[Anyone] "empire"

[totem at laplaza.org]

> 	
> 
> 	America in the Time of Empire
> 	    By Chris Hedges
> 
> 	    Monday 26 November 2007
> 
> 	This column was originally published by the Philadelphia
> Inquirer.
> 
> 	    All great empires and nations decay from within. By the time
> they hobble off the world stage, overrun by the hordes at the gates or
> vanishing quietly into the pages of history books, what made them
> successful and powerful no longer has relevance. This rot takes place
> over decades, as with the Soviet Union, or, even longer, as with the
> Roman, Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires. It is often imperceptible.
> 
> 	    Dying empires cling until the very end to the outward
> trappings of power. They mask their weakness behind a costly and
> technologically advanced military. They pursue increasingly unrealistic
> imperial ambitions. They stifle dissent with efficient and often
> ruthless mechanisms of control. They lose the capacity for empathy,
> which allows them to see themselves through the eyes of others, to
> create a world of accommodation rather than strife. The creeds and noble
> ideals of the nation become empty cliches, used to justify acts of
> greater plunder, corruption and violence. By the end, there is only a
> raw lust for power and few willing to confront it.
> 
> 	    The most damning indicators of national decline are upon us.
> We have watched an oligarchy rise to take economic and political power.
> The top 1 percent of the population has amassed more wealth than the
> bottom 90 percent combined, creating economic disparities unseen since
> the Depression. If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes president, we will see
> the presidency controlled by two families for the last 24 years.
> 
> 	    Massive debt, much of it in the hands of the Chinese, keeps
> piling up as we fund absurd imperial projects and useless foreign wars.
> Democratic freedoms are diminished in the name of national security. And
> the erosion of basic services, from education to health care to public
> housing, has left tens of millions of citizens in despair. The
> displacement of genuine debate and civil and political discourse with
> the noise and glitter of public spectacle and entertainment has left us
> ignorant of the outside world, and blind to how it perceives us. We are
> fed trivia and celebrity gossip in place of news.
> 
> 	    An increasing number of voices, especially within the
> military, are speaking to this stark deterioration. They describe a
> political class that no longer knows how to separate personal gain from
> the common good, a class driving the nation into the ground.
> 
> 	    'There has been a glaring and unfortunate display of
> incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders,' retired
> Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of forces in Iraq,
> recently told the New York Times, adding that civilian officials have
> been 'derelict in their duties' and guilty of a 'lust for power.'
> 
> 	    The American working class, once the most prosperous on
> Earth, has been politically disempowered, impoverished and abandoned.
> Manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas. State and federal
> assistance programs have been slashed. The corporations, those that
> orchestrated the flight of jobs and the abolishment of workers' rights,
> control every federal agency in Washington, including the Department of
> Labor. They have dismantled the regulations that had made the country's
> managed capitalism a success for ordinary men and women. The Democratic
> and Republican Parties now take corporate money and do the bidding of
> corporate interests.
> 
> 	    Philadelphia is a textbook example. The city has seen a
> precipitous decline in manufacturing jobs, jobs that allowed households
> to live comfortably on one salary. The city had 35 percent of its
> workforce employed in the manufacturing sector in 1950, perhaps the
> zenith of the American empire. Thirty years later, this had fallen to 20
> percent. Today it is 8.8 percent. Commensurate jobs, jobs that offer
> benefits, health care and most important enough money to provide hope
> for the future, no longer exist. The former manufacturing centers from
> Flint, Mich., to Youngstown, Ohio, are open sores, testaments to a
> growing internal collapse.
> 
> 	    The United States has gone from being the world's largest
> creditor to its largest debtor. As of September 2006, the country was,
> for the first time in a century, paying out more than it received in
> investments. Trillions of dollars go into defense while the nation's
> infrastructure, from levees in New Orleans to highway bridges in
> Minnesota, collapses. We spend almost as much on military power as the
> rest of the world combined, while Social Security and Medicare
> entitlements are jeopardized because of huge deficits. Money is
> available for war, but not for the simple necessities of daily life.
> 
> 	    Nothing makes these diseased priorities more starkly clear
> than what the White House did last week. On the same day, Tuesday,
> President Bush vetoed a domestic spending bill for education, job
> training and health programs, yet signed another bill giving the
> Pentagon about $471 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. All
> this in the shadow of a Joint Economic Committee report suggesting that
> the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been twice as expensive than
> previously imagined, almost $1.5 trillion.
> 
> 	    The decision to measure the strength of the state in
> military terms is fatal. It leads to a growing cynicism among a
> disenchanted citizenry and a Hobbesian ethic of individual gain at the
> expense of everyone else. Few want to fight and die for a Halliburton or
> an Exxon. This is why we do not have a draft. It is why taxes have not
> been raised and we borrow to fund the war. It is why the state has
> organized, and spends billions to maintain, a mercenary army in Iraq. We
> leave the fighting and dying mostly to our poor and hired killers. No
> nationwide sacrifices are required. We will worry about it later.
> 
> 	    It all amounts to a tacit complicity on the part of a
> passive population. This permits the oligarchy to squander capital and
> lives. It creates a world where we speak exclusively in the language of
> violence. It has plunged us into an endless cycle of war and conflict
> that is draining away the vitality, resources and promise of the nation.
> 
> 	    It signals the twilight of our empire.
> 
> 
> 
> 



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