Moment of Silence

by Emmanuel Ortiz
September 11, 2002

Before I start this poem, I'd like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honour of those who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last September 11th. I would also like to ask you To offer up a moment of silence For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned, disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes, For the victims in both Afghanistan and the US

And if I could just add one more thing...

A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the hands of US-backed Israeli forces over decades of occupation. Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people, mostly children, who have died of malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year US embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,

Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa, Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country. Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin And the survivors went on as if alive. A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam - a people, not a war - for those who know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their relatives' bones buried in it, their babies born of it. A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of a secret war .... ssssshhhhh.... Say nothing ... we don't want them to learn that they are dead. Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia, Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.

An hour of silence for El Salvador ...
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua ...
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos ...
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years. 45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas 25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could poke into the sky. There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains. And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west...

100 years of silence...

For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears. Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the refrigerator of our consciousness ...

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won't be.
Not like it always has been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written. And if this is a 9/11 poem, then: This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971. This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977. This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New York, 1971.

This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.

This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and Newsweek ignored. This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window of Taco Bell, And pay the workers for wages lost. Tear down the liquor stores, The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton's 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all... Don't cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we, Tonight we will keep right on singing... For our dead.

EMMANUEL ORTIZ, 11 Sep 2002

[Emmanuel Ortiz is a third-generation Chicano/Puerto Rican/Irish-American community organizer and spoken word poet residing in Minneapolis, MN. He is the author of a chapbook of poems, "The Word is a Machete," and his poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including two books published in Australia: Open Boat - Barbed Wire Sky (Live Poets' Press), an anthology of poems to aid refugees and asylum-seekers, and Passion for Peace: Exercising Power Creatively (UNSW Press). His poetry will also appear in the forthcoming FreedomBook, an anthology of writings in support of Puerto Rican political prisoners. He currently serves on the board of directors for the Minnesota Spoken Word Association, and is the coordinator of Guerrilla Wordfare, a Twin Cities-based grassroots project bringing together artists of color to address socio-political issues and raise funds for progressive organizing in communities of color through art as a tool of social change.

From http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/ s11/silence.html ]

Angry teen takes out wrath on innocent people -- so did he have role model(s)?

Jim Sorrells wrote:

Jeffrey Weise [the teenage gunman at Red Lake High School in Minnesota] was a loner, ostracized by his peers, wore black and trench coats, drew skeletons and skulls and people killing each other, admired Hitler, posted threatening messages on the National Socialist Party neo-Nazi website, was fascinated by zombies, his father committed suicide and his mother was seriously injured in an auto accident, and he wasn't allowed at the school.

And nobody noticed, nobody reached out to him? What does a guy have to do to get some attention around here?

Revrickm comments:

Or, to quote teenagers everywhere, maybe he was just 'bored.' Maybe that's code for 'help' or an expression the fact there's 'water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink.' Despite the Peace Corps and other volunteer groups, most kids are not really offered anything very constructive to get involved in. I see the Army, etc. are going to turn up the recruiting program and, of course, kids can always aspire to enter a noble profession like politician, attorney, big-time developer, corporate CEO, or some other kind of 'player.' Maybe it shouldn't be any surprise that kids with with interest and talent in sports might take steroids rather than study hard to become a teacher.

And no wonder Mark McGuire and Barry Bonds are a little put off by politicians lecturing them about being role models for kids.

All that doesn't excuse some kid from shooting ten people at his school, but neither is it 'cool' to bomb millions of people and spend billions of dollars (taken from the mouths of poor children in poverty in our own country) to pay contractors (from a company where some claim the Vice President still 'works' and has a large financial interest in) to rebuild facilities that our military destroyed on his advice and consent, when many of these very facilities are urgently in need of repair and upgrading here at home. Schools and penitentiaries are a disgrace, and due to government cutbacks for everything except the military, colleges, health care, social programs and the public infrastructure are struggling to stay afloat. More tax cuts for the rich and private accounts for Social Security are supposed to 'trickle down' to help everyone (oh yes, we all remember how well that method worked under Reagan or Bush#1). A 'thousand points of light' works only when churches are allowed to proselytize and charitable organizations are allowed to discriminate in their hiring and service policies -- and if those 'lights' aren't powered in some 'blue' state with electric power supplied by an Enron or some other Robin-Hood-in-reverse type of business.

You probably get my drift, just in case you've been on another planet and hadn't noticed any of this over the past few years.

