( – promoted by buhdydharma )
Sweet Lo-retta!
In a TV segment, CNBC panelists candidly debate the decline of the “US empire” without batting an eyelash. The accompanying article is entitled, “Health Care Law Signals US Empire Decline?”, wherein the guest, a hedge fund manager in “emerging markets” argues that the health care reform is one of many obvious indicators that the lights are blinking red on the US empire, just as national healthcare in Britain signaled its obvious imperial decline.
In their expansionary phase, empires force people to go out, seek risks and fend for themselves, Murrin said, reminding of the dismantling of the British empire after the war, when the National Health Service, which ensures universal health coverage in Britain, was created.
I have to confess, that was a fast transition from the former “lips-sealed” posture US propagandists used to take on our shining city on a hill. Perhaps they’ve taken their cue from Alan “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” Greenspan. Whoops! Was I just using my outside voice?
“This (empire decline) is actually a dead-set course that societies get into and it will happen very quickly I’m afraid,” he told “Squawk Box Europe.”
“As you start to build a system it becomes cohesive because of its success… the fractures in the American system I think are more apparent than ever,” Murrin added.
Someone needs to revoke that yakker’s visa, because he’s spilling the beans all over the place.
Among the pitfalls of decline are the rise of China militarily and economically, peak commodities, and the battle for African resources (It’s like the dude never heard of AFRICOM!). The Chinese, he said, are particularly reeking of testosterone.
“We all know there’s going to be a change, the surprise will be the pace of that change,” Murrin said, noting that “all empires when they decline they underestimate their challengers.”
“You have a lot more males in China then you do in the west,” he said, noting that 56 percent of the Chinese society was male, because of the country’s policies to control population and because of traditions which value males more than females.
“What that means is that they’re far more risk-oriented than a society in the West…if you look at conflict and your ability to risk your males in conflict,” Murrin explained.
Pow! There goes your satellite, bitchez.
Another tell-tale sign of decline is when the incumbent president fails to adequately project power (missile defense in Poland, controlling North Korea and Iran). Because Obama is clearly signaling penile lassitude, the empire is going “tits up,” ladies and gents.
It’s not just the end of the US empire, but a tectonic shift that is “the end of the Western Christian empire.” I hope the white, reich-wingnut males are sitting down when Christiane Amanpour breaks the news to them.
The decline of the American landscape may not be nearly as graceful and glacial as some think:
For now, the world still expects the United States to muddle through, eventually confronting its problems when, as Churchill famously said, all the alternatives have been exhausted. Through this lens, past alarms about the deficit seem overblown, and 2080 – when the U.S. debt may reach staggering proportions – seems a long way off, leaving plenty of time to plug the fiscal hole. But one day, a seemingly random piece of bad news – perhaps a negative report by a rating agency – will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry about the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy but also the public at large, not to mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial: a complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability.
What is Niall Ferguson on about? No one thinks the US economy could collapse.
We have tremendous faith in the housing recovery.
Even Tim Geithner says so.
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that can be bombed and destroyed to fix this problem, isn’t there? :-/
…. bill signing ceremony.
So many corks musta popped over that mandate.
but I’m a racist.
CNBC: where something only happens when some pompous right wing psuedo-strategist with British accent and a book to hawk says it does.
I hopes he’s right though. Because if the decline of the American Empire truly does result in a strengthening of the social safety net, then I for one say ‘Huanying Guanglin’ to our new Chinese overlords.
So the British Empire declined because they rolled out universal health care? Not because they were bled dry by two World Wars?
Talk about historical revision.
… when the non-problems are inflated into problems, as the Deficit Errorists are wont to do … and the actual problem – having an economy on the front line of demand destruction in the face of Peak Oil heading into a series of escalating oil price shocks within the coming decade at the latest and next year at the earliest – treated so negligently that the prescription of American Empire is offered to cure a disease it makes worse.
Most of the talk about a failing empire (from the right) comes from over-grown 12 year old boys looking at maps and salivating over control over those maps. They dream about marching armies, rape and rapine, glorious victories featuring heroism and so on. These people grew up in luxury and were insulated against hard knocks — were given second and third chances, their indiscretions stricken from the record, their proclivities hushed. Their later financial dealings were the result of careful mentoring by those who possessed the inside knowledge of our system. And if they weren’t raised in that way they were scholarship boys who took on the values of their new peers with fanatical enthusiasm. We forget the class structure in this country at our peril.
Conquest, brothers and sisters, is conquest whether military or financial. I believe, in the end, what does divide us more than anything is whether we believe in conquest as a worthy social goal or we do not. I do not. I’ve seen the wreckage that follows conquest both on the side of the victor and the conquered both in personal lives and in the grander historical events. Conquest and the cultivation of the reptilian mind is not going to go away but those that idolize that part of the mind ought to be made to face that fact and to look in the mirror.
hegemony is over? I got an idea, let’s drop opium from
predators over Beijing. We can use our ultra new, invisible, super state of the art, empire defender stealth
bomber, the one that nobody knows about or how much cost actually went into its production or where it’s actually located. But I’m sure congress will authorize any amount to find it, even if we have to dig under every mountain range in America or send an exploratory expedition to
Atlantis. We’ll solve this problem with good old American know how and our risk taking, rugged, no holds barred, entrepeneurial spirit. Here’s to John Bull and Uncle Sam!
I’ll be glad when it’s gone, and we can focus on problems at home!