{"id":34282,"date":"2018-05-16T05:46:14","date_gmt":"2018-05-16T10:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34282"},"modified":"2018-05-16T05:46:14","modified_gmt":"2018-05-16T10:46:14","slug":"why-the-empire-never-sleeps-the-indispensable-nation-folly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34282","title":{"rendered":"Why The Empire Never Sleeps: The Indispensable Nation Folly"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Why The Empire Never Sleeps: The Indispensable Nation Folly<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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Like the case of Rome before it, the Empire is bankrupting America. The true fiscal cost is upwards of\u00a0$1.o trillion<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>per year (counting\u00a0$200 billion<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>for veterans and debt service for wars), but there is no way to pay for it.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because the 78-million strong Baby Boom is in the driver\u2019s seat of American politics. It plainly\u00a0will not permit the\u00a0$3 trillion<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>per year retirement and health care entitlement-driven Welfare State to be curtailed.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Trumpite\/GOP has already sealed that deal by refusing to reform\u00a0Social Security and Medicare and by proving utterly incapable of\u00a0laying a glove politically on Obamacare\/Medicaid. At the same time, boomers keep\u00a0voting for the GOP\u2019s anti-tax allergy, thereby\u00a0refusing to tax\u00a0themselves to close Washington\u2019s yawning deficits.<\/p>\n

More importantly,\u00a0the generation which\u00a0marched on the Pentagon in 1968 against the insanity and\u00a0 barbarism of LBJ\u2019s Vietnam War have long since abandoned\u00a0the cause of peace. So doing,\u00a0boomers have\u00a0acquiesced in the final ascendancy of the Warfare State, which grew like topsy once the US became the world\u2019s sole superpower after the Soviet Union slithered off the pages of history in 1991.<\/p>\n

Yet there is a reason why the end of the 77-year world\u00a0war which incepted with the \u201cguns of August\u201d in\u00a01914 did not enable the world to resume the status quo ante of relative peace and prosperous global capitalism.<\/p>\n

To wit, the hoary ideology of American exceptionalism and the Indispensable Nation was also,\u00a0ironically, liberated from the shackles\u00a0of cold war realism when the iron curtain came tumbling down.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Consequently, it burst\u00a0into a\u00a0quest\u00a0for\u00a0unadulterated global hegemony. In short order (under Bush the Elder and the\u00a0Clintons) Washington morphed into the Imperial City, and became a beehive not only of militarism, but of an endless complex\u00a0of think-tanks, NGO\u2019s, advisories and consultancies, \u201claw firms\u201d, lobbies and racketeers.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why The Empire Never Sleeps: The Indispensable Nation Folly Like the case of Rome before it, the Empire is bankrupting America. The true fiscal cost is upwards of\u00a0$1.o trillion\u00a0per year (counting\u00a0$200 billion\u00a0for veterans and debt service for wars), but there is no way to pay for it. That\u2019s because the 78-million strong Baby Boom is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[1949,5012,18357,1361,5979,2120,259,1024,827,2525,4318],"class_list":["post-34282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-america","tag-american-exceptionalism","tag-baby-boom","tag-bankruptcy","tag-contracorner","tag-david-stockman","tag-empire","tag-rome","tag-united-states","tag-welfare-state","tag-zerohedge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34282"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34283,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34282\/revisions\/34283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}