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Ask that to the Vietnamese, all central and south america, the Irakies, the Palestinian, the Afgans, ... Edit: heck, ask that to the Americans. Inequality in y

Ask that to the Vietnamese, all central and south america, the Irakies, the Palestinian, the Afgans, ... Edit: heck, ask that to the Americans. Inequality in your homeland is rampant. What you call American Empire is known also by Globalization, and it seems that is not very popular in the US right now. Anyway, that decission is not for the US to make, and I reckon the whole world would prefer a more balanced situation.

sheepmullet 8y ago
I’m not claiming the US is perfect. I’m asking what makes you think a more balanced world would have been better? > Inequality in your homeland is rampant. What you call American Empire is known also by Globalization, and it seems that is not very popular in the US right now. Yes. We believe the “American Empire” has been far too altruistic towards other nations and ignored its own people.... I don’t think that really helps your argument.
- gonvaled 8y ago
  > Yes. We believe the “American Empire” has been far too altruistic towards other nations and ignored its own people.... We believe that: 1) The US has been extremely egoistical, by more than making up for the losses it has endured on trade by manipulating the global economy through the use of its monopoly on the dollar. Also by plundering resources all around the world (see Irak war for example). 2) That the economic problems of the US are of its own making, by buying into the fantasy of the American dream and letting its politicians funnel all richess to the 1 percenters, while promising that the money will trickle down.
  - EdwardDiego 8y ago
    > by manipulating the global economy through the use of its monopoly on the dollar If you believe that France, or Germany, or any other members of the EU wouldn't have done the same had their currency become the global default by dint of being the largest economy on the world, you're kidding yourself.
    - gonvaled 8y ago
      And they would have been justly critizized for that.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - sheepmullet 8y ago
    > We believe that: 1) In this context why does it matter what you believe? America doesn’t need your permission to fight for fairer trade deals. 2) I don’t think you understand Americans or our problems. A 10% increase in tax revenues by focusing on the uber-wealthy will not fix our structural problems.
    - gonvaled 8y ago
      > America doesn’t need your permission to fight for fairer trade deals. We know you do not need permission, and even when you pretend to get it (Irak war), you do it by blatantly lying. You will not sell to the world that your fight is fair though. > A 10% increase in tax revenues by focusing on the uber-wealthy will not fix our structural problems. Your structural problems are not our problem - that is, as long as you are being confrontational. The world can be convinced to be more sensitive to the US's issues if the US shows sensitivity for the world's issues. You want a fairer trade? Great! Let's do that. Let's eliminate at the same time the dollar as a huge distorting factor.
      - sheepmullet 8y ago
        > You will not sell to the world that your fight is fair though. I think you misunderstand the power imbalance. The world needs to convince the US that it is fighting unfairly. We spent over a trillion dollars on the Iraq war. We could handle a 1-2 trillion dollar trade war - who else can reliably say the same?
        gonvaled 8y ago
        I would not be so sure about that. The reason why you are able to spend those huge amounts is because you are able to print the money while the world keeps on accepting it. The same imbalance that strengthens your hand on trade (the huge trade deficit that the US has), is a big weakness regarding the dollar: the fact that the world has accumulated and keeps accumulating dollars could prove a big problem for the US once we decide your policies must be retaliated with actual measures. For example, it does not make any sense for the EU to be unable to abide by a perfectly working international commitment (the agreement with Iran about non-proliferation, which has been positively audited internationally), just because we are unable to manage the flow of capitals when the US decides to block them. It would be in the interest of the EU to actively fight the prominence of the dollar.
- EdwardDiego 8y ago
