Can't see anything in there that I really disagree with. Nice work!

Pendant: Jimmy Carter did have a US Navy vessel named after him - a "Seawolf"-class attack submarine. I wonder what symbolism one might draw from that, considering that as you've pointed out other presidents have aircraft carriers named after them... big loud and flashy types needing a metric ton of support to operate, versus a "run silent, run deep" practically invisible solo operator that can pop up where you least expect it?

Hard to say whether anything was meant by naming a small attack sub after Carter or not. They may have felt something had to be named for him, and not a garbage scow, but didn't want to bestow any major honour on him either.

Given his contribution to the downfall of the USSR, I suggest one of the next supercarriers be named for Mihail Gorbachev.

The TV sitcom "Michale's Navy" was briefly a favourite of mine.

Carter was a submarine captain. Might have to do with that.

Possibly. Carter may not have been a warhawk, but he never had anything against the Navy, nor the other way around so far as I know. And the "boomers" are named after States. I guess they couldn't name an attack sub after him either, since those are named for cities. Still seems a come-down, though.

The USS Jimmy Carter *is* an attack submarine; the Seawolf class was intended to replace the Los Angeles class. (It wasn't so much that attack subs were named after cities as that /class/ of them was, and for a long time it was our best attack sub class. Same with boomers; the Ohio-class subs are named for states, but the old Benjamin Franklin class were named for US historic figures.) Seawolfs are longer, faster, and quieter than the Los Angeles class.

They're also more expensive, which is why we only have three of them. They were replaced by the Virginia class attack subs, which cost less.

The Jimmy Carter is unique though; it's an *extra* hundred feet long because it has a special module for transporting and undersea launches of special forces groups and remote drones.

It's not an aircraft carrier, but it's not a slap in the face, either.

Sounds good then.

Carter wasn't a very effective president. I don't think he knew how to get things down in Washington, and nobody was willing to help. But I admire him for being one of the few heads of state I trusted to try to do the right thing.

Oddly, when he was running, I was against him -- I didn't believe a born again politician could be trusted in office. I'd be reluctant to try the experiment a second time. But Carter did good.

As many pundits have observed, Jimmy Carter is probably the best EX-president the U.S. has ever had.

And possibly Al Gore the best president ever elected who never served...

Some of my friends and I have an on-going discussion about who was the "greatest U.S. president" -- defined as the Chief Executive who did the least damage to the country while in office. Al Gore may just hold that honor, but largely due to an electoral technicality.

I contend that the greatest president was William Henry "Tippecanoe" Harrison, who had the good sense to die just 31 days after taking office (from pneumonia, contracted after giving the longest inaugural speech in U.S. history, in a cold, driving rain wearing neither a hat nor an overcoat). A man that stupid could certainly have done great damage to the country.

On the flip side, I'd argue that the worst president his U.S. history was probably Millard Fillmore. Even though he had a reputation as a "do nothing" president, it was that very penchant for inaction on several key issues -- primarily slavery -- that set the stage for the U.S. civil war.

Of course, certain very recent U.S. presidents are also in contention for the "worst" slot. ;)

Filmore bears a lot of blame for the Civil War that came, but it would probably have happened anyway. Another poor president was James Buchanan, who also did little to address the growing split in the nation.

I usually cite Jackson as a president who did the nation much more harm than good. By ending the Federal Bank he set the stage for the chronic shortage of cash the US suffered from for the next thirty years, allowing the proliferation of little banks and their worthless banknotes that nobody could trust. Without a decent amount of credit for business, the South was encouraged to stagnate. Jackson was also famous for defying states rights... except the one time the Indian nations claimed protection from the state, and Jackson let them twist in the wind rather than have the Federal government intervene. He only arroused himself, as I recall, when the Nations successfully sued in the Supreme Court, when Jackson defied their ruling. An impeachable offense in my opinion. He rode into the White House on a half-lie about the 1812-1815 war. (He won the battle, but the was already over.) I really don't know what good you can say about him, but he's been a favourite of U.S. History anyway.

Jackson is definitely up there (or "down there," as the case may be). I remember, in junior high school, I was once assigned to write a report about a U.S. president. I decided to pick Andrew Jackson because he was, as you said, a favorite of U.S. history. I knew little about him at the time before diving into my research. Suffice it to say, at the tender age of 12 I was thoroughly shocked and dismayed by what I discovered about the man.

