE WITH TITLE 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107, THIS MATERIAL IS DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PROFIT TO THOSE WHO HAVE EXPRESSED A PRIOR INTEREST IN RECEIVING THE INCLUDED INFORMATION FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. PELICAN BLOGS HAS NO AFFILIATION WHATSOEVER WITH THE ORIGINATOR OF THIS ARTICLE NOR ARE PELICAN BLOGS ENDORSED OR SPONSORED BY THE ORIGINATOR.


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Let The Sun Shine In......

BLOWBACK!!! DRAGON ASCEDNING, EAGLE DESCENDING........

SOUTH RISING AND THEN THERE'S THE PLANET, POSSIBLY TRUMPING ALL ELSE!

Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Blowback Effect, 2020

By Michael Klare
Posted on January 5, 2010, Printed on January 6, 2010
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175186/

You can already see a new style of writing about China emerging in our American world.  The New York Times set it off recently by publishing a front-page piece on a $3.4 billion Chinese investment in one of the planet’s last great copper reserves -- in Afghanistan.  In passing, reporter Michael Wines also pointed out that Chinese energy companies had gained a stronger foothold in the future exploitation of Iraq’s massive oil reserves than had U.S. multinationals.  The ironies were legion and painfully visible. 

Our two wars have been sucking us dry in two countries where state-owned Chinese companies have just scored significant economic victories.  “While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda [in Afghanistan],” wrote Wines, “China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce.”

Already, the follow-up pieces are starting to come out and heady cocktails they are:  one part awe and one part bitterness mixed with one part despair.  In Esquire online, Thomas P.M. Barnett put it this way:  “Worse still: Will the rest of the world end up profiting from our blood and money?... The reason why Obama neglects to mention any regional interests like Pakistan's? Admitting the larger logic of regionalization would make too painfully obvious the nature of our current strategic bankruptcy. Because it would suggest that the only 'victory' to be found would be 'won' by those neighboring powers who did nothing to stabilize the situation. In other words, their 'treasure' and our 'blood.'"  AtForeign Policy online, Stephen M. Walt chimed in:  “While we've been running around playing whack-a-mole with the Taliban and 'investing' billions each year in the corrupt Karzai government, China has been investing in things that might actually be of some value, like a big copper mine.”

Under George W. Bush, the U.S. set out, in part, to turn the Greater Middle East into an American “lake” of energy reserves via two invasions, and you know how that worked out.  The Chinese, on the other hand, only last year sent their warships abroad -- to hunt pirates as part of an international flotilla in the Gulf of Aden -- for the first time since the eunuch Zheng He commanded a Ming dynasty armada that reached Africa six centuries ago.  Unfortunately, as Michael Klare, TomDispatch regular and author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, makes clear below, China’s leaders are as unlikely to learn from our deepest mistakes as they were 30-odd years ago when China’s post-Cultural Revolution leadership looked our way and made a logical but calamitous decision: that the auto industry -- all those millions of individual cars burning fossil fuels -- would be a crucial pillar of their future industrial development.

Right now, they may still seem to be acting out a key lesson of this American moment:  Stay off the hard stuff.  You know, all that advanced weaponry (and the military-industrial complex that goes with it), all those aircraft carrier battle groups, all those “expeditionary forces” ready to be sent thousands of miles from home to fight “little wars.”  Once again, however, as Klare suggests, our present symbols of “power” are likely to be their paragon and the future will be a mess.  It’s not enough, it seems, to make money, not war.  Once you have the money, it has to be spent on something and our imaginations remain so limited.

Too bad.  Here’s where you could only wish the future might be a little less predictable.  No such luck, Klare tells us, when it comes to military power as the measure of greatness on planet Earth in the second decade of the twenty-first century.  Tom

The Second Decade (Providing we somehow survive that long)
The World in 2020
By Michael T. Klare

As the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, we find ourselves at one of those relatively rare moments in history when major power shifts become visible to all.  If the first decade of the century witnessed profound changes, the world of 2009 nonetheless looked at least somewhat like the world of 1999 in certain fundamental respects:  the United States remained the world’s paramount military power, the dollar remained the world’s dominant currency, and NATO remained its foremost military alliance, to name just three.

