The World Will Not Mourn The Decline Of US Hegemony | Zero Hedge
Description: "According to a global survey of 66,000 people conducted across 68 countries at the end of 2013, Earth’s people see the United States as the leading threat to peace on the planet. The U.S. was voted top threat by a wide margin..."

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## Corporate America vs. Margin Call, the Movie

by EconMatters - May 17, 2018 5:33 pm

How corporations are laying off employees these days is worse than how Stanley Tucci was let go in the 2011 movie Margin Call.

## All Roads Lead to Stagflation – This is How We Got Here

by Palisade Research - May 17, 2018 6:35 pm

"I don’t think people realize how the latest ‘growth’ the U.S. has had is superficial – all thanks to a weaker dollar.

Most CNBC pundits don’t even mention how the weaker dollar has given the economy a short-term spurt. And the couple that do won’t even acknowledge that it’s temporary.

But now there is an inflation problem - and the economy is too weak to hike faster.

Let me explain. . ."

## A Central Banking Insider Just Revealed the Blueprint For When the Next Crisis Hits

by Phoenix Capita… - May 16, 2018 10:07 am

Discussions of ending physical cash and introducing strictly digital money are taking place within the highest circles of Central Bankers.

# The World Will Not Mourn The Decline Of US Hegemony

Authored by Paul Street via TruthDig.com,

There are good reasons for any good progressive to bemoan the presence of the childish, racist, sexist and ecocidal, right-wing plutocrat Donald Trump in the White House. One complaint about Trump that should be held at arm’s-length by anyone on the left, however, is the charge that Trump is contributing to the decline of U.S. global power - to the erosion of the United States’ superpower status and the emergence of a more multipolar world.

This criticism of Trump comes from different elite corners. Last October, the leading neoconservative foreign policy intellectual and former George W. Bush administration adviser Eliot Cohen wrote an Atlantic magazine essay titled “How Trump Is Ending the American Era.” Cohen recounted numerous ways in which Trump had reduced “America’s standing and ability to influence global affairs.” He worried that Trump’s presidency would leave “America’s position in the world stunted” and an “America lacking confidence” on the global stage.

But it isn’t just the right wing that writes and speaks in such terms about how Trump is contributing to the decline of U.S. hegemony. A recent Time magazine reflection by the liberal commentator Karl Vick (who wrote in strongly supportive terms about the giant January 2017 Women’s March against Trump) frets that that Trump’s “America First” and authoritarian views have the world “looking for leadership elsewhere.”

> “Could this be it?” Vick asks. “Might the American Century actually clock out at just 72 years, from 1945 to 2017? No longer than Louis XIV ruled France? Only 36 months more than the Soviet Union lasted, after all that bother?”

I recently reviewed a manuscript on the rise of Trump written by a left-liberal American sociologist. Near the end of this forthcoming and mostly excellent and instructive volume, the author finds it “worrisome” that other nations see the U.S. “abdicating its role as the world’s leading policeman” under Trump—and that, “given what we have seen so far from the [Trump] administration, U.S. hegemony appears to be on shakier ground than it has been in a long time.”

For the purposes of this report, I’ll leave aside the matter of whether Trump is, in fact, speeding the decline of U.S. global power (he undoubtedly is) and how he’s doing that to focus instead on a very different question: What would be so awful about the end of “the American Era”—the seven-plus decades of U.S. global economic and related military supremacy between 1945 and the present? Why should the world mourn the “premature” end of the “American Century”?

It would be interesting to see a reliable opinion poll on how the politically cognizant portion of the 94 percent of humanity that lives outside the U.S. would feel about the end of U.S. global dominance. My guess is that Uncle Sam’s weakening would be just fine with most Earth residents who pay attention to world events.

According to a global survey of 66,000 people conducted across 68 countries by the Worldwide Independent Network of Market Research (WINMR) and Gallup International at the end of 2013, Earth’s people see the United States as the leading threat to peace on the planet. The U.S. was voted top threat by a wide margin.

There is nothing surprising about that vote for anyone who honestly examines the history of “U.S. foreign affairs,” to use a common elite euphemism for American imperialism. Still, by far and away world history’s most extensive empire, the U.S. has at least 800 military bases spread across more than 80 foreign countries and “troops or other military personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories.” The U.S. accounts for more than 40 percent of the planet’s military spending and has more than 5,500 strategic nuclear weapons, enough to blow the world up 5 to 50 times over. Last year it increased its “defense” (military empire) spending, which was already three times higher than China’s, and nine times higher than Russia’s.

Think it’s all in place to ensure peace and democracy the world over, in accord with the standard boilerplate rhetoric of U.S. presidents, diplomats and senators?

Do you know any other good jokes?

A Pentagon study released last summer laments the emergence of a planet on which the U.S. no longer controls events. Titled “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primary World,” the study warns that competing powers “seek a new distribution of power and authority commensurate with their emergence as legitimate rivals to U.S. dominance” in an increasingly multipolar world. China, Russia and smaller players like Iran and North Korea have dared to “engage,” the Pentagon study reports, “in a deliberate program to demonstrate the limits of U.S. authority, reach influence and impact.” What chutzpah! This is a problem, the report argues, because the endangered U.S.-managed world order was “favorable” to the interests of U.S. and allied U.S. states and U.S.-based transnational corporations.

