February 03, 2011 09:27 AM UTC

Teeter on the Edge at the Great Maw of China

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• by: Teeter

The staggering debt of the United States, much owed to China and other nations, is not news although it is in it again today with some of Colorado’s own lamebrains wanting to pay it off with funds already bequeathed to those that deposited them.  

And while the GOP members of Colorado’s delegation fixate on everything but jobs, the monetary reckoning is not the only deficit that China holds over the United States. That some are so eager to sell off the store to quickly settle does not bode well for our nation of bounty, even as we struggle through difficult times.

Many of the rising global powers are marked by large populations seeking and achieving greater wealth, acquiring more things, and placing great emphasis on better infrastructure and education, the brick and mortar of any nation’s future.  

This emphasis brings innovation, new consumerism, and increasingly dominant markets. And these are all places where the United States has risk to quickly fall behind.  

In Utah the State Legislature is threatening to seize power from local school boards, some surmise because Salt Lake City and Park City have offered support groups for gay students.  The battles over Texas curriculum, and the subsequent purging of ‘offensive’ material (although I understand at the end Thomas Jefferson made the cut), are legion..  Teaching evolution is suspect across much of the nation, as is climate change or really anything suggesting environmental restraint.  

While some nations in South America and Asia have an expanding middle class, in the Untied States it is shrinking.  Wealth here is being quickly consolidated into hands that no longer have any real loyalty to the nation that enabled their rise–it’s more lucrative to be headquartered in Dubai and to hide bank assets somewhere offshore.

And while the Dow did hit 12,000, no one pretends that it is the only game in town.  Many ‘hot’ markets are elsewhere.

I was a Cold War Baby and visited East Germany when it was. The Berlin Wall, even as a child, struck me as a terrible thing. And back then it was not only the Soviets. That was shortly after the RINO Nixon dared open dialogue with the dragon. But no one was fooled, at least not the Birchers, the ‘Chi-Coms’ were also a threat.  

I remember well the fear that we must be vigilant–the ‘eternal price of liberty,’ Lest communism will take us, even from within. Especially from within.

An irony is that this may come to pass, but not exactly as foretold. Quickly gaining the ability to exploit and manipulate global currencies, control world resources, and out-consume the heretofore greatest consumer culture in the history of forever, the ‘ChiComs’ may beat us within our own game.  

Liquid Assets-Poisoned Land

While the push to develop resources is a bi-partisan affair, it is no secret that one side dominates the debate. Obama, some say, is the biggest threat to U.S. energy stability, more so than violent unrest across the Middle East, through his agents Salazar and Chu, umpteen czars, and the jack-booted EPA (or something, I confess it’s a bit of a hard argument to follow).

While the Drill-Baby-Drill mentality at least had some intuitive appeal when natural gas was in high demand, as anyone who has paid attention knows, that is no longer the case.  We have a lot of natural gas-oodles and oodles, more than ever before.

Meanwhile, the incidents compile, and more and more people are threatened from impacts of the dirty business of bringing this ‘clean-burning’ fuel to market.  

But in that recent glory day, before the bust the boosters said this time would never come, natural gas was booming and we couldn’t drill enough.  

In those days entrepreneurs were talking of building Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) hubs on the west coast to bring a needed fuel to the people.

Perhaps that was always a shell game, or maybe the balance just changed that quickly.  But now the realization has hit many folks, in places like Coos Bay, not so excited about a new target hub in midst. The hubs are for export.  Asia is hungry.

And while Rep. Lamborn does his best to bankrupt America’s trust fund, he also holds another assignment as chair of the Natural Resources subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources.

And now we sail back from China, all the way back to Colorado, literally–at the head of the soon-to-be-completed Ruby natural gas pipeline.

Bill Due at the World Market

Bills are coming due for our nation in an increasingly complex multilateral world. However one reckons the ledger, the deficit is growing between the U.S. and much of the rest of the world. We have a lot of resources and it is a needful, covetous planet.

Of all resources used from the Earth in the whole of human history, what percent of that has been consumed in just the last .05% of that time?  And if we were to rethink our relationship with the planet and its life-giving things right now this second going forward we would still need to consider that there are now more people alive than have ever been alive in total.  And they all want an i-Pad.

Putting the robber-barrons in charge, those who might literally sell their mothers to make a buck, portends a sober future where we stand to dewater, denude and deplete our bounty to service a debt or try to backfill a deficit.  

We teeter on the edge of a tragic irony: That we stand poised to strip, sell, and surrender our assets in a way that gives advantage to our greatest competitors; done most willfully by so-called ‘conservatives’ in the name of ‘American exceptionalism.’