End of Empire or Not? Any opinions out there?
Mr. Fish
The American empire is coming to an end. The U.S. economy is being drained by wars in the Middle East and vast military expansion around the globe. It is burdened by growing deficits, along with the devastating effects of deindustrialization and global trade agreements. Our democracy has been captured and destroyed by corporations that steadily demand more tax cuts, more deregulation and impunity from prosecution for massive acts of financial fraud, all the while looting trillions from the U.S. treasury in the form of bailouts. The nation has lost the power and respect needed to induce allies in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa to do its bidding. Add to this the mounting destruction caused by climate change and you have a recipe for an emerging dystopia. Overseeing this descent at the highest levels of the federal and state governments is a motley collection of imbeciles, con artists, thieves, opportunists and warmongering generals. And to be clear, I am speaking about Democrats, too.
The empire will limp along, steadily losing influence until the dollar is dropped as the world’s reserve currency, plunging the United States into a crippling depression and instantly forcing a massive contraction of its military machine.
Short of a sudden and widespread popular revolt, which does not seem likely, the death spiral appears unstoppable, meaning the United States as we know it will no longer exist within a decade or, at most, two. The global vacuum we leave behind will be filled by China, already establishing itself as an economic and military juggernaut, or perhaps there will be a multipolar world carved up among Russia, China, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and a few other states. Or maybe the void will be filled, as the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power,” by “a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral military forces like NATO, and an international financial leadership self-selected at Davos and Bilderberg” that will “forge a supranational nexus to supersede any nation or empire.”
Under every measurement, from financial growth and infrastructure investment to advanced technology, including supercomputers, space weaponry and cyberwarfare, we are being rapidly overtaken by the Chinese. “In April 2015 the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggested that the American economy would grow by nearly 50 percent over the next 15 years, while China’s would triple and come close to surpassing America’s in 2030,” McCoy noted. China became the world’s second largest economy in 2010, the same year it became the world’s leading manufacturing nation, pushing aside a United States that had dominated the world’s manufacturing for a century. The Department of Defense issued a sober report titled “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World.” It found that the U.S. military “no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors,” and “it no longer can … automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range.” McCoy predicts the collapse will come by 2030.
Empires in decay embrace an almost willful suicide. Blinded by their hubris and unable to face the reality of their diminishing power, they retreat into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with unilateral threats and the blunt instrument of war.
This collective self-delusion saw the United States make the greatest strategic blunder in its history, one that sounded the death knell of the empire—the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The architects of the war in the George W. Bush White House, and the array of useful idiots in the press and academia who were cheerleaders for it, knew very little about the countries being invaded, were stunningly naive about the effects of industrial warfare and were blindsided by the ferocious blowback. They stated, and probably believed, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, although they had no valid evidence to support this claim. They insisted that democracy would be implanted in Baghdad and spread across the Middle East. They assured the public that U.S. troops would be greeted by grateful Iraqis and Afghans as liberators. They promised that oil revenues would cover the cost of reconstruction. They insisted that the bold and quick military strike—“shock and awe”—would restore American hegemony in the region and dominance in the world. It did the opposite. As Zbigniew Brzezinski noted, this “unilateral war of choice against Iraq precipitated a widespread delegitimation of U.S. foreign policy.”
Historians of empire call these military fiascos, a feature of all late empires, examples of “micro-militarism.” The Athenians engaged in micro-militarism when during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) they invaded Sicily, suffering the loss of 200 ships and thousands of soldiers and triggering revolts throughout the empire. Britain did so in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal and then quickly had to withdraw in humiliation, empowering a string of Arab nationalist leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and dooming British rule over the nation’s few remaining colonies. Neither of these empires recovered.
“While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” McCoy writes. “Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micromilitary operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way.”
