[Mb-civic] "repair the vote" and Collapse of Empire

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Here is a quick online action opportunity followed by article about 
impending collapse of the U.S. empire.  It may not be pretty but it's 
still  our job to seek sanity and justice as we can...

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Subject: We need to repair the vote now

Hi,

After the last two presidential elections, it's incredibly important to 
repair our election system. We need to guarantee paper printouts 
for electronic voting machines, cut long lines, and prohibit partisan 
election officials.

There's lots of legislation in Congress to do just that, and we need 
to demand our representatives pass it immediately.

I just signed a petition to Congress. Can you join me by signing this 
petition?

http://www.moveonpac.org/repairthevote/

This is urgent because states are preparing to spend over a billion 
dollars on new electronic voting machines. Unless Congress 
requires paper printouts now, we'll be stuck with expensive 
machines that can't do a simple recount.

I hope you'll sign this petition to Congress:

http://www.moveonpac.org/repairthevote/

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http://www.counterpunch.org/sale02222005.html

Counter Punch   February 22, 2005

Imperial Entropy

Collapse of the American Empire

By Kirkpatrick Sale

It is quite ironic: only a decade or so after the idea of the United
States as an imperial power came to be accepted by both right and left,
and people were actually able to talk openly about an American empire, it
is showing multiple signs of its inability to continue. And indeed it is
now possible to contemplate, and openly speculate about, its collapse.

The neocons in power in Washington these days, those who were
delighted to talk about America as the sole empire in the world following
the Soviet disintegration, will of course refuse to believe in any such
collapse, just as they ignore the realities of the imperial war in Iraq.
But it behooves us to examine seriously the ways in which the U.S. system
is so drastically imperiling itself that it will cause not only the
collapse of its worldwide empire but drastically alter the nation itself
on the domestic front.

All empires collapse eventually: Akkad, Sumeria, Babylonia, Ninevah,
Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Mali, Songhai,
Mongonl, Tokugawaw, Gupta, Khmer, Hapbsburg, Inca, Aztec, Spanish,
Dutch, Ottoman, Austrian, French, British, Soviet, you name them, they all
fell, and most within a few hundred years. The reasons are not really
complex. An empire is a kind of state system that inevitably makes the
same errors simply by the nature of its imperial structure and inevitably
fails because of its size, complexity, territorial reach, stratification,
heterogeneity, domination, hierarchy, and inequalities.

In my reading of the history of empires, I have come up with four reasons
that almost always explain their collapse. (Jared Diamond's new book
Collapse also has a list of reasons for societal collapse, slightly
overlapping, but he is talking about systems other than empires.) Let me
set them out, largely in reference to the present American empire.

First, environmental degradation. Empires always end by destroying lands
and waters they depend upon for survival, largely because they build and
farm and grow without limits, and ours is no exception, even if we have
yet to experience the worst of our assault on nature. Science is in
agreement that all important ecological indicators are in decline and have
been for decades: erosion of topsoils and beaches, overfishing,
deforestation, freshwater and aquifer depletion, pollution of water, soil,
air, and food, soil salinization, overpopulation, overconsumption,
depletion of oil and minerals, introduction of new diseases and
invigoration of old ones, extreme weather, melting icecaps and rising
sealevels, species extinctions, and excessive human overuse of the earth's
photosynthetic capacity. As the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has said,
after lengthy examination of human impact on the earth, our "ecological
footprint is already too large for the planet to sustain, and it is
getting larger." A Defense Department study last year predicted "abrupt
climate change," likely to occur within a decade, will lead to
"catastrophic" shortages of water and energy, endemic "disruption and
conflict," warfare that "would define human life," and a "significant
drop" in the planet's ability to sustain its present population. End of
empire for sure, maybe end of civilization.

Second, economic meltdown. Empires depend on excessive resource
exploitation, usually derived from colonies farther and farther away from
the center, and eventually fall when the resources are exhausted or become
too expensive for all but the elite. This is exactly the path we are on –
peak oil extraction, for example, is widely predicted to come in the next
year or two – and our economy is built entirely on a fragile system in
which the world produces and we, by and large, consume (U.S. 
manufacturing
is just 13 per cent of our GDP). At the moment we sustain a nearly $630
billion trade deficit with the rest of the world – it has leapt by an
incredible $500 billion since 1993, and $180 billion since Bush took
office in 2001 – and in order to pay for that we have to have an inflow of
cash from the rest of the world of about $1 billion every day to pay for
it, which was down by half late last year. That kind of excess is simply
unsustainable, especially when you think that it is the other world
empire, China, that is crucial for supporting it, at the tune of some $83
billion on loan to the U.S. treasury.