By the end of the second decade of this century, however, our world is likely to have a genuinely different look to it.  Momentous shifts in global power relations and a changing of the imperial guard, just now becoming apparent, will be far more pronounced by 2020 as new actors, new trends, new concerns, and new institutions dominate the global space.  Nonetheless, all of this is the norm of history, no matter how dramatic it may seem to us.

Less normal -- and so the wild card of the second decade (and beyond) -- is intervention by the planet itself.  Blowback, which we think of as a political phenomenon, will by 2020 have gained a natural component.  Nature is poised to strike back in unpredictable ways whose effects could be unnerving and possibly devastating.   

What, then, will be the dominant characteristics of the second decade of the twenty-first century?  Prediction of this sort is, of course, inherently risky, but extrapolating from current trends, four key aspects of second-decade life can be discerned: the rise of China; the (relative) decline of the United States; the expanding role of the global South; and finally, possibly most dramatically, the increasing impact of a roiling environment and growing resource scarcity.
Let’s start with human history and then make our way into the unknown future history of the planet itself.

The Ascendant Dragon

That China has become a leading world power is no longer a matter of dispute.  That country’s new-found strength was on full display at the climate summit in Copenhagen in December where it became clear that no meaningful progress was possible on the issue of global warming without Beijing’s assent.  Its growing prominence was also evident in the way it responded to the Great Recession, as it poured multi-billions of dollars into domestic recovery projects, thereby averting a significant slowdown in its economy.  It spent many tens of billions more on raw materials and fresh investments in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, helping to ignite recovery in those regions, too. 

If China is an economic giant today, it will be a powerhouse in 2020. According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), that country’s gross domestic product (GDP) will jump from an estimated $3.3 trillion in 2010 to $7.1 trillion in 2020 (in constant 2005 dollars), at which time its economy will exceed all others save that of the United States.  In fact, its GDP then should exceed those of all the nations in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East combined.  As the decade proceeds, China is expected to move steadily up the ladder of technological enhancement, producing ever more sophisticated products, including advanced green energy and transportation systems that will prove essential to future post-carbon economies.  These gains, in turn, will give it increasing clout in international affairs.

China will undoubtedly also use its growing wealth and technological prowess to enhance its military power.  According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), China is already the world’s second largest military spender, although the $85 billion it invested in its armed forces in 2008 was a pale shadow of the $607 billion allocated by the United States.  In addition, its forces remain technologically unsophisticated and its weapons are no match for the most modern U.S., Japanese, and European equipment.  However, this gap will narrow significantly in the century’s second decade as China devotes more resources to military modernization.

The critical question is:  How will China use its added power to achieve its objectives?

Until now, China's leaders have wielded its growing strength cautiously, avoiding behavior that would arouse fear or suspicion on the part of neighbors and economic partners.  It has instead employed the power of the purse and “soft power” -- vigorous diplomacy, development aid, and cultural ties -- to cultivate friends and allies.  But will China continue to follow this “harmonious,” non-threatening approach as the risks of forcefully pursuing its national interests diminish?  This appears unlikely.

A more assertive China that showed what the Washington Post called“swagger” was already evident in the final months of 2009 at the summit meetings between presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao in Beijing and Copenhagen.  In neither case did the Chinese side seek a “harmonious” outcome:  In Beijing, it restricted Obama’s access to the media and refused to give any ground on Tibet or tougher sanctions on key energy-trading partner Iran; at a crucial moment in Copenhagen, it actually sent low-ranking officials to negotiate with Obama -- an unmistakable slight -- and forced a compromise that absolved China of binding restraints on carbon emissions. 

If these summits are any indication, Chinese leaders are prepared to play global hard-ball, insisting on compliance with their core demands and giving up little even on matters of secondary importance.  China will find itself ever more capable of acting this way because the economic fortunes of so many countries are now tied to its consumption and investment patterns -- a pivotal global role once played by the United States -- and because its size and location gives it a commanding position in the planet’s most dynamic region.  In addition, in the first decade of the twenty-first century Chinese leaders proved especially adept at nurturing ties with the leaders of large and small countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that will play an ever more important role in energy and other world affairs.