Empires need more than force to dominate other nations. They need a mystique. This mystique—a mask for imperial plunder, repression and exploitation—seduces some native elites, who become willing to do the bidding of the imperial power or at least remain passive. And it provides a patina of civility and even nobility to justify to those at home the costs in blood and money needed to maintain empire. The parliamentary system of government that Britain replicated in appearance in the colonies, and the introduction of British sports such as polo, cricket and horse racing, along with elaborately uniformed viceroys and the pageantry of royalty, were buttressed by what the colonialists said was the invincibility of their navy and army. England was able to hold its empire together from 1815 to 1914 before being forced into a steady retreat. America’s high-blown rhetoric about democracy, liberty and equality, along with basketball, baseball and Hollywood, as well as our own deification of the military, entranced and cowed much of the globe in the wake of World War II. Behind the scenes, of course, the CIA used its bag of dirty tricks to orchestrate coups, fix elections and carry out assassinations, black propaganda campaigns, bribery, blackmail, intimidation and torture. But none of this works anymore.
The loss of the mystique is crippling. It makes it hard to find pliant surrogates to administer the empire, as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. The photographs of physical abuse and sexual humiliation imposed on Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib inflamed the Muslim world and fed al-Qaida and later Islamic State with new recruits. The assassination of Osama bin Laden and a host of other jihadist leaders, including the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, openly mocked the concept of the rule of law. The hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees fleeing our debacles in the Middle East, along with the near-constant threat from militarized aerial drones, exposed us as state terrorists. We have exercised in the Middle East the U.S. military’s penchant for widespread atrocities, indiscriminate violence, lies and blundering miscalculations, actions that led to our defeat in Vietnam.
The brutality abroad is matched by a growing brutality at home. Militarized police gun down mostly unarmed, poor people of color and fill a system of penitentiaries and jails that hold a staggering 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although Americans represent only 5 percent of global population. Many of our cities are in ruins. Our public transportation system is a shambles. Our educational system is in steep decline and being privatized. Opioid addiction, suicide, mass shootings, depression and morbid obesity plague a population that has fallen into profound despair. The deep disillusionment and anger that led to Donald Trump’s election—a reaction to the corporate coup d’état and the poverty afflicting at least half of the country—have destroyed the myth of a functioning democracy. Presidential tweets and rhetoric celebrate hate, racism and bigotry and taunt the weak and the vulnerable. The president in an address before the United Nations threatened to obliterate another nation in an act of genocide. We are worldwide objects of ridicule and hatred. The foreboding for the future is expressed in the rash of dystopian films, motion pictures that no longer perpetuate American virtue and exceptionalism or the myth of human progress.
“The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines,” McCoy writes. “Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit—witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe.”
When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”
“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq],” he writes.
Many of the estimated 69 empires that have existed throughout history lacked competent leadership in their decline, having ceded power to monstrosities such as the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero. In the United States, the reins of authority may be in the grasp of the first in a line of depraved demagogues.
“For the majority of Americans, the 2020s will likely be remembered as a demoralizing decade of rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading international competitiveness,” McCoy writes. The loss of the dollar as the global reserve currency will see the U.S. unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds, which will be drastically devalued at that point. There will be a massive rise in the cost of imports. Unemployment will explode. Domestic clashes over what McCoy calls “insubstantial issues” will fuel a dangerous hypernationalism that could morph into an American fascism.
A discredited elite, suspicious and even paranoid in an age of decline, will see enemies everywhere. The array of instruments created for global dominance—wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties, sophisticated torture techniques, militarized police, the massive prison system, the thousands of militarized drones and satellites—will be employed in the homeland. The empire will collapse and the nation will consume itself within our lifetimes if we do not wrest power from those who rule the corporate state.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 11 books,
Even Aristotle over 2000 years ago recognized that empires only last for about a couple of centuries. He described how typically the progression of decay goes through a cycle.
We need to worry more about a not uncommon ending ….a war or series of wars, for the purpose of extending power, but inevitably failing so to do.
The Boer War was Britain’s Vietnam. It happens to them all.
