Our 'American Truth'

Our American Pravda is the title of an article from The American Conservative of 29 April 2013 by its editor, Ron Unz. It is a profoundly informed and reflective cry of dismay and distress. It illuminates Australia's Asian Century, because it reveals a bewildering, at first unbelievable, depth of systemic corruption and dysfunction. If this defines contemporary America, it can only leave the "indispensable" nation with rapidly declining international authority and relevance. Equally, it suggests that another Anglo creation, Australia, has little option but an "Asian Century", whether it likes it or not.

Paul Craig Roberts, an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy from 1981 to 1982 under President Reagan, for which Roberts received the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award, quickly commended Unz on 10 May 2013 with an article on his website titled How Elites and Media Minimize Dissent and Bury Truth. He followed this on 13 May 2103 with an article titled Gangster StateAmerica.

The Roberts articles above were preceded on 12, 13 and 16 April 2013 respectively by articles headed Fed Orchestrated Smash on Gold, Assault on Gold Update and Update to the Update: The Attack on Gold. But the opening and closing paragraphs of the Gangster State America article are the most troubling. It begins:

There are many signs of gangster state America. One is the collusion between federal authorities and banksters in a criminal conspiracy to rig the markets for gold and silver.

And it concludes:

Another irony is the benefactors of the banksters sale of the gold leeched from the gold ETFs. Asia is the beneficiary, especially India and China. The "get out of gold line" of the US financial press enables China to unload its excess supply of dollars, accumulated from the offshored US economy, into the gold market at a suppressed price of gold.

Kranzler points out that not only does the Fed's manipulation permit Asia to offload US dollars for gold at low prices, but the obvious lack of confidence in the dollar that the manipulation demonstrates has caused wealthy European families to demand delivery of their gold holdings at bullion banks (the bullion banks are essentially the "banks too big to fail"). Kranzler notes that since January 1, more than 400 tons of gold have been drained from COMEX and gold ETF holdings in order to satisfy world demand for physical possession of bullion.

Again we see that institutions of the US government are acting 100% against the interests of US citizens. Just who does the US government represent?

Unlike Roberts, Unz does not touch on the manner in which the American Federal Reserve is rapidly extinguishing the value of the US Dollar and driving China and other productive communities to alternative international institutional arrangements in order to develop more reliable means of conducting international exchange and saving. Rather he recounts a number of discoveries, starting with:

The realization that the world is often quite different from what is presented in our leading newspapers and magazines is not an easy conclusion for most educated Americans to accept, or at least that was true in my own case.

He then enters other complex and very troubled territory:

Thoughtful individuals of all backgrounds have undergone a similar crisis of confidence during this same period. Just a few months after 9/11 New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argued that the sudden financial collapse of the Enron Corporation represented a greater shock to the American system than the terrorist attacks themselves, and although he was widely denounced for making such an "unpatriotic" claim, I believe his case was strong….

Just a few years later, we saw an even more sweeping near-collapse of our entire financial system, with giant institutions such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, and AIG falling into bankruptcy, and all our remaining major banks surviving only due to the trillions of dollars in government bailouts and loan guarantees they received. Once again, all our media and regulatory organs had failed to anticipate this disaster.

Or take the remarkable case of Bernie Madoff.

He progresses through the Iraq War that "Lt. Gen. Bill Odomrightly called the "greatest strategic disaster in United States history"", America as an "attention deficit democracy," that might surprise George Orwell, the Merck Vioxx medication scandal with a premature death toll likely much greater than ever publicly recognized, and the government actions that "came within a hairbreadth of placing its entire national-security apparatus under the authority of a high-school dropout connected with organized crime. He also recounts anomalies concerning three stories-the evidence and allegations related to the September 2001 anthrax attacks, revelations about the relationship between Republican Presidential candidate McCain and American prisoners of war abandoned in Vietnam and charges made by FBI interpreter Sybil Edmonds about the involvement of high-level government officials in subverting some of the most sensitive areas of American defense and foreign policy. Unz concludes with a passage that illuminates the democratic aspirations of:

…..the recently deceased Boris Berezovsky, once the most powerful of the Russian oligarchs and the puppet master behind President Boris Yeltsin during the late 1990s. After looting billions in national wealth and elevating Vladimir Putin to the presidency, he overreached himself and eventually went into exile. According to the New York Times, he had planned to transform Russia into a fake two-party state-one social-democratic and one neoconservative-in which heated public battles would be fought on divisive, symbolic issues, while behind the scenes both parties would actually be controlled by the same ruling elites. With the citizenry thus permanently divided and popular dissatisfaction safely consistent with power for themselves, with little threat to their reign. Given America's history over the last couple of decades, perhaps we can guess where Berezovsky got his idea for such a clever political scheme.

David Stockman, who, as Director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981 to 1985, overlapped Roberts in service to the Reagan Administration, gave an interview on 19 April 2013 to Fox Business, which was reported under the headingThanks to the Fed, We're in "Monetary Fantasyland". His final paragraphs added a further perspective to the problems with which Unz and Roberts have been concerned:

Stockman said the real growth rate of the economy for the past 13 years has been the lowest since the Civil War and median income of the average family is down 8% since 2000.

"What we have is massive fiscal stimulus; what we have is a Fed that creates serial bubbles," Stockman said. "All of this creates kind of the appearance of prosperity temporarily and then the day of reckoning comes, the bubbles break. Then we have disaster in its wake and then they come back and say let's do more of the same so that we can get out of the mess that we're in."

Unz, Roberts and Stockman are all fiercely patriotic American writers. All have demonstrated through their work and lives a profound dedication to very high American ideals. In an imperfect world, some may think their ideals unrealistic. All, however, are experienced and accomplished in positions of high responsibility in managing the imperfections of this world. And all have been sufficiently troubled by what they observe and understand to be openly critical in ways that are likely to lose them favour in the circles that have shaped their lives.

For Australia, the most critical aspect of their insights concerns a type of rot in American culture and process. In this context, the latest American dream that innovative genius offers cost free solutions to deep seated problems can become a problem in itself. For instance, frequent claims that the innovation of fracking may turn America into another Saudi Arabia are far from reassuring. The problems outlined by Unz, Roberts and Stockman are too profound. They threaten the future viability of the US Dollar, American defence expenditure and American political integrity.

This leaves a high probability that Australia will quickly need to take its "Asian Century" rhetoric seriously and move far beyond the meaningless gestures of recent decades. While Prime Minister Gillard's recent visit to Beijing took important and informed steps forward, neither political nor administrative leaders seem to show any practical understanding of the cultural and educational challenges of a world where Anglo-American exceptionalism could become a troubled memory.