"In the Twilight of Empire" by Jeff Faux at InTheseTimes

[applegrove]

In the Twilight of Empire

by Jeff Faux at InTheseTimes

http://inthesetimes.com/article/13629/in_the_twilight_of_empire/

"SNIP.............................................

“In the long run,” John Maynard Keynes famously said, “we are all dead.” But living off large privileged stores of capital, most members of the governing classes are protected on the downside from the natural capitalist cycles of boom and bust. Recessions, even depressions and other economic calamities, are not typically life-threatening. As the crash of 2008 taught us once more, money may be lost, CEOs may be forced to retire early, and some assets might have to be sold, but those who drove the economy off the cliff did not end up sleeping on park benches. Three years later, Wall Street profits and bonuses were at or exceeding pre-crash levels.

The interpretation of the past, upon which much of the optimism for the future is based, also blurs the difference between the life of America and the lives of Americans. Ordinary citizens live in shorter, more fragile time frames. The damage from being out of work for six months, losing your house and/or your marriage, not being able to afford an operation, or having to drop out of college is never made up over a lifetime. The call for patience and shared sacrifice for the future has costs for the governed that those who govern typically never face.

Thus, in 2007, Forbes writer Quentin Hardy took naysaying Americans to task for their creeping pessimism: “We are longer-lived and with access to more knowledge and experiences than any king or pope who has come before, never mind the lives of countless billions whose ordinary tragedies are collectively called ‘history.’ This much luck should make us hug ourselves with delight.” Furthermore, he argued, “Having slipped catastrophes like the 1914-1945 worldwide conflicts (with 100 million dead), or the nuclear threat of the 44 cold war years that followed, there are also reasonable grounds to believe we can work out our problems. The daily advances in science and technology lend hope that on balance things can be even better.”

Unfortunately for them, the 19-year-olds whose futures were blown to pieces at Verdun, Iwo Jima or Khe Sanh; the young immigrant women incinerated in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire; and the kidnapped slaves from Africa worked to death on cotton plantations did not “slip the catastrophes” of history. We cannot ask them if their sacrifices were worth it.

.............................................SNIP"

[kenny blankenship]

1. This is a very worthwhile article

which is unfortunately not very well summarized by only the 4 paragraphs allowed. I suspect there hasn't been discussion of it because simply pulling four connected paragraphs doesn't convey the argument effectively. The callout quote on the page is a good beginning:"It’s a hopeless illusion that Americans can deal with the long economic twilight of empire that lies in front of them without radically reducing the dominance of money over our democracy." The author goes on to assert that this Change did not happen post-2008, where like Thomas Frank he would have Hoped for it to occur, after the financial melt down and election, because the political system selects charlatans like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton who have no actual interest in reforming the system and who thus prove themselves acceptable to the wealthiest corporate donors of their party, and who merely run faux-populist campaigns when it's most convenient, with no intention of following through and rocking the boat. All the other problems of a great power in decline, the declining standards of living and opportunity, the encroaching resource scarcity and environmental degradation, are likewise not dealt with in turn, preemptively tossed aside due to this first and more basic failure to -or refusal to- wrest the power of government away from the dictatorship of the super wealthy. This being the case, the only path leading away from a future of degenerate ever-worsening banana-republic dysfunction and spiraling authoritarianism that is afforded to us by our Constitutional system is to amend that Constitution. "The solution, therefore, is a constitutional amendment establishing once and for all that corporations do not have the political rights of, in the language of the court, “persons” and mandating hard limits on campaign spending." Within the electorate strong majorities of both left and right agree that big money wields far too much influence over our government and substantially delegitimizes its acts and process. So then, unite over what unites us to cast out what divides and oppresses us.

Great idea. But how do you get this Constitutional reform past the twin guardians of the corporate dictatorship? It's not going to happen.

[applegrove]

2. I think Sandy gave us a window on how to try and fix climate change.

I think that boom/bust stuff is important since that is how the rich want the economy to work and it guts the middle class and of course the poor. And the rich desperately want that boom bust to continue with no financial regulation or a watered down dodd/frank. These two are the fronts obama can fight on. I do think economies work best when they are mixed markets, with both socialist programs and capitalism in place. I think Obama has done a good job but is often strapped in by a crazy right wing in the USA. So much so he's done very little on the environment. The fault lies mostly with the right as I believe capitalism needs to be captured and not allowed to run amuk. It serves humanity, not the other way around.

[tama]

6. By calling a constitutional convention by states

and giving it an open mandate to revise and rewrite constitution to meet the challenges of contemporary reality.

All resent revolutions in Latin America, Arab spring and Iceland have included rewriting a new constitution and putting it under referendum.

[x2 vancouverite]

3. Faux is True

Except when it comes to a "news" network.

[emmafox]

4. Natural calamities

Natural calamities are not new to us. But though we have made great deal of progress in all the fields, we are still very much dependent of nature. This is nature's way to pay us back for our sins.

http://feelday.com

[hrmjustin]

5. Welcome to DU!

[tama]

7. Culture of superiority

"In 2011, the third year of the global recession, the Pew Research Center polled public attitudes in the United States, Germany, Britain, France and Spain. Only in the United States did a majority agree with the statement, “Our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others.” Even the notoriously proud French were only half as convinced of their exceptional culture as Americans were of theirs."

And there is no doubt that the "superiority" of US over others has all to do with superior power to blow everybody else into smithereens and superior power to hoard lions share of natural resources and destroy the carrying capacity of our planet. In word, imperial superiority. And then those same Americans wonder about wide spread "Anti-Americanism" over the globe.