Is Economic Freefall Next?

What the Bush Administration has proven beyond any shadow of doubt is that it lacks the ability to focus on more than on issue at a time. By investing all of its political capital and focus on not even its own war on terror, but instead on its war of choice in Iraq, the Bush Administration has placed ever other aspect of governing the United States on the back burner.

The United States government is being run by political hacks like Michael Brown, Julie Myers, the list is endless, who are in so far over their heads that it will take years to undo the damage done to the infrastructure of government agencies.

While this army of the incompetent bungles its way from disaster to disaster, President Bush rides on, oblivious to the disaster his presidency has become. Not just the major international disaster that is Iraq, or the incredible national disaster that Katrina has become, but through the daily litany of micro-disasters and the accumulated destruction by incompetence or inattention of virtually every agency of the federal government.

James Walcott comments on the real "clear and present danger" that faces America. It is a threat that could lead to the destruction of this country and the impoverishment or enslavement of our children's children. It is a threat that the Bush Administration has helped build through its inattention to the consequence of its tax and trade policies. Quoting economist Stephen Roach, Walcott points us in the true direction of danger:

"From Beijing to Dubai, there is a growing undercurrent of economic anti-Americanism. The irony of it all is truly extraordinary: The US has the greatest external deficit in the history of the world, and is now sending increasingly negative signals to two of its most generous providers of foreign capital -- China and the Middle East. The United States has been extraordinarily lucky to finance its massive current account deficit on extremely attractive terms. If its lenders now start to push back, those terms could change quickly -- with adverse consequences for the dollar, real long-term US interest rates, and overly indebted American consumers. The slope is getting slipperier, and Washington could care less."

While Bush allows his cronies to loot the treasury and runs up the national debt to numbers that are beyond comprehension, the rest of the world is waiting for us to fall.