Any serious efforts to redesign the international status quo so that it favors any other states or people is portrayed in the report as a threat to U.S. interests. To prevent any terrible drifts of the world system away from U.S. control, the report argues, the U.S. and its imperial partners (chiefly its European NATO partners) must maintain and expand “unimpeded access to the air, sea, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum in order to underwrite their security and prosperity.” The report recommends a significant expansion of U.S. military power. The U.S. must maintain “military advantage” over all other states and actors to “preserve maximum freedom of action” and thereby “allow U.S. decision-makers the opportunity to dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international disputes,” with the “implied promise of unacceptable consequences” for those who defy U.S. wishes.

“America First” is an understatement here. The underlying premise is that Uncle Sam owns the world and reserves the right to bomb the hell out of anyone who doesn’t agree with that (to quote President George H.W. Bushafter the first Gulf War in 1991: “What we say goes.”)

It’s nothing new. From the start, the “American Century” had nothing to do with advancing democracy. As numerous key U.S. planning documents reveal over and over, the goal of that policy was to maintain and, if necessary, install governments that “favor[ed] private investment of domestic and foreign capital, production for export, and the right to bring profits out of the country,” according to Noam Chomsky. Given the United States’ remarkable possession of half the world’s capital after World War II, Washington elites had no doubt that U.S. investors and corporations would profit the most. Internally, the basic selfish national and imperial objectives were openly and candidly discussed. As the “liberal” and “dovish” imperialist, top State Department planner, and key Cold War architect George F. Kennan explained in “Policy Planning Study 23,” a critical 1948 document:

> We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. … In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. … To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. … We should cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

The harsh necessity of abandoning “human rights” and other “sentimental” and “unreal objectives” was especially pressing in the global South, what used to be known as the Third World. Washington assigned the vast “undeveloped” periphery of the world capitalist system—Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and the energy-rich and thus strategically hyper-significant Middle East—a less than flattering role. It was to “fulfill its major function as a source of raw materials and a market” (actual State Department language) for the great industrial (capitalist) nations (excluding socialist Russia and its satellites, and notwithstanding the recent epic racist-fascist rampages of industrial Germany and Japan). It was to be exploited both for the benefit of U.S. corporations/investors and for the reconstruction of Europe and Japan as prosperous U.S. trading and investment partners organized on capitalist principles and hostile to the Soviet bloc.

“Democracy” was fine as a slogan and benevolent, idealistic-sounding mission statement when it came to marketing this imperialist U.S. policy at home and abroad. Since most people in the “third” or “developing” world had no interest in neocolonial subordination to the rich nations and subscribed to what U.S. intelligence officials considered the heretical “idea that government has direct responsibility for the welfare of its people” (what U.S. planners called “communism”), Washington’s real-life commitment to popular governance abroad was strictly qualified, to say the least. “Democracy” was suitable to the U.S. as long as its outcomes comported with the interests of U.S. investors/corporations and related U.S. geopolitical objectives. It had to be abandoned, undermined and/or crushed when it threatened those investors/corporations and the broader imperatives of business rule to any significant degree. As President Richard Nixon’s coldblooded national security adviser Henry Kissinger explained in June 1970, three years before the U.S. sponsored a bloody fascist coup that overthrew Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”

The U.S.-sponsored coup government that murdered Allende would kill tens of thousands of real and alleged leftists with Washington’s approval. The Yankee superpower sent some of its leading neoliberal economists and policy advisers to help the blood-soaked Pinochet regime turn Chile into a “free market” model and to help Chile write capitalist oligarchy into its national constitution.

> “Since 1945, by deed and by example,” the great Australian author, commentator and filmmaker John Pilger wrote nearly nine years ago: “The U.S. has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see William Blum’s histories). Bombing is apple pie.”

Along the way, Washington has crassly interfered in elections in dozens of “sovereign” nations, something curious to note in light of current liberal U.S. outrage over real or alleged Russian interference in “our” supposedly democratic electoral process in 2016. Uncle Sam also has bombed civilians in 30 countries, attempted to assassinate foreign leaders and deployed chemical and biological weapons.

If we “consider only Latin America since the 1950s,” writes the sociologist Howard Waitzkin:

> [T]he United States has used direct military invasion or has supported military coups to overthrow elected governments in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Haiti, Grenada, and Panama. In addition, the United States has intervened with military action to suppress revolutionary movements in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. More recently … the United States has spent tax dollars to finance and help organize opposition groups and media in Honduras, Paraguay, and Brazil, leading to congressional impeachments of democratically elected presidents. Hillary Clinton presided over these efforts as Secretary of State in the Obama administration, which pursued the same pattern of destabilization in Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia.

The death count resulting from “American Era” U.S. foreign policy runs well into the many millions, including possibly as many as 5 million Indochinese killed by Uncle Sam and his agents and allies between 1962 and 1975. The flat-out barbarism of the American war on Vietnam is widely documented on record. The infamous My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, when U.S. Army soldiers slaughtered more than 350 unarmed civilians—including terrified women holding babies in their arms—in South Vietnam was no isolated incident in the U.S. “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Noam Chomsky’s phrase at the time). U.S. Army Col. Oran Henderson, who was charged with covering up the massacre, candidly told reporters that “every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden somewhere.”

