How they see us: Will the U.S. drag the world into a recession?

The world is waking up to the real America, said Hamid Omidi in Iran

The world is waking up to the real America, said Hamid Omidi in Iran’s Kayhan, and it isn’t pretty. Infrastructure is literally crumbling all over the U.S., with bridges collapsing into rivers and tunnels cracking. The federal government, wallowing under massive debt, can’t pay for the necessary repairs. So it has resorted to war, “pretending that there is a global crisis to dominate other countries’ resources and to sell weapons.” But while economic panic was behind America’s “stupid and ferocious behavior in Iraq,” it hasn’t helped the U.S. economy. Instead, the dollar is weakening and investors are fleeing to other currencies. America is in decay.

That’s an overstatement, but America’s economic weakness is now undeniable, said Dmitry Shlapentokh in China’s Asia Times. In a humiliating slap to the Americans, for instance, Iraq recently awarded its new utility contracts to companies from China instead of the U.S.—a clear acknowledgment that U.S. economic management has been “wasteful, corrupt, and inefficient.” The fact is, America can’t project power against its enemies through its military alone—it must also coax its allies with largesse. Yet as the dollar weakens from the fallout of the subprime mortgage scandal, “the U.S. has started to lose its major weapon: the checkbook.”

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