America for sale: as our government careens toward bankruptcy, Americans are being dispossessed by the outsourcing of industrial jobs and the buyout of our infrastructure by foreign interests

New American, The, Sept 4, 2006 by William Norman Grigg

We begin with a parable: Driven to the streets after a run of relentless misfortune, a man took up station on a street corner holding a hand-lettered sign stating: "Will work for food."

Most pedestrians and motorists passed the desperate man without so much as a second's worth of thought. One exception was a well-dressed businessman, who read the sign while waiting for the street light to change. But burdened by thoughts of his own concerns, the businessman gave in to a moment of imprudent sarcasm.

"You 'work for food'? I work for Visa!" he exclaimed to the sign-bearing man. "I'm working for food I ate years ago!" After getting the green light, the businessman launched one last unworthy gibe:

"You're not broke--you're even!"

The homeless man eventually found a steady job paying just enough for him to get by and save a little money. His employer, a large and amoral conglomerate paying most of its employees subsistence wages, used its workers' savings (which the conglomerate controls) to make loans to spendthrifts' like the heavily leveraged businessman--people who continued to live well beyond their means by stretching their credit lines well past the breaking point. At the same time, the conglomerate quietly used its' expanding financial holdings to buy up practically everything in sight.

Eventually, the loans were called in, the debtors were unable to pay, and the businessman found himself--along with many of his fellow spendthrifts--working for that same predatory conglomerate. His earnings and standard of living were "harmonized downward" to those of the homeless man whose plight he had once mocked.

Adapted from a stand-up routine broadcast on Comedy Central about a decade ago, this parable is not intended to inspire mockery of the homeless or other unfortunate people. It's intended to encourage a realistic appraisal of our national economic condition. Think of the homeless man as symbolizing the poor but industrious Chinese population, willing and eager to work for a fraction of what Americans earn, and the businessman as a stand-in for an American population whose prosperity is largely a debt-enhanced illusion.

The conglomerate, of course, is the entity upon which our nation and our government have become increasingly dependent to underwrite that pseudo-prosperity: the Communist Chinese regime, which is rapidly acquiring the means quite literally to buy our country out from underneath us.

Indeed, the process of selling off public assets to foreign interests is already underway.

In June, for example, a Spanish-Australian conglomerate paid $3.8 billion to lease the Indiana Toll Road. Transfer of electronic tolling equipment began in August, and by fall it is expected that the new foreign owners will be collecting tolls once paid by Indiana residents to their own state government. And similar deals are being struck by states and municipalities across the country.

"Roads and bridges built by U.S. taxpayers are starting to be sold off, and so far foreign-owned companies are doing the buying," reported the Associated Press on July 15. At present the main foreign players in these deals are companies based in Australia and Spain. But as China accumulates ever-increasing quantities of depreciating dollars, it will start looking for tangible goods in which to invest those dollars. And as we will see, some analysts in this country are suggesting that we should welcome Chinese "direct investment" in our country as a way of closing our imponderably huge "fiscal gap."

Beijing Buyout

"Without Chinese support, the dollar would have already collapsed, bond yields would have soared, and the U.S. economy would already be in a recession, if not a depression," observe Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin in their study Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis. "Where does the money come from? The Chinese get the dead presidents from selling products to live Americans, who seem ready to consume anything that comes their way. First, the dollars come rolling off U.S. printing presses, then they make their way into the hands of Chinese and other manufacturers, and finally, they are returned to their birthplace as loans. China is fast becoming America's 'company store,' to whom we owe our standard of living and maybe even our soul."

By accumulating hundreds of billions of dollars in their foreign-exchange holdings, the Chinese are acquiring the power to define our nation's economic destiny. At some point, perhaps very soon, Beijing will have the ability to decimate our currency by selling off its dollar-denominated bonds. But this would inflict severe damage on China's economy as well, making that option the economic equivalent of a suicide-bomb attack.

A better approach, from Beijing's perspective, would be to take its huge and expanding supply of depreciating dollars and invest them in tangible productive assets. In recent years, China has been following that approach in the Western Hemisphere. During his 2005 tour of Latin America, President Hu Jintao inked lucrative energy and resource deals with Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela. In January, China completed a deal with Canada for joint development of Alberta's uranium mines and oil sands.