The American Empire is in decline. Chris Hedges writes that the signs of decay are everywhere:
The U.S. economy is being drained by wars in the Middle East and vast military expansion around the globe. It is burdened by growing deficits, along with the devastating effects of deindustrialization and global trade agreements. Our democracy has been captured and destroyed by corporations that steadily demand more tax cuts, more deregulation and impunity from prosecution for massive acts of financial fraud, all the while looting trillions from the U.S. treasury in the form of bailouts. The nation has lost the power and respect needed to induce allies in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa to do its bidding. Add to this the mounting destruction caused by climate change and you have a recipe for an emerging dystopia. Overseeing this descent at the highest levels of the federal and state governments is a motley collection of imbeciles, con artists, thieves, opportunists and warmongering generals.
And, as with all empires, the end will come quickly. Hedges quotes Alfred W. McCoy:
“The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines,” McCoy writes. “Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit—witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe.”
Most Americans -- and, most importantly, the current president -- are clueless about what is happening. They huff and puff in collective self delusion as their future gets darker:
For the majority of Americans, the 2020s will likely be remembered as a demoralizing decade of rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading international competitiveness,” McCoy writes. The loss of the dollar as the global reserve currency will see the U.S. unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds, which will be drastically devalued at that point. There will be a massive rise in the cost of imports. Unemployment will explode. Domestic clashes over what McCoy calls “insubstantial issues” will fuel a dangerous hypernationalism that could morph into an American fascism.
This is the way their world ends.
Image: wwwviralthread.com
10 comments:
not to mention the boomer retirement that is mostly unfunded.(stolen)
Things are going to get tough, Steve.
2020s? All that stuff is happening now.
Cap
True, Cap. I think Hedges is implying that you ain't seen nothin' yet.
I can't challenge McCoy's predictions, Owen, but I am a bit skeptical about the context. The United States does not stand alone, no nation does in today's tightly integrated global economy, and, while the US probably faces some major dislocative threats, so do many countries in almost every corner of our world.
For example, we're all living in late or terminal-stage neoliberalism. Our leaders may still pretend the pursuit of perpetual, exponential growth is a viable policy objective but obviously it's not. They're seeking a goal they cannot possibly achieve. Yet their persistence, their failure of vision, their refusal to even attempt to chart a new course, probably dooms us all to some degree of collapse. These events are seismic and they're not contained within national borders. Triggers? There are plenty of possibilities: climate change and severe weather events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration; the rise of failed states and the decline of the Westphalian nation state; mass migrations out of lands that can no longer support their indigenous populations; resource shortages and resource wars; nuclear proliferation; all and any of the above. Our leaders are doing nothing to avert or even deflect any of these perils. They're not even trying.
Collapse will probably be global but it won't be uniform. Some nations, these days primarily due to their latitude, will be less devastated than others. That may become as much a curse as a blessing, we shall have to wait and see.
I agree that the United States is not the only nation facing Collapse, Mound. Unfortunately, the people living in the Third World will get the shortest of the short end of things -- just as they did during economic boom times.
Let's not overlook what is happening deep inside the social fabric of the USA: the decay of the very stuff of a nation - the human glue that holds it together, the identification of Americans with one another as a people. Increasingly, they are identifying so strongly with lesser groups within their country that they are going out of the way to brand themselves as loyal members of those groups. A genuine Republican is be on the Right, always on the Right, always opposed to Democrats and what they stand for; a real Democrat is always on the Left, always opposed to Republicans. The two groups are expected to be at loggerheads on the opposite ends of a continuum of values and attitudes and beliefs about virtually everything from religion to social mores to gun control.
Perhaps the inclination to identify oneself as a member of a group is based on a human need to feel part of something greater than oneself. If, for example, you are a member of the NRA and want to be considered a committed member, you will, branding yourself, agree with the NRA president's recent proclamation that the NRA is against athletes protesting during the national anthem; committing yourself further, you will support his proclamation by your actions. In many cases the inclination to belong leads to something good. But in this case, probably not - not if you don't like the idea of enlarging the NRA's influence to the extent that it is given a voice beyond its advocacy of the US 2nd Amendment, perhaps giving it more influence than it already enjoys.
Because Trump is playing identity politics, he is encouraging Americans to "brand" themselves by proudly defending the interests of their group against another group's, worsening long-time American divisions and melting the nation's glue. Along with the other indicators of that country's decline, this one does not bode good either.
CD
I agree, CD. None of things bode well for the future. The United States is devolving from a nation into a collection of tribes. The end result is that they have no common interests but a great many individual enemies.
The ultimate perpetual, exponential growth scheme may be large families. So frequently, where we see famine we see populations that have drastically outstripped their supply of food, shelter and everything worth living for. In the past, mass migrations have solved much of the population crunch. Now we need another habitable planet and cheap, easy transportation to it.
That goal appears to be a long way off, Toby.
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