  > Yes. We believe the “American Empire” has been far too altruistic towards other nations and ignored its own people.... You really think that the US has been too altruistic? From my perspective in the South Pacific ocean, that's a very odd statement. Unless you're referring to the $50 billion of foreign aid per annum, but then that money is less than a tenth of what the US spends on the military - if you wanted to shift spending internally. I don't think the foreign aid is curtailing internal domestic spending, I think it's political ideologies. You guys could have vastly more accessible and available healthcare and social welfare if you so chose, but for political and ideological reasons, you choose not to. It does baffle me. I certainly agree with you that the US century has been good for many people across the world, and vastly preferable to the alternatives, but I see very little altruism in America's activies and very much realpolitik. However, it does help when the world's leading power with the most firepower also happens to be a nation where the individual is considered valuable, and freedom and democracy considered core traits, even if your own internal execution is somewhat lacking.
  - gonvaled 8y ago
    I roughly agree with this, but I have a slightly different perspective. You are basically saying: "it could be worse, so we should be happy". What I am saying is: "we could do much better, but the current course of action is bringing us to a much worse situation"
  - sheepmullet 8y ago
    > I see very little altruism in America's activies and very much realpolitik I wouldn’t call it realpolitik. I think a lot of the decisions are based around a mix of altruism and ideology. It’s hard to seperate the two. For example I would say Europeans and Americans have some fairly similar ideals overall. However, if something is bad for Europeans in the short term then they tend to avoid it. I’d say the only exception is on European integration where they are driven by ideology. > You guys could have vastly more accessible and available healthcare and social welfare if you so chose, but for political and ideological reasons, you choose not to. Could we though? And with what trade-offs? States have a lot of power in the US - so for example a state like California could implement its own single payer system and show the rest of the country how it is done.
EdwardDiego 8y ago
The American century has been vastly better for the world than the previous centuries of colonial European powers - you reference South America and Mesoamerica, well, the US have had far less of an impact than the Spanish and Portugese ever accomplished... and don't forget that the colonial Europeans created the country of Iraq, created the issues in the Levant (Balfour Declaration etc.) and also routinely fought and killed the Afghanis. To paraphrase Churchill - the American century is the worst form of global hegemony, except for all the others. Personally, I would much rather have lived my life under the purview of the USA than the Soviet Union or China, simply because, despite its excesses and hamfisted anticommunist coups, it is a country with values that consider the individual to be of value as a matter of course.
- gonvaled 8y ago
  The US has been better than the English / Spanish, right. But we are living in a different era: an era of enligntment, democracy and globalization, where multilateralism had a good chance to succeed. The crime of the US is not that it has been worse than the past empires: it is that is has killed, for good and for a long time to come, one of the rare chances that we had of creating a world community with strong international institutions, government by the strength of the law and not the law of the strong. For that reason you will not find much sympathy around the world.
  - EdwardDiego 8y ago
    I would argue that the US century was necessary to bring us to the place where your vision of a world community is even possible. It was the US that sheltered fragile Western Europe post WW2 from the Soviets and thus gave room for the EU to be born. I'm not sure how you'd envisage such a multilateral world developing naturally from the imperialist days of the Great Game.
    - gonvaled 8y ago
      Those were the days! That is the kind of leadership we would like from the US. Not only paying lip service, but leading by example: ceding power and transferring it, step by step, to international, independent bodies, as it happened when the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO were created (not that those are without political influence at the moment). That is the kind of US that we admire. But that US does sadly not exist anymore, and the world is awaking to that fact.

