Who will save America from drowning in debt?
This article by Jeremy Warner is frightening. The scale of the impending calamity is summed up in the observation that “By the end of the decade, the annual [United States] interest bill alone will have reached $1 trillion, or more than a quarter of all current US federal spending.” Amazing and depressing in equal measure.
If you want to scare yourself with statistics, go to www.usdebtclock.org. This brilliantly conceived internet graphic engenders much the same feeling you get when watching the extortion of the meter in a London taxi; at some stage, you know you are going to have to get out and walk.
Amongst much else, what it shows is the real-time accumulation of US public debt. When I last looked, this was approaching $14.228 trillion, or around 100 per cent of GDP. Higher and higher, the big number goes. America is bankrupting itself as surely as Wilkins Micawber. So extreme is the country’s addiction to debt that if nothing is done, it will surely force the wholesale retreat from the New World’s century-old dominance of international economic and geopolitical affairs. Worse, the medicine required to correct the problem threatens to be so strong that it may force that same retreat in any case.
The Dark Side of Dubai - Johann Hari
Possible byline: The high price of progress in decadent Dubai.
I hope any society which builds its wealth on back of slave labour crashes, burns, falls into the ocean or is swallowed by the earth.
Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging.
The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history.
But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed’s smile. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new constructions – like the vast Atlantis hotel, a giant pink castle built in 1,000 days for $1.5bn on its own artificial island – where rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof. This Neverland was built on the Never-Never – and now the cracks are beginning to show. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun than Iceland in the desert.
Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.
