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Leaders faced with unrest, rising demands and dwindling coffers always debauch their currency as the politically expedient “solution.”

Whatever you think of former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, he is one of the few public voices identifying runaway entitlement costs as a structural threat to the economy and nation. We can summarize Greenspan’s comments very succinctly: there is no free lunch. The more money that is siphoned off for entitlements, the less there is for investment needed to maintain productivity gains that are the foundation of future income generation: Greenspan: Worried About Inflation, Says “Entitlements Crowding Out Investment, Productivity is Dead” (via Mish)

Many people look to the rising costs of the U.S. military as the structural problem, and they have a point: there is no upper limit on military spending, and the demands (by the civilian leadership of the nation) on the services and the Pentagon’s demands for new weaponry are constantly pushing budgets higher.

But the truth is entitlement spending now dwarfs military spending:entitlements are more than $1.75 trillion, half of all Federal spending, while the Pentagon, VA, etc. costs around $700 billion annually.

We have a model for what happens when military and social welfare spending exceed the state’s resources to pay the rising costs: the state/empire collapses. The Western Roman Empire offers an excellent example of this dynamic.

As pressures along the Empire’s borders rose, Rome did not have enough tax revenues to fully fund the army. Hired mercenaries had become a significant part of the Roman army, and if they weren’t paid, then the spoils of war became their default pay.

This erosion of steady pay also eroded the troops’ loyalty to Rome; their loyalties switched to their commanders, who often decided to take his loyal army to Italy and declare himself Emperor.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Empire of Lies

February 9, 2016

The Empire of Lies

The Trajan Column was built in order to celebrate the victories of the Roman Armies in the conquest of Dacia, during the 2nd century AD. It shows that the Romans knew and used propaganda, although in forms that for us look primitive. In those times, just as in ours, a dying empire could be kept together for a while by lies, but not forever.

At the beginning of the 5th century AD, Augustine, bishop of Hippo, wrote his “De Mendacio” (“On Lying”). Reading it today, we may be surprised at how rigid and strict Augustine was in his conclusions. A Christian, according to him, could not lie in any circumstances whatsoever; not even to save lives or to avoid suffering for someone. The suffering of the material body, said Augustine, is nothing; what’s important is one’s immortal soul. Later theologians substantially softened these requirements, but there was a logic in Augustine’s stance if we consider his times: the last century of the Western Roman Empire.

By the time of Augustine, the Roman Empire had become an Empire of lies. It still pretended to uphold the rule of law, to protect the people from the Barbarian invaders, to maintain the social order. But all that had become a bad joke for the citizens of an empire by then reduced to nothing more than a giant military machine dedicated to oppressing the poor in order to maintain the privilege of the few. The Empire itself had become a lie: that it existed because of the favor of the Gods who rewarded the Romans because of their moral virtues. Nobody could believe in that anymore: it was the breakdown of the very fabric of society; the loss of what the ancient called the auctoritas, the trust that citizens had toward their leaders and the institutions of their state.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Empire Has No Clothes

January 27, 2016

The Empire Has No Clothes

empire2 Hans Christian Andersen told the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as part of his Fairy Tales Told for Children collection. The tale is almost two hundred years old. Most know how a little boy was the first to announce that the emperor had no clothes. Andersen’s tale is being re-written today and should be entitled “The Empire Has No Clothes.” This story is one occurring around the world.

Governments are in disrepair and disrepute everywhere. They are increasingly viewed as exploitive, ineffective and catering to privilege. Public interest, the idealistic goal of government, never was real in the sense that it overrode the private needs and wants of officeholders. “Public servants” were never better stewards of public interest than private citizens pursuing their own self-interest. Indeed, once the returns to power increased, self-selection made most politicians inferior in morality and public interest than the typical citizen.

The discomfort and turn against government occurs not because any of its behavior is new. Government has always been dishonest and a scam. What changed over time is the magnitude of government and its burden on citizens. The pain of tolerating it has apparently reached that threshold where people are no longer willing to ignore it.

Governments around the world have become leviathans, meddling in the most minute and personal decisions of its citizens. Supporting government in its infancy required no taxation. Today the average citizen pays more than 40% of his production as tribute and support to the empire. Few believe they get much of value in return.

Even with such confiscatory theft, governments are spending themselves and their citizens into bankruptcy. Capital that entrepreneurs need to start and grow businesses is now consumed by government vote-buying schemes and stupidity. As a result, economic growth cannot occur, jobs are lost and the standard of living declines.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

2016: The Year Ahead

January 10, 2016

2016: THE YEAR AHEAD

This brief piece appears in New Dawn magazine, Jan 2016 edition. The editor asked me and several other authors and thinkers to give our 500 word perspective on what 2016 will bring. Read more at newdawnmagazine.com and get your copy of this great mag.

