U.S. Joins Ranks of Failed States
The U.S. has every characteristic of a failed state.
The U.S. government's current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation.
Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the U.S. relies on terrorism and military aggression.
Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest of rich organized interest groups at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. For example, war at all cost—which enriches the armaments industry, the officer corps and the financial firms that handle the war's financing—takes precedence over the needs of American citizens. There is no money to provide the uninsured with health care, but Pentagon officials have told the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the House that every gallon of gasoline delivered to U.S. troops in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $400.
"It is a number that we were not aware of, and it is worrisome," said Rep. John Murtha, chairman of the subcommittee.
According to reports, the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan use 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $400 per gallon, that comes to a $320,000,000 daily fuel bill for the Marines alone. Only a country totally out of control would squander resources in this way.
While the U.S. government squanders $400 per gallon of gasoline in order to kill women and children in Afghanistan, many millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes and are experiencing the kind of misery that is the daily life of poor Third World peoples. Americans are living in their cars and in public parks. America's cities, towns and states are suffering from the costs of economic dislocations and the reduction in tax revenues from the economy's decline. Yet, Obama has sent more troops to Afghanistan, a country halfway around the world that is not a threat to America.
It costs $750,000 per year for each soldier we have in Afghanistan. The soldiers, who are at risk of life and limb, are paid a pittance, but all of the privatized services to the military are rolling in excess profits. One of the great frauds perpetuated on the American people was the privatization of services that the U.S. military traditionally performed for itself. "Our" elected leaders could not resist any opportunity to create at taxpayers' expense private wealth that could be recycled to politicians in campaign contributions.
Republicans and Democrats on the take from the private insurance companies maintain that the U.S. cannot afford to provide Americans with health care and that cuts must be made even in Social Security and Medicare. So how can the U.S. afford bankrupting wars, much less totally pointless wars that serve no American interest?
The enormous scale of foreign borrowing and money creation necessary to finance Washington's wars are sending the dollar to historic lows. The dollar has even experienced large declines relative to currencies of Third World countries such as Botswana and Brazil. The decline in the dollar's value reduces the purchasing power of Americans' already declining incomes.
Despite the lowest level of housing starts in 64 years, the U.S. housing market is flooded with unsold homes, and financial institutions have a huge and rising inventory of foreclosed homes not yet on the market.
Industrial production has collapsed to the level of 1999, wiping out a decade of growth in industrial output.
The enormous bank reserves created by the Federal Reserve are not finding their way into the economy. Instead, the banks are hoarding the reserves as insurance against the fraudulent derivatives that they purchased from the gangster Wall Street investment banks.
The regulatory agencies have been corrupted by private interests. "Frontline" reports that Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers blocked Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, from regulating derivatives. President Obama rewarded Larry Summers for his idiocy by appointing him director of the National Economic Council. What this means is that profits for Wall Street will continue to be leeched from the diminishing blood supply of the American economy.
An unmistakable sign of Third World despotism is a police force that sees the pubic as the enemy. Thanks to the federal government, our local police forces are now militarized and imbued with hostile attitudes toward the public. SWAT teams have proliferated, and even small towns now have police forces with the firepower of U.S. Special Forces.
Summons are increasingly delivered by SWAT teams that tyrannize citizens with broken down doors, a $400 or $500 repair born by the tyrannized resident. Recently, a mayor and his family were the recipients of incompetence by the town's local SWAT team, which mistakenly wrecked the mayor's home, terrorized his family and killed the family's two friendly Labrador dogs.
If a town's mayor can be treated in this way, what do you think is the fate of the poor white or black? Or the idealistic student who protests his government's inhumanity?
In any failed state, the greatest threat to the population comes from the government and the police. That is certainly the situation today in the U.S.A. Americans have no greater enemy than their own government. Washington is controlled by interest groups that enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.
The 1 percent that comprise the superrich are laughing as they say, "Let them eat cake."
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Those who benefit from all this had better party while they can. The bell tolls.
If the U.S. were a small country, the U.S. would invade it. It's run by a unitary regime masquerading as a two-party system. The rules are rigged so it's impossible to set up a competing party. It massacres religious minorities (Waco 1993). Local police powers have been centralized, and are increasingly brutal and irrational (as documented by Roberts and William Norman Grigg, among others). Its media are controlled by the unitary regime, and propagandize for it ceaselessly. Its economic system is crony capitalism -- capitalist profits for the Rancid Ruling Elite, socialist penury for everybody else. It invades foreign countries at a whim and tortures prisoners as a matter of policy, violating international law and human decency. It debases its currency like Zimbabwe.
John Murtha is the last one to speak about his concern for government waste.
FTA: "In any failed state, the greatest threat to the population comes from the government and the police. That is certainly the situation today in the U.S.A. Americans have no greater enemy than their own government. Washington is controlled by interest groups that enrich themselves at the expense of the American people."
Bravo. This is precisely why I, a very loyal supporter of our goverment and military for almost my entire adult life, now fear our rulers in Wasington far more than Osama bin Laden.
#4 "...the greatest threat to the people comes from the government and the police."
Yes, but the question is: Why don't the American people recognise this? And is there any such thing as "the American people."?
Great article, Dr. Roberts, telling it like it is. Here's my two cents, which I realize is repetitive, but I've just got to write it out.
