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End Of The Empire
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
If the top 1/100th of 1% crowding airports with their private jets isn't afraid of impoverished, disenchanted debt-serfs with pitchforks, they should be.
By End of the Empire I refer not to the collapse of American Imperial power but to the excesses and anxieties that characterize the decay of Empire. I have covered the dynamics of Imperial decay before: How Empires Fall (April 17, 2013):
The imperial tree falls not because the challenges are too great but because the core of the tree has been weakened by the gradual loss of surplus, purpose, institutional effectiveness, intellectual vigor and productive investment.
What I want to address today is the psychological characteristics of Imperial decay: a jaded populace that seeks distraction from their anxieties in excess. We know what characterizes empires on the make: a populace that is vigorous, confident, brimming with abilities and more than willing to engage in spirited intellectual debate on key issues.
What characterizes the American populace today? Jaded, unwilling to sacrifice comfort and convenience for long-term gain, incapable of honest debate, brimming with resentful excuses, insecure, anxious, fearful, depressed, distracted, self-absorbed. These last seven are of course the key traits of permanent adolescence, the state of arrested development encouraged by consumerism.
But they also characterize an Empire that has lost its edge, its ability to sacrifice for a common good, its confidence in its leadership and institutions, and its focus on building value rather than consuming.
Longtime correspondent Kevin K. recently submitted a comparison of the cost for a family of four to attend an NFL football game. San Francisco led the pack at $641 per game for average seats and a few drinks/hot dogs. (Scratch the $10 program and the $22 hat and that drops it all the way down to $609.)
49ers stadium priciest in NFL for a family of four: $641
49ers stadium priciest in NFL for a family of four: $641
The cheapest outing in the league came in at $345. I confess I'm frugal (hey I'm a writer, frugality is part of the package), but $345 doesn't strike me as particularly affordable. That's two months' groceries in our abode, and $641 is the cost of a 3,000-mile car-camping trip.
It's remarkably easy to drop $600 on a dinner for four at a high-end eatery (with wine, of course). It's almost laughable to look at archived menus of top-end restaurants in the 1960s; even in major bastions of old wealth like San Francisco, the fare at the best restaurants in town in the 1960s would barely pass muster at a decent cafe nowadays in terms of sophistication and complexity.
There is no way to parody current high-end restaurant fare: it is its own parody.Whatever bizarre combination of ingredients you might propose in a parody is on the menu at some fancy bistro--with a straight face and hefty price tag.
You know we're in trouble when parody has been rendered impossible.
Want to attend a live rock concert with a big name band? $600 might buy you two decent seats--or not. Even lesser names cost in excess of $100.
The median household income in the U.S. is around $51,000. A house in a "nice" neighborhood in many Left Coast cities costs $1,000,000. These are not mansions or the best house in town: these are average homes.
Although I can't find statistics to verify this, I am fairly confident that this ratio of median income to average houses in "nice" Left Coast neighborhoods (20 to 1) far exceeds the extremes of 1929.
$105,000 income puts a household in the top 20%, and $150,000 puts a household in the top 10%. How many football games (or meals, weekends away, concerts, etc.) at $600 a pop can a household earning $105,000 afford? How many should a household indulge in, given the pressing need to save for investment and emergencies?
We all know households that have no business squandering these sums on entertainment do so for two reasons: entitlement and aspirational spending. Imperial populations feel entitled: to bread and circuses (food stamps and 24-hour sports channels), to high-paying, secure jobs where sluggards can't be fired, to trust funds (so we don't have to lower ourselves to do work that is not fulfilling), to pills that cure us of ailments we nurtured with our unhealthy lifestyles, etc. etc. etc.
Everyone aspires to look like they belong in the elite. The top 10% want to look like they're 1%ers, the top 20% want to look like top 5%ers, the top 40% want to look like top 10%ers, and so on.
The absurd excesses of consumerism are driven by one key dynamic: the top slice has never been wealthier or had so much free cash to blow on excess consumption.
