Politics.369 - Decline of the American Empire

Sami, two hundred plus years ago prominent folks espoused 'blood letting' as a medical treatment and 6000 years ago another culture espoused foot-transportation, single-fiber clothing, feared anything porcine, and ostracized those beseeching magical specialists. Some still do. Where is it written that the internet is not evil, not magic, not false spirits, ... ? Revert to the one method of communication given.

{Politics.369.799}: {sami} Sun, 01 Apr 2012 13:01:06 EDT (0 lines)
{erased by sami Sun, 01 Apr 2012 13:01:34 EDT}

The founding fathers of America founded America. You produce only hateful shit on a webforum. If a normal person had the choice between listen to you and the rest of the cyber hooligans posting in the joint called New Cafe and between listening to Goerge Washington - there is no doubt who would he choose given the fact he is normal.

When Goerge Washington says in his Farewell Address to the citisens of the USA, that religion, as the source of morality, is a necessary spring of popular government and advises his fellow citizens that religion and morality are the great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens and that national morality could not exist in exclusion of religious principle - only a nutcase would listen to a bunch of modern liberal leftist anarchists that follow Obama's advise that penetration of one male's organ to antother male's rectum is a solid basis for healthy family as the foundation of sound society.

Will the host in this forum please either hide or preferably erase posting {800}? Please. The Politics Forum is publicly readable, and available to actual healthy people of all ages. The multiple sicknesses of one Cafiend should not be allowed to sully its pages, please.

Sami, your postings complement those of regulars at the following sites: Free Republic Home Page - Latest Articles Over 300,000 people have registered for posting privileges on Free Republic since inception in 1996 and our forum is read daily by over one hundred thousand freedom ... www.freerepublic.com/home.htm - Cached Free Dominion - Principled Conservative - Party and Canadian ... General Topics Posts Last post; Fight Canada's Internet Censorship Laws This forum is for discussion of the Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act and other ... www.freedominion.ca/phpBB2/index.php

As Paul Craig Roberts cogently points out in his new article ("http://personalliberty.com/2012/04/03/empires-then-and-now/?eiid=") , Americans didn't get any extractive benefits from our multi- trillion dollar efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What follows here is my interpretation, spin (on), and understanding of what Paul said. Comments and disagreements are of course welcome.

After eight years of war and attempted occupation of Iraq, all Washington has for its efforts is several trillion dollars of additional debt and no Iraqi oil. After 10 years of trillion-dollar struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Washington has nothing to show for it except possibly some part of the drug trade (!) that can be used to fund covert CIA operations. (What a damned joke!)

America’s wars are very expensive. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have doubled the national debt, and quite incredibly the American people have derived no benefits from it. No riches and no bread and circuses flow to Americans from Washington’s wars. So what was it all about?

The answer is that Washington’s empire extracts resources FROM THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THEMSELVES -- for the benefit of the few powerful interest groups that rule America. This deserves reiteration: The military-security complex, Wall Street, agribusiness and the Israel lobby use ‘our’ government to extract resources from Americans themselves, to increase their profits and power.

In addition, the U.S. Constitution itself has been ‘extracted’ in the interests of the security state, and a good portion of Americans’ incomes have been (and are being) redirected to the pockets of the top 1 percent. This is the peculiar and perverse way in which the American empire functions. And it happens without ever achieving conquest over a foreign country. The American military did not conquer Iraq and has been forced out politically by the puppet government that Washington established. There is no victory in Afghanistan, and the American military does not control the country after a decade of war. But our top 1% does own and control the bottom 99% of the country, and exploits them and milks them instead.

In this new kind of empire, traditional success at war no longer matters. The extraction takes place BY BEING at war. Huge sums of American taxpayers’ money have flowed into the American armaments industries, and huge amounts of power have flowed into the Department of Homeland Security, which now employs nearly a million people! Simply stated, the American empire works by systematically stripping our country's citizens of much of the wealth they would otherwise have, as well as much of the liberty they would otherwise acquire.

This is why the wars cannot and will not end and why if one of them does end, another starts. Remember when Obama came into office and was asked what the U.S. mission was in Afghanistan? He replied that he did not know what the mission was and that the mission needed to be defined. But he never defined the mission. Instead he renewed the Afghan war without telling us its purpose. Why not tell us the purpose? Because he soon came to realize that he could not allow himself to tell us the real truth, i.e. that the only purpose of the war was to build the power and profits of the military/industrial/security complex (that he soon came to see was in a position to allow his re-election if he stooped to serving their interests). (-- a parasitical military/industrial/security complex that exists at the expense of, and feeds off of, the American citizenry.)