-- Revrickm

George Bush's Leveraged Buyout of Social Security

by Stirling Newberry
Tuesday 15 March 2005

In reading the new Richard Parker biography of John Kenneth Galbraith,(1) it becomes clear that while others may have dazzled with equations, John Kenneth Galbraith chose, instead, to become the wisest of economists. He has spent his career, not laying out arguments about that metaphysical creature "the rational economic actor," but looking at how people actually make decisions. He is also among the most quotable of writers: he quipped "financial genius is leverage and a rising market." By "leverage" he means the ability to borrow to invest, or more often speculate, in stocks. When stocks are rising generally, borrowing cheaply and investing in the rise of the market seems as sure a thing as there is.

It was this sure thinking that lead to the bust of Long Term Capital Management in September of 1998. The market stalled, and a trillion-dollar bet went wrong.(2) The Federal Reserve was called in to prevent the markets from imploding under the unraveling of "financial genius" failing. Of course, anyone who had read Galbraith would know that it had to fail: eventually the money or the market would run out of map.

We are being treated now to the spectacle of the fall of the House of Enron, in which the executives are offering the "Yes, I am, I am an idiot" defense,(3) and the world's largest insurer is facing a shake-up because of probes into whether it inflated its figures.(4) But inflating figures is business as usual; in my career in business I found several cases of not merely "aggressive accounting," but outright manipulation of the databases that really tell people what a company is worth - not merely among small dot-com companies, but in large companies run by people who were worth, on paper, more than a billion dollars. During the rising market, one must not only prove one can do what one says, but that things are going better than already outrageously high expectations.

But what many observers of Bush's tenure in office have not understood is that we now have a government run the same way: like a company on the make, trying to bamboozle its share holders and creditors just to keep the game going. That is how business works at the top: get control of the board - 51% will do - and then put your plan into operation. It could involve a hostile takeover, or a leveraged buyout, or selling off divisions, or entering a new line of business. Then comes the hard part, waiting for it to pay off - because often that payoff never comes, or comes much later than expected. The job of a CEO is then to herald every green leaf as the sign of coming spring, even if it was glued on and spray-painted by the army of consultants he has hired. He must, above all else, convince the share holders to "stay the course" and the lenders to continue to hand money over, no matter what.

And when that fails, the time comes to cook the books. Or come up with a new scheme for borrowing. Or both. As we know, the first Bush plan was a hostile takeover of Iraq, his goal from day one,(5) which has not produced the promised economic results.(6) And that is in which we are now: the plan for Bush's second term in the White House was simple - a leveraged buyout of Social Security. He's hoping for some financial genius in borrowing public money and dumping it into the stock market. It seems, to him, like a sure thing.

The key to a leveraged buyout is to borrow money, and then pay it back by chopping apart the company to be purchased. This kind of "LBO" was very popular in the 1980s, and is based on a simple idea: if there is money there, why not get it now? And that is precisely what Bush proposed: borrowing a vast sum of money, and then extracting value from the Social Security system by cutting benefits. The future retirees would pay for the cost of creating "private accounts," by getting less from the FICA taxes that they paid. The people who would be sure winners would be the stock brokers and companies who, in the present, would get the money flowing in from people's contributions to "private accounts" right now.

The beauty of this plan, even if an ugly kind of beauty, is that while merely cutting benefits can be reversed by a later, saner, Congress - borrowing and private accounts can't. Even though private accounts do little to nothing for fixing the problem, or less than nothing, they become a weight that is hard to reverse.

Paul Krugman sees that the public mood has turned, and worries about cooking the books in his most recent Op-Ed for the New York Times.(7) It might seem that this attempt has been thwarted, that the American public has turned sharply against "private retirement accounts," simply because they realize that they aren't going to get the benefits now, and they are sure to pay the taxes no matter what happens. The public understands that they get the risk, no matter what the reward.

This, however, misses the other part of how business works: when you need to get control of a company, create a sense of crisis. Normally business is nothing happening all at once: people go about their jobs, do what they need to do, and hope that, at the end of the week, there is another to make payroll. Making anything happen is a maze of checks and balances, approvals, meetings, and signatures, and even the smallest decision can require approval of higher-ups. To get something to happen now, you need to create a sense of impending crisis, disaster waiting behind the bend, so that panicked shareholders will vote absolute power, with absolutely no reason, to whoever says he is in charge.

We saw this with Iraq in 2002 and early 2003, where even the State of the Union address became a conduit for delivering scare tactics about Saddam's atomic bomb, and the American public was convinced that Osama bin Saddam was out to get them. It worked, America marched to war, and even Wesley Clark, a former general, was aghast at how the process had become "cockeyed." September 11th was a very thick book of blank checks, and the freely flowing money helped the US bounce back, momentarily, from the 2001 recession. But instead of pushing for total recovery, where people would be hired back, Bush blocked the kinds of stimulus bills that would normally have been passed, and played on the sense of economic, military and social crisis to push America towards the option that he, and those who backed him, had in mind.

