All empires end. Ours will too one day.

but until that day arrives, it will be interesting hard times.

While I do believe we are on the wind down, due to a great many issues, mostly to do with colossal ignorance, it will take a long time for it to come to a complete stop.

I don't believe it will be a Soviet Union type collapse, as Dimitri Orlov describes. While the Soviet collapse had a massive effect on the Warsaw pact countries and their various satellites, it had very little effect upon the western nations and their NATO allies.

The US economy is so huge and so all encompassing, that it will be virtually impossible for a single nation in the world not to feel the effect in one way shape or form.

To paraphrase George Castanza, "we will be like an old man getting slowly into a hot bath". It's to the worlds benefit that we don't have a sudden collapse. They don't want to go down with us.

So to all of us who are paying attention, the various supports and props that are paraded out as "fixes" to this that or the other are merely there to delay the inevitable.

Can collapse be avoided if already set into motion? Maybe, but that is a very big maybe. What needs to be done is an massive investment into retrofitting society for a new reality. A society that has to do with a lot less. Not less productivity, not less happiness, just less of everything across the board.

Our over indulgence is what got us here. We have %5 of the population and use 25% of the earths resources.

And now when you have China and India wanting a similar (not the same) standard of living we enjoy, those additional resources have to come from somewhere. And when dealing with finite resources, something has to give.

There is a war going on. No, not the ones we know too well about. The war is one of economics. While China's economy is dwarfed by ours and certainly doesn't have the various safeguards that we enjoy, it still is growing at a rapid pace while ours is just about all but still.

We are losing that war. How? By shipping our industry oversees. By selling out the American public to the lowest bidder.

Once upon a time, the US economy and lifestyle was the envy of the world. Not because we bought crap and wasted everything, but because we had peace from coast to coast. People could earn a decent living and provide for their families. Could send their kids to college.

My dad worked for the Dept of Sanitation in NYC. My mom didn't work. He provided for our family and able to put 4 kids through college, retire very nicely, own a small cottage on a lake in Canada and leave my mom a nice tidy sum of money when he passed away.

Today? That is a fantasy written from whole cloth.

Single income household? Provide college education for your kids without loans? Own an additional house on a lake? Who are you? Rich?

Hell, no, my dad was a blue collar worker. A mechanic.

We have fallen so far and so deep down the republican hole of rhetoric in this nation, that what once was the norm is now looked upon as crazy impossible.

My dad had a great union job. He got the benefits of such from people like him who protested and demanded that the City of NYC treat its workers right. He also benefited from the millions of others who fought and died and protested for those same rights before him.

But what has the last 30 years brought us? We are told that Unions are evil. The majority of Americans believe the complete falsehood that "all unions are crooked", "all unions take money from you", etc.

Sadly, no one in this nation ever checks the source anymore, they take this statements at face value because this lie been pounded into their heads so relentlessly by the few corporations that control everything that they believe nothing else.

The slow and deliberate spiral of this nation is due to something very simple yet has incredible significance.

What is that one thing? The total and complete disregard for the people of this nation. Period.

Once we became labeled "consumers" we lost everything that went with being a citizen. The slow and deliberate whittling away of our rights.

They tell us to go "shopping" in times of despair as if we were some stereotyped 1950's tv housewife. How insulting is that? Not just to women, but to everyone!

We are told that government will solve the problems of security, but out of the same mouth we are told that government is the problem.

We tortured in the name of freedom but are able capture OBL without raising a hand to anyone for information.

We choose to zone out and tune into nightly propaganda to tell us the things we want to hear, not the things we need to know.

We are sliding down. A few of us are trying to snag a branch, a rock or an exposed root on the way down, but sadly, the further we descend, the slippery it gets.

It will be a long slide, it will take a long time, but not like Rome, which took about 300 years (depending on which historian you read). No, for the US, due to globalization, it will take about 100 years to complete.

All along the way, we will continue to give up more and more for our "safety", while budgets for defense will go up and programs for the poor go down. All in the name of "freedom and safety".

We are dying a death by 1000 cuts. Each cut, we bleed just a little bit. We shrug it off, but before you know it, we will have been bled dry.

Will we stand up to this madness? Will we say no more? Will we have had enough when we are scraping for potatoes to get us through another winter?