Suicide by parasite?
It’s been chic to call for the end of the American empire. Many of the hallmarks are certainly there.
“Overseeing this descent at the highest levels of the federal and state governments is a motley collection of imbeciles, con artists, thieves, opportunists and warmongering generals. And to be clear, I am speaking about Democrats, too.”
Chris is a talented writer and at least he calls out his own (albeit vaguely), but the first statement is far too broad in its implications. There are plenty of bright and honest people in government, but the percentages are dwindling and the bad apples get all the press.
Oh yeah, we’ve been in Afghanistan for 16 years and counting. We had the opportunity to “win” 15 years ago, but chose to nation-build instead. Why is Afghanistan called the graveyard of empires?
https://thediplomat.com/2017/06/why-is-afghanistan-the-graveyard-of-empires
The next century belongs to China, Russia looks like it will be pretty good too.
I would think alot of nations will do better without so much american influence.
Big Al:
Please explain why you are so confident that nothing would come out of another independent investigation into 9/11.
The US is certainly in rapid imperial decline. What comes next is anyone’s guess. Does the US return to decency in a multi-polar community of nations? Or do those wrecking the US move on to yet greater destruction?
Pardon me for waxing religious but, I have a different perspective on this issue. America’s greatest threat to its demise is by virtue of its moral decay from within. Moral decay in the halls of government, industry, education, and most importantly, when the more part of the people begin to choose wickedness. Moral decay is the foundation of many of the ills in the country. Sadly, all of this was foreseen, by the founders, and by prophets. The Book of Mormon is another testament of Jesus Christ and God’s dealings with the ancient people of the Americas. Prophets recorded much in this book and told of these things long ago. What is transpiring in our day was foretold long ago. like a disease, immoral people who seek for power and influence are throughout our society in positions of power and helping our demise and sowing seeds of contention for their own good.
Let me quote one verse which deals with our day specifically and see how on target it is: “Condemning the righteous because of their righteousness; letting the guilty and the wicked go unpunished because of their money; and moreover to be held in office at the head of government, to rule and do according to their wills, that they might get gain and glory of the world, and, moreover, that they might the more easily commit adultery, and steal, and kill, and do according to their own wills.”
This was what one of their prophets was describing was happening in their day and that it would repeat itself in our day and cause much ill in our society. They warned us to not let these conditions happen in our day and to be more wise than they were.
I know this is a different perspective, but so much of what is happening over the last several decades reads right out of their day, after all, human nature repeats itself, so is it any wonder the fix we are in?
Hedges covers a lot of territory in this article. Going through it point by point will have a person writing a book. All his points are debatable, some more some less.
The American empire is coming to an end. Probably. Is this bad or good? Depends. Were you paying for it? Were you getting your money’s worth? Was it better spent elsewhere? Was it always a good or bad idea? Maybe for a time to keep other empires in check, maybe. Perhaps the time of empires has passed……. perhaps. But one aspect of empires was plunder in one form or another. I put forth the idea that we are reaching a law of diminishing returns on “Empire”. The EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) means that you need a wide spread in capability and “fire in the belly” to subdue your opponent to make this sustainable (and profitable). It also helps if your opponent plays by your rules, but I digress. I doubt this exists anymore in a world of nuclear weapons and the type of comparatively low technology resistance that is increasingly in play. Using a 50 million dollar fighter aircraft with equally expensive ammunition to to kill an illiterate rebel with a 40 year old rifle over and over is (to put it mildly) not going to work.
There are a great number of people outside the “Empire” that seem to live (some more, some less) happy and content.
Does China want to be and empire? Does Russia want to be an empire? I would hazard a guess that both have the Tshirt and would rather not go through that again. But, they don’t intend to put up with wannabe “empires” pissing in their cornflakes. EVERY country has enough problems satisfying their own populations without looking for outside dragons to slay. Let’s tend to our own knitting, shall we?
