It is extraordinary to be sitting in the United States in amidst these cathartic shenanigans on Capitol Hill.

(The figures Grief and History on the Peace Monument, near the US Capitol building, Washington. Image: Getty)

They talk about it on the beach here, in the supermarket and in Moby Dick’s seafood restaurant.

For whilst it is about debt, finance and economics…it is actually about none of them. It is about America. It is also, in a strange way, about us.

The US is vastly over spent, and over spending: hundreds of billions of dollars on the longest wars in modern history; a manufacturing base that has been exported to Asia, and a tax system that enables the rich to get richer, whilst more or less everyone else gets poorer.

It has always been easy for a Brit to sneer at America. We have needed to, to offset our own decline. But now we need to grow up and recognise that our “closest ally”, from whom we remain distanced by our common tongue, is in the deepest trouble most of us alive have ever known.

When I lived and reported from here in 1980′s, I sensed America had reached its Reaganesque peak.

Today, despite being the world’s largest economy, she is in decline. A decline accentuated by China and Asia
Sure, there is growth here – better than ours – but there is a withering too.

It is a withering of hope and aspiration – the very ideals Obama came to power espousing.  To read the papers, to watch the telly, this magnificent, accomplished – if sometimes misled nation – is psychologically on the floor.

Of course if you wander down Fifth Avenue in New York, it is buzzing.

The little village store here on Cape Cod is buzzing every evening, heaving with families buying for today. The morrow is another place.

High economic crisis, low politics. The immigration officer at Logan airport told me, as he inspected my finger prints – “Those guys in Washington? Scum!”.

So you get the Tea Party that doesn’t believe in tax and much else. Life does not divide into Republicans and Democrats. Just as it has long since ceased to divide into Tory and Labour.

Political tribal loyalty is all but dead. Individuals want individual answers to individual problems. God, political or otherwise, will not provide – even if some in the Tea Party think he/she will. Communities want community answers to community problems.

We landed up with a Coalition. But we are stuck with a Westminster which hasn’t seen radical reform in more than a century. Despite its enviable Constitution, “we the People”, presents a fossilised Congress that we have seen ‘in action’ in these present days.

We worry about democracy-free China. Shall we start worrying about democracy itself?

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 These are eerie days. I am no economist, no banking expert, but the stirrings of insecurity seem to be with us again.

Spain is in the frame again…stress testing her banks seems not to have been a particularly reassuring experience.

France has added a couple of years to her retirement age to cope with her own burgeoning economic difficulties.

I am meeting too many people who seem to understand these things and who think we are headed for another catastrophe.

They talk of Spain requiring a bail out. They talk of Greece headed for eventual total collapse and exit from the Euro – irrespective of their remedial actions.

Above all, I am hearing the phrase ‘the Banks are back to their old ways – nothing has changed.’ I am beginning to fear they are right.

Is this a ‘double dip’ I see before me? Emergency Budget Day – next Tuesday here in the UK assumes an ever larger and more draconian form.

Has global finance run out beyond the control of any national or global system of control?

Again?