News Discussion Project Name of Article: “Maybe U.S. needs yard sale”

• Main Authors: Eric Margolis (the Edmonton Sun, John Zagar
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.672.4322; http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/cjfy/article/download/6095/5169/

The Edmonton Sun newspaper recently carried an interesting article entitled “Maybe U.S. needs yard sale ” written by Eric Margolis. In Eric Margolis’s article, he talks about the recent financial crisis devastating the Unites States of America’s (US) economy, along with much of the other global economies as well (Margolis, 2008). The current economic situation has been blamed on the tendency of certain banks to lend out loans (at low interest rates) to individuals and corporations who do not have the funds to payback those loans. This mistake has occurred in nation-states such as the United States, and Iceland. However, Eric Margolis article is not about the causes of the current economic crisis per se, but rather on the irony of the whole situation facing the United States as a consequence of their belief in neo-liberalism and their treatment of other nation-states. However, first we will look at the specific article. Eric Margolis first describes how the last superpower, which was The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Great Britain), went bankrupt shortly after, and possibly due to World War Two, and that since then the United States has been the world’s single superpower. It is worth noting that for a brief time the former Soviet Union was also a world superpower (from the end of World War Two, until 1991), but Eric Margolis fails to mention this fact in his article (Steger, 2003: 40). The article goes on to say that despite the attempted bailout of $700 million dollars, the U.S. economy still had a $1-trillion deficit, and the potential of inflation was always ever present. The article then shifts its focus to the world economy as a whole. First turning its attention to the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. has paid Pakistani politicians an annual rate of $1.2 billion to