Another Sabbath eve. I’m not going to commit to writing every Friday night, but the thought occurs that it might be good—If not for you, then for me—a way to reflect back on my week. If nothing else it’ll keep me at home.

Doom permeates the air wherever I go.

Our economy is headed down the tubes. Many Democrats think things are going to get better now that Obama has been elected into office. I don’t share their optimism.

A year or so ago, I picked up Chalmers Johnson’s book, Blowback. I read about half of it and then it got lost in a stack of partially finished books. Earlier this week I ran out of something to read and reopened the book. The last half could well have been taken from today’s newspaper.

Then I considered the fact that Blowback had been written before George W. Bush served a single day in the White House.

From the next to last chapter of the book:

This is not to say that all barefoot peoples of the world who might like to wear athletic shoes or all the relatively poor people who might be able to afford a television set or an automobile are satisfied. But for now they are too poor to be customers. The current overcapacity in East Asia has created intense competition among American and European multinational corporations. Their answer has been to lower costs by moving as much of their manufacturing as possible to places where skilled workers are paid very little. These poorly paid workers in places like Vietnam, Indonesia, and China cannot consume what they produce, while middle- and lower-class consumers back in the United States and Europe cannot buy much more either because their markets are saturated or their incomes are stagnant or falling. The underlying danger is a structural collapse of demand leading to recession and ultimately to something like the Great Depression. As the economic journalist William Greider has put it in his book One World, Ready or Not, ”Shipping high-wage jobs to low-wage economies has obvious, immediate economic benefits. But, roughly speaking, it also replaces high-wage consumers with low-wage ones. That exchange is debilitating for the entire system.” The only answer is to create new demand by paying poor people more for their work. But the political authorities capable of enacting and enforcing rules to enlarge demand could no do so even if they wanted to because “globalization” has placed the matter beyond their control.

In the last chapter titled The Consequences of Empire Johnson sums up the book, describing how America’s Imperialistic machinations have led to many of the ills we face today. And then he offers this advice (once again, written pre-9-11):

What is to be done? Were awareness of an impending crisis of empire to rise among American citizens and their leaders, then it would be fairly obvious what first steps should be taken: adjust to and support the emergence of China on the global scale; establish diplomatic relations with North Korea and withdraw ground forces from the Korean peninsula; pay the United States’ dues to the United Nations; support global economic diversity rather than globalization; extricate ourselves from our trade-for-military-bases with rich East Asian countries, even if they do not want to end them; reemphasize the “defense” in the Department of Defense and make its name fit its mission; unilaterally reduce our stockpile of nuclear warheads to a deterrent level and declare a no-first-use policy; sign and ratify the treaty banning land mines; and sign and ratify the treaty establishing an international criminal court.

More generally, he United States should seek to lead through diplomacy and example rather than though military force and economic bullying. Such an agenda is neither unrealistic nor revolutionary. It is appropriate for a post-Cold War world and for a United States that puts the welfare of its citizens ahead of the pretensions of its imperialists...

It took a long time for us to dig ourselves into this hole and it may take a long time to get back out. There are no guarantees that we will be able to do so.

As for Bush, why waste another word on the guy? We have work to do.