2016 will rigorously test people’s readiness to embody their truth. Can we live the wisdom and transformation we’ve been cultivating over years of study, journeying, and contemplation? Can we summon the strength to have our outside accurately reflect our inside? Are we ready to run our own world yet?

In many schools of mystical study, polarity is a key principle. The student is taught that everything in life is dual. All phenomena have pairs of opposites, as observed in the primal forces of birth and death, day and night, order and chaos, joy and sorrow. Over time, through experientially mapping and understanding the interplay of each set of polarities in our own lives, we may gradually determine a point of equilibrium that reveals the hidden teachings of these mysterious fluctuations. What we must be careful to avoid, is clinging to just one end of life’s naturally divergent polarizations. And herein lie the trials set forth in the world’s current crises.

At every turn, the synthetic culture of Empire implores us to throw our hearts and minds into unconscious polarization. It wants us to radicalize ourselves to either patriot or terrorist, believer or atheist, white or black, liberal or conservative, strong or weak, and then embark on an endless crusade to reform, condemn, or destroy the other side. This one-way polarization renders all participants impotent, regardless of which side they pick. This subtle but devastating trick deactivates our will and we automatically forfeit our capacity to rule ourselves. Lost in unconscious polarization, we serve Empire.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Empires (Like the U.S.) Fall When Corruption Becomes Rampant

January 8, 2016

Empires (Like the U.S.) Fall When Corruption Becomes Rampant

Widespread corruption destroys empires.

By way of example, corruption was one of the main causes of the collapse of the Roman Empire:

The Praetorian Guard—the emperor’s personal bodyguards—assassinated and installed new sovereigns at will, and once even auctioned the spot off to the highest bidder [and see this]. The political rot also extended to the Roman Senate, which failed to temper the excesses of the emperors due to its own widespread corruption and incompetence. As the situation worsened, civic pride waned and many Roman citizens lost trust in their leadership.

The Ottoman Empire started its decline when the sale of offices, bribery and corruption became widespread. Indeed:

Most historians point to “degenerate Sultans, incompetent Grand Viziers, debilitated and ill-equipped armies, corrupt officials, avaricious speculators, grasping enemies, and treacherous friends.

The Yuan Empire (led by the Mongols) also collapsed due to corruption:

The decline of the [the Yuan empire] was a result of a number of factors, these being incompetent and rivaling leaders, corruption, revolts, decadence, factional struggles, assassinations, external attacks, and disease.

Moreover:

Toward the end, corruption and the persecution became so severe that Muslim generals joined Han Chinese in rebelling against the Mongols.

Former history professor at the University of Alabama Larry Clayton notes:

The [Roman] republic evolved into an empire and the empire grew corrupt from its own tremendous power. There arose, like mushrooms after a long rain, self-indulgent vices driven by pride and power. An oft quoted observation noted:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” wrote the English essayist and historian Lord Acton in 1887.

Long after the Roman Empire disappeared, other empires, notably the ones of France, England, and Spain began with the conquest and settlement of the New World. By the end of the nineteenth century, European nations had created economic, military and commercial empires across much of the globe.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The American Empire: Murder Inc.

January 5, 2016

The American Empire: Murder Inc.

As Indonesia’s former President Suharto lay ill in 2008, a supporter displayed a portrait of him outside the Jakarta hospital where the military dictator died two weeks later. It was in Suharto’s brutal three-decade reign that Indonesia invaded East Timor, where investigative journalist Allan Nairn covered atrocities the general’s troops committed. (Vincent Thian / AP)

Terror, intimidation and violence are the glue that holds empire together. Aerial bombardment, drone and missile attacks, artillery and mortar strikes, targeted assassinations, massacres, the detention of tens of thousands, death squad killings, torture, wholesale surveillance, extraordinary renditions, curfews, propaganda, a loss of civil liberties and pliant political puppets are the grist of our wars and proxy wars.

Countries we seek to dominate, from Indonesia and Guatemala to Iraq and Afghanistan, are intimately familiar with these brutal mechanisms of control. But the reality of empire rarely reaches the American public. The few atrocities that come to light are dismissed as isolated aberrations. The public is assured what has been uncovered will be investigated and will not take place again. The goals of empire, we are told by a subservient media and our ruling elites, are virtuous and noble. And the vast killing machine grinds forward, feeding, as it has always done, the swollen bank accounts of defense contractors and corporations that exploit natural resources and cheap labor around the globe.