The top 1/10th of 1% has never been wealthier, the top 1% has never been wealthier, the top 5% have never been wealthier, and the top 10% have never been wealthier. People wonder why they're "poor" despite earning $250,000 a year, and yet they seem unaware of where their earnings go because they're entitled to all the goodies: by golly, we worked hard and we deserve it.
Even if we didn't work hard, we still deserve it, because we're special.
One would imagine that the populace of an Empire at its zenith would feel euphoric, confident, secure, fearless: chomping at the bit to go out and do great things not just for themselves but for the Empire.
Instead, we see a populace on anti-depressants, insecure, anxious, burdened by ill health, jaded by 24 hours of everything, every day, distrustful of its corrupt leadership and self-serving institutions, and beneath the rah-rah phony cheer, fearful that the whole rotten contraption might give way before they secure their share of the Imperial swag.
If the top 1/100th of 1% crowding airports with their private jets isn't afraid of impoverished, disenchanted debt-serfs with pitchforks, they should be.
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One need not lament the end of a completely corrupt 'empire', but more to the point, one should celibrate that with relish. The so-called 'system' actually died on March 10th 2008 @ 11:00am Bear Stearns time. Since this date the 'system' has been propped up artificially via 'QE Infinity' which is
a known fraud in and of itself. As Radical Marijuanna always states, one system of deceits on top of another whilst supported by even more frauds
and deceits on other levels of a system wide fraud. The 'Empire' is actually
what Johnny Cash characterized it as when he came out with his last tune
'My Empire of Dirt' before he bit the dust, kicked the can, and took a dirt nap. The United States of America is a full blown fraud in and of itself and the rest of the world population knows it without equivocation with regard to what level of fraud we are discussing. The 1% are preparing to escape the mass destruction that is currently manifesting
by setting up security, stockpiled commodities, genocide [See Ebola],
and mass war all over the planet. 'End Of The Empire' sounds so much better than what the Greeks would characterize this as. Frankly, the necropolis is merely an outgrowth of the metropolis, and the acropolis.
Methinks it is time to start thinking about a new edifice, SUCKERS!
"What characterizes the American populace today? Jaded, unwilling to sacrifice comfort and convenience for long-term gain, incapable of honest debate, brimming with resentful excuses, insecure, anxious, fearful, depressed, distracted, self-absorbed...."
Obviously Charles Two Minds does NOT ever visit Zh, where we areNOT as he described: "Incapable of honest debate."
In empires of old, they'd go puke in the garden to make room for more. Not sure that would work now, as it seems foot-long turkey legs have morphed into tiny chicken nuggets . . .
"Adversity breeds men. Prosperity breeds monsters."
- Victor Hugo
I refuse to spend anything on professional sports, including college extravaganzas.
I did donate to our local semi-pro football team as they put on a good show for cheap.
The last pro baseball game I saw was the Milwaukee Braves. I did see a pre-season Packer game once, but I only listen to them on the radio. They'd starve if they relied upon me except they get me by taxation for their playpens.
Watch as thousands of Ebola infected Africans fly to the US for free treatment.
Obama is telling all infected people in 3rd world countries your welcome in the US to spread the diseases.
While America’s Upside GDP is dominated by “fluff and guesstimates,” the predominantly Mexican population of Salinas, California, is going to the polls in November to vote on yet another school bond issue - a state-controlled educational system whereby California teachers enjoy $107,000+ annual pensions, plus hundreds of thousands more in free retiree health care benefits...
Key reasons for this bond issue are to meet Common Core issues and to deal with overcrowding (huge increases in immigrants) with enrollment expected to expand 1200 to 1400 students in Salinas. This bond issue will pay for a new high school, freeing up other monies to be used for additional teachers and salary increases.
Salinas's huge immigration percentage is clearly demonstrated in the voting patterns as voters approved a $110.7 M school bond issue in April of this year. California, whose white population is dwindling, is building new schools not only in Sallinas but throughout the state.