Now let us look at the present: just as with Iraq, the first attempts at pushing America into the Social Security LBO have failed(8) - just as attempts to rattle sabers about Iraq failed in early 2001, and attempts to blame the anthrax attack on Iraq failed in late 2001. But we haven't repealed the business cycle, and many are, in fact, worried that the current stalled stock market could lead to a sharp drop in share prices. There will be another recession, sooner or later, and when that happens, Bush will be on the television saying that the problem is that bond holders and others have lost faith in America because of the "Social Security Crisis."

Now this is not in the least the case. The real problem in the US is that we have slashed government revenues, and kept spending, much of it for Iraq, very, very, very high. If there is a crisis of confidence in America, it is not in the question of how to meet benefit levels in 2060, but in how we are going to pay the debt service on the national debt, when interest rates are rising. But just as with Iraq, Bush has never let the facts being against him make any difference.(9)

According to the rosiest of predictions - from the White House's Office of Management and Budget - the interest paid on the national debt is going to rise in 66% between 2003 and 2008, in real terms.(10) That is the interest on what the Federal Government is borrowing - and that's real money, not inflated money. We will owe, as our national debt, 40% of everything made or sold in the US. That, not some distant question of Social Security Benefits, is what worries bond holders. To put it another way, we are going to be paying as much in increased interest costs every year as the cost of the war in Iraq. Or if you want to think about it another way, the interest on the debt is going to be more than 10% of the total Federal Budget. If you ask a credit agency, someone spending 10% of their total gross income on debt service is not a good candidate for a loan.

This is the real crisis - and in politics, it isn't whether you win or lose, it is how you place the blame. Right now, the Republicans are saying over and over again that there is a crisis, and they are going to blame Social Security. You can take that to the bank. This is why it is not a good idea to make compromises now just to quiet the Republicans, because appeasement doesn't work. They aren't making noise to get something small, but to grab a big chunk of the future revenues of America. It is also time, for everyone who wants to see Social Security work, to push back, and hard, on the real crisis: the borrow and squander policies that are slowing America's economy and the growth of real wages.

Or as Max Sawicky(11) says, "No deals with dipsticks."(12)

---

(1) The Galbraith biography website is here: http://www.johnkennethgalbraith.com/

(2) A sobering case study on the collapse can be found here: http://www.erisk.com/Learning/CaseStudies/

(3) Andrew Leonard reviews Kurt Eichenwald's book on Enron here: http://www.salon.com/books/review/ 2005/03/15/

(4) The Financial Times reports: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/ 6855b5e2-9499-11d9-8dd3-00000e2511c8.html

(5) Bush's people were meeting on this starting in early 2001: http://scoop.agonist.org/archives/015920.html

(6) In 2002, many thought that "a successful outcome" in Iraq would improve the world economy, echoing sentiments from Bush's council on economic advisors. An example of the thinking of that time can be seen here: http://www.iie.com/publications/pb/pb02-9.pdf

(7) Krugman's piece is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/15/opinion/

(8) The Washington Post reports that "support for Bush on Social Security wanes": http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33028-2005Mar14.html

(9) Dean Baker and David Rosnick go over the facts on Social Security here: http://www.cepr.net/publications/

(10) The gory details are here, particularly in table 6.1, on page 121: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/

(11) Max is a noted labor economist and one of those grouchy but quotable types who is respected because he is so often on the mark: http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/001204.html

(12) An economist writing under the nom de guerre "Pro-Growth Liberal" has been busy debunking the day-to-day fabrications of the right wing for some time. He has some very interesting observations here: http://angrybear.blogspot.com/2005/03/is-social-security-trust-fund-worth.html

[+++] The Third Stage of American Empire

by William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

[NOTE: This is a MUST-READ article, in my opinion, and so I am sending it out to friends on my email list, as well as posting it on various informational websites I am connected with. The only editorial comment I'll make is to say that this article and its conclusion regarding empire reminds me of a scene in "49th Parallel," an old WWII movie about German U-boat officers "hiding in plain sight" in Canada until one by one they are caught. The one scene I remember is where a Canadian gentleman finds out who they are and exclaims, "You're Nazis! That explains it - the arrogance, the stupidity..." But the real message of the movie (and what we are witnessing today) is clear: "Listen up America. Nazism will reach your great land soon if you do not help to fight it. Look at [who and what] is there already and if [some can recognize the threat] to the American way, then you all can." -- Revrickm]


Tuesday 01 March 2005

There have been three stages of American empire since the creation of this nation. Each has fed the other, and each has been established and fortified by war. More importantly, each has been fortified by the vast profits derived by the few in the making of war. The first two stages did not collapse, so much as they were absorbed by the next iteration, carrying over all circumstances and attendant difficulties. We exist today within the third stage of empire, one that is sick at the core.