There are very few journalists who have covered empire with more courage, tenacity and integrity than Allan Nairn. For more than three decades, he has reported from Central America, East Timor, Palestine, South Africa, Haiti and Indonesia—where Indonesian soldiers fractured his skull and arrested him. His reporting on the Indonesian government massacres in East Timor saw him branded a “threat to national security” and officially banned from occupied East Timor.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Empire of Chaos preparing for more fireworks in 2016

December 27, 2015

Empire of Chaos preparing for more fireworks in 2016

In his seminal ‘Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization,’ Bryan Ward-Perkins writes, “Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue forever… They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.”

The Empire of Chaos, today, is not about complacency. It’s about hubris – and fear. Ever since the start of the Cold War the crucial question has been who would control the great trading networks of Eurasia – or the “heartland”, according to Sir Halford John Mackinder (1861–1947), the father of geopolitics.

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We could say that for the Empire of Chaos, the game really started with the CIA-backed coup in Iran in 1953, when the US finally encountered, face to face, that famed Eurasia crisscrossed for centuries by the Silk Road(s), and set out to conquer them all.

Only six decades later, it’s clear there won’t be an American Silk Road in the 21st century, but rather, just like its ancient predecessor, a Chinese one. Beijing’s push for what it calls “One Belt, One Road” is inbuilt in the 21st century conflict between the declining empire and Eurasia integration. Key subplots include perennial NATO expansion and the empire’s obsession in creating a war zone out of the South China Sea.

As the Beijing-Moscow strategic partnership analyses it, the oligarchic elites who really run the Empire of Chaos are bent on the encirclement of Eurasia – considering they may be largely excluded from an integration process based on trade, commerce and advanced communication links.

Beijing and Moscow clearly identify provocation after provocation, coupled with relentless demonization. But they won’t be trapped, as they’re both playing a very long game.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Dictators of the Roman and American Empires – The Blue Ribbon Has To Go To Obama

December 23, 2015

Dictators of the Roman and American Empires – The Blue Ribbon Has To Go To Obama

obama-dictator

Every group (and especially an empire) needs its good or evil spokesperson, leader, or figurehead to focus upon: the embodiment of the particular group or nation. The size of the group is irrelevant: there simply must be a leader that exemplifies the characteristics of the group. History is replete with great leaders, however, benevolence and goodness are not necessarily a leader’s qualities. For every good leader, it seems there are a plethora of those who are self-serving, power-hungry despots whose aims are either not for the people or (the other end of the spectrum) against the people.

To be sure, these bad leaders are usually good actors: able to dupe the people into believing that they are the ones who are fit to lead. In this manner, the leader chosen is a reflection of the people and needs only feed upon the wants and desires in the populace and then manipulate those desires to his advantage. We continue with the last segment but this time in micro perspective: a comparison of the Emperor Nero of Ancient Rome with the “would-be Emperor” and dictator of America, President Barack Husein Obama II.

Behind every evil leader are bad people who are aiding the despot’s rise to power. The Emperor Nero (born December 15, in the year 37 A.D.) was aided to take the throne by his mother, Agrippina, who proclaimed him worthy of it and enabling it in the year 54 A.D., when he was only 16 years old. Agrippina had been married to the Emperor Claudius (her third husband), and probably poisoned him.

With Barack Obama, we saw that he was aided and mentored by convicted terrorists of the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Et Tu, Brute? (How Empires Die)

December 22, 2015

Et Tu, Brute? (How Empires Die)

(Image: The assassination of Julius Caesar, led by Brutus.)

The state-owned Bank of China has been ordered by an American court to hand over customer information to the US. The bank has refused to comply, as to do so would violate China’s privacy law. The US court has subsequently ordered the Bank of China to pay a fine of $50,000 per day.

Any guess as to how this is likely to turn out?

China is a sovereign nation, halfway around the globe from the US, yet the US seems to feel that it’s somehow entitled to set the rules for China (as well as the other nations in the world). When China sees fit to develop islands in the South China Sea that it has laid claim to for centuries, it begins to hear threatening noises from the US military. A candidate for US president declares that he would buzz the islands with Air Force One, the Presidential jet, saying, “They’ll know we mean business.”

All over the world, those who live outside the US are increasingly observing that the US has become so drunk with power that they’re threatening both friend and foe with fines, trade restrictions, monetary sanctions, warfare, and invasions.

And in so-observing, those of us who have studied the history of empires note that history is once again repeating itself. Time and time again, great empires build themselves up through industriousness and sound economic management only to subsequently decline into debt, complacency, and an entitlement mind-set.