It is difficult, sometimes, to wrap one’s mind around the extent of the savagery Uncle Sam has unleashed on the world to advance and maintain its global supremacy. In the early 1950s, the Harry Truman administration responded to an early challenge to U.S. power in Northern Korea with a practically genocidal three-year bombing campaign that was described in soul-numbing terms by the Washington Post years ago:

> The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. ‘Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—20 percent of the population,’ Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later Secretary of State, said the United States bombed ‘everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.’ After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops … [T]he U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of explosives on North Korea, including 32,557 tons of napalm, an incendiary liquid that can clear forested areas and cause devastating burns to human skin.

Gee, why does North Korea fear and hate Uncle Sam?

This ferocious bombardment, which killed 2 million or more civilians, began five years after Truman arch-criminally and unnecessarily ordered the atom bombing of hundreds of thousands pf civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to warn the Soviet Union to stay out of Japan and Western Europe.

Some benevolent “world policeman.”

The ferocity of U.S. foreign policy in “America Era” did not always require direct U.S. military intervention. Take Indonesia and Chile, for two examples from the “Golden Age” height of the “American Century.” In Indonesia, the U.S.-backed dictator Suharto killed millions of his subjects, targeting communist sympathizers, ethnic Chinese and alleged leftists. A senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s later described Suharto’s 1965-66 U.S.-assisted coup as s “the model operation” for the U.S.-backed coup that eliminated the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, seven years later. “The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders,” the officer wrote, “[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965.”

As John Pilger noted 10 years ago, “the U.S. embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a ‘zap list’ of Indonesian Communist party members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. … The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called ‘the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia.’ ”

> “No single American action in the period after 1945,” wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, “was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate [Suharto’s] massacre.”

Two years and three months after the Chilean coup, Suharto received a green light from Kissinger and the Gerald Ford White House to invade the small island nation of East Timor. With Washington’s approval and backing, Indonesia carried out genocidal massacres and mass rapes and killed at least 100,000 of the island’s residents.

Among the countless episodes of mass-murderous U.S. savagery in the oil-rich Middle East over the last generation, few can match for the barbarous ferocity of the “Highway of Death,” where the “global policeman’s” forces massacred tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on Feb. 26 and 27, 1991. Journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:

> U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. ‘It was like shooting fish in a barrel,’ said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun … for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. … ‘Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,’ said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. … U.S. pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the flight deck, from cluster bombs to 500-pound bombs. … U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions. … The victims were not offering resistance. … [I]t was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or defend.

The victims’ crime was having been conscripted into an army controlled by a dictator perceived as a threat to U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil. President George H.W. Bush welcomed the so-called Persian Gulf War as an opportunity to demonstrate America’s unrivaled power and new freedom of action in the post-Cold War world, where the Soviet Union could no longer deter Washington. Bush also heralded the “war” (really a one-sided imperial assault) as marking the end of the “Vietnam Syndrome,” the reigning political culture’s curious term for U.S. citizens’ reluctance to commit U.S. troops to murderous imperial mayhem.

As Noam Chomsky observed in 1992, reflecting on U.S. efforts to maximize suffering in Vietnam by blocking economic and humanitarian assistance to the nation it had devastated: “No degree of cruelty is too great for Washington sadists.”

But Uncle Sam was only getting warmed up building his Iraqi body count in early 1991. Five years later, Bill Clinton’s U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright told CBS News’ Leslie Stahl that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S.-led economic sanctions imposed after the first “Persian Gulf War” (a curious term for a one-sided U.S. assault) was a “price … worth paying” for the advancement of inherently noble U.S. goals.

> “The United States,” Secretary Albright explained three years later, “is good. We try to do our best everywhere.”

In the years following the collapse of the counter-hegemonic Soviet empire, however, American neoliberal intellectuals like Thomas Friedman—an advocate of the criminal U.S. bombing of Serbia—felt free to openly state that the real purpose of U.S. foreign policy was to underwrite the profits of U.S.-centered global capitalism. “The hidden hand of the market,” Friedman famously wrote in The New York Times Magazine in March 1999, as U.S. bombs and missiles exploded in Serbia, “will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

In a foreign policy speech Sen. Barack Obama gave to the Chicago Council of Global Affairs on the eve of announcing his candidacy for the U.S. presidency in the fall of 2006, Obama had the audacity to say the following in support of his claim that U.S. citizens supported “victory” in Iraq: “The American people have been extraordinarily resolved. They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah.”

It was a spine-chilling selection of locales. In 2004, the ill-fated city was the site of colossal U.S. war atrocities, crimes including the indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals, and the practical leveling of an entire city by the U.S. military in April and November. By one account, “Incoherent Empire,” Michael Mann wrote:

> The U.S. launched two bursts of ferocious assault on the city, in April and November of 2004 … [using] devastating firepower from a distance which minimizes U.S. casualties. In April … military commanders claimed to have precisely targeted … insurgent forces, yet the local hospitals reported that many or most of the casualties were civilians, often women, children, and the elderly… [reflecting an] intention to kill civilians generally. … In November … [U.S.] aerial assault destroyed the only hospital in insurgent territory to ensure that this time no one would be able to document civilian casualties. U.S. forces then went through the city, virtually destroying it. Afterwards, Fallujah looked like the city of Grozny in Chechnya after Putin’s Russian troops had razed it to the ground.

