World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [121]
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Today, America sits on top of the global economy. As with the market-dominant Chinese in Southeast Asia, global marketization has intensified America’s breathtakingly disproportionate wealth and economic power. “Not so long ago,” writes Mort Zuckerman, editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report, “our preoccupation was with how America could prosper in a new era of global competition against a relentless Japan, a uniting Europe, and the Pacific Rim low-wage economies.” But in fact America emerged “triumphant in the new world economy.”
3 According to U.S. government statistics for 2000, despite concerns about economic slowdown and recession, the United States, with a GDP of $9 trillion, is “the largest and most technologically powerful economy in the world” as well as “the leading industrial power in the world.” Our exports in 2000 totaled $776 billion; this figure does not include the roughly $2 trillion worth of goods produced, assembled, and sold overseas by foreign affiliates of American companies.
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Needless to say, these blanket statistics hide enormous inequalities within the United States. In 1999, Bill Gates “owned as much as 40 percent of the American population put together,” writes Thomas Frank. Along with Gates, hundreds of thousands of American entrepreneurs, corporate managers, and just ordinary investors have become multimillionaires, even multibillionaires, practically overnight. Between 1979 and 1997, and adjusting for inflation, reports economist Paul Krugman, the income of families in the middle of the U.S. income distribution rose 9 percent, while the income of families in the top 1 percent rose 140 percent. Meanwhile, an estimated 60 million Americans have had to accept stagnant or even declining earnings in the 1990s and, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 34.5 million Americans (12.7 percent of the population) were officially poor in 1998. Drug addiction and violence continue to be looming problems in our inner cities. “Only the sadly impoverished and chaotic Russian Federation,” notes Edward Luttwak, “has as great a proportion of its citizens in prison as the affluent and well-governed United States . . .”
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None of these internal blots lessens America’s market dominance at the global level. The American dollar is the world’s dominant currency; even jihadis hold their assets in dollars. English is the world’s dominant language; globalization is making this increasingly so. American multinationals are the most powerful and visible in the world. It was fashionable for a while to describe multinationals as “citizens of the world,” beholden to no nation. But for most of the world today there is no question that Nike, Gap, Reebok, Starbucks, Ben & Jerry’s, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Disney, Levi Strauss, and Toys “” Us are American. It is precisely the American-ness of these brands that makes them irresistible to so many—and despicable to so many others.
American fast food is globally dominant. Enough has been written elsewhere about McDonald’s, but it’s also worth noting that Pizza Hut operates in 86 countries around the world, Kentucky Fried Chicken in 82, and Burger King in 58, including Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. American stock exchanges are globally dominant; this is true despite the explosion of new stock exchanges from Shanghai to the Ivory Coast. American media are market dominant: “Where once the BBC let nation speak unto nation,” a British columnist recently lamented, “now we are one world under CNN.”
6 Perhaps most important, American firms are utterly dominant in