sheepmullet 8y ago

I’m not claiming the US is perfect. I’m asking what makes you think a more balanced world would have been better? > Inequality in your homeland is rampant. What you call American Empire is known also by Globalization, and it seems that is not very popular in the US right now. Yes. We believe the “American Empire” has been far too altruistic towards other nations and ignored its own people.... I don’t think that really helps your argument.

gonvaled 8y ago
> Yes. We believe the “American Empire” has been far too altruistic towards other nations and ignored its own people.... We believe that: 1) The US has been extremely egoistical, by more than making up for the losses it has endured on trade by manipulating the global economy through the use of its monopoly on the dollar. Also by plundering resources all around the world (see Irak war for example). 2) That the economic problems of the US are of its own making, by buying into the fantasy of the American dream and letting its politicians funnel all richess to the 1 percenters, while promising that the money will trickle down.
- EdwardDiego 8y ago
  > by manipulating the global economy through the use of its monopoly on the dollar If you believe that France, or Germany, or any other members of the EU wouldn't have done the same had their currency become the global default by dint of being the largest economy on the world, you're kidding yourself.
  - gonvaled 8y ago
    And they would have been justly critizized for that.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- sheepmullet 8y ago
  > We believe that: 1) In this context why does it matter what you believe? America doesn’t need your permission to fight for fairer trade deals. 2) I don’t think you understand Americans or our problems. A 10% increase in tax revenues by focusing on the uber-wealthy will not fix our structural problems.
  - gonvaled 8y ago
    > America doesn’t need your permission to fight for fairer trade deals. We know you do not need permission, and even when you pretend to get it (Irak war), you do it by blatantly lying. You will not sell to the world that your fight is fair though. > A 10% increase in tax revenues by focusing on the uber-wealthy will not fix our structural problems. Your structural problems are not our problem - that is, as long as you are being confrontational. The world can be convinced to be more sensitive to the US's issues if the US shows sensitivity for the world's issues. You want a fairer trade? Great! Let's do that. Let's eliminate at the same time the dollar as a huge distorting factor.
    - sheepmullet 8y ago
      > You will not sell to the world that your fight is fair though. I think you misunderstand the power imbalance. The world needs to convince the US that it is fighting unfairly. We spent over a trillion dollars on the Iraq war. We could handle a 1-2 trillion dollar trade war - who else can reliably say the same?
      - gonvaled 8y ago
        I would not be so sure about that. The reason why you are able to spend those huge amounts is because you are able to print the money while the world keeps on accepting it. The same imbalance that strengthens your hand on trade (the huge trade deficit that the US has), is a big weakness regarding the dollar: the fact that the world has accumulated and keeps accumulating dollars could prove a big problem for the US once we decide your policies must be retaliated with actual measures. For example, it does not make any sense for the EU to be unable to abide by a perfectly working international commitment (the agreement with Iran about non-proliferation, which has been positively audited internationally), just because we are unable to manage the flow of capitals when the US decides to block them. It would be in the interest of the EU to actively fight the prominence of the dollar.
EdwardDiego 8y ago
> Yes. We believe the “American Empire” has been far too altruistic towards other nations and ignored its own people.... You really think that the US has been too altruistic? From my perspective in the South Pacific ocean, that's a very odd statement. Unless you're referring to the $50 billion of foreign aid per annum, but then that money is less than a tenth of what the US spends on the military - if you wanted to shift spending internally. I don't think the foreign aid is curtailing internal domestic spending, I think it's political ideologies. You guys could have vastly more accessible and available healthcare and social welfare if you so chose, but for political and ideological reasons, you choose not to. It does baffle me. I certainly agree with you that the US century has been good for many people across the world, and vastly preferable to the alternatives, but I see very little altruism in America's activies and very much realpolitik. However, it does help when the world's leading power with the most firepower also happens to be a nation where the individual is considered valuable, and freedom and democracy considered core traits, even if your own internal execution is somewhat lacking.
- gonvaled 8y ago
  I roughly agree with this, but I have a slightly different perspective. You are basically saying: "it could be worse, so we should be happy". What I am saying is: "we could do much better, but the current course of action is bringing us to a much worse situation"
- sheepmullet 8y ago
  > I see very little altruism in America's activies and very much realpolitik I wouldn’t call it realpolitik. I think a lot of the decisions are based around a mix of altruism and ideology. It’s hard to seperate the two. For example I would say Europeans and Americans have some fairly similar ideals overall. However, if something is bad for Europeans in the short term then they tend to avoid it. I’d say the only exception is on European integration where they are driven by ideology. > You guys could have vastly more accessible and available healthcare and social welfare if you so chose, but for political and ideological reasons, you choose not to. Could we though? And with what trade-offs? States have a lot of power in the US - so for example a state like California could implement its own single payer system and show the rest of the country how it is done.

EdwardDiego 8y ago

The American century has been vastly better for the world than the previous centuries of colonial European powers - you reference South America and Mesoamerica, well, the US have had far less of an impact than the Spanish and Portugese ever accomplished... and don't forget that the colonial Europeans created the country of Iraq, created the issues in the Levant (Balfour Declaration etc.) and also routinely fought and killed the Afghanis. To paraphrase Churchill - the American century is the worst form of global hegemony, except for all the others. Personally, I would much rather have lived my life under the purview of the USA than the Soviet Union or China, simply because, despite its excesses and hamfisted anticommunist coups, it is a country with values that consider the individual to be of value as a matter of course.

gonvaled 8y ago
The US has been better than the English / Spanish, right. But we are living in a different era: an era of enligntment, democracy and globalization, where multilateralism had a good chance to succeed. The crime of the US is not that it has been worse than the past empires: it is that is has killed, for good and for a long time to come, one of the rare chances that we had of creating a world community with strong international institutions, government by the strength of the law and not the law of the strong. For that reason you will not find much sympathy around the world.
- EdwardDiego 8y ago
  I would argue that the US century was necessary to bring us to the place where your vision of a world community is even possible. It was the US that sheltered fragile Western Europe post WW2 from the Soviets and thus gave room for the EU to be born. I'm not sure how you'd envisage such a multilateral world developing naturally from the imperialist days of the Great Game.
  - gonvaled 8y ago
    Those were the days! That is the kind of leadership we would like from the US. Not only paying lip service, but leading by example: ceding power and transferring it, step by step, to international, independent bodies, as it happened when the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO were created (not that those are without political influence at the moment). That is the kind of US that we admire. But that US does sadly not exist anymore, and the world is awaking to that fact.