6 Signs That the American Empire Is Coming to an Early End

"The day of America's global pre-eminence is over" so says Michael Klare. Is that a bad thing? Is that a scary thing? Is that a good thing?

Did America use its decades of global pre-eminence to advance good causes? to advance world peace? to advance global justice? Peacenik doesn't think so. So Peacenik doesn't think the collapse of America's pre-eminence is a bad thing. But it could be scary.

Can America be irrelevant when America is sitting on enough military power to blast the world apart many times over. In hindsight the Soviet Union seems to have accepted it's fall from co-global pre-eminence. But will the United States. The U.S. military and political class is already full of wingnut, religious crackpots. How are they going to adapt to the new reality? Not to mention the simultaneous collapse of their economic might. Scary indeed.

by Michael Klare

The day of America's global pre-eminence is over. We must face the new global realities.

Memo to the CIA: You may not be prepared for time-travel, but welcome to 2025 anyway! Your rooms may be a little small, your ability to demand better accommodations may have gone out the window, and the amenities may not be to your taste, but get used to it. It's going to be your reality from now on.

Okay, now for the serious version of the above: In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency, issued the latest in a series of futuristic publications intended to guide the incoming Obama administration. Peering into its analytic crystal ball in a report entitled Global Trends 2025, it predicted that America's global preeminence would gradually disappear over the next 15 years -- in conjunction with the rise of new global powerhouses, especially China and India. The report examined many facets of the future strategic environment, but its most startling, and news-making, finding concerned the projected long-term erosion of American dominance and the emergence of new global competitors. "Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor [in 2025]," it stated definitively, the country's "relative strength -- even in the military realm -- will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained."

Read on...

Chris Hedges "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle"

punditman says...This is an interesting interview with Pullitzer prize-winning author Chris Hedges. The signs of inverted totalitarianism (where politics is subordinate to economics) are everywhere. Toss in the modern obsessions with celebrity and consumerism, and you can see why democracy has been subverted. As for the American empire, Hedges observes that a culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies.

Obamageddon

punditman says...Many of you may have noticed the absence of Peacenik. You would be right; he is off in the wilderness once again training for the collapse of everything—and vacationing at the same time until the 20th. In the meantime, Punditman will try to fill Peacenik's shoes. Punditman has trouble finding a pair of tennis shoes to fit Punditman's quirky feet, so filling two people's shoes simultaneously should prove challenging.

I'll give it a shot.

The article below is a good place place to start, because it deals with several crises all at once: President Obama's escalating war in Afghanistan, the threat of war with Iran, the collapse of the "bailout bubble" and finally, the mother of all bubble burstings, the collapse of the American hyper-power empire. That outta keep your neurons firing for awhile.

The Celente thesis: war as the "solution" to economic depression
by Justin Raimondo
www.antiwar.com

An American president is launching the most ambitious, the most expensive, and certainly the most dangerous military campaign since the Vietnam War – and the antiwar movement, such as it is, is missing in action. After a long and bloody campaign in Iraq and the election of a U.S. president pledged to get us out, our government is once again revving up its war machine and taking aim at yet another "terrorist" stronghold, this time in Afghanistan. Yet the antiwar movement’s motor seems stuck in the wrong gear, making no motions toward mounting anything like an effective protest. What gives?

We shouldn’t doubt the scope of the present war effort. Make no mistake: the Obama administration is radically ramping up the stakes in the "war on terrorism," which, though renamed, has not been revised downward, as the Washington Post reports:

"As the Obama administration expands U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, military experts are warning that the United States is taking on security and political commitments that will last at least a decade and a cost that will probably eclipse that of the Iraq war."

There are always "warnings" in the beginning, aren’t there? For some reason, however, they are never heeded. Instead, we just barrel ahead, undaunted, into the tall grass where ambush awaits us. War opponents predicted the Iraq invasion would prove unsustainable – and we were right. We said that, far from greeting us with cheers and showers of roses, the Iraqis would soon be shooting at us and demanding our ouster – and we were right. We said the rationale for war was based on a series of carefully manufactured and marketed lies – and that was the truth, now wasn’t it? Yet it seems we are caught in an endlessly repetitive nightmare, where the same prophetic voices are being drowned out by a chorus of "responsible" voices – to be followed by an all-too-familiar disaster.

The problem, however, is that the scale of these disasters seems to be increasing exponentially. As Gerald Celente, one of the few economic forecasters who predicted the ‘08 crash, put it the other day, "Governments seem to be emboldened by their failures." What the late Gen. William E. Odom trenchantly described as "the worst strategic disaster in American military history" – the invasion of Iraq – is being followed up by a far larger military operation, one that will burden us for many years to come. This certainly seems like evidence in support of the Celente thesis, and the man who predicted the 1987 stock market crash, the fall of the Soviet Union, the dot-com bust, the gold bull market, the 2001 recession, the real estate bubble, the “Panic of ‘08,” and now is talking about the inevitable popping of the "bailout bubble," has more bad news:

"Given the pattern of governments to parlay egregious failures into mega-failures, the classic trend they follow, when all else fails, is to take their nation to war."

As the economic crisis escalates and the debt-based central banking system shows it can no longer re-inflate the bubble by creating assets out of thin air, an economic and political rationale for war is easy to come by; for if the Keynesian doctrine that government spending is the only way to lift us out of an economic depression is true, then surely military expenditures are the quickest way to inject "life" into a failing system. This doesn’t work, economically, since the crisis is only masked by the wartime atmosphere of emergency and "temporary" privation. Politically, however, it is a lifesaver for our ruling elite, which is at pains to deflect blame away from itself and on to some "foreign" target.

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