Over the millennia, empires as disparate as Persia, Rome, Spain, and Great Britain rose to dominate the world. Of course, we know how those empires turned out and, by extension, we might hazard an educated guess as to how the present American Empire will end.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fall Of The American Empire: “They Intend To Collapse the Financial System”

December 19, 2015

Fall Of The American Empire: “They Intend To Collapse the Financial System”

“…for two weeks the mob had been rioting uncontrolled in the streets…The economy of the greatest empire that the world had ever seen was coming apart like an unraveling sweater…the cost of maintaining…gigantic armed forces…was bleeding the nation white and in addition there were the heavy subsidies that had to be paid to the…nations dependent…for support. The impoverished government had neither the funds nor the power to stop the riots.”

Readers, are we close to such a point? It happened, for the excerpt above was taken from the book, Those About to Die, by Daniel P. Mannix, written in 1958, and the nation was the Roman Empire. There are many similarities between the decline and fall of Rome and the decline of the United States of America, standing upon the threshold of its fall.

As you well know, the economy is stretched to its breaking point, and the American Empire has over-extended itself, much in the manner of the now-defunct Roman Empire. As with Rome, the United States has experienced a severe influx of illegal aliens, encouraging “immigration” by individuals who (most of them) come to the U.S. not to contribute, but to consume, or even worse: to “conquer,” as a fifth-column. The conquest (especially for illegal aliens crossing the border illegally from Central and South America) is actually seen as such: a “retaking” of Aztlan, alleged land in the U.S. these aliens claim historically as their own, the whole “process” called La Reconquista, or “the re-conquest.”

The Roman Empire had done this, in a manner:

“Throughout its history, [the Roman Empire] had taken in outsiders: a constant stream of individuals looking to make their fortune…supplemented by large-scale migrations.”

(The Fall of the Roman Empire, by Peter Heather, p. 159)

“Multiculturalism” as is very evident in Europe (the latest being Norway, paying non-Norwegian individuals up to $9,800 to pack up and leave) is currently tearing the countries of Europe apart.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

License to Kill

December 15, 2015

License to Kill

Jakub Rozalski

[This post is, once again, a rerun, but its subject seems quite timely. As you watch the political establishment in the US go through its usual antics, ask yourself: are they even capable of understanding the fact that they have already lost the empire?]

The story is the same every time: some nation, due to a confluence of lucky circumstances, becomes powerful—much more powerful than the rest—and, for a time, is dominant. But the lucky circumstances, which often amount to no more than a few advantageous quirks of geology, be it Welsh coal or West Texas oil, in due course come to an end. In the meantime, the erstwhile superpower becomes corrupted by its own power.

As the endgame approaches, those still nominally in charge of the collapsing empire resort to all sorts of desperate measures—all except one: they will refuse to ever consider the fact that their imperial superpower is at an end, and that they should change their ways accordingly. George Orwell once offered an excellent explanation for this phenomenon: as the imperial end-game approaches, it becomes a matter of imperial self-preservation to breed a special-purpose ruling class—one that is incapable of understanding that the end-game is approaching. Because, you see, if they had an inkling of what’s going on, they wouldn’t take their jobs seriously enough to keep the game going for as long as possible.

The approaching imperial collapse can be seen in the ever worsening results the empire gets for its imperial efforts. After World War II, the US was able to do a respectable job helping to rebuild Germany, along with the rest of western Europe. Japan also did rather well under US tutelage, as did South Korea after the end of fighting on the Korean peninsula.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Decline of the West Revisited

November 17, 2015

The Decline of the West Revisited

LONDON – The terrorist slaughter in Paris has once again brought into sharp relief the storm clouds gathering over the twenty-first century, dimming the bright promise for Europe and the West that the fall of communism opened up. Given dangers that seemingly grow by the day, it is worth pondering what we may be in for.

Though prophecy is delusive, an agreed point of departure should be falling expectations. As Ipsos MORI’s Social Research Institute reports: “The assumption of an automatically better future for the next generation is gone in much of the West.”

In 1918, Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West. Today the word “decline” is taboo. Our politicians shun it in favor of “challenges,” while our economists talk of “secular stagnation.” The language changes, but the belief that Western civilization is living on borrowed time (and money) is the same.

Why should this be? Conventional wisdom regards it simply as a reaction to stagnant living standards. But a more compelling reason, which has seeped into the public’s understanding, is the West’s failure, following the fall of the Soviet Union, to establish a secure international environment for the perpetuation of its values and way of life.

The most urgent example of this failure is the eruption of Islamist terrorism. On its own, terrorism is hardly an existential threat. What is catastrophic is the collapse of state structures in many of the countries from which the terrorists come.