However, a big danger for the Leftists pushing tax money for schools is a definite slowing in the growth of the tax base. Already, the top 1% of earners in California pay more than half the state’s tax revenue; the top 10% pay 80%.
Reflecting the trends of massive immigration and white flight, the state is experiencing a much wider gap between the rich and the poor (non-cash benefits which are the bulk of welfare payments are not included in welfare recipients' income).
Approximately half of California adults pay no state income tax
“This increasing income inequality is undermining the state revenue growth,” both in California and nationwide, a Standard & Poor’s report shows.
The White population of California this year fell to 38.8% "white non-Hispanic." Governor Jerry Brown has revealed that nearly 30% of the state’s school children are either illegal immigrants or do not speak English. Whites students are now a minority in the system.
As for the economic truth here’s John Williams, Shadow Government Statistics (Shadowstats):
No. 662: Second-Quarter 2014 GDP — Third Estimate September 26th, 2014
• GDP Has Fully Reestablished Itself as the Most Worthless of Economic Series • Fluff and Guesstimates Dominated the Upside GDP Revision • Monthly Economic Reporting Should Turn Increasingly Negative…
http://www.shadowstats.com/
No. 663: September Labor and Monetary Conditions, August Trade Deficit & Construction Spending October 3rd, 2014
• No Recovery in Actual Business Activity • Pre-Election Nonsense in Labor Numbers • Congress Addresses Data Falsification in Unemployment Survey • September Unemployment Rates: 5.9% (U.3), 11.8% (U.6), 23.1% (ShadowStats) • Fed's Monetary Policy Propped Stocks • Annual Money Supply M3 Growth Fell to 4.3% in September • Trade Data Were Positive, Construction Spending Was Neutral for Third-Quarter GDP…
End of the Empire already is fixed in the mix.
"Everyone aspires to look like they belong in the elite. The top 10% want to look like they're 1%ers, the top 20% want to look like top 5%ers, the top 40% want to look like top 10%ers, and so on."
REJECTED. Fear not GenXers', do not despair Millenials, the Boomers are pissed because they squandered the greatest gifts given any generation; they blamed their parents and want to discourage you. Do not let them. Own your destiny, and let no one tell you you cannot. Opportunity still abounds. Live prudently and aspire only to your own calling and purpose. Live within your means. Avoid debt and you can and will thrive.
You say, the Boomers "squandered the greatest gifts given any generation; they blamed their parents and want to discourage you." You have bought hook, line and sinker the banker-controlled media lie to create artifical hatred between generations in order to divert attention from the Fed's fleece of the nation by pitting generation against generation as it transfers the wealth of the people to itself.
The truth is exactly the opposite.
On August 07, 2012,The Associated Press reported:
People retiring today are part of the first generation of workers who have paid more in Social Security taxes during their careers than they will receive in benefits after they retire. It's a historic shift that will only get worse for future retirees, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.”
On October 15, 2013, The Senior Citizens League (TSCL) announced:
According to TSCL’s 2013 Survey of Senior Costs, Social Security benefits have lost almost one-third of their buying power since 2000. Since 2000, the COLA increased benefits just 38 percent while typical senior expenses have jumped 81 percent, more than twice as much.
The truth is, most baby boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, were in America’s first generation that could only make ends meet on the paychecks of two wage earners rather than one. Yet, only a tiny percentage send their elderly parents to nursing homes… elderly parents who increasingly are being forced into reverse mortgages. Thus, Fed ZIRP policy is destroying what little inheritance boomers would have received from their parents.
Fact is that by 1983…a 30-year-old baby boomer needed to commit 44 percent of his income to meet the carrying charges on a median-priced house and 65 percent of all first-time baby boomer homebuyers needed two paychecks to meet their monthly payments…
And then came the 21st Century – and it all blew, the markets, savings income based on negative rates, broken pension promises, boomers' lost home equity in the housing bust, offshored jobs, student loans and tuition for their children, taxation for open border welfare costs, with calls for reduced “health care for boomers” -- i.e., Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s grim Reaper Curve flashing warnings to all hospitals for patients age 52 and older: !!!! "Minimal Treatment"!!!!... !!!!"Minimal Treatment"!!!!...
