The Rebirth of Common Sense: Terminate The Empire

If people want America to survive, they must get the giant gorilla, aka its empire, off their back. It may be a David vs Goliath battle, but these are biblical times, so we have a shot. It begins with small acts, and small heroes, with individuals like Deb Suran, who is a self-sufficient webmaster from Deer Isle, Maine. She and other locals demanded that their Congressman Mike Michaud refuse the President funding for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The Deer Isle Rebellion was not a shot heard round' the world, because the world these days is covered by a media that cares very little about ground-breaking stories unless the ground is literally breaking. But since an earthquake is unlikely to hit the coast of Maine anytime soon, it is pretty much certain that a small town in revolt won't make the national headlines. At least, not until it's too late. And that day could come sooner than expected.

The power is in our hands. However, if the empire is not shut off immediately, it will come to a screeching halt, potentially wrecking millions of lives. It's clear the empire will come to an end with or without us. The question is how much damage will it do if we don't intervene and end it in a clean and quick fashion?

The amount of money that is currently servicing America's unsustainable war budget is unlikely to last. And the nation's debt is ballooning at a time when more and more Americans are finding it difficult to buy a decent meal, and a bed to sleep in. Ending the empire is no longer an opaque political problem, it is quickly becoming a choice between living and dying. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke recently warned that a Greek-type crisis could come to the United States in the very near future. Such an economic fiasco has been staring us in the face for a long time, at least to those of us willing to look. But the catastrophe is finally approaching. And when it officially comes, the institutions and the states could fall faster than dominoes, as Andrew Gavin Marshall has warned.

So the time has come to gear up and stop playing around. The Democrats and the Republicans have both failed us. And President Obama bamboozled us. As Andrew Bacevich writes:

Once elected and after due deliberation, Obama decided that endless war remains an imperative. The new president just wanted to focus on Afghanistan and “AfPak” rather than on Iraq and the Persian Gulf. So he hired his own version of General David Petraeus and announced his own version of the surge. In Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike responded with applause, with blank-check authorizations, and with massive appropriations of money.

Which leaves us pretty much back where we were after 9/11—except that no one any longer believes that the concerted use of military power will enable the United States to eliminate terror—much less evil itself—or to spread democracy around the world. The fighting continues. The bills mount. To what end?

To what end? I don't want to know. But if people really want to get rid of terror and evil, we must come together and terminate the empire. That will go a long way.


Alexandria's Link.