To what ends will China wield its growing power?  For the top leadership in Beijing, three goals will undoubtedly be paramount: to ensure the continued political monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to sustain the fast-paced economic growth which justifies its dominance, and to restore the country’s historic greatness.  All three are, in fact, related:  The CCP will remain in power, senior leaders believe, only so long as it orchestrates continuing economic expansion and satisfies the nationalist aspirations of the public as well as the high command of the People’s Liberation Army.  Everything Beijing does, domestically and internationally, is geared to these objectives.  As the country grows stronger, it will use its enhanced powers to shape the global environment to its advantage just as the United States has done for so long.  In China’s case, this will mean a world wide-open to imports of Chinese goods and to investments that allow Chinese firms to devour global resources, while placing ever less reliance on the U.S. dollar as the medium of international exchange.

The question that remains unanswered:  Will China begin flexing its growing military muscle?  Certainly, Beijing will do so in at least an indirect manner.  By supplying arms and military advisers to its growing network of allies abroad, it will establish a military presence in ever more areas.  My suspicion is that China will continue to avoid the use of force in any situation that might lead to a confrontation with major Western powers, but may not hesitate to bring its military to bear in any clash of national wills involving neighboring countries.  Such a situation could arise, for example, in a maritime disputeover control of the energy-rich South China Sea or in Central Asia, if one of the former Soviet republics became a haven for Uighur militants seeking to undermine Chinese control over Xinjiang Province.

The Eagle Comes in for a Landing

Just as the rise of China is now taken for granted, so, too, is the decline of the United States.  Much has been written about America’s inevitable loss of primacy as this country suffers the consequences of economic mismanagement and imperial overstretch.  This perspective was present inGlobal Trends 2025, a strategic assessment of the coming decades prepared for the incoming Obama administration by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency.  “Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor [in 2025],” the NIC predicted, “the United States’ relative strength -- even in the military realm -- will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained.” 

Some unforeseen catastrophe aside, however, the U.S. is not likely to be poorer in 2020 or more backward technologically.  In fact, according to the most recent Department of Energy projections, America’s GDP in 2020 will be approximately $17.5 trillion (in 2005 dollars), nearly one-third greater than today.  Moreover, some of the initiatives already launched by President Obama to stimulate the development of advanced energy systems are likely to begin bearing fruit, possibly giving the United States an edge in certain green technologies.  And don’t forget, the U.S. will remain the globe’s preeminent military power, with China lagging well behind, and no other potential rival able to mobilize even Chinese-level resources to challenge U.S. military advantages. 

What will change is America’s position relative to China and other nations -- and so, of course, its ability to dominate the global economy and the world political agenda.  Again using DoE projections, we find that in 2005, America’s GDP of $12.4 trillion exceeded that of all the nations of Asia and South America combined, including Brazil, China, India, and Japan.  By 2020, the combined GDP of Asia and South America will be about 40% greater than that of the U.S., and growing at a much faster rate.   By then, the United States will be deeply indebted to more solvent foreign nations, especially China, for the funds needed to pay for continuing budget deficits occasioned by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon budget, the federal stimulus package, and the absorption of “toxic assets” from troubled banks and corporations.
Count on this, though:  in an increasingly competitive world economy in which U.S. firms enjoy ever diminishing advantages, the prospects for ordinary Americans will be distinctly dimmer.  Some sectors of the economy, and some parts of the country, will certainly continue to thrive, but others will surely suffer Detroit’s fate, becoming economically hollowed out and experiencing wholesale impoverishment.  For many -- perhaps most -- Americans, the world of 2020 may still provide a standard of living far superior to that enjoyed by a majority of the world; but the perks and advantages that most middle class folks once took for granted -- college education, relatively accessible (and affordable) medical care, meals out, foreign travel -- will prove significantly harder to come by.

Even America’s military advantage will be much eroded.  The colossal costs of the disastrous Iraq and Afghan wars will set limits on the nation’s ability to undertake significant military missions abroad.  Keep in mind that, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a significant proportion of the basic combat equipment of the Army and Marine Corps has been damaged or destroyed in these wars, while the fighting units themselves have been badly battered by multiple tours of duty.  Repairing this damage would require at least a decade of relative quiescence, which is nowhere in sight.

