United Socialists of America

Who would've even begun to imagine, even a short six months ago that the United States of America would succumb to the kind of social malaise they've always scorned Canada for. Not likely, even with the most febrile imagination, to dream up a scenario even coming close to what the world has witnessed in the past few months. A country whose wealth and politics has evolved around a capitalist free-market system, one built on initiative, enterprise, and bold entrepreneurship would never twist itself inside out.

Government was government and business was its own reward. In some benighted countries governments might nationalize corporations, banks, agriculture, mineral and fossil fuels extraction and distribution, but not in the United States. Nothing remotely like it would ever be contemplated. This was the country of opportunities and government stand-back. Corporate interests must have free reign to do what they do best, and government interference - other than to guard against monopolies - went against the American grain.

What a pity it was that American trust in American virtues and verities, values and ethics, morals and social infrastructure has been betrayed. Who might ever have imagined that human greed and stupidity would evince themselves in such monumental proportions - and we aren't even talking about the kind of greed that would lead to criminal activity like embezzlement; just the entitlements, say, of bankers, using capital as though it were their own, and ordinary taxpayers not envisioning personal responsibility to their own debts.

Yet here we are, post financial collapse, with a population led to believe it is their state-given right to own a home, two cars, flat-screen televisions, on a low-wage service paycheque. Over-maximized credit cards, squeezed to pay the monthly mortgage, and it's all the fault of resourceful and conscienceless real estate marketers, and money-managers.

Executives who aren't embarrassed to receive huge bonuses on top of absurdly-elevated salaries while their mismanagement has managed to pound the value of the companies they represent into the ground, then come cap in hand for government bail-outs. Compounding their fiscal idiocy by taking those tax-payer hand-outs and lavishing themselves with additional personal embellishments to celebrate their executive positions.

Well, a government's gotta do what a government's gotta do. Beggar the economy for generations to come to own a stake in all those rescued corporations and financial institutions so integral to the wealth and stature and future of the economy and the nation. And a budget with all manner of goodies to hand around, while lifting the country out of its refusal to commit to further consumption, so factories can continue producing.

Universal medicare is finally on the way. A system in its end-result not entirely unlike the one in good practise in the neighbouring country to the north, and which system always elicited sneers of "socialized" medicine. A GDP-deflating deficit to result in a further build-up of an impossibly large debt, to be borne by generations to come. The country with the largest, wealthiest, most dynamic economy in the world finding itself indebted to China, the largest, most populous, fastest-emerging dynamo in the world.

It's utterly amazing that a self-assertive, proudly capable, intrinsically energetic and powerful economy like that of the United States could be set back on its heels so emphatically, taking the rest of the world with it. And that it could be transformed from rigidly conservative capitalism to tentatively socialist capitalism in one fell swoop.