We can do this easy or we can do this hard. Americans get to decide (if the shadow government decides to use the two brain cells they have left and stand out of the way) whether sending sons and daughters to die to “promote” democracy (at least our version) to countries on the other side of the world (some literally thousands of years older than ours) is just pissing our treasure down a gopher hole. It’s not our “white man’s burden”. If we are a “shining city on a hill”, it will be obvious and they will follow. If not, well………
The military is more than enough to protect our own borders. As far as I’m concerned, there is to much of the military protecting other idiots. Come back and protect our own idiots. They seem to be sprouting up like weeds.
Know when to hold them, know when to fold the……….
China has an Achilles heel and that is Artificial Intelligence. Manufacturing is returning to The US. Cheap labor does not matter in this new Industrial Revolution, people are not needed, only an ability to stay on the cutting edge of technology.
The real problem lies in our ability as a species to survive this revolution we have engineered and will most certainly replace us.
I always love reading Chris Hedges grim books and essays. He has seen so many countries/people die thanks to senseless wars, racketeering, and dung-ridden corporate+political “leadership”. Robert Fisk is another guy worth reading, as he has spent the last three decades witnessing and reported from the “ground zero” of American Imperialism. Gruesome stuff that Empire!
China and Russia strike a deal…….yuan trade backed by gold…for oil
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-04/failing-empire-part-2-de-dollarisation-china-and-russias-plan-petroyuan-gold
Looks like the Gold Bugs are going to get their Gold backed currency.
I wonder if they will be happy with Communist China and Russia dictating policy.
If it comes about that way, it won’t be the Gold Bugs doing. Had their view been heeded in time, the situation would never have gotten to this point.
Gh:
The same folks with the Gold control the fiat.
I have gold and I am not controlling the fiat……… “)
Jerry:
I have Gold to.But neither of us have enough to in any way control the outcome concerning price discovery.
Price discovery is being made in China and Russia………check the over night price of gold on the SGE…..
Jerry:
I own Gold because I know how the planet spins.
I own Bitcoin because I still believe in Freedom.
Common usage of ‘Gold Bugs’ suggest the little guy who believes in hard money etc., not the bullion bankers.
I would agree with the bullion statement…….GH
GH:
I will come up with something else.
What we believe and what is actually reality is changing for me everyday.
That is good……
Almost a year and half ago I started to read the Bible. Everyday is a new lesson for me.
Jerry is right about Jubilee.
We need a reset.
Thank you JOHN…….appreciate…….
Chinese are just doing an end run around the money changers……
Off Topic, but informative:
http://cambridgehouse.com/video/4428/commerce-resources-with-president-chris-grove
Zerohedge posts 16 questions about the Las Vegas shooting from Michael Snyder:
Some questions are easily answered and I will do so:
The following are 16 unanswered questions about the Las Vegas shooting that the mainstream media does not want to talk about…
#1 Photos of Stephen Paddock’s hotel room have been leaked, and one of those photos appears to show a suicide note. Why hasn’t the public been told what is in that note?
#2 Were there additional shooters? A taxi driver clearly captured video of an automatic weapon being fired out of a lower level window. A video from another angle and brief footage captured by Dan Bilzerian also seem to confirm that automatic gunfire was coming from a floor much lower than the 32nd floor room that Stephen Paddock was located on. And if you weren’t convinced by the first three videos, this fourth video should definitely do it.
#3 Why were law enforcement authorities discussing “another suspect on the fourth floor”, and why isn’t the mainstream media talking about this?
#4 As Jon Rappoport has pointed out, it would have been impossible for Stephen Paddock to kill and wound 573 people in less than five minutes of shooting with the kinds of weapons that he is alleged to have used. So why won’t law enforcement authorities acknowledge this fact?
………Answer. Your timing is incorrect. The shooting, with breaks, went on for over 12 minutes. (I did not try to eliminate the breaks, but it is possible the actual firing period without the breaks could be as short as 5 minutes.