This truth doesn’t mean that the objects of American military aggression have escaped without cost. Large numbers of Muslims have of course been bombed and murdered and their economies and infrastructure ruined -- but not in order to extract resources from them.

It is ironic that under “the new empire,” it is the citizens of the empire who are robbed of their wealth and liberty. Just like the bombed and murdered Muslims, the American people are also victims of the American empire, but they are victims of a new and distinctly different kind.

It's not only space that we can no longer reach unassisted. Read last line. "http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/09/12/0233255/russia-builds-worlds-largest-nuclear-powered-ice-breaker" Russia's dream to dominate the Arctic will soon get a boost with a $1.1 billion nuclear-powered icebreaker 170 meters long and 34 meters wide. It's designed to navigate both shallow rivers and the freezing depths of the Northern Sea. Powered by two 'RITM-200' compact pressurized water reactors generating 60MWe, the world's largest 'universal' nuclear icebreaker is designed to blast through ice more than 4 meters thick and tow tankers of up to 70,000 tons displacement through Arctic ice fields. Why the effort and cost? 'Climate change is a pivotal factor in accelerating Russia's interest in icebreakers,' says Charles Ebinger. 'With climate change we are seeing a major change in the Northern Sea Route, which is a transport route along Russia's northern coast from Europe to Asia. Just in the last few years, with less and less permanent sea ice, maritime traffic across the Russian Arctic has risen exponentially.' The expectation is that the melt will continue, but there are still sections of route that would require icebreakers to keep it open year round. Icebreakers are an excellent example of a special purpose vehicle that is very poorly designed for operation outside its specific envelope. The key element is the rounded bow, a shape best suited to riding up on ice shelves and crushing them from above, causing the ships to roll from side to side in the waves when sailing on open water, making for a very seasick ride for the crew. Russia is the only country in the world currently building nuclear icebreakers, and has a fleet of about half a dozen in operation, along with a larger fleet of less powerful, diesel-powered icebreakers. The U.S. has been relying on a Russian diesel icebreaker to deliver supplies to Antarctica due to our own shrinking fleet of the cold-water, diesel-fueled vessels.

The St.Lawrence freezes and in the Spring the Canucks open the Seaway with the "Red Bird"; an icebreaker. Used to be quite an event on the river. My mother's dad, who died when she was a child, would run out to the various islands on his ice boat, jumping the pressure cracks. I would have to go through 3' of ice to fish most places in January.

{Politics.369.811}: Bloviation T. Cornpone {oldman} Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:08:24 EDT (31 lines)

Only time will tell but things like this are indications that we are done for. The price of the security we so desperately crave is the growing dissolution of what remains of our 'freedoms.' Residents erect monument to troop remains dumped in Va. landfill By Steve Hendrix, Published: September 23 Maybe it’s because they live just a few miles from a stone memorial to Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s severed left arm. But when a group of residents from Virginia’s Northern Neck heard that the cremated body parts of American troops had been dumped unceremoniously in a local landfill, they knew what to do: Mark the place — rotting garbage and all — as sacred ground. . . . According to Army spokesman Lt. Col. Steven Warren, the Pentagon turned down Brabo’s request because it came from her in a private capacity, not from the county supervisors. “We would consider a request from the county government,” Warren said. Brabo said there was little support among supervisors to make the formal request. So organizers put together the program without military help. A color guard was provided by a local Sea Cadets chapter. “I think [the Department of Defense] has really missed an opportunity here,” Brabo said. “This was never about placing blame; it’s about respect and honor for our service members.” "http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/residents-erect-monument-to-troop-remains-dumped-in-va-landfill/2012/09/23/aa7b2808-058e-11e2-a8dc-fd7db4d7c996_story_1.html"

Few indeed are those in power who still regard the soldier's as an honorable profession. Aside from the geeks in Nevada who remotely operate the drones, most of the million or more American servicemen stationed in our closing-upon 200 bases in every nook and cranny of the globe are regarded by the brass as cannon fodder, to be disposed of in the cheapest way when broken and no longer useful. The "respect the troops" meme is primarily aimed towards keeping the populace quiet about our imperial genocide, so they won't object to losing all their support systems to budget cuts so as to feed the inexhaustible hunger of the war lords and their corpusReichions.