Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
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.
To untangle America from its Imperial Project, we also need to end financialization and crony-state-capitalism, both of which are key features of the Imperial Project. what better way is there to extend influence than exporting inflation and offering limitless credit in U.S. dollars?
What better way to skim the profits from trade than importing materials and goods and exporting fiat currency?
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: not directly, but indirectly via its ability to foist trillions of dollars of debt on the world economy.
The believers that hot wars are all there is to the Imperial Project fall silent when their share of the swag might be threatened. Unsurprisingly, we want the financial benefits of Empire but recoil at the entanglements of Empire.
Imperial Rome offers a useful template for what happens when the domestic populace gets dependent on Imperial wealth: the notion of sacrifice for the nation goes out the window and bread and circuses become the sole source of state legitimacy.
Needless to say, collapse follows these developments like night follows day.
For America to come home and untangle itself from the Imperial Project, it will have to do more than not meddle in everyone else’s affairs; it will have to learn to live within its means–what it earns from producing goods and services, not what it skims from global financialization.
A lot of the SS number includes the SS Disability fund which will soon be broke because it is being used for Behavior, Emotion and Mental Disabilities of mostly minority children and for able bodied goldbricks. I’m very tired of Liberals attacking National Defense when four times as much money is spent on Welfare. Also note that SS and Medicare are insurance Ponzi Schemes workers pay for but Medicaid is as big a cost and pure Welfare.
National defense is code for global empire building….and Putin the global warming denier just stepped into a pile of empire stink….no one dare deny climate change …not even Vlad the indestructible…..shit is about to get real.
Russia’s Putin Says Global Warming Is ‘A Fraud’
Daily Caller News Foundation
Russia’s Putin Says Global Warming Is ‘A Fraud’
Photo of Michael Bastasch
Michael Bastasch
10:56 AM 10/29/2015
Russian President Vladimir Putin believes global warming is a “fraud” — a plot to keep Russia from using its vast oil and natural gas reserves.
Putin believes “there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries, including Russia,” Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst and Putin critic, told The New York Times.
“That is why this subject is not topical for the majority of the Russian mass media and society in general,” Belkovsky said.
Putin has been casting doubt on man-made global warming since the early 2000s, according to the Times. In 2003, Putin told an international climate conference warming would allow Russians to “spend less on fur coats,” adding that “agricultural specialists say our grain production will increase, and thank God for that.”
Putin’s comments likely came after his staff “did very, very extensive work trying to understand all sides of the climate debate,” according to Andrey Illarionov, Putin’s former senior economic adviser, who’s now a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.
“We found that, while climate change does exist, it is cyclical, and the anthropogenic role is very limited,” Illarionov said. “It became clear that the climate is a complicated system and that, so far, the evidence presented for the need to ‘fight’ global warming was rather unfounded.”
The New York Times published an article on how the Russian media’s skepticism of global warming is being driven by Putin’s laissez faire attitude on the issue. The Times bashed the Russian autocrat for offering “only vague and modest pledges of emissions cuts ahead of December’s U.N. climate summit in Paris.”
Russia’s largely state-run media has spent little to no time covering global warming despite huge fires raging across Siberia. Instead of blaming the fires on warming, Russian news outlets tended to focus on “locals who routinely but carelessly burn off tall grasses every year, and the sometimes incompetent crews struggling to put the fires out.”
Such reasoning wasn’t good enough for the Times, which argued that “Russian media continue to pay little attention to an issue that animates so much of the world.”
Russian media leaders argue it’s not just the tone being set by Putin, but a weak economy and unemployment woes are a top concern of the Russian public — they don’t seem to care much about the weather.
“It is difficult to spend editorial resources on things that are now a low priority in the midst of the economic crisis,” Galina Timchenko, who runs a news site, told the Times. “Unfortunately climate change is not very interesting to the public.”