The “global policeman’s” deployment of radioactive ordnance (depleted uranium) in Fallujah created an epidemic of infant mortality, birth defects, leukemia and cancer there.

Fallujah was just one especially graphic episode in a broader arch-criminal invasion that led to the premature deaths of at least 1 million Iraqi civilians and left Iraq as what Tom Engelhardt called “a disaster zone on a catastrophic scale hard to match in recent memory.” It reflected the same callous mindset behind the Pentagon’s early computer program name for ordinary Iraqis certain to be killed in the 2003 invasion: “bug-splat.” Uncle Sam’s petro-imperial occupation led to the death of at least 1 million Iraqi “bugs” (human beings). According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in December 2007, “Iraq has been killed. … [T]he American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century.”

Along with death came the ruthless and racist torture. In an essay titled “I Helped Create ISIS,” Vincent Emanuele, a former U.S. Marine, recalled his enlistment in an operation that gave him nightmares more than a decade later:

> I think about the hundreds of prisoners we took captive and tortured in makeshift detention facilities. … I vividly remember the marines telling me about punching, slapping, kicking, elbowing, kneeing and head-butting Iraqis. I remember the tales of sexual torture: forcing Iraqi men to perform sexual acts on each other while marines held knives against their testicles, sometimes sodomizing them with batons. … [T]hose of us in infantry units … round[ed] up Iraqis during night raids, zip-tying their hands, black-bagging their heads and throwing them in the back of HUMVEEs and trucks while their wives and kids collapsed to their knees and wailed. … Some of them would hold hands while marines would butt-stroke the prisoners in the face. … [W]hen they were released, we would drive them from the FOB (Forward Operating Base) to the middle of the desert and release them several miles from their homes. … After we cut their zip-ties and took the black bags off their heads, several of our more deranged marines would fire rounds from their AR-15s into their air or ground, scaring the recently released captives. Always for laughs. Most Iraqis would run, still crying from their long ordeal.

The award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told the ACLU about the existence of classified Pentagon evidence files containing films of U.S-“global policeman” soldiers sodomizing Iraqi boys in front of their mothers behind the walls of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. “You haven’t begun to see [all the] … evil, horrible things done [by U.S. soldiers] to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run,” Hersh told an audience in Chicago in the summer of 2014.

It isn’t just Iraq where Washington has wreaked sheer mass murderous havoc in the Middle East, always a region of prime strategic significance to the U.S. thanks to its massive petroleum resources. In a recent Truthdig reflection on Syria, historian Dan Lazare reminds us that:

> [Syrian President Assad’s] Baathist crimes pale in comparison to those of the U.S., which since the 1970s has invested trillions in militarizing the Persian Gulf and arming the ultra-reactionary petro-monarchies that are now tearing the region apart. The U.S. has provided Saudi Arabia with crucial assistance in its war on Yemen, it has cheered on the Saudi blockade of Qatar, and it has stood by while the Saudis and United Arab Emirates send in troops to crush democratic protests in neighboring Bahrain. In Syria, Washington has worked hand in glove with Riyadh to organize and finance a Wahhabist holy war that has reduced a once thriving country to ruin.

Chomsky has called Barack Obama’s targeted drone assassination program “the most extensive global terrorism campaign the world has yet seen.” The program “officially is aimed at killing people who the administration believes might someday intend to harm the U.S. and killing anyone else who happens to be nearby.” As Chomsky adds, “It is also a terrorism generating campaign—that is well understood by people in high places. When you murder somebody in a Yemen village, and maybe a couple of other people who are standing there, the chances are pretty high that others will want to take revenge.”

> “We lead the world,” presidential candidate Obama explained, “in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good. … America is the last, best hope of earth.”

Obama elaborated in his first inaugural address. “Our security,” the president said, “emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint”—a fascinating commentary on Fallujah, Hiroshima, the U.S. crucifixion of Southeast Asia, the “Highway of Death” and more.

Within less than half a year of his inauguration, Obama’s rapidly accumulating record of atrocities in the Muslim world would include the bombing of the Afghan village of Bola Boluk. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives in Bola Boluk were children. “In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to outraged members of the Afghan Parliament,” the New York Times reported, “the governor of Farah Province … said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed.” According to one Afghan legislator and eyewitness, “the villagers bought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred. Everyone at the governor’s cried, watching that shocking scene.” The administration refused to issue an apology or to acknowledge the “global policeman’s” responsibility.

By telling and sickening contrast, Obama had just offered a full apology and fired a White House official because that official had scared New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people of 9/11. The disparity was extraordinary: Frightening New Yorkers led to a full presidential apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Killing more than 100 Afghan civilians did not require any apology.

Reflecting on such atrocities the following December, an Afghan villager was moved to comment as follows: “Peace prize? He’s a killer. … Obama has only brought war to our country.” The man spoke from the village of Armal, where a crowd of 100 gathered around the bodies of 12 people, one family from a single home. The 12 were killed, witnesses reported, by U.S. Special Forces during a late-night raid.

