"Degenerate, Delusional and Senile"
Is the sun setting on the mighty American Empire?
by Bill Bonner
Youghal, Ireland - "We try to keep our distance from politics. But like a bully in a barroom, politics shimmies up close to us anyway. We smell the liquor on its breath.
Inflation is fundamentally a matter of government policy. Politicians want more money than they can get from taxing and borrowing. Usually, they need it to pay for expensive and unproductive programs, such as land redistribution (Zimbabwe), bribing the voters (Argentina), or war (Germany). Always and everywhere, it is a way of ripping off the many for the benefit of a few.
And it is not entirely unpredictable. There are patterns to markets and to history. In markets, the Primary Trend sets a course that can continue for many decades, no matter what happens in the daily news. The interest rate cycle, for example, can last a lifetime. Interest rates hit record lows after WWII. They rose…and didn’t return to an ultimate low again until 2020 – more than 7 decades later.
A Familiar Pattern: In politics, one of the most powerful trends is the arc of empire – from an earnest, dynamic and humble beginning (the US in the 19th century)... to a powerful, proud, admired hegemon (the US in the 20th century)….to a degenerate, and largely delusional, senility ( the US in the 21st century) – the pattern is familiar; it seems ‘natural.’
On a still-larger scale, the polished glory of the whole English-speaking world…from the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 to its own defeat in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan five centuries later…is now turning gray. The British ruled the waves in the 19th century. America took the lead after WWI and ruled the 20th. But now, US sanctions are said to affect a third of the human race – with little effect. For all the press bluster to the contrary, the Russians appear to be winning their war in the Ukraine. France has announced that it may be going its own way. The Japanese are re-arming. China is beginning to play a larger and larger role. The BRICs are developing their own reserve currency... while asserting their independence. The English speakers’ prestige, power and wealth – relative to the rest of the world – are clearly waning.
Almost 20 years ago, when we wrote our ‘Empire of Debt’ book, with Addison Wiggin, we saw the writing on the wall. The US conquered. But it couldn’t win. It could destroy foreign governments…but it couldn’t build a democracy. It spent money to run its empire…now nearly $1.5 trillion/year…but it had no revenue to pay for it. The gist of our argument, then….and now: This is not going to end well.
Barbarians Inside the Gate: Turning to contemporary politics…what is perhaps most remarkable is that there is so little opposition to the program that is most likely to ruin us. The US has no enemies that it didn’t create itself. Russia is not going to invade Alaska. Canada is not going to send mounties to take control of Minnesota. China is not preparing an attack on California. And Mexicans are very unlikely to march into Houston.
Still, trillions of dollars are spent on ‘national security.’ And in the debt ceiling brouhaha nobody in Congress even suggested the obvious solution: cut a few hundred billion out of the empire budget. Instead, both parties agreed to exempt the Pentagon and its suppliers from any reductions.
The last US presidents to rock the boat at all were Eisenhower and Kennedy, more than half a century ago. In his farewell speech, Eisenhower warned the nation to beware of the military. A celebrated war hero, he knew, better than almost anyone, how perverse and corrupting the military-industrial complex could be. JFK was a war hero too. According to his nephew, RFK,Jr., the young president had been played by the CIA. The Bay of Pigs invasion was intentionally botched, he claims, to force Kennedy to send the Pentagon to the rescue.
A Thousand Pieces: By the early ‘60s, the CIA was a law unto itself…with a classified, apparently unlimited budget. It was a government within a government…the deepest part of the Deep State. It supported revolutions and coups d’etat. It tried to murder foreign leaders. It ran roughshod over much of the world; it bankrolled the Cuban debacle.
But instead of sending US warplanes to cover the assault, Kennedy held US forces in check…and vowed to smash the CIA “into a thousand pieces.” Two years later, Kennedy was assassinated…and the CIA became more powerful than ever. Since then, there has been no serious challenge to the military-industrial-spook complex. And now there are no war heroes to oppose it.
Donald Trump and his ‘Make America Great Again’ campaign appealed to those people longing for a return to the early days of the empire. He even claimed he would end the ‘forever wars’ that the CIA had started. But The Donald never understood what was going on. His fans, and maybe he too, thought he opposed the Deep State, even while he gave it bigger military budgets, bigger deficits than America had ever seen, and an unprecedented and unnecessary ‘lockdown’ of civilian society.
And Joe Biden? There is no chance that he will try to change things either. Birds gotta fly. Fish gotta swim. And empires gotta go onto the trash heap of history. But how? When? Who will lead them there? More to come…"
o
"Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind"
“The past is a bucket of ashes.”
1
"The woman named Tomorrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it
and fastens at last the last braid and coil
and puts the hairpin where it belongs
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?
My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone.
What of it? Let the dead be dead.
2
The doors were cedar
and the panels strips of gold
and the girls were golden girls
and the panels read and the girls chanted:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.
The doors are twisted on broken hinges.
Sheets of rain swish through on the wind
where the golden girls ran and the panels read:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.
3
It has happened before.
Strong men put up a city and got
a nation together,
And paid singers to sing and women
to warble: We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.
And while the singers sang
and the strong men listened
and paid the singers well
and felt good about it all,
there were rats and lizards who listened...
and the only listeners left now...
are…the rats…and the lizards.
And there are black crows
crying, “Caw, caw,”
bringing mud and sticks
building a nest
over the words carved
on the doors where the panels were cedar
and the strips on the panels were gold
and the golden girls came singing:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.
The only singers now are crows crying, “Caw, caw,”
And the sheets of rain whine in the wind and doorways.
And the only listeners now are…the rats…and the lizards.
4
The feet of the rats
scribble on the door sills;
the hieroglyphs of the rat footprints
chatter the pedigrees of the rats
and babble of the blood
and gabble of the breed
of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers
of the rats.
And the wind shifts
and the dust on a door sill shifts
and even the writing of the rat footprints
tells us nothing, nothing at all
about the greatest city, the greatest nation
where the strong men listened
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was."
- Carl Sandburg
