Last year I reported
on Jeff Vail's analysis of México as a 'failing state'. The signs he
reported included the presence of independence groups (the Zapatistas)
who have just given up on the dysfunctional government, the collapse of
key economic resources (agriculture and oil), vast disparity of wealth,
cynicism about the purpose of voting and other democratic behaviours,
the use of 'manufactured' crises and fear to distract the people from
government incompetence and impotence, and the growing prominence of
organized crime and corruption.
These same signs are prevalent
in Belize, and I witnessed them all last week, since an election there
is on the horizon. It confirmed my sense that the nation-state has
largely outlived its usefulness and is on its last legs everywhere as
our unsustainable civilization nears its inevitable collapse. Outside
of Europe, which has problems of its own, the balanced-economy model
that allows both government and individual enterprise to each do what
they do best, seems to have been given up as hopelessly idealistic. And
that got me thinking about whether the US and Canada are likely to
follow México quite quickly into disintegration and anarchy as the central authority simply no longer offers enough to the people to warrant its continued support. Here are the ten reasons why this just might happen, and sooner than we think:
- Crushing debts and trade deficits:
Argentina a few years ago was the latest textbook example of what
happens when a country borrows vastly more money than it can ever hope
to repay. The US has the largest national debt and largest trade
deficit that the world has ever known, and both of these are still
growing at an alarming rate. Canada is arguably even less
self-sufficient than the US (when bad economic news is reported in the
US, the $US rises in value relative to the Canadian dollar, because of
Canada's total trade dependence on the US). Any collapse of the US
currency and hence the US economy (rated even by the conservative Davos
economists, last week, as the global threat with the highest
combination of probability and severity) will be immediately followed
by a similar collapse in Canada. It has just been far too easy for
Canada to extract and export its raw materials to the US, adding little
or no value to the natural wealth we inherited and are now stealing
from future generations, destroying our environment in the process.
- Poor service: You know your economy is in trouble when:
- It becomes cheaper to throw things out and replace them than to repair and maintain them
- It makes sense to sell you car and house and buy a new one because repair costs exceed depreciation
- Health care reaches the point that the majority resort to alternative medicine and self-care
- Infant
mortality is at third-world levels and the rates of chronic
environmentally-caused diseases are soaring past the point of
affordability to treat them
- People expect poor service both before and after they buy a product
- Public education has declined into a dysfunctional and expensive child care and unemployment deferral system.
- Lineups ('Queues'):
Long lines are a symptom of demand greatly outstripping
oligopoly-constrained supply, of systems that have grown too large to
function, and of production and distribution systems that belie the
myth of the 'efficient market'. Markets work when they respond to
public needs affordably. Today's North American markets increasingly
serve only the wants of the rich, and make the rest line up for
manufactured scarcity. Choice among poor quality, undifferentiated
Tweedledum and Tweedledee products is no choice at all -- it's just
oligopoly brand propaganda.
- Zero 'value-added' production:
Almost all of the cost of commercial breakfast cereal is advertising.
Most of the cost of 'brand name' jeans is the markup that the brand
owner applies without doing anything more than licensing the label to
the Chinese manufacturer, and hyping the brand. Most of the cost of
almost everything now is the exorbitant profit that shareholders and
obscenely overpaid executives demand for their oligopoly goods and
services, for virtually no value added. Oligopoly power and
intellectual property 'rights', bought inexpensively from, and enforced
by, compliant governments, prevents small and innovative competitors
from entering their markets. Nothing of value is done: labour is all
expended pushing paper, suing people, and trying to persuade people
that products are worth far more than they actually are.
- Soaring inequality of wealth:
The income disparity (Gini) index in the US, and increasingly in Canada
as well, is comparable to that in the world's most corrupt struggling
nations. Such wealth inequality can only be sustained by deliberate and
ruthless means -- theft, bribery, corruption, cheating, lying,
anti-competition conspiracy, relentless propaganda and suppression of
dissent. The poor are made to feel guilty and ashamed of their poverty,
their illness and their unemployment, when they should be angry.
- An economy dominated by (in)security:
Defense is now the #1 industry in the US (by a huge margin), and is
moving up fast in Canada. A sign of a failing state is one that spends
more protecting the property, security and interests of the rich than
it spends on the health, education and welfare of the mainstream
population. In most struggling nations, there is not enough money to do
both. In Canada and the US there is, but there is a growing expectation
that this will be short-lived. So those that already 'got theirs' are
obsessed with security, as it becomes increasingly clear that there
will soon not be enough of anything to go around, and as the inequality
of income and wealth is increasingly seen not as enterprising, but as egregious.
- Crumbling infrastructure:
The soaring cost to repair and replace decaying infrastructure -- water
and sewer systems, pipelines, utilities, roads, bridges, dikes,
communications etc. -- has reached trillions of dollars, and
governments and corporations have abandoned some of these and are
waiting until others reach crisis situations, far beyond their intended
useful lives. When the consequences of this negligence -- flooded
cities, chronic blackouts, poisoned wells, collapsed bridges, exhausted
reservoirs, ruptured pipelines -- wreak havoc, we are unlikely to have
the funds to fix them or the preparations to mitigate their effects.
- Spending beyond the means of repayment:
North Americans, encouraged by artificially low interest rates,
fraudulent credit card promotions, and the ability to charge consumer
purchases against their inflated home values, are now spending more
than they earn. It's not enough that none of the externalities -- the
cost of debt and waste and pollution we are pushing off on poorer
nations and future generations -- are 'counted' in our extravagant
spending. Now, even excluding these expenditures, our per capita net
worth (other than that of the tiny rich elite), is plummeting. We are
staggeringly vulnerable to a drop in housing values, or currency
values, or a spike in interest rates or commodity prices. And the
entire economy depends on increasing spending by already over-extended
citizens.
- Hugely unpopular governments and cynicism about the value of government:
In healthy nations, the role of governments as regulator in areas where
the 'private' sector cannot be expected to self-regulate, and as
investor in infrastructure and services in areas where corporations
lack the motivation or competence to provide it, is appreciated and
respected. Successful states have always been those that get the
public-private balance right. And while everyone is skeptical about
government, it usually only in failed states that that cynicism is so
deep that citizens have given up on government's ability to do anything
competently or honestly. We're moving quickly toward that stage in
Canada and the US.
- Rampant corruption: The
gerrymandering, crfiminally deceptive electioneering, pork-barreling
and overt bribery that prevails in the US, and that country's inability
to provide any assurance that its elections are free and fair and
reflect the will of the people, are astonishing to us Canadians. But I
fear we are not far behind. The ultra-conservative Harper
government now governs through US-style propaganda press releases, and
will no longer accept questions at press conferences unless there is a
pre-scripted 'talking points' response for them. Harper, like Bush,
believes he knows better than the voters what is good for them, and, to
the dismay of many of us, most Canadians seem acquiescent to this
arrogant style of government.
The answers are obvious, but
probably beyond the political will of our dumbed-down, disenfranchised,
propagandized electorates. Like other failed states, we will wait for
the collapse to occur before we act, belatedly and inadequately. Our
biggest challenge in North America will be that, unlike most struggling
nations, we lack the self-sufficiency to live without institutional
education, employers, technology, experts to do all the basic things
we've forgotten or never learned to do, doctors with their drugs,
packaged, imported foods, and cheap oil. The Long Emergency is coming, and we're the least prepared people in the world to cope with it.
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