People will do a lot. Humans are amazing creatures. From the civilians at Leningrad who ate the glue on book bindings to live, to the people of the dust bowl who ate nothing but beens month after month to survive, to the Cambodians who lived through pol pot by drinking cows blood, we will go on.

However, a nation that doesn't listen to it's people can not survive.

It's really that simple.

The slow and deliberate spiral of this nation is due to something very simple yet has incredible significance.

What is that one thing? The total and complete disregard for the people of this nation. Period.

Once we became labeled "consumers" we lost everything that went with being a citizen. The slow and deliberate whittling away of our rights.

...all their calculations.

Which means, really, the only power they've (inadvertently) left us is... to stop consuming!

I just want to be able to feed and shelter everyone in the country and make sure they can get healthcare without having to forfeit the former.

after WWII. It grew and corrupted slowly into what we have today. I think you are right it will go back slowly unless something like oil depletion happens much faster than we are expecting.

we can really get that going. ;)

closer than we think.

The global ruling elite will still have all the wealth and power

They will move on to other places whenever they want - today, tomorrow, who knows? Hardly a class of nobles that empires typically possess.

Case in point:

During the oil embargo of the 1970s, I remember seeing a magazine cover that read, "Detroit Thinks Small." There was a drawing of a (then) small car. I thought, "It's about time!"

So throughout the 1970s smaller cars appeared on the nation's roads.

Then came the 1980s and Reaganism, and the cars got bigger and bigger. First there was the mini-van and I thought, "What happened to the 'small car'?" Then came the SUV, then the Monster pick-up, then the Monster SUV, and finally the Hummer. And I thought "WTF??!!!"

Somewhere along the way we decided on bigger cars and trucks without considering the effects on the environment and energy.

We were stupid but we were consumers...

Yup, way back in the 30's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevy_Suburban#1933.E2.80.931934

I was referring to one of these:



And, of course, the 1930s saw oil wars, climate change, oil embargoes, peak oil, and spiraling gasoline prices, right?

:hide:

and I still don't believe it. However, as I stated, if they government continues to igore the people of this nation, then collapse is inevitable. Happens with every single empire.

If you like going zero to 60 instead of discussing the topic like an adult, then you can count me out.

You may now have the last word, because, like most children who are unable to have adult conversations, you seem to require it.

I agree with you. First right to work, clean air act,Nafta, gat, help america vote act, patriot act, and quite a few acts that I missed.
I don't see it getting undone anytime soon, we need people in the streets to take back the country.

I have been hearing the demise of America for the last 40 years.. Still here.. still going strong..everything changes in time.. 150 years ago, the town I live in did not exist.. It was a vast prairies with Native cultures.. things change and morph ..

Except for the overstretched military, massive unemployment and debt, totally broken regulatory apparatus, rapidly rising energy costs, the loss of any sort of safety net, and the fact that a handful of billionaires now run the government, America is going GREAT! Our economy hasn't had any real growth in a decade, real wages have plateaued for 40 years, and both parties are talking about gutting the only popular things the governments does, but things are just super!

Seriously, how rich must you be to be blind to the degradation that we are experiencing. Do you not buy your own food or gas? Did you not spend months or even years recently unemployed like most of us have? Things are not OK. If we don't fix anything, we only guarantee that we will degrade further.

two vasty different things.

It's about the exercise of coercive power to force people to do what you want them to, regardless of how they feel about it.

Is THAT what you think the US should stand for?

I don't know, but it appears to me that you did not.

Since I did state, "The slow and deliberate spiral of this nation is due to something very simple yet has incredible significance.

What is that one thing? The total and complete disregard for the people of this nation. Period.

Once we became labeled "consumers" we lost everything that went with being a citizen. The slow and deliberate whittling away of our rights."

While I hate the concept of empire, the empire; which we are (like it or not), will fall if the government continues its disregard for it's people.

But there is the rub. We became an empire because it disregarded us. If it chose to pay attention to us and fear us, as any government "of the people" should, we wouldn't have become an empire.

Sorry to say it but now that corporate interests can tell employees who to vote for and spend unlimited amounts of money on campaigns, what happened in Wisconsin with the supreme court elections is gonna be just the tip of the iceberg.

I hope it takes no more than a few years to stop being empire and start being equal to everyone else. I hate empire. It needs to always go to war to maintain itself.