Sunset for American Empire

As we in the various movements have been warning for decades, America is sliding downhill fast, globally. Of course, it's blamed on everything but the massive, record-shattering, conflict magnet military expenditures.
"Subprime loans"
"Darn Chinese"
"Obama"
"Bailouts"
"Government regulation"
"Welfare"
"Medicare"
And so the fantasies continue. We can fix it all by spending more on the military and controlling more of the universe. We can fix it all by eliminating all government help for the poor. We can fix it all by allowing industry to pollute like they used to. Why don't we go back to the good old days when we could send in the Marines, shoot thousands of indigenous people and install our own strongman to help our companies extract cheap natural and human resources?

Some are helping the youth to understand this. Right now the National Priorities Project and the American Friends Service Committee present youth responses to the question, What would you do with a trillion dollars? Youth get that you cannot spend that on the military every year and expect the economy to flourish. They see the fallacy that you cannot give that much in tax cuts to the most wealthy and look for job creation. They totally understand that pouring that amount into the wars in the Middle East has not helped our society to sustain, much less advance.

We are an empire sinking slowly into the sunset, well on our way to becoming just another nation, but how we exit empire will determine how the rest of the world treats us--and let's not forget that we've armed them well. Will we pretend that military power is ruling Earth? Will we spend our way on useless ecologically disastrous weaponry and military actions until there's nothing left to bioremediate our wreckage?

Leave it to the One Percenters from Richistan and we are doomed. If the 99ers don't take back control, real control--not Fox-mediated, Rush Limbic-propagandized war-warped ersatz democracy--we will continue to lose more and more, faster and faster.

The choice is entirely ours. The Occupy Movements may not be clear on much, they may be too alienating for many middle-class Americans, but they are a manifestation of radical discontent with the Big Lies of flag-toting, gun-waving nationalism. They could use your help in finding the way to clarity, to a real radical nonviolence, disarmament and genuinely new evolutionary way forward. If you can't help them, get into a political party and never stop agitating toward making that party stand for something new, something nonviolent, something with real peace content and forward motion. Compromise with war profiteering is Just So Second Millennium. Let's finally enter this one.