#5 How in the world did Paddock get 42 guns and “several thousand rounds of ammo” into his hotel room without anyone noticing?
…………..Paddock booked the room weeks in advance and was in the room 5 days.
From his car in the parking garage, it would be relatively easy to take multiple trips using a standard clothes rack/suitcase trolley to move everything upstairs using a direct elevator.
#6 How did someone with “no military background” and that wasn’t a “gun guy at all” operate such advanced weapons? Because what we are being told by the mainstream media just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I really like how Natural News made this point…
……….Paddock acquired the weapons slowly over a period of longer than a year.
Why could he not have gone to a gun range and practiced?
Far from what the firearms-illiterate media claims, these are not systems that any Joe off the street can just pick up and use to effortlessly mow down 500 people. Running these systems requires extensive training, experience and stamina. It is physically impossible for a guy like Stephen Paddock to operate such a system in the sustained, effective manner that we witnessed, especially when shooting from an elevated position which throws off all the ranging of the weapon system.
…………22,000 targets. He hardly had to aim at all.
The police radio indicates breaks in firing. But he had enough guns not to need to replace magazines much, and he did not have to wait for cooling….just move to another gun. He had tables on which to rest the firearms, so he was not holding all the weight.
Far from being a Navy Seal, Stephen Paddock is a retired accountant senior citizen with a gambling problem and a flabby physique. The only way he could have carried out this shooting is if he were transformed into a human superweapon through a magic wand. I’m calling this “Mission IMPOSSIBLE” because of the physical impossibility of a retired, untrained senior citizen pulling this off.
……….This over-exaggerates the difficulty, and the physical strength required.
#7 Why was one woman telling people in the crowd that they were all going to die 45 minutes before the attack?
#8 Why did it take law enforcement authorities 72 minutes to get into Stephen Paddock’s hotel room?
……police were in the building within minutes of the first firing.
They spent a lot of time clearing occupants out of lower floors. I do not know why.
It took almost 30 minutes from being outside his room with the floor cleared of non police, before entry into the room.
Possibly this delay was getting SWAT team and explosives to the location.
(At this point of time firing had stopped, so there was really no need to hurry.)
#9 Why did Paddock wire $100,000 to the Philippines last week?
…….His brother said he sent the money to his girlfriend for her parents.
#10 Why was Paddock’s girlfriend, Marilou Danley, in the Philippines when the attack took place? Did she know what was about to happen?
……His brother said she was vising friends or her parents.
#11 Was Paddock on antidepressants like so many other mass killers in the past have been?
#12 Why was ISIS so eager to take responsibility for this attack, and why was the FBI so quick to dismiss that connection?
…….ISIS claimed responsibility and then doubled down repeating responsibility.
#13 Apparently Paddock had earned millions of dollars “through real estate deals”. If he was so wealthy, why would he all of a sudden snap like that?
#14 Why did he move so frequently? It is being reported that Paddock had 27 different residences during his adult life.
……….It is not uncommon for a single person in real estate, especially to start with, to move into a property while it is being fixed up, sell it, move on to the next property and repeat.
#15 Why were nearly all of the exits out of the concert venue completely blocked?…
In essence, the concert trapped the people, preventing them from escaping, and denying them the ability to seek cover. From there, sustained, full-auto gunfire is almost impossible to survive.
………..Unfortunately it is not uncommon to block other entrances and exits while a concert is in progress to stop people getting in for free. Likewise a high fence or wall is used to block vision from a distance.
From Fox News, a caller named Russell Bleck, who survived the shooting, said live on air, “There were ten-foot walls blocking us in. We couldn’t escape. It was just a massacre. We had nowhere to go.”
#16 Why was a country music festival chosen as the target? Was the goal to kill as many Trump supporters and other conservatives as possible? And is there evidence that Stephen Paddock was connected to Antifa in any way?
