The end of the American dream

Lewis H. Lapham's article "Estate Sale," in the May 2008 issue of Harper's is a definitive expose of how the American dream is ending - not with a bang, but with a whimper as a First World Country slides slowly into Third World status.

Mr. Lapham begins: "Not being expert at the interpretation of economic data, I'm never sure which leading indicators point in which direction, but when every morning's newspaper offers a further proof of the bankrupt American dream, I'm prepared to believe that somewhere near at hand there is a piper waiting to be paid."

What he reads in the papers is this: "informed financial opinion ... bearing witness of the pride that goeth before a fall, generating the portents of doom--the American dollar sinking to record lows against the euro, the capital and credit markets reduced to a state of paralysis, hedge funds vanishing into clouds of blown-back smoke, home mortgages abandoned in the Arizona desert, banks drowned in pools of toxic debt, yet another American corporate sweetheart (department store, hotel chain, record label) sold to a syndicate of Chinese communists or into the seraglio of an Arab emir.

"When the appalled bystanders find themselves momentarily at a loss for words, they move downstage and run the numbers. The national debt pegged at $9.4 trillion (up from $6.4 trillion in 2003), running expenses of $16 billion a month for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (the eventual cost projected at more than $3 trillion); $4 trillion borrowed since 2002 using homes as collateral, the value of American real estate diminished by $1 trillion in a matter of months; losses of $600 billion to be incurred by investors holding debt instruments backed by specious credit. American assets in the amount of $414 billion sold to foreign buyers in 2007, the Federal Reserve on March 11, 2008, cleansing the wounds of the New York banks with $200 billion in liquidity and then, a few days later, allotting $30 billion for the salvage of Bear Stearns. ..."

It is no wonder that "Our creditors in Europe, Asia, and the Persian Gulf (from whom we currently borrow $2 billion a day to export the blessings of democracy to Iraq) begin to suspect that the American modus operandi doesn't lend itself to the trustworthy management of global empire. ... "

It has come to the selling of the United States. "Except for a few fragments of homeland defense (weapons-grade uranium, the runways at Ronald Reagan National Airport) nearly everything in the American estate sale (shopping malls, universities, telephone companies, movie studios) could be sold to almost any buyer whose name the lawyers knew how to spell. ... "

But being a third-world country won't be so bad, says Lapham, to comfort us. "Third World countries are by no means as unpleasant or as dangerous as they can be made to seem by the editorial writers at the New York Times.

"The United States has been ridding itself of its First World status for as long as it has been privatizing its critical infrastructure (a.k.a. the common good), at the same time despoiling the natural resource embodied in the health, welfare, courage, and intelligence of its citizenry. Over the past eight years, under the absentee landlord economic policies of the Bush Administration, the stepped-up rate of disinvestment has resulted in... Third World confusion and mismanagement... "

And, we can be certain, counsels Mr. Lapham, that "advanced industrial nations" and "the bankers in Hong Kong and Mumbai [will] expect sincere proofs of 'accountability' as well as earnest attempts to strengthen the currency and occasional repayments of outstanding debt."

To cite another, ancient, cliche, the party's over.

There may be a way out, though, as Mr. Lapham has already, with tongue in cheek, hinted. We merely "recast the United States as a developing nation," thus "Our liabilities become assets." That would carry the "excitements of an emerging market." Foreign investors wouldn't know what anything was worth--"how much oil is under the sand in Utah, if the chinook salmon will return to the Sacramento River, who holds the mortgage on the Brooklyn Bridge ..."

And that would mean that "foreign money [could] be counted upon to assign value to commodities that the natives believe to be worthless ... it's conceivable that the Arab sovereign wealth funds might wish to collect, as rare specimens of an exotic breed, ornamental American CEOs prized for their capacity to turn gold into lead. Priceless objects unavailable for purchase with MasterCard, capitalist action figures embodying the treasure of the Christian West, to be as proudly displayed as the peacocks in the gardens of Doha and Riyadh."

(Lapham, Lewis H., "Notebook: Estate Sale," Harper's, May 2008, pp. 9-12)