The incidents you cite, above, were probably the least scandalous of his two terms. He enforced the brutal and racist Indian Removal Policy -- even against the tribe who helped him fight the British in Louisiana. His corruption was infamous; the "spoils system" was a term coined during his presidency. He was considered boorish, ill-tempered, a thug, and was reviled by the press -- but the public loved him. In many ways his administration was very similar to George W. Bush's. Perhaps the only significant difference was that Jackson actually had combat experience (even if his most famous battle was fought after the war had ended).

I wonder if it would be going too far to call him a murderer as well. I seem to recall he had killed a man in a duel. But that wasn't considered exceptional or criminal in his day. But its a mark against a man in my opinion. I have a similar distate for Nathan Bedford Forrest. Sheby Foote can barely restrain his praise for a common guerilla, who certainly had killed men in duels, and was a slave-dealer as well. What little genius he had in the saddle does not measure upagainst his iniquities. Though I gather than after founding the KKK he did have the good sense to realize it had gotten out of hand and disowned it. (Publically, at least. And whatever his original intentions for the KKK were, they could not have been honourable.)

Yep. Faving this; a good essay you have here, I'll comment again when I finish reading.

*Nods*

A good article. Something to note about the Chinese industrial capacity; while a lot of their industry is light industry or in textiles, their heavy industry is pretty substantial too, and their native mining and resource extraction is pretty robust as well. Most of their light industry could be converted to heavy if the Chinese really wanted it to be that way.

This puts an additional sinister option in place to follow behind the downfall of the US economy. without our money, they could take a perfectly reasonable Keynesian approach to dealing with all their extra industrial capacity and convert it into military production and take another swing at the imperialism thing. Disarming the world economy is even more important with this thought in mind.

Also regarding all the extra folks in the military in the south... they don't have to cool their heels even while the system is being dismantled. The situation of the continental US when it comes to basic infrastructure is appalling. Basic essential hardware is out of date, and maintenance has been getting kicked up the road for years, just look at the bridge collapse near Minneapolis a few years ago and the dire state of the GG bridge in San Francisco, or the levee failure in New Orleans. Instead of building bridges and power lines and water systems in Iraq and Afghanistan, we would do well to have those military boys building the same here.

Maybe it is time for another "New Deal" and a massive public works project like the WPA?

The Chinese could easily divert consumer capacity into a military buildup. If they do, the Russians will end up having to build up their own land forces, much to their dismay. An article I read about a year ago talked abut the American nightmare, that the Chinese would build a huge blue-water fleet. That's entirely possible too --Chinese boomers and supercarriers trying to elbow aside the US Pacific Fleet. One can only hope that Beijin sees no profit in this, only prestige, and doesn't bother.

The best outcome would be to scrap all the carriers, missiles, bombers, and subs, and put about 1/4 as much effort into exploring our solar system. I'd hate to see a Chinese flag on the moon (no doubt there would be a no-West zone for some considerable distance around it). But better that if it means no risk of war and thirty other nations busy chipping away at the ignorance about our own solar backyard.

A modern WPA is basically what any effective jobs bill would have to include; incentivizing anything will just slide the growth curve over time. That could speed up resolution of a normal business-cycle recession unemployment surge, but recovering from nearly 20% in U-6 will take something else, that represents a pretty fundamental failure in our economy. Some sort of WPA style effort to abort unemployment until incentives can take hold is probably necessary.

I don't think there is anything too fundamentally wrong with the "system" as it was between FDR and Reagan. Canada has not followed the US or Thatcher's lead and deregulated everything. In fact, we had a couple of bank scares in Western Canada in the 90's and started going in the other direction, refusing banks their mergers and other shady maneuvers. We also don't have anything like the military expenditures of the US. Consequently, the Canadian economy as emerged from the global meltdown as the soundest among the G20. The effects of the recession have been piddling by comparison with other countries, particularly the US. The main trouble we've had is that our trading partners have been hit bad, impacting the price of oil and cutting into our exports.

Not that the Canadian economy is any miracle. But I think it shows that the 1945-1980 model worked fairly well.

The biggest missing piece is frankly a tax curve that focuses people into the middle class. People sometimes forget that that's the real point of a highly progressive income tax; to flatten away the peak of the income curve by taxing it down, and reduce incentives for that extreme to exist. The (from a modern perspective) limited difference between the employee and the executive was one of the real driving forces behind the power of the american economy in that time span. The same effects led to the more fluid nature of politics in the US in that span.

A lot of everything else that we see is ultimately just symptoms of wildly broad income disparities; it's hard to have a real moderate consensus when people aren't seeing things from even remotely similar perspectives.

