Submitted by ButtCracker —
Empires die. Some abruptly, by cataclysmic defeat and destruction; most in stages, over years, decades. Our own meltdown–early in the fantasized “New American Century”–will not be exceptional… unlike our arrogance.
When human injury results in coma, a victim is assessed on the Glasgow Coma Scale. Eye function, and sound and motion capability, indicate if death is imminent or not.
Empires’ ends are unpredictable, but three criteria seem determinant: military overreach, state insolvency, and economic inequity.
Our overreach is obvious, ridiculous, and inalterable: our criminal economy demands it. America attacks, invades, and destroys so our murderous war machine can engorge itself on wealth extracted from our own blood and marrow.
Our State–absolutely insolvent, existing on loans–runs a giant shell game using keystroke fiat money on nations so gigantically bankrupt, so utterly captive, that they have to accept the wildly bogus dollar’s value or crash and burn.
Economic inequity is at a level unmatched in any empire since Ninevah and all financial levers work to increase it.
So then, for America, is it all over but the shouting?
Or can this absurdly precarious condition continue? It probably can, until a Black Swan event roars out of the dark and sweeps the whole moribund structure away.
So, a clumsily provoked war, perhaps, against a real adversary, not one of the tiny, poor, primitive “enemies” that routinely stalemate our glitzy war machine. Or a category 5 typhoon of 200 trillion in derivatives that blows Wall Street’s house down? A “people’s revolution”..? Nah.
The unique feature of our Empire may be the stunning contrast between its ponderous material might and the imbecility of its human owners. Wherever one looks in the stratosphere of American authority, instead of wisdom and probity there is rabid vacuity or what-me-worry bufoonery.
Our President is the incarnation of infantile autism. His Braindead Trust of dotty warlords are brass boobs with the intellectual acuity of ventriloquists’ dummies. His cabinet is a looney gaggle of retro clowns and Snerd goofuses, embarrassing even to that stumblebum Congress of sociopathic criminals and defectives that confirmed them.
And the Goldberg Machine of US Empire churns on. And so it goes, as Vonnegut said. In his view humans were put on earth to fart around, and this seems certain in our case.
But listen! The sound you hear behind the idiocy of official fake news is the tectonic rumble of imperial earthquake.
Oct 2 2017, Paul Edwards, CounterPunch