At first I thought that this was a fairly straightforward story too, but the more I have dug into it the more complex things have become.
Personally, I have come to the conclusion that Stephen Paddock definitely did not act alone. That means that the others involved in the shooting are still out there, and they must be brought to justice. Let us never forget what these extremely wicked individuals did to innocent civilians such as 27-year-old Tina Frost…
A 27-year-old woman has lost her right eye after a bullet ripped through her face during the Las Vegas concert massacre.
Tina Frost remains in a coma in hospital after undergoing surgery to remove the bullet that became lodged in her eye when a gunman opened fire on the crowd of country music fans on Sunday night.
Frost, who is originally from Maryland but moved to California several years ago, is expected to remain in the coma for a week.
Whoever did this is going to pay greatly. Yes, I do believe that Stephen Paddock was involved. But he did not act alone, and the mainstream media is doing the public a great disservice by ignoring all of the evidence that this was not just a “lone wolf” operation.
Just remember who owns that mainstream media, CFS.
another clue, complete breakdown of foreign policy
Donald Trump Threatened North Korea After Completely Imaginary Negotiations
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/03/donald-trump-threatened-north-korea-after-completely-imaginary-negotiations/
Rex Tillerson Is Running the State Department Into the Ground
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/04/rex-tillerson-is-running-the-state-department-into-the-ground-215677
Las Vegas shooting:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4946740/Bodycam-footage-shows-cops-advancing-Las-Vegas-killer.html
It has been stated it was impossible for Paddock to have caused the amount of casualties.
Paddock had 12 rifles fitted with bump-stock modifications, which allowed them to fire at full-auto rates of up to 800 rounds a minute. He killed 58, plus himself, and injured 527 others.
Taking the lowest estimate of firing time of 5 minutes times 800 rounds per minutes is
4,000 shots fired. But the firing was not continuous, so let’s take half that number……2,000 shots.
shooting at a packed mass of 22,000 people with 585 casualties assuming no one hurt by stampeding to the exit, and assuming no one hurt by shrapnel, and assuming no bullet hit more than one person, would still allow 1,415 shots to miss targets out of 2,000 fired.
Seems to be quite possible.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4946740/Bodycam-footage-shows-cops-advancing-Las-Vegas-killer.html#ixzz4udMkUfNa
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One of the saddest lessons in History is this:
If we are bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
BCCI,Iran Contra, 9/11
Empire. The true Empire Builder at this time is not America, but the Globalists. They use the kind of conquest JohnM is talking about only to an extent. Their main means of control are propaganda and financial enslavement. The failure of the American Empire is likely just a pre-meditated stage in their project. Their Imperial project is advancing steadily.
The Gold Bug meme is that the West is being drained of gold as China, Russia, etc. vacuum up gold for the coming new economic order. Does it make any sense that the likes of Goldman Sachs, etc. are really so clueless and pissing their financial power and future away? Or are they playing a deeper game that they believe they are positioned to win? I don’t know, but common sense suggests to me the latter.
The Keiser Report.
2nd half of the show,Max talks with legendary investor.Doug Casey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtPGaUflXyE
good interview…………imo
First time………….palladium is more expensive than platinum………
I still say there is more going on here than catalytic converters.
Did you see the new coin at the US mint……that is made of palladium, I think it is the first US coin to be made of palladium.
Big Al, I wonder if any of us truly understand what the founders suffered to give us and what we were given. I think the last words and hopes of John Adams says it best when he stated “Know posterity, Ye will never know how much it cost us to preserve your freedom. I hope that you will make a good use of it, and if you do not, I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.”
They deserve the nation’s gratitude and return to the principles that made the country great and not what we have become.
I’ve only written five books and I predicted the end of empire in a book written in
November of 2015 for exactly the same reasons. It’s pretty simple. This is how empires commit suicide.
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Peace-Robert-Moriarty/dp/1533153930/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1507162091&sr=8-9&keywords=the+art+of+peace