Obama was only warming up his “killer” powers. He would join with France and other NATO powers in the imperial decimation of Libya, which killed more than 25,000 civilians and unleashed mass carnage in North Africa. The U.S.-led assault on Libya was a disaster for black Africans and sparked the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

Two years before the war on Libya, the Obama administration helped install a murderous right-wing coup regime in Honduras. Thousands of civilians and activists have been murdered by that regime.

The clumsy and stupid Trump has taken the imperial baton from the elegant and silver-tongued “imperial grandmaster” Obama, keeping the superpower’s vast global military machine set on kill. As Newsweek reported last fall, in a news item that went far below the national news radar screen in the age of the endless insane Trump clown show:

> According to research from the nonprofit monitoring group Airwars … through the first seven months of the Trump administration, coalition air strikes have killed between 2,800 and 4,500 civilians. … Researchers also point to another stunning trend—the ‘frequent killing of entire families in likely coalition airstrikes.’ In May, for example, such actions led to the deaths of at least 57 women and 52 children in Iraq and Syria. … In Afghanistan, the U.N. reports a 67 percent increase in civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes in the first six months of 2017 compared to the first half of 2016.

That Trump murders with less sophistication, outward moral restraint and credible claim to embody enlightened Western values and multilateral commitment than Obama did is perhaps preferable to some degree. It is better for empire to be exposed in its full and ugly nakedness, to speed its overdue demise.

The U.S. is not just the top menace only to peace on Earth. It is also the leading threat to personal privacy (as was made clearer than ever by the Edward Snowden revelations), to democracy (the U.S. funds and equips repressive regimes around the world) and to a livable global natural environment (thanks in no small part to its role as headquarters of global greenhouse gassing and petro-capitalist climate denial).

The world can be forgiven, perhaps, if it does not join Eliot Cohen and Karl Vick in bemoaning the end of the “American Era,” whatever Trump’s contribution to that decline, which was well underway before he entered the Oval Office.

Ordinary Americans, too, can find reasons to welcome the decline of the American empire. As Chomsky noted in the late 1960s: “The costs of empire are in general distributed over the society as a whole, while its profits revert to a few within.”

The Pentagon system functions as a great form of domestic corporate welfare for high-tech “defense” (empire) firms like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon—this while it steals trillions of dollars that might otherwise meet social and environmental needs at home and abroad. It is a significant mode of upward wealth distribution within “the homeland.”

The biggest costs have fallen on the many millions killed and maimed by the U.S. military and allied and proxy forces in the last seven decades and before. The victims include the many U.S. military veterans who have killed themselves, many of them haunted by their own participation in sadistic attacks and torture on defenseless people at the distant command of sociopathic imperial masters determined to enforce U.S. hegemony by any and all means deemed necessary.

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MozartIII Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:28 Permalink

The US has been in decline for over 20yrs. Catch up already!

Rome was in denial as well. Get what you can ethically while you can. Simple...

Watch this close. This article will get buried. Any time there is a decanting view on ZH the article gets buried. With new articles, and the clown show goes on.... Until

it stops

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Rapunzal MozartIII Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:31 Permalink

The destruction of the US was planned decades ago. The typical suspects are the Rockefellers and Rothschilds. Stepping stones are the FED and the Founding of the U.N. people will look back and remember the freedom and liberty. Once they got their oligarchy NWO running we will live in neofeudalism. That’s why they need depopulation, to erase the memories of the older generations.

In reply to The US has been in decline… by MozartIII

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Stuck on Zero Rapunzal Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:34 Permalink

We may be the #1 threat to world peace but actual annual deaths from warfare have fallen greatly for the last fifty years. I guarantee that when the US backs away from its global role the world will become a much more dangerous place.

In reply to The destruction of the US… by Rapunzal

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revolla Stuck on Zero Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:35 Permalink

The World Will Not Mourn The Decline Of US Hegemony

Israhell will.

If it's still around.

In reply to We may be the #1 threat to… by Stuck on Zero

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bobcatz revolla Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:40 Permalink

The US has not been its own since the Fed was created in 1913. It's controlled by foreign bankers who have more love for Israel than for the US. They hope when the US dies, Israel will control the Middle East. Fat chance.

It's up to the American people to rise up and take back their country and end the empire of (((these bankers))). Because regular Americans never voted for Empire.

In reply to The World Will Not Mourn… by revolla

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TBT or not TBT bobcatz Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:49 Permalink

I’d like to see the D.C. government do a little hegemony domestically, in matters of protecting basic rights(its most basic job) like the right of the people to keep and BEAR arms, which is heavily infringed in Kaliforniastan, and atop that, my right to not have my assets taxed and vote diluted by millions of illegals running amok.

FFS, the US isn’t even controlling itself nevermeind the rest of the world. Let’s start with some constitutional sovereignty right here at home.

In reply to The US has not been its own… by bobcatz

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Setarcos Stuck on Zero Fri, 05/18/2018 - 03:50 Permalink

Where do you fluck your figures from and why "the last fifty years"? Why not since 1946 (72 years) with the cynical bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at least half a million dead and counting still? Why not 1950 (68 years) with the destruction of Korea, 3-5 million dead and counting (still at war with sanctions, starvation, etc.)? Why not 1953 (65 years) with the coup in Persia and all of the deaths due to the installed Shah and then the inevitable revolution, with fomented war against Iraq (1980s - 38 years) with millions dead? Why not the War against Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia from 1965 - 53 years) with anything up to 10 million dead and counting? Why not the war against Iraq from 1991 - 28 years and continued 2002 (16 years) with at least 10 million deaths and counting. Afghanistan since 2001 and more millions dead, one way or another (but counting officially stopped after Vietnam).

