The public’s recent exposure to the exponential growth rate graphs of the pandemic may encourage them to reexamine other iconic graphs from the industrial revolution of the 18th century and “great acceleration” of the post-W.W. II era with a new eye.
These graphs portend a series of significant, precipitous drops in our collective material circumstances worldwide in the near future due to the evolution of specific economic, social, and political factors since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, ending both the Bretton Woods international monetary arrangement and the American Century (Luce 1941).
The rise and (eventual) fall of the dollar in a financialized American economy, the erosion of any collective sense of participation in American militarism since the end of the draft in 1973, and the evolution of national security strategy to unilateral preemptive war have all combined to create the present state of emergency in peak anthropocene, as we begin to confront the ecological limits of the prevailing ideologies of indefinite economic and population growth in very material ways.
The rise and (eventual) fall of the dollar
After the Bahamas achieved independence in 1973, the United Kingdom’s offshore financial services sector moved much of their activities to the Cayman Islands. The British Virgin Islands passed their model international business corporation laws in 1984. America became a net debtor nation in 1985. Since these developments, offshore incorporations and complex international corporate tax avoidance structures have proliferated. For example, one of the largest sources of direct investment in the People’s Republic of China is the British Virgin Islands. NAFTA (1994) and other free trade-investor rights deals were other major factors in the tremendous rise in foreign direct investment.
The market share for the two leading centers of the international financial services industry is New York at 19% and the United Kingdom and their offshore jurisdictions at 25%. If former British colonies such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, Cyprus and others are counted, the percentage of the market connected to the City of London rises to 40% (Oswald 2017). The financialization of the global economy and durability of the petrodollar enforce the crepuscule of the dollar’s reign as the international currency of reserve.
The United States public debt was over $22 trillion before the pandemic. According to the Congressional Budget Office, interest payments on the debt will increase from $325 billion in 2018 to $928 billion by 2029, making interest on the national debt the “fastest growing item in the budget over the next decade” (Committee 2019). These interest payments amounted to “$375 billion, or about 8 percent of the budget” in 2019 (Center 2020). Rarely discussed are the $122 trillion in unfunded liabilities like Social Security and Medicare (Adams 2019). While such legerdemain may help expand the bubble a bit more, the dollar can’t avoid inflation forever, perhaps even hyperinflation.
Important bilateral trade deals in local currencies and the basket of leading currencies in the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR) are important components of a gradual move by the international community away from the dollar. China ended the yuan’s peg to the dollar in 2005. The Federal Reserve System stopped tracking the M3 monetary aggregate in 2006. The yuan was added to the SDR basket and the size of China’s economy passed that of the United States (adjusted for purchasing power parity) in 2016.
Leadership within multilateral international institutions that it helped create was a powerful means Washington had of regulating the post-World War II international consensus. While America continues to devolve into predation as a rogue superpower, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, BRICS, and Shanghai Cooperation Association are just some of the many examples of the multilateralism that China is embracing and America is abandoning. America’s economic decline relative to China on the eve of a crisis of confidence in the dollar marks the death of the American empire in a later, less euphoric stage of capitalism.
American militarism and evolving national security strategies
Around the time the all-volunteer army began in 1973, K Street began the long process of capturing the federal government, with lobbyists in Washington growing from dozens to thousands in the decades to come. The defense industry practice of splitting up military procurement throughout numerous Congressional districts was another factor integral to the institutionalization of militarism.
Grenada was a “splendid little war” on trumped-up charges against a defenseless enemy to help America “get over” the Vietnam Syndrome. Beyond that, and with the disaster of the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, the political establishment was unsure of the military’s new role. The collapse of the Soviet Union briefly offered the prospect of demilitarization and a peace dividend. Gulf War 1.0 and Panama provided a momentary rationale for the continuation of the military. Drugs wasn’t quite fitting the bill as an adequate enemy. Neither did “humanitarian intervention.” Paul Wolfowitz’ Defense Planning Guidance (1992) provided the broad outlines of the ascendant national security theme of preemptive unilateral war near the end of the George H.W. Bush presidency.
Too aggressive to become public doctrine then, it was elaborated upon by Wolfowitz and the neoconservative A-team in the Project for a New American Century’s statement of principles (1997). Their “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” manifesto anticipated a “new Pearl Harbor” might be needed to achieve the desired “revolution in military affairs” (2000). By the time the Supreme Court appointed Bush president, the deep state was moving the final pieces in place to enable the selection of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism as the new enemy for the military-industrial-intelligence complex. 911 provided the “new Pearl Harbor” that enabled Dubya to implement this strategy of unilateral preemptive war with Afghanistan and Gulf War 2.0.
The currency of the ideology of The Enemy circulates in a symbolic economy of fear anchored not by gold but by an iconic image. The Cold War had the mushroom cloud. The GWOT has the World Trade Center towers. The televisual spectacle of 911 solidified the doctrine of preemptive war - this timeon an abstract noun – terror - as the new focal point of the permanent war. It established new standard operating procedures: kill lists, torture, and the assassination of senior government officials. What emerged was the rogue superpower (Blum 2005) of the third industrial revolution, information revolution, and digital age.
Absent any collective sense of involvement in the permanent war waged by an all-volunteer army, the primary function the military serves as a kind of magical totem that somehow defends the American lifestyle of manic consumerism, media overload, creature comforts, and gadgets even though it is never used for that purpose. To keep this magic totem adequately enchanted requires blood sacrifice and the breaking of things, overseas casualties the ultimate capitalist externality.
