So watt?

Why should we care that China is working on an electrical plant in Iraq instead of the U.S.?: (my bold)

Recently, the US media reported what seems to be a not very important event: China is among the countries that has received contracts for building electric power plants in Iraq. Still, close scrutiny of the event revealed a lot about the nature of not so much China's but the US's foreign policy and political system, and the real state of the US economy.

The very fact that China was invited to build power stations in Iraq looks like a rather surprising development. The point is that this should be done by the Americans, who not only have the expertise but - and this should be quite an important consideration - have allocated literally billions of dollars of taxpayer money for Iraqi "reconstruction", ie, providing the country with essential services, without which, as the George W Bush administration rightly asserts, a stable government is not possible. Still, after several years of work and all the billions spent, as one Iraqi official acknowledged, little has been done to provide even such essentials as electricity.

[snip]

During the Cold War era, the nations of Eastern Europe publicly proclaimed their desire for liberty as the major reason for their attachment to the US. Still, liberty was not the major attraction: the desire was for the American way of life - as it was visualized - and it was the life of economic plenty, a life where everything ran smoothly and efficiently and the American dollar was the king of currencies.

Still, as the experience of those who encounter Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other parts of the world reveal, these characteristics - efficiency and concern for results - have become more and more passe. American companies have behaved in extremely "non-American" ways; they immediately created several layers of highly paid but absolutely useless management, brought workers from abroad for exorbitant wages and spent on themselves all the "aid" money - presumably given to help the populace - and then departed with with little to show for their "expertise".

And this image of US management as wasteful, corrupt and inefficient, after years and billions of dollars spent, and unable not just to improve the life of ordinary people but even to return Iraq's basic services in many areas to a level existing even during Saddam Hussein's rule, has damaged the US's image much more than all the abuses of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. At the same time, however, the inefficiencies of the American economy are not just reflected in a change of the image of the US. The implication is much more serious.

It is true that the US continues to be one of the major economies of the world and has considerable financial resources. Still, as the dollar's value continues to fall against all major currencies (this in itself reflects the realities of America's economic health) and the US's debt continues to rise to astronomical levels, the ability of the US to maintain its imperial presence continues to erode.

It is not only that the weakening dollar makes maintaining the US global presence more and more burdensome but also that the US has fewer and fewer resources for providing substantial amounts of largess for its friends and satellites.

The US has started to lose its major weapon: the checkbook. And it is here that other nations who became "Americanized", ie, efficient and rich, have started to replace the US. And it is this that is indicated by what seems to be the trivial fact of replacing an American company by a Chinese one in building an electricity plant in Iraq.

When you run a bloated bureaucratic inefficient indifferent business.... people will actually notice and take their business elsewhere. Gee. How strange.

Guess they didn't cover that in Econ. 101 where you aren't supposed to cram your greedy cronies into government contract jobs and rip off the treasury, taking the money without doing the work, huh, Georgie?