That's just a small, if major sample yielding at least 50,000,000 dead, one way or another - rivalling WW2 - but then add at least 40 minor wars like those against Panama and Honduras, plus more major ones like Yugoslavia, Libya, Yemen and Somalia. Add wars since the Empire got crafty and just backed Israel against it neighbours, or used vassal states from NATO, or employed mercenary armies like Al Qaida and ISIS - you see no "boots on the ground" means less domestic back-lash and protests, but the killing goes on, such as in Syria, Chechnya and the Ukraine.

Add in the deliberate destruction of the Soviet Union and the economic sanctions which killed hundreds of thousands. Oh and then there was what happened in Indonesia a few years back … it's well-nigh impossible to make an exhaustive list.

Just during your nominated 50 years the body count would conservatively be 40-50,000,000, but a ridiculously low 5,000,000 would be too many and makes a total farce of your claim that if the US gave up hegemon, the World would be more dangerous.🤢🤔🤣🤣‼

In reply to We may be the #1 threat to… by Stuck on Zero

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107cicero Setarcos Fri, 05/18/2018 - 06:16 Permalink

Good analysis, thanks.

In reply to Where do you fluck your… by Setarcos

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Fireman Stuck on Zero Fri, 05/18/2018 - 04:40 Permalink

Pox Amerikana that almost killed humanity will surely kill the parasitic host.

Just gotta love nature's way of dealing with disea$e!

In reply to We may be the #1 threat to… by Stuck on Zero

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ebworthen Rapunzal Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:44 Permalink

Top threat because the warnings of George Washington and Dwight D. Eisenhower were ignored so the populace could be sold out.

The U.S. is following the British model, how did that work out?

Hang 'em high!

In reply to The destruction of the US… by Rapunzal

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Setarcos ebworthen Fri, 05/18/2018 - 04:43 Permalink

George Washington continued the British model soon after 1776, when he started the Indian Wars, thus beginning the carving out of the mainland Empire, then not many years after with the Spanish and Mexican Wars. The US bBEGAN as a "nascent empire" … try reading what a lot of the land-owning Founding Oligarchs had to say, such as designating natives as savages, less than wild animals and to be driven into the "stony places". Of course they did not give a fig for other men who did not own land, nor women, of course not slaves and natives not even a rotten fig.

The Declaration of Independence and Constitution read well, UNTIL reality bites on realizing that the flowery rhetoric and "rights" only belonged to the elite. It's rather like English people believe that Magna Carta applied to commoners. Nope. It was the robber barons (land-owning oligarchs) resenting being taxed by King John (later King George) and wanting it all for theyselves + "rights" which simply did not apply to the masses who they taxed with impunity. Nothing ever changes, except that there was a very unusual period of history in the "West" from about 1950-90, when widespread affluence and/or consumerism gave the masses the illusion of "participation". Perhaps never since the latter years of Rome have so many had it so good … briefly.

Well since neoliberalism and the neocons gained ascendancy during the '90s, it has all quite quickly exposed the temporary illusion affluence and "rights". The oligarchs - 0.1 - 0.01% - are firmly back in charge … but may have blown it now that the East is gradually ousting the Western economic system, best alluded to by Rothschild & Associates. (I'm sure that most ZHers can fill in the blanks.)

If you really believe that Washington and Eisenhower were somehow opposed to "the system" - which is now full-blown fascism - you haven't taken the red pill. Fascism is the "bundle" of private, oligarchical corporations, the government which they own and the military industrial wing under their control. George Washington was steeped in the precursor economic system of his day (still mainly agrarian and mercantilist) with empire a given, or implicit presumption ("they" were all at it in Europe). He was really very much the "English Gentleman", like the rest of the founders.

Ike worked in the increasingly fascist (say post capitalist) system for all of his life without complaint. If, like Boris Yeltsin about three decades later, he got a belated conscience it was too late and no one, except maybe JFK, had a clue how to dismantle it. I fancy that, NOW, we will either get taken to World War the Last, or the economic implosion of the Empire (probably with States seceding from the Union), or both. I do not believe in miracles, but I do believe that if anyone could find a peaceful way through the maze, then it might be Vladimir Vladimirovich and his team, perhaps via the Eurasian and OBOR projects.

In reply to Top threat because the… by ebworthen

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TheEndIsNear Rapunzal Thu, 05/17/2018 - 23:29 Permalink

Rapunzal said: "The destruction of the US was planned decades ago."

December 23, 1913 to be exact.

In reply to The destruction of the US… by Rapunzal

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Lumberjack MozartIII Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:59 Permalink

https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/997267870223650816

In reply to The US has been in decline… by MozartIII

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HRClinton MozartIII Thu, 05/17/2018 - 23:44 Permalink

"(US) soldiers sodomizing Iraqi boys in front of their mothers behind the walls of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison"

Support our Troops. Send them Viagra.

