The best is yet to come, I heard someone say this.

I don't see anything fine and dandy about America losing or appearing to lose its power and prestige in the world. America is dominant for certain reasons and those reasons are still with us - mainly economical - and this is not the Great Depression, the economy will be back on its feet soon. A recession does not signal the downfall of the country. However there are challenging issues we have to face. Health care, immigration, environment, etc. Meanwhile, let's get our houses back in order before we start squabbling over whose house is the best...

www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/6480289/It-is-Japan-we-should-be-worrying-about-not-America.html

Our leverage is waning in part because natural resource rich countries with deplorable human rights records like Burma or Uzbekistan can find other buyers, principally China, who don't care about the country's internal political arrangements.

What passes for a leadership cadre in this country has completely taken leave of anything remotely resembling common sense. We now have utter fantasy masquerading as sane policy. To witL

We have a fiscal policy of massive borrowing and new spending, particularly on entitlements, and absolutely not a clue as to how or even IF we should pay for it;

We have a monetary policy that is visibly reducing the US dollar to the worth of the 1780s Continental, and at warp speed;

We have a welfare policy that promises an open cornucopia to all and sundry, even when that cornucopia doesn't have enough to provide for all who take advantage of it now;

We have an immigration policy that offers that same cornucopia to the entire world's dispossessed.

And we have a voting-rights policy that allows welfare and Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid recipients----wards of the State, in other words---to vote on the same basis as productive, normal citizens.

Combine all those and watch them work. Frankly, I'll be surprised if the United States exists at all in 2025. We're blowing ourselves apart chasing after what are, in effect, social and political mass hallucinations.

Look for 2025's Mexico, China and Europe to be picking over the bones to see if there's anything worth salvaging from our ruins. My guess is that the answer to that will be "No".

This assumes, btw, that that whatever civil conflict that finally does blow us apart doesn't spread worldwide and take the rest of the Human species down with us, of course.

Your servant,

Lord Karth

P.S. I flatly refuse to make any cash bets against that scenario coming to pass.

"Our best times are in front of us!" "A shining city on the hill, a beacon of freedom to the world!"

yadda yadda yadda

Michael Klare is absolutely right. If the American Empire were a can of corn, we'd be well past our product code date right now, and it's a matter of time before the can just bulges out and shows everyone that the edible food inside has turned into poison.

He's illuminated the ways we've entered our decline, but the America Firsters should not feel so bad about the evidence. The USA is just following in the footsteps of every other empire that's ruled the earth. For you Bible lovers, I will only refer you to Ecclesiastes and its citation, "for everything there is a time..."

What characterizes an empire in decline besides the specifics mentioned for the USA? I will give you a few:

-hugified government bureaucracies

-massive levels of debt, public and private

-chronic defecit spending

-an oursourcing of jobs to former colonies now almost equals, and rising stars

-wealth creation based on finance and not manufacturing

- ongoing military adventures that overreach country capacities

-cultural "decadence"

-an increasing and persistent underclass

-an income distribution that benefits the elite at the expense of the masses

-devaluation of the currency

Does any of this sound familiar to you? I just didn't pull these indicators out of the air. Some of these things have been discussed since the time of Thuyucides in ancient Greece, and students/theorists of the rise and fall of empires have been commenting and elaborating on these factors up to the present day.

To many people dependent on obtaining advantages from the present system, the decline of the American Empire no doubt looks like very bad news. But as we all know, every economic and political action has winners and losers.

Losers will include defense contractors and the military-industrial complex. As the cost of waging war gets ever more and more expensive, the United States will be less able to get involved in much loved military adventures as we've seen since 1950. In making hard choices, political leaders will be forced to benefit the greatest number of citizens, which means you and me instead of Boeing. And Boeing will have its feathers soothed by being able to obtain green technology projects from the government as a bailout/sop. Thus, in the long term, we might even talk about the environmental-industrial complex instead, which couldn't possibly be any worse than what we have now.

On the human and cultural side, most (but not all) empires have a painful adjustment stage when they finally realize that their days as king of the world are now officially over. End of empire doesn't automatically mean something like the death of Nazi Germany. Great Britain in the 20th Century did quite well in transitioning from empire to non-empire status, relatively speaking. Mind you, two world wars and a depression are not much fun, but remember, Great Britain was still technically a world power for ten years after 1945. It still had its empire. It wasn't until the Suez Crisis of 1956, that the United Kingdom finally realized that it was out of the game. And what happened after that? In less than ten years, they'd discovered the Beatles and Swinging London!

Hopefully, the same thing will happen in a kinder,gentler way for the USA. The Iraq and Afghani Wars were two shots. The death of Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch, etc. was another shot. Hopefully there won't be too many more. Hopefully, we can do an empire-ectomy painlessly and peacefully by ourselves.

And wouldn't it be fun to have a new thing to replace the Beatles?