Firearms Lawyer

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed article dated February 17, 2010 entitled “The United States: Debtor and Leader? Why Lech Walesa is right to worry about declining American influence”, Judy Shelton discusses the perfect storm that is coming to America:

 ”As Lech Walesa, the former president of Poland who confronted Soviet repression with demands for the right to self-govern, observed recently: ‘The world has no leadership. The U.S. was the last resort and hope for all the nations. Today, we have lost that hope.’ What has changed about America’s role in the world?”

 Walesa’s answer is, “They don’t lead morally and politically any more.”  Ms. Shelton states that American voters “need to elect new representatives who recognize that America’s greatness cannot be achieved in the absence of national solvency.”

 ”It’s not only the small concessions to China over “internal” matters, or the possibility of faltering in helping our allies at critical moments, that undermine our global claim to moral leadership. It’s the longer-term vulnerability to financial extortion. It’s the perception, at home and abroad, that American values may be subjugated to financial considerations due to America’s permanent state of indebtedness.”

 China holds more than one-fifth of foreign U.S. Treasury bonds and China is now the largest creditor nation to the United States.  Just recently, China sold a significant portion of its holdings in U.S. Treasury bonds- Japan now holds the largest amount of U.S. Treasury debt- and threatens to take further action if the U.S. government further damages “trust and cooperation between our two countries”; i.e., by doing anything to hold the Chinese government accountable in regard to its deplorable human rights record.

 The big question that often goes unasked is whether the leverage that China wields in U.S. financial markets can be used in order to further military objectives if push ever comes to shove.  In a 2008 article entitled Is China Preparing for War Against America? we explored the Chinese government’s motives and global strategies:

“Hasn’t China invested a great deal of money in the U.S. economy and would they want to risk their investments?  Financial manipulation and maneuvering for control of oil are additional weapons in an asymmetrical or conventional arsenal.  It is interesting to see how much aid China has received from Japan, the U.S. and Europe over the years even as China presently increases military spending and aid to countries which have gradually entered the Chinese sphere of international influence.”

Until relatively recent times, the Western nations have pumped huge amounts of capital into the Chinese economy.  The transfer of wealth from the West to the former Soviet Union and China during and after the Nixon years is a story that has never been completely told.  At a time that U.S. military personnel were being killed by Soviet materiel in Vietnam, the Nixon and Ford Administrations were making direct loans and guaranteeing private low-interest loans to Communist China and Russia during a time of runaway inflation.  The perfect storm is now on the horizon- our money is now worth almost nothing- and the interests that worked during the Vietnam War years to manipulate the currency and the American  people are still working now!  A nation gets the leaders that they deserve.  It is also often said that Americans deserve better than we are getting.  It is time to stop flattering the American people and see some real change.