The Present State of Emergency
The present state of emergency can be construed in two different ways: a dangerous situation or a birth, something to fear and survive or the beginning of a new era. The pandemic and economic meltdown is just the first iteration of a series of global environmental, economic, and geopolitical shocks set to begin cascading down upon us this decade. Ever since the precariat began forming in the early 1970s, the social fabric has been dissolving, every significant safety valve responsive to collective pressure has been destroyed, and social atomization runs amok. There was a moment in the early 1970s when the American worker worked the least amount per week they would ever work. Since then, working hours and labor insecurity have increased and diseases of social misery like addiction have proliferated, The Great Society and New Deal coalitions are in tatters and the hard-won gains of these coalitions’ social movements are in dire jeopardy. Wealth and income disparities are at levels unseen since the Robber Baron era. The influence of money on politics continues to cripple representative democracy and consolidate oligarchy and kleptocratic corporate rule.
Peak Anthropocene
Fukuyama (1992) claimed that the collapse of the U.S.S.R. was the “end of history” because the liberal capitalist constitutional model for the nation-state had “won” the contest of history. Implicit in this model, however, is that the material consumption and massive human modification of the biosphere can continue indefinitely. As George H.W. Bush said at the 1992 Rio Summit: "our way of life is not negotiable.” Mathematically, this is clearly impossible, as the great acceleration graphs so ominously portend.
This way of life is a tense animation of the central existential malaise of modernity. “The underlying anxiety and disorientation that pervade modern societies in the face of a meaningless cosmos create both a collective psychic numbness and a desperate spiritual hunger, leading to an addictive, insatiable craving for ever more material goods to fill the inner emptiness and producing a manic techno-consumerism that cannibalizes the planet” (Tarnas 2006, 32-33). The alienation that fosters this lifestyle has not yet lifted.
Mainstream recognition of the ecological limits of indefinite economic and population growth began with Rachel Carson (1962) and the Club of Rome (1973). There has been no shortage of similar calls since then. A representative sampling might include Catton (1980), the first and second scientists’ warning on global warming (Union of Concerned Scientists 1992, Ripple et al 2017), Rees (2003), Suzuki (Rae 2018), and Thunberg (United Nations 2019). The common message of these Cassandras is that organized, large-scale human civilization is currently being impacted by a holistic, multi-faceted, anthropogenic ecological crisis that will continue to get worse unless human activity changes dramatically and quickly. The Rio Summit was a major moment of international scientific consensus as to the nature and scope of the problem. Since then, however, carbon emissions have risen considerably, to choose only the most obvious among dozens of categories diagnosing a sick planet, all of which are degenerating.
“Peak everything” (Heinberg 2007) builds upon the concepts of Hubbert’s Peak and peak oil by aligning the exponential inclines of the iconic charts of the great acceleration with the exploitation of non-renewable “resources” and massive human modification of the biosphere. The affluenza (deGraaf 1998) of the post W.W. II first world lifestyle has been based on the bubble economy of the Earth’s rape. While we should be radically redefining our relationship with other people and the planet, instead, over 500 new coal power plants are permitted or under construction worldwide.
The present crisis has laid bare the vicious, cruel, anti-planet, anti-future, anti-human foundations of neoliberalism for all to see. This makes it an ideal time to take stock and see if we want to adjust economic, social, and political arrangements to offer ourselves a sane and sustainable future for the people and the biosphere. The alternative would be to continue offering up voluntary servitude to an ever-intensifying transnational corporate kleptocracy built around social engineering in the subject-consumer-citizen a systematic, complete, ongoing, and preemptive capitulation to capital and the 0.01%. The mavens of this social engineering have found precisely how much of their basic well being that workers are willing to do without while still enabling the surplus value extraction machine that is their government and economy to continue functioning.
The domestic assumptions of the bipartisan Washington consensus are an insatiable appetite for ever more militarized police and ever more power and reach for the prison-industrial complex, carceral state, and surveillance state. What the United States visited upon the world’s resources and people as an empire, it visits upon its own people in the twilight of empire.
Endnotes
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Blum, W. (2000). Rogue state: A guide to the world's only superpower. Common Courage Press.
Carson, R. (1962). Silent spring. Houghton Mifflin.
Catton, W.R. (1980). Overshoot: The ecological basis of revolutionary change. University of Illinois Press.
Committee for a responsible federal budget. (2019, February 13). As debt rises, interest cost top $1 trillion.
Center on budget and policy priorities. (2020, April 9). Policy basics: Where do our federal tax dollars go?
de la Boetie, E. (1576). Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.
DeGraaf, J. (Director). (1998). Affluenza [video].
Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. Penguin.
Heinberg, R. (2007). Peak everything: Waking up to the century of declines. New Society Publishers.
Luce, H. (1941, February 17) The American century. Life.
Oswald, M. (Director). (2017). The spider’s web: Britain’s second empire [Video].
Meadow, D.H., Meadow, D.L., Randers, J., & Behren, W.W. (1972). The limits to growth. Universe Books.
Project for a New American Century. (1997). Statement of principles.
Project for a New American Century. (2000). Rebuilding America’s defenses: Strategy, forces, and resources for a new century.
Rae, K. (2018). Why it’s time to think about human extinction Dr. David Suzuki [video].
Rees, M. (2003). Our final hour: A scientist's warning. Basic Books.
Ripple, W.J., Wolf, C. Newsome, T.M., Galetti, M., Alamgir, M., Crist, E., Mahmoud, M.I., & Laurance, W.F. World scientists’ warning to humanity: A second notice. BioScience 67(12), 1026–1028.
Tarnas, R. (2006). Cosmos and psyche: Intimations of a new world view. Plume.
United Nations. (2019). Greta Thunberg (young climate activist) at the Climate Action Summit 2019 - official video [Video]. YouTube.
Union of Concerned Scientists. (1992). World scientists' warning to humanity.