Down, down, down - in the ring of fire

I'm sure Johnny Cash didn't think about his own country when writing that tune, but it sure looks like "The Greatest Nation on Earth" is going down. I wrote about it last year, but now the signs are so obvious even highly respected magazines like Affärsvärlden blow it up on their cover (#42 -07) and journalists tell signs about it all over.

The dollar is falling. People are loosing the respect they used to have. After all, we're talking about a nation where

- 18.000 people die every year, because there is no public health care.
- The richest 1% owns as much as the poorest 46% (2004, 27% in 1979).
- Only 10% of the students at the best universities come from the poorest 50% of the population.
- China will pass the US as the biggest economy within 20 years (Goldman Sachs).
- History talks against this unipolar world order. Eg Asia used to be much mightier than today.
- More and more countries drop their currency's dependency on the dollar.
- The trade deficiency is 5% of GNP while the export is 10%. It will take a long time of a weak dollar to come to terms with this unbalance. At the same time they save only 2% of GNP.
- The infrastrucure is falling apart. I was myself driving on lousy roads last week. In a lousy car, made in the US... which brings me to the next subject:
- Many jobs are lost when they are moved overseas. They can't keep up with the competition.
- They don't care about minimum wage legislation, so of course they plummet in this environment. It is now so low there is no way to survive on it. Working at Wal-Mart you earn $7 an hour. And that's the biggest company of them all!
- Which is another problem - they don't know how to do things properly. No wonder no US cars are sold in Europe!
- Communication: They are falling behind hard when it comes to cellular phones or bandwidth (average speed 1,9 Mb/s, 7 in Canada, 61 in Japan).
- The stoack market of the US used to be 50% of the world's. It's down to 36% 2007.
- They waste their money on arms and war - tools of the past. 46% of the world's war money come from the US.
- Due to the never-ending need of cheap labour the stream of people from abroud (mostly Spanish-speaking) will not halt. It is estimated that Spanish might be the biggest language at the end of this century.



Still people are thinking "don't count them out, things go fast in the US". Yeah, it used to be like that. But with a nation that becomes more and more divided, I'm not sure that's still a fact...