There is an interesting measure of this that I've had reson to mention before, called the GINA. (Wiki it if interested.) In brief, it's a measure of how wide the disparity of incomes in a country, the lower the number, the more narrow the extremes. Western European nations have GINAs around 30 to 36 as I recall. Canada at 34 was more or less similar. Mexico had a whopping 46, indicating massive disparity, and Haiti was almost off the map with something like 49. Guess where the US fell? 46, just like Mexico. And Americans habitually point to that country as the poster-boy of corruption and poverty!

There are other measures, too. CEOs in the US make average incomes that are huge multiples of the average wage-earner's -- I forget, but let's imagine 60 or thereabouts. In Europe and Japan its much lower -- let's say 15.

Most Americans appear totally blind to any of this -- or the higher standards of living for most people in places like France, Germany or Italy. It's as though they have lost the capacity to see through anything but the eyes they had in 1955.

That measure is exactly what I was thinking of regarding income disparity, yes.

The multiple for US CEO median income relative to employee CEO median income is a lot higher than 60, by the way. Like, at minimum five times higher. It was nearly 300, 5 years ago, and is certainly substantially higher now.

And when I said fundamental failure I mean that reversing that trend will take a generation to complete. Remember, U-6 was still high even when U-3 was low a few short years ago. Our service-industry economy has trouble sustaining itself because of all the low-value-added careers it has spawned. Fixing that feeds on education and educational prospects, which means real resolution is always years down the road even if a solution is implemented now.

Little chance the standard of eduction in much of the US (outside of elite institutions) can be raised until the Creationists, southern apologists, the religious right, the neocons and other vested interests can all be slapped down, and prevented from imposing their own prejudices and bans on teaching.

Step one is application of some national standards for curriculum. As much as I dislike it for union busting, so far that concept has been pretty central to Obama's plans for our educational future.

A facitious thought... send all school childrent to Canada for an education, except for the religious right/creationists, who can stay at home if they choose and learn how to be witch doctors and ignorant savages.

The only way to get rid of anti-intellectualism is to get rid of its root causes ("middle class" institutionalized relative poverty) and educate away as much of it as you can. Just ignoring the problem leaves it to spread, because it perpetuates itself.

I don't want anti-intellectualism to have control of American military might (again).

Speaking of anti-intellectualism (and related intellectual foot-dragging of all sorts), "Freethinkers, a History of American Secularism" by Susan Jacoby is extremely well worth your time reading. It ties together a lot of threads in American history, solves a few paradoxes, and shows how close the US came to being just another old world nation with a state religion right from the first. More intimidating has been the 100 year effort to see that the US does have a state religion soon. For the most part chuarches and the religious do no come out looking good, but not because of their beliefs... because of their consistent stand with the regressive and wrongful, then, when progress happens in spite of them, the lies the use to pretend to have been on the side of right all along,while denigrating those who actually fought the good fight.

Interesting read

I'm mostly in agreement as well. However, predicting where this will all go is challenging, at best.

One thing I will say is that the U.S. economy will collapse long before its imperial (mis)adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan come to and end. In fact, it may force the U.S. out long before the resistance does. Despite the trillions spent bailing out Wall Street and certain favored corporations, there has not been any measurable improvement in the U.S. economy or the unemployment rate. The system is teetering at the edge of another major downturn and could go over the edge if another real-estate bubble bursts (and there are a couple -- one in Europe and, apparently, one in China).

Another thing I'll note, too, is that the only way for a country like the U.S. to address its debt is either to raise taxes or print more money. Both have consequences that, among other things, could send the U.S. into another deep recession, or even a depression. Regardless, sooner or later the Chinese (and other U.S. debt holders) are going to want their money back, and as soon as they get wind of any shenanigans on the part of the U.S. (e.g., printing more money, messing with interest rates or, less likely, defaulting on payments) they'll start unloading that debt -- or worse, start divesting themselves of their holdings of actual U.S. currency (which, in the case of China, is pretty significant). That will be the "nuclear option" that could also collapse the U.S. economy.

As you observed, the U.S. and China are currently locked into an economic dance of death. That is a mitigating factor in all of the above. Which is why China is also looking to expand into other markets, especially in Asia.

Another thing few observers note -- China's "elephant in the room" -- are the ethnic tensions internally and on the periphery of the Heavenly Kingdom. We've already gotten a preview with recent uprisings among Tibetans and Uighurs. Toss in class conflicts among Han Chinese as a result of growing economic disparity and the classic rural/urban split, and the corruption endemic to the Chinese politics, and you have a recipe for social breakdown.