Cut the bullshit JR.
I am of your generation, SS drawdown possible in a few years, and everyone is greedy, stupid, did not save, and considers that to be MY MONEY.
No one thinks of it as a tax - it was always a tax, and taxes have no performance clause. Once they tax you, it is gone and you get nothing.
Those getting SS don't care that it will destroy those younger who must work more, pay more, get less, to fund ''What I paid into and deserve...".
They don't care that their kids or grandkids will have to work to pay for their greed - they just don't care.
I don't care about your excuses, I have read and heard them all.
Be prepared to get -40% of ''what is yours'', suck it up, shut up, sit down, and be quiet.
The Silents, Boomers and Jonesés are running the country into the dirt, and I am among you.
Your bottom line is you want to take it from the boomers (btw, I am Generation X). Your key line: “They don't care that their kids or grandkids will have to work to pay for their greed - they just don't care.”
My concern is not one class attacking another but in what’s happening to the American economy because of this Bob Rubin banker campaign to use the younger generation against their parents, to create greed and hatred because they are hoping legislation will follow to cut SS, lumping SS payers with welfare recipients and equalizing everyone to the lowest common denominator.
Can’t you see that as the younger generation gets older the bankers will use the same squeeze on them?
And what kind of government do we have that promises, takes, and then reneges on the contract it made. It is a government that can’t be trusted.
BTW, “75% of Americans nearing retirement in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts,” according to Ted Siedle on Forbes who covers pension, money management and securities industry practices.
Writes Siedle in 2013:
“We are on the precipice of the greatest retirement crisis in the history of the world. In the decades to come, we will witness millions of' elderly Americans, the Baby Boomers and others, slipping into poverty. Too frail to work, too poor to retire will become the 'new normal' for many elderly Americans.
“That dire prediction, which I wrote two years ago, is already coming true. Our national demographics, coupled with indisputable glaringly insufficient retirement savings and human physiology, suggest that a catastrophic outcome for at least a significant percentage of our elderly population is inevitable. With the average 401(k) balance for 65 year olds estimated at $25,000 by independent experts – $100,000 if you believe the retirement planning industry - the decades many elders will spend in forced or elected “retirement” will be grim.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardsiedle/2013/03/20/the-greatest-retirement-crisis-in-american-history/print/
That which can not continue, won't. Just a matter of time before the music stops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpDkYZWeeVg
"Deserves got nuthin' to do with it."
How great. It's governmelnt by Eastwood.
I am either Gen X, a Boomer or Gen Jones, take your pick.
Your verbiage reveals your bias and that of most.
Take it from the Boomers...
TAKE
JR, there is nothing to TAKE, there was never anything GIVEN. It is no more than a few electrons displaying a cell in a spreadsheet on a screen. That's it. It does not exist. The taxes listed as ''Given to the Boomers" were spent within 2 weeks of their receipt of their paychecks, of your paycheck, of mine.
On what? On everything else in the USA budget at that time. Roads, crop subsidies, Medicare, Medicaid, DOD and SS, and all the rest.
Everyone needs to go back to their SS ''statement'' and read the line about how this can change due to law. None of us will get more than we paid in taxes, a sensible outcome, and it is wise to take the projected benefit and multiply that by .60 to get the real amount of future inflated dollars you will receive.
You don't like it, no one likes it.
However Maths cannot be denied. The money is not there, it's just bogus T Bonds that must be swapped to Treasury, and Treasury must then emit NEW credit into the actual, real, Bond Market to get the cash listed on those special SS Bonds in the filing cabinet in Parkersburg, WVa.