The growing constraints on American power were recently acknowledged by President Obama in an unusual setting:  his West Point address announcing a troop surge in Afghanistan.  Far from constituting a triumphalist expression of American power and preeminence, like President Bush’s speeches on the Iraq War, his was an implicit admission of decline.  Alluding to the hubris of his predecessor, Obama noted, “We’ve failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy.  In the wake of the economic crisis, too many of our neighbors and friends are out of work and struggle to pay the bills…. Meanwhile, competition in the global economy has grown more fierce.  So we simply can’t afford to ignore the price of these wars.”   

Many have chosen to interpret Obama’s Afghan surge decision as a typical twentieth-century-style expression of America’s readiness to intervene anywhere on the planet at a moment’s notice.  I view it as a transitional move meant to prevent the utter collapse of an ill-conceived military venture at a time when the United States is increasingly being forced to rely on non-military means of persuasion and the cooperation, however tempered, of allies.  President Obama said as much:   “We’ll have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power…. And we can’t count on military might alone.”  Increasingly, this will be the mantra of strategic planning that will govern the American eagle in decline. 

The Rising South

The second decade of the century will also witness the growing importance of the global South:  the formerly-colonized, still-developing areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  Once playing a relatively marginal role in world affairs, they were considered open territory, there to be invaded, plundered, and dominated by the major powers of Europe, North America, and (for a time) Japan.  To some degree, the global South, a.k.a. the “Third World,” still plays a marginal role, but that is changing. 

Once a member in good standing of the global South, China is now an economic superpower and India is well on its way to earning this status.  Second-tier states of the South, including Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, and Turkey, are on the rise economically, and even the smallest and least well-off nations of the South have begun to attract international attention as providers of crucial raw materials or as sites of intractable problems including endemic terrorism and crime syndicates.

To some degree, this is a product of numbers -- growing populations and growing wealth.  In 2000, the population of the global South stood at an estimated 4.9 billion people; by 2020, that number is expected to hit 6.4 billion.  Many of these new inhabitants of planet Earth will be poor and disenfranchised, but most will be workers (in either the formal or informal economy), many will participate in the political process in some way, and some will be entrepreneurs, labor leaders, teachers, criminals, or militants.  Whatever the case, they will make their presence felt.

The nations of the South will also play a growing economic role as sources of raw materials in an era of increasing scarcity and founts of entrepreneurial vitality.  By one estimate, the combined GDP of the global South (excluding China) will jump from $7.8 trillion in 2005 to $15.8 trillion in 2020, an increase of more than 100%.  In particular, many of the prime deposits of oil, natural gas, and the key minerals needed in the global North to keep the industrial system going are facing wholesale depletion after decades of hyper-intensive extraction, leaving only the deposits in the South to be exploited.

Take oil:  In 1990, 43% of world daily oil output was supplied by members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (the major Persian Gulf producers plus Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Libya, Nigeria, and Venezuela), other African and Latin American producers, and the Caspian Sea countries; by 2020, their share will rise to 58%.  A similar shift in the center of gravity of world mineral production will take place, with unexpected countries like Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Niger (a major uranium supplier), and the Democratic Republic of Congo taking on potentially crucial roles.

Inevitably, the global South will also play a conspicuous role in a series of potentially devastating developments.  Combine persistent deep poverty, economic desperation, population growth, and intensifying climate degradation and you have a recipe for political unrest, insurgency, religious extremism, increased criminality, mass migrations, and the spread of disease.  The global North will seek to immunize itself from these disorders by building fences of every sort, but through sheer numbers alone, the inhabitants of the South will make their presence felt, one way or another.

The Planet Strikes Back

All of this might represent nothing more than the normal changing of the imperial guard on planet Earth, if that planet itself weren’t undergoing far more profound changes than any individual power or set of powers, no matter how strong.  The ever more intrusive realities of global warming, resource scarcity, and food insufficiency will, by the end of this century’s second decade, be undeniable and, if not by 2020, then in the decades to come, have the capacity to put normal military and economic power, no matter how impressive, in the shade. 

