On Reading Michael Crichton's "Rising Sun" - What Happened to Japan? (Part 2), 7-29-2010

 [Continued from On Reading Michael Crichton's “Rising Sun” – What Happened to Japan? (Part 1), 7-29-2010. sch 2/20/23]

Did Japan fail – again – in recognizing what it meant to take on a continental economy?  I would like to say so, yet there are points in Crichton's criticisms that still ring true:

"They say Americans are too eager to make theories. They say we don't spend enough time observing the world, and so we do not actually know hoe things actually are.

###

"The Japanese say it's because America has become a land without substance. We let our manufacturing go. We don't make things anymore. When you manufacture products, you add value to raw materials, and you literally create wealth. But America has stopped doing that. Americans make money now by paper manipulation, which the Japanese say is bound to catch up to us because paper profits don't reflect real wealth. They think our fascination with Wall Street and junk bonds is crazy."

 Hard not to blush reading that second paragraph after the subprime mortgage mess and how close Wall Street got us to a global financial meltdown. Jeep has a new commercial touting what we build here.

Remember, too, the dot come bubble burst between Crichton's book and today. Is that American economic success consists solely of financial fraud perpetrated on the wider world?

Answering that question with a yes scared me for two reasons. First, it means that the entire American economy is built on falsehood – think house of cards – and has no future beyond the financier's ability to work up new scams. Sooner or later, those economies creating true value and wealth for their populations will tire of our scams. Maybe we will tire also when we recognize the scams drain our wealth from ourselves to the fraudsters.

Secondly, if our economy is based on going from one fraud to another, the behavior of the Bush Administration raises questions, as does the candor of the Obama Administration. If the Bushies understood the economy was fraud based, why go into the Iraq War after invading Afghanistan, and then cut taxes? Could it be the Bushies had no better understanding of our true national financial condition in 2001 than they had in 2008? Historians and those capable of researching the facts may answer what I can only question.

About Obama's candor, I have long felt that he thought discretion was the better part of valor. I think he chose Geithner for Treasure as a way of placating the Chinese. Discretion served to keep panic contained and avoid the meltdown. I think Obama has long range goals and changes in mind, but for the meantime he must hold together a very fragile economy.

I worry about this because of China. While China has a tendency to fall apart, but it has more cohesion than the European Union. India strikes me as having too poor an infrastructure, and with bashing Pakistan. Besides, China has a big chunk of American trade and securities as well as European trade. Russia chases its tail, seeking former glory, an economy bases solely on its natural resources to match Chinese trading and manufactures.

Unlike Japan, Chinese is close to a continental power like the US. The Chinese possess the scale for absorbing competition from multiple sources, and not susceptible to Wall Street's paper manipulations. We must compete in real terms over real things, or rash and burn.

More questions. Why did the Republicans under Bush hock us to the Chinese? Did they think the Chinese would wither as did the Japanese? If so, they raised delusion to a high art form. They also hemmed in the Obama Administration by putting our fragile economy under the shadow of Beijing. You people who can vote in 2010 need to remember what Bush and the Republicans gave us for a future.

One last thought about a fraudulent American economy has to do with our own morality. I remember some Republicans and conservatives talking about a slippery slope of morality if we bailed out businesses and/or provided national healthcare. I say we have fallen down a very slippery slope by championing a casino economy benefitting an oligarchic class – they have made us all complicit in fraud. I have seen it in politics and in business. I felt sunk by my debts, which only inflamed my depression. I looked about and saw those with fewer scruples prospering quite well. Remember, pigeons will come home to roost.

sch