Cause when you gotta butt cuck, you gotta butt cuck.

Join the Army and be all you can be.

Oh, I am entertained!

In reply to The US has been in decline… by MozartIII

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PeaceForWorld MozartIII Thu, 05/17/2018 - 23:55 Permalink

Someone told me that all the empires fail after invading Afghanistan. Here we are!

In reply to The US has been in decline… by MozartIII

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falconflight Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:29 Permalink

Scanned article and observed Chomsky as a source of truth...eat shit and die soon...

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valerie24 Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:30 Permalink

The world has it right.

The US is owned and operated by Israel.

We are the #1 warmongering, peace hating idiots in the world. The true axis of evil is the US/UK/Israel.

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falconflight valerie24 Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:32 Permalink

Gosh Ms. Four-Month ZH'er, I hope you're better in bed than you are posting about world events and trends. ;0

In reply to The world has it right. The… by valerie24

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valerie24 falconflight Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:43 Permalink

Hey Assbag

I've been reading ZH since it's inception and after being banned for years for some unknown reason was just recently able to re-post to combat the likes of morons like you.

I remember the good guys like Sawyer that were able to post and tell the real truth.

Don't you have some Neocon nuts you need to go lick?

The world is waking up - finally.

In reply to Gosh Ms. Four-Month ZH'er, I… by falconflight

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MozartIII valerie24 Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:54 Permalink

Get a life! It does not involve a ZH forum and you lack of self esteem.

In reply to Hey Assbag I've been… by valerie24

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valerie24 MozartIII Thu, 05/17/2018 - 22:23 Permalink

And you are here on the ZH forum because??

What a dooshbag.

You Neocon, Zionist loving scum are in full panic mode because the truth is coming out and you no longer own the propaganda.

In reply to Get a life! It does not… by MozartIII

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cbxer55 valerie24 Thu, 05/17/2018 - 22:42 Permalink

Douchebag. Sheesh, come on here criticizing everyone and can't even spell correctly. What an ultra moron!

In reply to And you are here on the ZH… by valerie24

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valerie24 cbxer55 Thu, 05/17/2018 - 22:54 Permalink

You caught my drift though right?

I don't criticize everyone only Zionist/Neocon loving morons like you.

I'll try to use spellcheck next time douche

In reply to Douchebag. Sheesh, come on… by cbxer55

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cbxer55 valerie24 Thu, 05/17/2018 - 23:04 Permalink

I don't use spellcheck, never had to. At least, thanks to me, you spelled douche correctly this time.

Douche Nozzle.

In reply to You caught my drift though… by valerie24

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PeaceForWorld valerie24 Fri, 05/18/2018 - 01:05 Permalink

You got that right. I joined this site because we are free to comment with a different opinion, different from MSM. But of course there are the low IQ and Zionist commentators that will try to attack at intellectual commentators. I wish that more Americans would travel abroad to learn about the world, but they won’t because they believe in American Exceptionalisem! Or they were brought up to be dumb.

In reply to And you are here on the ZH… by valerie24

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PeaceForWorld MozartIII Fri, 05/18/2018 - 01:08 Permalink

@Mozartlll Get a brain! If Mozart was alive and knew someone like you is using his name, he would commit suicide!

In reply to Get a life! It does not… by MozartIII

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CatInTheHat valerie24 Thu, 05/17/2018 - 23:04 Permalink

^^^^^winning^^^^^^°

In reply to Hey Assbag I've been… by valerie24

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MozartIII falconflight Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:51 Permalink

It's getting late. The world event crowd cometh, with all the wisdom that can be attached to a bottle....

In reply to Gosh Ms. Four-Month ZH'er, I… by falconflight

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DennisR Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:30 Permalink

If you're not on board with the USA! USA! USA! USA! blowing up lots of countries in the name of USA! USA! USA! USA!

Then you can just get out of USA! USA! USA! USA!

Hooooooooooo

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desertboy DennisR Fri, 05/18/2018 - 00:58 Permalink

You need to work on your delivery

In reply to If you're not on board with… by DennisR

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gigadeath Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:30 Permalink

The day America becomes great is the day she leads by example.

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edotabin gigadeath Fri, 05/18/2018 - 03:22 Permalink

Yes, agreed 100%. People need to join willingly. Force and coercion only go so far.

OTOH, I have been saying and continue to believe that one should be careful what they wish for. Nobody really knows the true face of the next great power. They may start out as benevolent and quickly turn.

TPTB and their influence is not limited to the US. They hold a great deal of power in many other countries.

Balance is another issue that may be important. It could be argued that the Soviet Union held things in check as the situation flew off the rails after the collapse. Nobody here knows how other powers will react if America retreats.

In general, I am for change and progress. I just think it needs to be gradual and based on solid decisions/reactions etc. Too frequently we see rapid shifts and I think those wind up creating more turmoil and pain than good.

In reply to The day America becomes… by gigadeath

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falconflight Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:30 Permalink

ALMATY, Kazakhstan (AP) — Hour upon hour, day upon day, Omir Bekali and other detainees in far western China’s new indoctrination camps had to disavow their Islamic beliefs, criticize themselves and their loved ones and give thanks to the ruling Communist Party.