“There is little doubt about the main trends,” Professor Ole Danbolt Mjøs, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said in awarding the Peace Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore in December 2007:  “More and more scientists have reached ever closer agreement concerning the increasingly dramatic consequences that will follow from global warming.”  Likewise, a growing body of energy experts has concluded that the global production of conventional oil will soon reach a peak (if it hasn’t already) and decline, producing a worldwide energy shortage.  Meanwhile, fears of future food emergencies, prompted in part by global warming and high energy prices, are becoming more widespread.
All of this was apparent when world leaders met in Copenhagen and failed to establish an effective international regime for reducing the emission of climate-altering greenhouse gases (GHGs).  Even though they did agree to keep talking and comply with a non-binding, aspirational scheme to cut back on GHGs, observers believe that such efforts are unlikely to lead to meaningful progress in controlling global warming in the near future.  What few doubt is that the pace of climate change will accelerate destructively in the second decade of this century, that conventional (liquid) petroleum and other key resources will become scarcer and more difficult to extract, and that food supplies will diminish in many poor, environmentally vulnerable areas.

Scientists do not agree on the precise nature, timing, and geographical impact of climate-change effects, but they do generally agree that, as we move deeper into the century, we will be seeing an exponential increase in the density of the heat-trapping greenhouse-gas layer in the atmosphere as the consumption of fossil fuels grows and past smokestack emissions migrate to the outer atmosphere.  DoE data indicates, for example, that between 1990 and 2005, world carbon dioxide emissions grew by 32%, from 21.5 to 31.0 billion metric tons.  It can take as much as 50 years for GHGs to reach the greenhouse layer, which means that their effect will increase even if -- as appears unlikely -- the nations of the world soon begin to reduce their future emissions.

In other words, the early manifestations of global warming in the first decade of this century -- intensifying hurricanes and typhoons, torrential rains followed by severe flooding in some areas and prolonged, even record-breaking droughts in others, melting ice-caps and glaciers, and rising sea levels -- will all become more pronounced in the second.  As suggested by the IPCC in its 2007 report, uninhabitable dust bowls are likely to emerge in large areas of Central and Northeast Asia, Mexico and the American Southwest, and the Mediterranean basin.  Significant parts of Africa are likely to be devastated by rising temperatures and diminished rainfall.  More cities are likely to undergo the sort of flooding and destruction experienced by New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.   And blistering summers, as well as infrequent or negligible rainfall, will limit crop production in key food-producing regions.

Progress will be evident in the development of renewable energy systems, such as wind, solar, and biofuels.  Despite the vast sums now being devoted to their development, however, they will still provide only a relatively small share of world energy in 2020.  According to DoE projections, renewables will take care of only 10.5% of world energy needs in 2020, while oil and other petroleum liquids will still make up 32.6% of global supplies; coal, 27.1%; and natural gas, 23.8%.  In other words, greenhouse gas production will rage on -- and, ironically, should it not, thanks to expected shortfalls in the supply of oil, that in itself will likely prove another kind of disaster, pushing up the prices of all energy sources and endangering economic stability.  Most industry experts, including those at the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, believe that it will be nearly impossible to continue increasing the output of conventional and unconventional petroleum (including tough to harvest Arctic oil, Canadian tar sands, and shale oil) without increasingly implausible fresh investments of trillions of dollars, much of which would have to go into war-torn, unstable areas like Iraq or corrupt, unreliable states like Russia.

In the latest hit movie Avatar, the lush, mineral-rich moon Pandora is under assault by human intruders seeking to extract a fabulously valuable mineral called "unobtainium."  Opposing them are not only a humanoid race called the Na’vi, loosely modeled on Native Americans and Amazonian jungle dwellers, but also the semi-sentient flora and fauna of Pandora itself.   While our own planet may not possess such extraordinary capabilities, it is clear that the environmental damage caused by humans since the onset of the Industrial Revolution is producing a natural blowback effect which will become increasingly visible in the coming decade.

These, then, are the four trends most likely to dominate the second decade of this century.  Perhaps others will eventually prove more significant, or some set of catastrophic events will further alter the global landscape, but for now expect the dragon ascendant, the eagle descending, the South rising, and the planet possibly trumping all of these.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Owl Books). A documentary film version of his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation at Bloodandoilmovie.com.
Copyright 2010 Michael T. Klare

© 2010 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
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