- All great empires and nations decay from within. By the
time they hobble off the world stage, overrun by the hordes at the gates
or vanishing quietly into the pages of history books, what made them successful
and powerful no longer has relevance. This rot takes place over decades,
as with the Soviet Union, or, even longer, as with the Roman, Ottoman or
Austro-Hungarian empires. It is often imperceptible.
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- Dying empires cling until the very end to the outward
trappings of power. They mask their weakness behind a costly and technologically
advanced military. They pursue increasingly unrealistic imperial ambitions.
They stifle dissent with efficient and often ruthless mechanisms of control.
They lose the capacity for empathy, which allows them to see themselves
through the eyes of others, to create a world of accommodation rather than
strife. The creeds and noble ideals of the nation become empty cliches,
used to justify acts of greater plunder, corruption and violence. By the
end, there is only a raw lust for power and few willing to confront it.
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- The most damning indicators of national decline are
upon us. We have watched an oligarchy rise to take economic and political
power. The top 1 percent of the population has amassed more wealth than
the bottom 90 percent combined, creating economic disparities unseen since
the Depression. If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes president, we will see
the presidency controlled by two families for the last 24 years.
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- Massive debt, much of it in the hands of the Chinese,
keeps piling up as we fund absurd imperial projects and useless foreign
wars. Democratic freedoms are diminished in the name of national security.
And the erosion of basic services, from education to health care to public
housing, has left tens of millions of citizens in despair. The displacement
of genuine debate and civil and political discourse with the noise and
glitter of public spectacle and entertainment has left us ignorant of the
outside world, and blind to how it perceives us. We are fed trivia and
celebrity gossip in place of news.
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- An increasing number of voices, especially within
the military, are speaking to this stark deterioration. They describe a
political class that no longer knows how to separate personal gain from
the common good, a class driving the nation into the ground.
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- "There has been a glaring and unfortunate display
of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders,"
retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of forces in
Iraq, recently told the New York Times, adding that civilian officials
have been "derelict in their duties" and guilty of a "lust
for power."
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- The American working class, once the most prosperous
on Earth, has been politically disempowered, impoverished and abandoned.
Manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas. State and federal assistance
programs have been slashed. The corporations, those that orchestrated the
flight of jobs and the abolishment of workers' rights, control every federal
agency in Washington, including the Department of Labor. They have dismantled
the regulations that had made the country's managed capitalism a success
for ordinary men and women. The Democratic and Republican Parties now take
corporate money and do the bidding of corporate interests.
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- Philadelphia is a textbook example. The city has
seen a precipitous decline in manufacturing jobs, jobs that allowed households
to live comfortably on one salary. The city had 35 percent of its workforce
employed in the manufacturing sector in 1950, perhaps the zenith of the
American empire. Thirty years later, this had fallen to 20 percent. Today
it is 8.8 percent. Commensurate jobs, jobs that offer benefits, health
care and most important enough money to provide hope for the future, no
longer exist. The former manufacturing centers from Flint, Mich., to Youngstown,
Ohio, are open sores, testaments to a growing internal collapse.
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- The United States has gone from being the world's
largest creditor to its largest debtor. As of September 2006, the country
was, for the first time in a century, paying out more than it received
in investments. Trillions of dollars go into defense while the nation's
infrastructure, from levees in New Orleans to highway bridges in Minnesota,
collapses. We spend almost as much on military power as the rest of the
world combined, while Social Security and Medicare entitlements are jeopardized
because of huge deficits. Money is available for war, but not for the simple
necessities of daily life.
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- Nothing makes these diseased priorities more starkly
clear than what the White House did last week. On the same day, Tuesday,
President Bush vetoed a domestic spending bill for education, job training
and health programs, yet signed another bill giving the Pentagon about
$471 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. All this in the shadow
of a Joint Economic Committee report suggesting that the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan have been twice as expensive than previously imagined, almost
$1.5 trillion.
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- The decision to measure the strength of the state
in military terms is fatal. It leads to a growing cynicism among a disenchanted
citizenry and a Hobbesian ethic of individual gain at the expense of everyone
else. Few want to fight and die for a Halliburton or an Exxon. This is
why we do not have a draft. It is why taxes have not been raised and we
borrow to fund the war. It is why the state has organized, and spends billions
to maintain, a mercenary army in Iraq. We leave the fighting and dying
mostly to our poor and hired killers. No nationwide sacrifices are required.
We will worry about it later.
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- It all amounts to a tacit complicity on the part
of a passive population. This permits the oligarchy to squander capital
and lives. It creates a world where we speak exclusively in the language
of violence. It has plunged us into an endless cycle of war and conflict
that is draining away the vitality, resources and promise of the nation.
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- It signals the twilight of our empire.
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