Since the world is connected at the hip to the US should not the EU and britain etcetera do a little analysis of what would happen to them if america does crap out like that?
Will they crumble when the US has some downtime? will internet still work if the US is bereft of electrical power? It was designed for redundancy but then later many geniuses started to make much of it dependant on some single key setups that have no redundancy I understand, and what about wall street? can we do without it for a few weeks? We should, but can we?
Plus the UN is located in america too for instance.

In fact, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commision (FERC) has written a substantial set of documents to address "Critical Cyber Assets" within the U.S. power grid.

In a nutshell, the standard requires that any computer equipment connected to critical electrical components and capable of routable electronic communication be on a seperate network and are not allowed to access the Internet. There are also substantial self-audit, testing, and logging requirements.

Audits begin this summer and will be ongoing.

P.S. this is also a result of 9/11 and the N.E. power blackouts of a couple years back.

another frightener hacked together in a couple of days and thrown in front of Congress by the DHS in an effort to justify additional funding to an already bloated, unregulated and ineffective department.

The DHS motto is "Preserving our Freedoms, Protecting America" - yeah right, just ask the people who work there what they really think:
http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/national_world&id=5017688