Low oil prices have hampered Russia’s economic growth, and spurred the Putin administration to take more action abroad, fomenting conflict in Ukraine and supporting the Assad regime in Syria. But at home, Russians are feeling the bite of cheap oil and western sanctions.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/29/russias-putin-says-global-warming-is-a-fraud/
I agree with RHS save for the “national defense” element: the USA could easily defend itself without the astronomical costs it incurs, a large portion of which (I suspect) is spent on boondoggles and “goldbricking” just as it is with the outrageous “disability” payments made to persons who have no justifiable “right” to such benefits.
Mr. Smith is correct in his conclusions and Mr. Putin will end up eating the lunch of the USA with its adherence to nonsense such as global warming or whatever the f&%$ else it’s called. Unless and until a stop is put to all the fuzzy-minded nonsense of the pussified SJW nonsense, y’all up there are in for harder and harder times and run the very real risk of ending up in a country ripe for conquest by the far-more-serious Russians and Chinese. The “Wolverines” won’t be able to stop them save for unleashing a nuclear holocaust that will moot the issue.
Great article indeed. I am confused however by the virulent disbelief in global warming I find on this site. Before any of my shit slinging monkey friends on TBP start flexing there sphincter muscles, let me say that I have no doubt that the parasites at the top of the Empire’s food chain would gladly use global warming as another pretext for controlling and fleecing the sheeple. Moreover, there are other imminent environmental dangers that require remedies that can’t be financialized or easily exploited like Fuckushima and are hence dealt with as public relations issues. That crisis was and may still be one of the biggest real national security threats we’ve faced, so what do we do but let it be handled by a bunch of compromised executives in Japan?
I also grant that infinite factors impact global climates and that climate change has been a major factor in human evolution all the way up through recent historical times. Long before humans could possibly have impacted climate, drought in Africa is thought by some geneticists to have reduced our species to just a few thousand individuals.
HOWEVER, the belief that human activity, with its massive transformations of the landscape and the very chemistry of the planet is somehow MAGICALLY exempted from all the list of climate change causes seems to me downright infantile. Even relatively primitive people have had surprisingly large impacts on their environments through over grazing and farming practices. Of course numerous other disruptions occur like volcanic activity and could again. We could raise the planet’s temperature ten degrees, then have a few big volcanoes blow and be freezing our asses off. But believing that raising the CO2 levels in the atmosphere indefinitely (something I contribute to myself every time I throw another log in the woodstove or drive my car) will NOT cause climate change reminds me of the very financialization this article is about. We may whine about the Empire but we still want the swag. Keep creating more and more money while doing less and less real work and imagine that this non-workers’ paradise will continue. Keep pumping more and more shit into the atmosphere and water and expect no consequences. That’s just another form of assumed entitlement, another way to put your hand out for that free lunch the Empire will gladly give you in exchange for your compliance. But in this case, we aren’t expecting the free lunch from
government, we’re expecting it from Mother Nature. Bad idea. Mother Nature is less tolerant of welfare queens than the federal government, and to my way of thinking many of the “conservative” cry babies who are having temper tantrums about climate change may be in for some very unpleasant surprises. I do hope I’ve offended someone. Sorry, this issue does piss me off.
By the way, I have had some contact with rather well informed scientists. One, my ex gf’s brother , Mark Serreze, is in charge of monitoring all the satellite data on the planet’s snow and ice cover. He and his sister are a couple of tough minded Mainers and super smart, politically more libertarian than anything else. I know Mark believes that man made climate change is real and has never been willing to submit to political pressure from either the pros or cons. He’s also spent more time outside in the Arctic than many Americans have away from their television sets.
“HOWEVER, the belief that human activity, with its massive transformations of the landscape and the very chemistry of the planet is somehow MAGICALLY exempted from all the list of climate change causes seems to me downright infantile.” ———— John Coster
During the DINOSAUR ERA …… earth was STIFLING HOT and had five times the current level of CO2. Soooooo, I guess humans did that too. Right?
And I guess THIS is nothing to do with GloBULL warming. Right?
[/img]
[img
You want “infantile”? Look in the mirror.