No one, including all of us in the electorate, was an adult at the time and now it is too late.
I first learnt of this at age 15 in the 70's, and every year no one did anything.
It is your fault, it is my fault, it is our fault.
Time to suck it up.
"everyone is greedy, stupid, did not save, and considers that to be MY MONEY"
they believed the lies told by the people who are running away with the money. that doesn't excuse their lack of stewardship towards the younger generations but they wouldn't have done it if they hadn't fallen for the lies told by the banking mafia owned media and politicians.
There is a solution to the nation's financial crisis other than the NY Fed’s and the IMF's program of debt and austerity for the people and trillions in bailout for the TBTF's..
Sheldon Emry explains it in his paper, “Billions for the Bankers, Debts for the People," that Congress need only issue debt-free and interest-free money. Germany did it and it worked.
“Money issued in such a way would derive its value in exchange from the fact that it had come from the highest legal source in the nation and would be declared legal to pay all public and private debts.
“Issued by a sovereign nation, not in danger of collapse, it would need no gold or silver or other so-called ‘precious’ metals to back it. As history shows, the stability and the responsibility of the government issuing it is the deciding factor in the acceptance of that government’s currency—gold, silver, or iron buried in some hold in the ground."
In case of a US monetary system collapses, our currency would be worthless anyway as was the Weimar Republic’s.
Germany’s solution after the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic was to use debt-free and interest-free money from 1935 and on. As a result, Germany rose from depression to a world power within five years.
“Germany financed its entire government and war operation from 1935 to 1945 without gold and without debt,” says Emry, “and it took the whole capitalist and communist world to destroy the German power over Europe and bring Europe back under the heel of the bankers.”
@JR: Very good points. In fact, if you read the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" you'll see that the goal is not a gold-backed currency at all, but a govt issued currency the quantity of which is managed in accordance with the population size and the "Elders'" view of how much an average person should need.
Stephen Gaskin had it all figured out years ago. My life would have been completely different had I accepted the invitation in 1972 to help start what became known as "The Farm" in Summertown, Tennesse. For better or worse, I didn't want to give up cheeseburgers or my dream of becoming a rock & roll star.
http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2014/07/01/stephen-gaskin-fou...
Rest in peace brother.
Actual Quote:
"I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that."
-Captain Smith, SS Titanic
You say, "Instead, we see a populace on anti-depressants, insecure, anxious, burdened by ill health, jaded by 24 hours of everything, every day, distrustful of its corrupt leadership and self-serving institutions, and beneath the rah-rah phony cheer, fearful that the whole rotten contraption might give way before they secure their share of the Imperial swag.?
The population has been "burdoned by ill health" or suffering toxic injury that produces anxiety, depression and a blind allegiance to the establishment as there is a desperate scramble to a perceived "safe harbor to nurse their wounds"
We pay a severe cost by allowing Big Government to dictate and poison our food, water and medicine. Americans are an extinct species. Not only did they lose their manufacturing jobs to more competitive foreigners, they lost their ability for independent and courageous thought.
The EU Organized Crime Syndicate, through their Jesuit, Masonic and Zionist agents, took over America in the 1913 Fed Act and has been chemically dumbing down the public to ensure there are no challengers to their lucrative Fed banking scams.
Follow the Big Money folks and Fed counterfeit banking scams make pesticide and chemo profits look like chicken feed. The Big Money is in counterfeiting the dollar and they have been printing un-backed dollars since the takeover of our money in 1913 and abandoning the 100% gold backed standard.
Their poisoning agenda is just to discourage challengers to their crooked scams. They keep officials in line and quiet with the usual bribes and death threats to the officials and their families in the organized crime tradition.
see
Banking Chairman Louis McFadden charges the Fed with theft of America;s gold to Hitler causing the 30s Depression. Get's assassinated on their 3rd attempt in 1936
http://www.afn.org/~govern/mcfadden.html
Eric Phelps - The Real Powers Behind The NWO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEEZUU1kDzU
Neurosurgeon Dr Russell Blaylock Chemical Dumbing down of masses.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB3xcN_eoPo
I knew a ZH thread wouldn't go by without at least one nut case babbling about the Joos. It's always the Joos isn't it? What a bunch of nuts.