The first stage of this American empire began with the Mexican-American war, but began to flourish at the conclusion of the Civil War. All the states east of the Mississippi River had been brought by force back under the rule of the federal government, a national taxation system had been established to provide revenues to that government, and the nascent outlines of what Eisenhower described as 'the military/industrial complex' had been built by the lucrative contracts handed out to arm, clothe and feed the military.

For many years prior, Americans had been pushing into the western lands occupied by native peoples. Under the banner of Manifest Destiny, the military/economic machine created to fight the Confederacy pushed its way to the Pacific Ocean. In the process, the vast majority of Native Americans were erased from the book of history, a book that is always written by the victors.

The boundaries of this first stage were limited to the 48 continental states, but did not long remain this way. By the time Woodrow Wilson assumed the presidency, the first stage had expanded to include Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Imperial footholds had been established in South America and East Asia. While other global empires were on the wane – the Spanish empire was essentially dissolved with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1898, while the French and British empires were being attacked and slowly rolled back – this American empire became more muscular with each passing day.

The transition between the first and second stages began on April 2nd, 1917, when newly re-elected President Wilson reversed his campaign theme of staying out of the European conflict and asked congress for a declaration of war against Germany. Previously, Americans had defined themselves in no small part by being separated from the troubles of the 'Old World.' When the doughboys shipped out, however, that line of demarcation was crossed.

Despite the eventual victory in Europe, the second stage took many more years to flower and flourish. American armies and navies were essentially dismantled in the aftermath of the 'War to End All Wars,' and the 1930s saw the near-collapse of the American economic system. The advent of and eventual victory in World War II not only cemented the second stage, but resurrected and forever changed the fundamental underpinnings of the American economy. From that victory to now, the American economy has been based centrally on preparation for and fighting of wars.

By the end of World War II, the influence of the American empire stretched throughout Europe to the borders of the new foe, the Soviet empire. Strongholds of the second stage could be likewise found in Africa, the Japanese mainland and many Pacific islands and, with the creation of the state of Israel, the strategically-vital Middle East. American corporations that had built the victorious war machine swam in an ocean of profits. The 'military/industrial complex' was about to become the dominant force in domestic and global commerce, conflict and social structure.

The central reality of the second stage was the Cold War, a death struggle between two competing empires waged across the width and breadth of the planet. The icy staring contest at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin stood a grim counterpoint to the hot blood spilled in proxy wars fought in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, the Sinai Peninsula and elsewhere. American and Soviet arms dealers salted the world with millions of conventional weapons to aid these proxy fights.

All the while, larger and more powerful nuclear weaponry was developed by both sides, deployed across the globe, and aimed with deadly intent. On several occasions, most prominently during the Cuban Missile Crisis, these dragons came within inches of slipping the leash. The production of these weapons left uncounted tons of waste behind.

The roots of the third stage were planted deep in this time. At home, the populace became accustomed to existing in a perpetual state of war. The establishment of the Truman Doctrine by men like Paul Nitze created the foundations for an enduring reality: Americans are most easily governed when they are made to fear the strangers 'over there' across the horizon.

Contracts for the development and deployment of weaponry became profitable on an epic scale. The military/industrial complex came to own whole swaths of the American political spectrum on both sides of the aisle, and attached itself umbilically to the petroleum industry as a matter of basic expediency. One cannot fight wars without an abundance of oil and gasoline, and after a fashion, the means and the ends became indistinguishable.

The transition from the second stage to the third stage of American empire came slowly. Millions of Americans took to the streets to protest the large-scale death empire required. The Vietnam War ended with images of Americans fleeing from rooftops in helicopters. A president was required to resign his office or face removal and imprisonment. A 1950s-era chess move in Iran resulted in the 1979 Islamic revolution and the daily humiliation of America by masked gunmen pointing rifles at blindfolded hostages.

The Soviet empire had invaded Afghanistan. The CIA, long the sharp saber of American foreign policy, was broken by the Church Committee. Gasoline became brutally expensive and the American economy struck yet another reef. The American populace, by and large, fell into what could be called a mass depression, described by the last president of the second stage as 'malaise.'

