empire

Don’t Diss the Dark Ages

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empireCharles Hugh Smith – Once dissed as The Dark Ages, the Medieval Era is more properly viewed as a successful adaptation to the challenges of the post-Western Roman Empire era. The decline of the Western Roman Empire was the result of a constellation of challenges, including (but not limited to) massive new incursions of powerful Germanic tribes, a widening chasm between the Western and the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), plague, an onerous tax burden on the non-elite classes, weak leadership, the dominance of a self-serving elite (sound familiar?) and last but not least, the expansion of an unproductive rabble in Rome that had to be bribed with increasingly costly Bread and Circuses.

In effect, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire ran out of time and money.The Grand Strategy, successful for hundreds of years, relied heavily on persuading “barbarian” tribes to join the Roman system for the commercial and security benefits. This process of integration worked because it was backed by the threat of destruction by military force.

The Empire maintained relatively modest military forces given its vast territory, but its road system and fleet enabled relatively rapid concentration of force to counter an invasion. It also maintained extensive fortifications along active borders.

All of this required substantial tax revenues, manpower and effective leadership, not just for fortifications, the army, roads and the fleet, but to maintain the commercial and political benefits offered to “barbarians” who chose integration in the Empire.

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The Empire Doesn’t Care Who You Vote For [Video]

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James Corbett – Elections are meaningless power rituals that only pit personas against each other in an establishment-endorsed Two Minutes Hate. So if these political wrestlemania matches don’t change society, what does?

https://youtu.be/OBfkR1YIU4A

Join us today for a fascinating conversation with Dan Sanchez about his recent article, “What If the Empire Held an Election and Nobody Came?”

SF Source corbettreport  Apr 2016

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The Lesson of Empires: Once Privilege Limits Social Mobility, Collapse Is Inevitable

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empire Charles Hugh Smith – Among the many lessons of empires is one shared by virtually every empire: once the privileged few limit the rise of those from humble origins (i.e. social mobility), the empire is doomed to rising instability and collapse.

Just as a reminder of how wealth and income are increasingly concentrated in the top of the wealth/power pyramid:

US-WealthDistributionSince1917

The greater the concentration of wealth and power, the lower the social mobility; the lower the social mobility, the greater the odds that the system will collapse when faced with a crisis that it would have easily handled in more egalitarian times.

When the economy is expanding faster than the population and the tide is lifting all ships large and small, the majority of people feel their chances of getting ahead are positive (even if the actual chances remain low).

But when the economy is stagnating, and they see those at the apex of the pyramid still amassing monumental gains, the majority realizes their chances of securing a better life are declining.

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The American Empire: Murder Inc.

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empireChris Hedges  – 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.

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Stairway To Tyranny

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“The Obama stratagem really clatters on the stairway. One step at a time, sweet tyranny, that’s all we’re asking from you.” – R Clifford

StairwayDown“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” —  Henry Kissinger (Nobel Peace Prize, 1975)

If a government can expand their power over the governed with such as The Patriot Act, National Defense Authorization Act, Department of Homeland Security, ,Federal Emergency Management Agency…there’s Dr. Kissinger’s aphrodisia—the Psychopathic Power Rush (PPR).

Heroin, power, cocaine, methamphetamine…“hard” drugs demand ever-increasing doses to keep the rush satisfying. Regarding the PPR, all questions lead to: How brutally can government tyrannize, how far can they push before sufficient numbers of the governed realize whose interests government actually serves? The governed are, at the very best, unsecured creditors, last in line. Banks, that’s whose interests are not only at the front of the line, banks own the line. Very little trickles past banks to serve interests behind theirs because government works for those who have a monopoly on creating “money” from nothing.

Regarding the question of how far the governed can be tyrannized before actually protecting themselves; historically, that question has sometimes been answered by: Revolution. But let’s not get hasty, tyranny has so many tentacles. And Napoleon Bonaparte might tell you: “History is a set of lies agreed upon.”

One part of history not a set of lies….

In 1787, Alexander Tyler of the University of Edinborough wrote that all democracies go through eight stages, two hundred years being the average cycle time. The stages are: Continue reading →