Can agree with your expectation of ZH's nut fringe, but cannot see it in the post above. Anti-Zionism is a cause embraced by many, many Jews of conscience. As for the Jesuits and Masons . . . wtf?
Have the joo haters gone subtle all of a sudden? Have I been sleeping all along?
Why anyone would pay an arm and a leg to view a sporting event is beyond me; given the best seat you could ever have is right there in front of the widescreen
People who make $250,000 a year feel poor because half their money goes to taxes and the remainder they budget for items like savings, healthy food, home/auto maintanence, continuing education (so they can continue to make $250,000/year), and finally NFL tickets.
Compare that to the person who blows off savings, eats taco bell 4 nights a week, uses zip car, rents an apartment, and doesn't care to learn another thing in their lifetime.
If you don't give a fuck, you can stretch your disposable income a lot farther than if you are trying to plan for the future.
So in the end, in the competition for the limited resource of football tickets, the person making $250,000/year is priced out.
It's their fault for not prioritzing fun ahead of the future, and for not realizing that on the back end they are going to have to fund the saftey net for all the people that put the NFL ahead of their future.
All of which is irrelevant to the NFL, which will continue to charge whatever the market will bear.
Charles?
Unfortunately these historical comparisons don't work anymore. Over 50% of our country is on some mood-altering drug of some kind. The American populace lacks the mental faculties to wake up and do anything about this situation. This is truly unprecedented.
I request that this guy's next article be about how to shop for groceries. I want to learn from him.
Funny thing is that class aspirations loop. Top 1% pretends like they're on par with the 99% (when they're not too busy doing god's work).
Does anyone here seriously believe humans rode kerosene powered rockets through the Van Allen radiation belts to the moon and back, never to return even once in over 40 years?
yes. for the same reason there wasn't 1000s of ships racing Columbus to cross the Atlantic.
"If the top 1/100th of 1% crowding airports with their private jets isn't afraid of impoverished, disenchanted debt-serfs with pitchforks, they should be."
If the banking mafia take all the money then it's effectively the same as there not being any means of exchange at all. The economy simply stops functioning. That's the real reason for pitchforks in the past and will be so in the future.
Unrestricted money-lending is (mostly) parasitic and has destroyed countless economies and civilizations over the centuries but I think what happened in the past is popular reaction to the destruction focused on the ethnicity of the money-lenders rather than the economic *mechanisms* involved and that's why the same process has kept repeating over and over again from Babylon to the Rome 2.0 that is happening today.
It's the *mechanisms* of the banking mafia's model of banking that eventually destroys the economy so Chinese Communists using the same mechanisms would eventually destroy China's economy just the same as if the banking mafia were running the Chinese banking system directly.
(** the mechanisms being 1) legalized counterfeiting, 2) unrestricted usury, 3) gradual corruption of the political system to achieve the first two, 4) the indirect consequences of the corruption of the political elite in all other areas of life)
#
that last point "the indirect consequences of the corruption of the political elite" is imo what causes the swarm of black swans that occur whenever a civilization is in the last stages of being taken down by the banking mafia. There are simply so many things going wrong at once that the permutations and combinations start to generate black swans.
Now is a good time to go long on food, ammo, water filters, and meds. Might need to confiscate your neighbor's pharma-fuel brain erasers for trade. They won't be needing them as they'll perish in the Ebola purge.
Nanosilver for the immune system, my friends. .999 silver for the safe.
Mark this post - by aborting creative destruction in 2000's, the mafia ruined America and even the possibility of a better life for all but the top.
Symptoms are is easily seen in plain sight, such as TARP, TBTF and no rule of law for money or "business."
Get out while you are thinking about it and still can..