The feckless Republican Party seems to think it's business as usual in DC, talking like there's a dispute over details while Obama's puppetmasters are transforming this nation into a fascist police state through, amongst other things, economic warfare against the American people. Fox News, which claims to support American values, is a profit-driven corporation that peddles lumpen conservatism because it sells, and with the exception of Beck, is doing more harm than good by aping the gutless Republicans in the face of national disintegration. Last night, for example, Bill O'Reilly stated he didn't believe Obama's a Marxist, even as the Obama team adds one Marxist apparatchik after the other. On the strength of the evidence and O'Reilly's reasoning, Hitler wasn't a Nazi either, and just appointed all those Nazi henchmen on a lark. None of these people, of course, will be anywhere to be found when it comes time to risk everything to save this country.
I'll only argue with Mr. Roberts on one point: it's not the cost of any military adventures that is breaking the proverbial bank. It's the cost of maintaining a parasitic non-productive class through "entitlement" programs. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are the prime movers behind the dire straits of the public fisc, not any war or even any State bailouts.
"The first conquest an Empire makes is of its own people."
Dr. Wilson I am rather certain you already know the answer to your question, since you answered it about a year ago, where you stated something to the effect that people who want to be considered middle class (i.e., in the ball game; not out on the fringe, or marginalized from society), believe -- or force themselves to believe -- that the government is an agent of benevolence. It was an opinion I had never heard before, but it makes perfect sense to me now.
#7, Mr. Schaber:
You are right. But the Bush-Neocon Wars and their immense expense --up to $5 trillion, according to Stiglitz -- just hurried the collapse. Bush paid for the wars with borrowing and by debasing the currency. It was those 5 trillion straws that broke the camel's back of prosperity. But it would have occurred anyway within a decade.
In the same fashion, Brezhnev's invasion of Afghanistan (graveyard of empires) hastened the inevitable implosion of the Soviet Empire.
#5, Dr. Wilson:
"And is there any such thing as 'the American people'.”
I remember about a decade ago you wrote that, from the 1924 immigration cutoff to the 1965 open-immigration law, Americans -- North and South, black and white, Protestant, Catholic, and Jew, and so on -- finally were coalescing into one people with a common culture. Then it ended. (Please excuse me if I got your article wrong in some fashion. I'm going by memory of an article that influenced me.)
So, where are we now? I don't know. The government schools 89% of kids attend inculcate a "diversity" hatred of dead white males, an entitlement mentality, unchastity, and atheism. Private and parochial schools aren't much better. Too many people want something for free from somebody else. And now prosperity, which covered over so many problems, has collapsed.
#10. Yes, Mr. Seiler, I commented that in the WW II era and immediate postwar, there seemed to be a unified American culture developing. The various pieces of revolutionary legislation adopted with such enthusiasm and self-glorification by the Republicans and Democrats in the mid-1960s destroyed that incipient cohesion.
The flood of immigrants engineered by the imperial elites of both parties will ensure there never again will be the danger (to the empire) of a cohesive American people that might want to restore the Republic.
"It’s the cost of maintaining a parasitic non-productive class through “entitlement” programs. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are the prime movers behind the dire straits of the public fisc, not any war or even any State bailouts."
Look, when a gallon of diesel fuel to fire the tank engines, trucks and supply vehicles that fighht our endless wars in the MIDDLE EAST, cost the country 400.00 dollars a gallon, it is insanity to speak of costs and benefits. You speak like a Republican -- mad at the parasites the Republicans created so the Republicans could have its way with the parasites whenever and wherever it desired. It can never be said enough in these dire times that perplex our families, our children and grandchildren's future. " THE REPUBLICAN PARTY SHOULD BE DESTROYED, BUT IF THAT IS NOT FEASABLE AT THIS MOMENT IN TIME, AT LEAST IGNORED."
Many nations of people in this world have proven to be naturally inclined towards imperialism at some point in their histories, and they maintained their empires quite well. Britain, Spain, France, and Russia come to mind. But America is surely the most disgustingly corrupt and wicked empire to ever roam this earth.
Not to mention that America, unlike 3 out of the 4 above examples, has never truly been a nation of people - or of anything.
#14, Brock H.: "But America is surely the most disgustingly corrupt and wicked empire to ever roam this earth."
Quite an overstatement. The empires of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich were far worse than anything D.C. has produced. From 1939-45, they ripped up large swaths of Eastern Europe that still haven't recovered -- murdering and raping and looting like nothing the world has ever seen, as they fought each other until the Nazis lost. At the same time the Japanese Empire of 1931-45 was another exercise in brutality far worse than Washington has produced.
To cite just one example, because he didn't trust them, Stalin shippped *all* the Chechens to Siberia, where half died.
Just imagine what Hitler or Stalin would have done in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Let's keep a little perspective here.
Seiler,
Good points all, but I do not measure an empire's (or any type of government's) wickedness or corruption by the size of its body count.
PCR: "According to reports, the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan use 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $400 per gallon, that comes to a $320,000,000 daily fuel bill for the Marines alone. Only a country totally out of control would squander resources in this way."
America is in precipitous decline. Just look at all the billionaires quietly moving their money overseas.
@ 18 Mr Roberts
By overseas, do you mean Tel Aviv?
Michael Moore could have written much the same thing. If Old Left and Old Right are converging, is this truly the End of the World?