The Islamic world contains 1.6 billion people, or 23% of the world’s population. A hundred years ago it was one of the world’s most peaceful regions; today it is the most violent. This is not the “peripheral” trouble that Francis Fukuyama envisioned in his 1989 manifesto “The End of History.” Through the massive influx of refugees, the disorder in the Middle East strikes at the heart of Europe.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Liam Fox’s Speech to the IEA on Honest Money

October 31, 2015

Liam Fox’s Speech to the IEA on Honest Money

Dr Fox gave his speech on honest money to the IEA last week. The video can also be viewed here: http://www.iea.org.uk/multimedia/video/rt-hon-liam-fox-on-honest-money

It is almost universally accepted that the first duty of government is the protection of its citizens. As a former Secretary of State for Defence I am only too aware of the external threats to the safety of our people and our country.

But there are other threats that I believe we have a right to be protected from – the debasement of our currency, the erosion of our earnings and the devaluation of our savings. I believe it is fundamentally wrong for governments to engage in structural profligacy, spending excessively across the economic cycle and passing ever larger amounts of debt onto future generations.

History is littered with examples of where economic failure led to compromised security. In my book, Rising Tides, I pointed out that by 1788, a year before the French Revolution, France was spending 62% of royal revenues on servicing its debt. The Ottoman Empire was spending 50% of its budget on debt interest payments by 1875 with the final repayment being made by the Republic of Turkey in 1954, even though the Empire had been abolished 36 years previously. The lessons from history are clear – if the destinations we wish to reach are security, prosperity, and honest money, then the road we must travel is that of fiscal restraint and monetary realism.

Today, I want to look at how close we are to those objectives, especially in the light of the great financial shock that came to the global economy following the events of 2008.

The policies of fiscal restraint imposed by the current government have seen our annual budget deficit fall from the terrifying heights of the 11.4% of GDP which we inherited from Labour in 2010, although at 5.7% of GDP it remains the third-highest in the EU.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Untangling America from the American Empire

October 30, 2015

Untangling America from the American Empire

Those calling for an end of the Empire don’t seem to realize that the federal state’s vast entitlement programs are ultimately funded by the Empire.

The Status Quo would have us believe that America and its Empire are one entity. This is handy for those with Imperial designs but it is false: America could be untangled from its Empire, and many of us believe it is essential that America untangles itself from its Imperial structures and ideologies.

What I call The Imperial Project was cobbled together in the aftermath of World War II, when the Soviet Union and America posed an existential threat to each other’s ideologies and systems. It may be hard to believe, but the U.S. did not have a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or other espionage/intelligence gathering agency prior to World War II.

America had no spy agency and no Black Operations/Special Forces capabilities. The National Security State as we know it today did not exist.

Though the Deep State has long been an essential feature of the American power structure, the post-war Deep State extended its reach globally in ways that the pre-war Deep State could not.

I have covered the Deep State for many years:

Surplus Repression and the Self-Defeating Deep State (May 26, 2015)

Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity? (March 14, 2014)

The Dollar and the Deep State (February 24, 2014)

Many people naively think all that’s needed to end the Imperial Project is close America’s overseas military installations and end the endless wars of choice.While the eradication of the neo-conservative Imperial agenda would be a welcome first step, it would only be a first step, as I explained in You Can’t Separate Empire, the State, Financialization and Crony Capitalism.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Bond Crisis & 2015.75

October 23, 2015

The Bond Crisis & 2015.75

Some people have wrongly expected a crash in the long bonds. What has actually happened is that China and others have sold into the high, liquidating their long bonds, and moving short-term. This is why rates are negative on the short-end. The CRASH comes in the opposite direction this time. Why? Because the central banks have engaged in Quantitative Easing. The ECB (European Central Bank) stepped up its buying of long-term debt to hold the market from 25% to 33%. Smart money is not interested in buying long-term paper, especially when the Fed keeps warning that they MUST normalize interest rates, i.e. raise rates.

So whom has the bonds and will take the loss? Guess who? The central banks. They are loaded to the gills and cannot sell the long-bonds they bought. There is no bid. In this debt crisis, there is no bid for debt, which is typically how empires, nations, & city-states collapse.

The system is now highly geared and we will see in the months ahead that short-term rates rise when people begin to wake up and realize that this system is failing. The U.S. Congress tried to push the debt ceiling from the September 30 deadline, which was precisely the day of the ECM – 2015.75. They could not make it out to December. There is a war within Congress and this is critical, for if the debt ceiling fight gets much worse, then we may indeed begin to start the perception that this is not going to look very pretty the further we move from 2015.75.

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