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the third stage came into being, but a hockey game will suffice as a marker. On February 2, 1980, the American Olympic hockey team came from nowhere to defeat the unbeatable Soviet squad in Lake Placid. The subsequent eruption of nationalistic fervor, augmented by the American squad's victory over Finland in the final round to capture the gold medal, led to an outpouring of public emotion that no sporting event had ever created.

It was at Lake Placid that the now-familiar chant of "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" was born. The American people had been well-trained during the second empire to expect being on top, and the years prior to Lake Placid had been hard. Something so simple as a win on that ice was enough to strike sparks again, to ignite the long fuse that has been this third American empire. The American people were mesmerized by the vision of their flag rising next to but just a little higher than the red Soviet banner. It was their first taste of what would become a long and uninterrupted stretch of total global dominance.

The central aspect of this third stage has been the rise of the 'movement conservative.' Not to be confused with the breed of conservative that included Nixon and Rockefeller, the movement conservatives held American nationalism and evangelical Christianity as a dual-headed state religion. They spurned concepts of détente and international cooperation. They were and remain radicals in every sense of the word, seeking to deconstruct the American social state that had been in place since the days of FDR.

Ronald Reagan, the first president of this third stage, was the avatar of these movement conservatives, who first began to become an organized entity in American politics during the campaign of Barry Goldwater. Reagan was their perfect man: Confident to a fault, dedicated to the enrichment of the wealthy corporate class while deconstructing Roosevelt's social safety net by any means necessary.

Reagan established the forked-tongue policy talk adopted by the present administration: Speak about the end of large government, gut entitlement programs wherever they can be found, while simultaneously cutting against the grain of the 'small government' ideal by vastly increasing the military and intelligence apparatus of government with trillions of dollars of taxpayer monies.

This cash, as it did during the rise of the first and second stages, vastly increased the power and reach of the military/industrial/petroleum combine. The movement conservatives, funded by this combine, pushed for the deregulation by government of business in every aspect of commerce, none more pointedly than within the media. Over the course of this third stage, that combine purchased 99% of the news media, ensuring that an uninterrupted commercial advocating for empire would be broadcast 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Competing messages were all but shut out.

When the Berlin Wall finally fell, when the Soviet empire finally imploded, the banner for this third stage was unfurled for all to see. For the first time in history since the apex of Roman rule, one nation and one government and one military ruled supreme over the known world. The movement conservatives, having lost communism as the main target for their energies and ire, turned inward and laid siege to their fellow citizens. The ultimate goal of this was to purge from debate and consideration anyone who did not approve of empire, and anyone who did not fit the Christian Reconstructionist mold they wished to build American society around.

The rise of George W. Bush, leader of the evangelical/political wing of American Christianity since 1996, to the office of the president has been the fulfillment of the dreams of movement conservatives. September 11 cemented their ascendancy. Now, permanent war and rule by fear are accepted without question. Now, the news media owned by the combine opens the public dialogue to these radicals while painting them as moderate, rational Americans. Now, the dominance of the military/industrial/petroleum combine is unquestioned. Now, the idea that America is engaged in a holy war has been widely disseminated.

There are several cracks in the veneer, however, many of which began during the second stage. The conventional weapons disbursed across the planet during the Cold War are now being pointed at us. Many of our former client states such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which served us so well during the Cold War, have now become profoundly debilitating problems that have exposed our vaunted national security system and military forces as less than adequate to the tasks of empire. The dollar is failing slowly but surely, and new power combines between nations like China, Russia and Iran threaten to destabilize American dominance. Oil, the true coin of this realm, is also becoming scarce. The extremism that always comes when one overwhelming force spreads its wings has passed the point of management, and has itself become both organized and well-funded.

It seems all too clear that this third American empire is threatening to collapse under its own ponderous weight. The movement conservatives cannot contain the forces that have been unleashed against them. The American military is proving itself to be incapable of sustaining the unreasonable demands being placed upon it. The ghosts from the second empire loom large, in Europe and Africa and the Middle East and Central Asia. The American economy, sustained for sixty years by petroleum and war, stands at grave risk of being subsumed by both.

Perhaps, someday, a powerful society will rise that understands the lessons of history. Empires fall, always. They consume themselves, slowly at first, but then with ever-increasing speed as military solutions fail to resolve threats and drain the resources of the core. Perhaps, someday.



-------------------------------------------------
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.' Join the discussions at his blog forum (http://forum.truthout.org/blog/story/2005/ 3/1/10233/71436).

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