Add to that an economy resting on a nearly $500 billion Federal budget
deficit, making up part of a total national debt of $7.4 trillion as of
last fall, and the continual drain on the economy by the military of at
least $530 billion a year (not counting military intelligence, whose
figure we never know). Nobody thinks that is sustainable either, which is
why the dollar has lost value everywhere – down by 30 per cent against the
euro since 2000 – and the world begins to lose faith in investment here. I
foresee that in just a few years the dollar will be so battered that the
oil states will no longer want to operate in that currency and will turn
to the euro instead, and China will let the yuan float against the dollar,
effectively making this nation bankrupt and powerless, unable to control
economic life within its borders much less abroad.

Third, military overstretch. Empires, because they are by definition
colonizers, are always forced to extend their military reach farther and
farther, and enlarge it against unwilling colonies more and more, until
coffers are exhausted, communication lines are overextended, troops are
unreliable, and the periphery resists and ultimately revolts. The American
empire, which began its worldwide reach well before Bush II, now has 
some
446,000 active troops at more than 725 acknowledged (and any number of
secret) bases in at least 38 countries around the world, plus a formal
"military presence" in no less than 153 countries, on every continent but
Antarctica – and nearly a dozen fully armed courier fleets on all the
oceans.  Talk of overstretch: the U.S. is less than 5 per cent of the
world's population.  Now that Bush has declared a "war on terror," instead
of the more doable war on Al Quada we should have waged, our armies 
and
agents will be on a battlefield universal and permanent that cannot
possibly be controlled or contained.

So far that military network has not collapsed, but as Iraq indicates it
is mightily tested and quite incapable of establishing client states to do
our bidding and protect resources we need. And as anti-American 
sentiment
continues to spread and darken – in all the Muslim countries, in much of
Europe, in much of Asia – and as more countries refuse the "structural
adjustments" that our IMF-led globalization requires, it is quite likely
that the periphery of our empire will begin resisting our dominance,
militarily if necessary. And far from having a capacity to fight two wars
simultaneously, as the Pentagon once hoped, we are proving that we can't
even fight one.

Finally, domestic dissent and upheaval. Traditional empires end up
collapsing from within as well as often being attacked from without, and
so far the level of dissent within the U.S. has not reached the point of
rebellion or secession – thanks both to the increasing repression of
dissent and escalation of fear in the name of "homeland security" and to
the success of our modern version of bread and circuses, a unique
combination of entertainment, sports, television, internet sex and games,
consumption, drugs, liquor, and religion that effectively deadens the
general public into stupor. But the tactics of the Bush II administration
show that it is so fearful of an expression of popular dissent that it is
willing to defy and ignore environmental, civil-rights, and progressive
groups, to bribe commentators to put out its propaganda, to expand
surveillance and data- base invasions of privacy, to use party superiority
and backroom tactics to ride roughshod over Congressional opposition, to
use lies and deceptions as a normal part of government operations, to
break international laws and treaties for short-term ends, and to use
religion to cloak its every policy.


It's hard to believe that the great mass of the American public would ever
bestir itself to challenge the empire at home until things get much, much
worse. It is a public, after all, of which, as a Gallup poll in 2004
found, 61 per cent believe that "religion can answer all or most of
today's problems," and according to a Time/CNN poll in 2002 59 per cent
believe in the imminent apocalypse foretold in the Book of Revelation and
take every threat and disaster as evidence of God's will. And yet, it's
also hard to believe that a nation so thoroughly corrupt as this – in all
its fundamental institutions, its boughten parties, academies,
corporations, brokerages, accountants, governments – and resting on a
social and economic base of intolerably unequal incomes and property,
getting increasingly unequal, will be able to sustain itself for long. The
upsurge in talk about secession after the last election, some of which was
deadly serious and led on to organizations throughout most of the blue
states, indicates that at least a minority is willing to think about
drastic steps to "alter or abolish" a regime it finds itself fundamentally
at odds with.

Those four processes by which empires always eventually fall seem to me 
to
be inescapably operative, in varying degrees, in this latest empire. And I
think a combination of several or all of them will bring about its
collapse within the next 15 years or so.

Jared Diamond's recent book detailing the ways societies collapse suggests
that American society, or industrial civilization as a whole, once it is
aware of the dangers of its current course, can learn from the failures of
the past and avoid their fates. But it will never happen, and for a reason
Diamond himself understands.

As he says, in his analysis of the doomed Norse society on Greenland that
collapsed in the early 15th century: "The values to which people cling
most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were
previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity." If this
is so, and his examples would seem to prove it, then we can isolate the
values of American society that have been responsible for its greatest
triumphs and know that we will cling to them no matter what. They are, in
one rough mixture, capitalism, individualism, nationalism, technophilia,
and humanism (as in the dominance of humans over nature). There is no
chance whatever, no matter how grave and obvious the threat, that as a
society that we will abandon those.

Hence no chance to escape the collapse of empire.

Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of twelve books, including Human Scale, 
The
Conquest of Paradise, Rebels Against the Future, and The Fire of His
Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream.



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