When Bekali, a Kazakh Muslim, refused to follow orders each day, he was forced to stand at a wall for five hours at a time. A week later, he was sent to solitary confinement, where he was deprived of food for 24 hours. After 20 days in the heavily guarded camp, he wanted to kill himself.

https://apnews.com/6e151296fb194f85ba69a8babd972e4b/Chinese-mass-indoct…

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52821740 falconflight Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:48 Permalink

Exactly. For all the faults of the US the idea of China ruling the world is much more sinister for anyone who has been following their actions.

In reply to ALMATY, Kazakhstan (AP) —… by falconflight

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el buitre 52821740 Thu, 05/17/2018 - 23:57 Permalink

I wonder if they are both being run by the same invisible hand.

In reply to Exactly. For all the faults… by 52821740

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falconflight Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:30 Permalink

...

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jmack Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:32 Permalink

trust me, they will regret the decline of US hegemony...in spades. And that is not in any way support US hegemony, just saying, its the worst possible system, except for all the rest....

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DaBard51 Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:32 Permalink

Hmmm... who ya gonna call? Who is #2?

China? Russia? UK? France? Italy? Brazil? Norway?

Tough choice, looking at the bench...

When nine hundred years old you become, look this good you will not.

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52821740 DaBard51 Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:53 Permalink

There are big differences between those countries. Most value Democracy, freedom of the press, transparency, human rights and are anti corruption. China most definitely doesn't and Russia isn't far behind.

In reply to Hmmm... who ya gonna call?… by DaBard51

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jmack 52821740 Thu, 05/17/2018 - 22:05 Permalink

lol, no one else in the world has freedom of the press. much less transparency, human rights or anticorruption. your comment is just ignorant.

In reply to There are big differences… by 52821740

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52821740 jmack Thu, 05/17/2018 - 22:22 Permalink

I up voted your trust me comment but it seems you yourself are either ignorant or thinking in absolutes. My statement wasnt one of absolute perfection I'm talking comparatively. Why do so many people now think in absolutes? Black or white. Good or Bad, right or wrong. Seems people don't have the ability to recognise that there is a gradient scale.

And with that said heres a list of countries that DO have those things COMPARATIVELY.

NZ, Australia, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, UK, France , Germany, and many more have all those things and the list goes on. ..

> https://googleweblight.com/i?u=http://cpi.transparency.org/&hl=en-IN&tg…

In reply to lol, no one else in the… by jmack

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jmack 52821740 Thu, 05/17/2018 - 22:58 Permalink

you are wrong. UK just put a guy in jail for making a video of his pug giving a nazi salute... denmark, norway and sweden, germany, france, all have laws against speaking facts that make the powers that be uncomfortable, i can give you many recent examples with a bit of google time. I dont know about NZ, but australia is very much on the level of canada and the uk as far as their freedom of the press. you are just wrong.

In reply to Ignoramus. NZ, Australia,… by 52821740

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52821740 jmack Fri, 05/18/2018 - 00:38 Permalink

I don't agree. It seems that you don't understand the meaning of 'comparatively '

In reply to you are wrong. UK just put a… by jmack

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52821740 jmack Fri, 05/18/2018 - 00:47 Permalink

I don't agree. It seems that you don't understand the meaning of 'comparatively '

In reply to you are wrong. UK just put a… by jmack

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jcbudmo 52821740 Fri, 05/18/2018 - 00:50 Permalink

You yourself just made absolutist, and ignorant comments about China and Russia.

In both those countries the citizens have a healthy cynicism of state media whereas in the West most believe everything they're told to beleive.

Furthermore, RT is way more objective than any Western state sponsored, or corporate media.

And finally, criminal bankers, oligarchs and officials actually get jailed in those countries. In the West they get a senate seat or a knighthood.

In reply to Ignoramus. NZ, Australia,… by 52821740

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DaBard51 52821740 Thu, 05/17/2018 - 22:23 Permalink

Numbers, you got my point. Who are the alternatives?

Measure both moral standing and capability to act.

When nine hundred years old you become, look this good you will not.

In reply to There are big differences… by 52821740

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52821740 DaBard51 Thu, 05/17/2018 - 22:46 Permalink

If I understand your point I agree that there isn't an immediate contender but China is rapidly rising, and is already stealing land (Spratlys & previously Tibet and claims Taiwan) and will be the strongest economic power in the world in just a few years time so the answer will soon be China. They are already stepping into the voids left by the US in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

In reply to Numbers, you got my point. … by DaBard51

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el buitre 52821740 Fri, 05/18/2018 - 00:05 Permalink

As far as freedom of the press, the Saker was raised in Switzerland by white Russians who fled the Bolsheviks and the USSR. His job was to study the USSR for western think tanks, particularly military analysis He had to read Izvestia and Pravda everyday. He made this comment this week on an internet interview (paraphrasing): The editors of Izvestia and Pravda would be amazed at the lack of freedom and distortions of the US media today. What they achieved was a pale reflection of the USA corporate media success.

In reply to There are big differences… by 52821740

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el buitre DaBard51 Fri, 05/18/2018 - 00:07 Permalink

Hmmm... who ya gonna call? Who is #2?

Call for what??

In reply to Hmmm... who ya gonna call?… by DaBard51

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JailBanksters Thu, 05/17/2018 - 21:32 Permalink

And the World will not mourn the death of all Jews, again

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