Degenerate, Delusional and Senile

Is the sun setting on the mighty American Empire?

(Source: Getty Images)

Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Youghal, Ireland...

We try to keep our distance from politics. But like a bully in a barroom, politics shimmies up close to us anyway. We smell the liquor on its breath. 

Inflation is fundamentally a matter of government policy. Politicians want more money than they can get from taxing and borrowing. Usually, they need it to pay for expensive and unproductive programs, such as land redistribution (Zimbabwe), bribing the voters (Argentina), or war (Germany). Always and everywhere, it is a way of ripping off the many for the benefit of a few.  

And it is not entirely unpredictable. There are patterns to markets and to history. In markets, the Primary Trend sets a course that can continue for many decades, no matter what happens in the daily news. The interest rate cycle, for example, can last a lifetime. Interest rates hit record lows after WWII. They rose…and didn’t return to an ultimate low again until 2020 – more than 7 decades later.

A Familiar Pattern

In politics, one of the most powerful trends is the arc of empire – from an earnest, dynamic and humble beginning (the US in the 19^th century)... to a powerful, proud, admired hegemon (the US in the 20^th century)….to a degenerate, and largely delusional, senility ( the US in the 21^st century) – the pattern is familiar; it seems ‘natural.’   

On a still-larger scale, the polished glory of the whole English-speaking world…from the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 to its own defeat in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan five centuries later…is now turning gray. The British ruled the waves in the 19^th century. America took the lead after WWI and ruled the 20^th. But now, US sanctions are said to affect a third of the human race – with little effect. For all the press bluster to the contrary, the Russians appear to be winning their war in the Ukraine. France has announced that it may be going its own way. The Japanese are re-arming. China is beginning to play a larger and larger role. The BRICs are developing their own reserve currency... while asserting their independence. The English speakers’ prestige, power and wealth – relative to the rest of the world – are clearly waning.

Almost 20 years ago, when we wrote our ‘Empire of Debt’ book, with Addison Wiggin, we saw the writing on the wall. The US conquered. But it couldn’t win. It could destroy foreign governments…but it couldn’t build a democracy.  It spent money to run its empire…now nearly $1.5 trillion/year…but it had no revenue to pay for it.

The gist of our argument, then….and now:

This is not going to end well.

Barbarians Inside the Gate

Turning to contemporary politics…

…what is perhaps most remarkable is that there is so little opposition to the program that is most likely to ruin us. The US has no enemies that it didn’t create itself. Russia is not going to invade Alaska. Canada is not going to send mounties to take control of Minnesota. China is not preparing an attack on California. And Mexicans are very unlikely to march into Houston.

Still, trillions of dollars are spent on ‘national security.’ And in the debt ceiling brouhaha nobody in Congress even suggested the obvious solution: cut a few hundred billion out of the empire budget. Instead, both parties agreed to exempt the Pentagon and its suppliers from any reductions.

The last US presidents to rock the boat at all were Eisenhower and Kennedy, more than half a century ago. In his farewell speech, Eisenhower warned the nation to beware of the military. A celebrated war hero, he knew, better than almost anyone, how perverse and corrupting the military-industrial complex could be.  

JFK was a war hero too. According to his nephew, RFK,Jr., the young president had been played by the CIA. The Bay of Pigs invasion was intentionally botched, he claims, to force Kennedy to send the Pentagon to the rescue.  

A Thousand Pieces

By the early ‘60s, the CIA was a law unto itself…with a classified, apparently unlimited budget. It was a government within a government…the deepest part of the Deep State. It supported revolutions and coups d’etat. It tried to murder foreign leaders. It ran roughshod over much of the world; it bankrolled the Cuban debacle.  

But instead of sending US warplanes to cover the assault, Kennedy held US forces in check…and vowed to smash the CIA “into a thousand pieces.” Two years later, Kennedy was assassinated…and the CIA became more powerful than ever.  

Since then, there has been no serious challenge to the military-industrial-spook complex. And now there are no war heroes to oppose it.  

Donald Trump and his ‘Make America Great Again’ campaign appealed to those people longing for a return to the early days of the empire. He even claimed he would end the ‘forever wars’ that the CIA had started. But The Donald never understood what was going on. His fans, and maybe he too, thought he opposed the Deep State, even while he gave it bigger military budgets, bigger deficits than America had ever seen, and an unprecedented and unnecessary ‘lockdown’ of civilian society.

And Joe Biden? There is no chance that he will try to change things either.  

Birds gotta fly. Fish gotta swim. And empires gotta go onto the trash heap of history. But how? When? Who will lead them there?

More to come…

Regards,

Bill Bonner