Farewell…For Now

Remember: Matter. How tiny your share of it.
Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it.
Fate. How small a role you play in it.

– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

For the past ten years, I’ve spent most of my waking hours learning how the systems we live under function and how wealth and power operate and consolidate in the U.S. as well as globally. I’ve learned a lot and I’ve shared a lot. If I could go back and do it all over again, I would.

I dedicated all that time and energy to writing and engaging on the big issues of our era for two main reasons. First, I felt there was a window of opportunity to turn the ship around and reform the system to avoid needless additional widespread suffering and upheaval, which to me was guaranteed given the destructive path to which our ruling class was obstinately committed. Second, my decade on Wall Street offered some valuable insight into the inner workings of financial feudalism and how it systematically and intentionally enriches certain small segments of the populace while enslaving the masses via perpetual colossal debt issuance coupled with reoccurring central bank bailouts for the creditor and financial asset speculator class. This wasn’t widely appreciated when I first started writing about it, so it became a personal mission to inform as many people as possible.

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The Trump Administration’s Iran Policy Will Hasten Imperial Decline

There was a postwar order, but was it liberal?  Like most political orders, it looked much better on paper than it did in practice and to the core members of the order than those on the margins…

Liberal values were only remotely attached to the postwar institutions.  Sovereign equality did not translate into a liberal world order.  The postwar institutions were run by the most powerful countries, with middle and lesser powers either shunted to the back of the room or locked out altogether…Third World now comprised most of the world’s states, but it was on the outside looking in.  Western states enjoyed democracy and the rule of law, but the U.S. and the former colonial masters undermined rather than supported democracy and human rights elsewhere. Some Western states and analysts presumed that the global order must have some legitimacy because there were no great (or at least successful) revolts by the Third World, but they mistook coercion and the lack of alternative for consent…

The suggestion, then, is that if the international order is having greater difficulty creating rule-based governance, it might have less to do with the weakening of liberalism and more to do with the fact that the rules that have been in place for decades were overdue for an overhaul, and especially given a shift in power from the West to the East.  

– From Michael N. Barnett’s piece: The End of a Liberal International Order That Never Existed

A primary focus of my writing of late centers around the idea that the policies of the Trump administration, and the neocons in control of it, will hasten the decline of U.S. imperial power and more rapidly usher in a multi-polar (and possibly bifurcated) world. Today’s news regarding the elimination of waivers on Iranian oil imports provides another perfect example.

Specifically, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced earlier today that waivers which allowed eight countries to import Iranian crude oil without being subject to U.S. sanctions would expire on May 2 without extension. The eight countries included are China, India, Turkey, South Korea, Japan, Greece, Italy and Taiwan.

This move is an extraordinarily foolish and reckless act which illustrates the extreme hubris and short-sightedness of those running American foreign policy under Trump. What the U.S. is decreeing to the entire world with this action is that the U.S., and the U.S. alone, decides who gets to trade with who. The U.S. is telling China, the second largest economy in the world and home to over one billion people, that it lacks the sovereign authority to buy oil from Iran if it so desires. If the U.S. can unilaterally play boss on the trade decisions of foreign countries, national sovereignty does not exist in practice anywhere on the planet. There is only empire.

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Prepare for Impact – This is the Beginning of the End for U.S. Empire

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.

Before I get into the meat of this post, I want to revisit something I wrote back in January.

From the post, Very Powerful People in the U.S. Government Want War – This is Their Sales Pitch:

We need to understand that those who want this war will be absolutely relentless. The sales pitch will not end until they get exactly what they want. This is where all of us critical thinkers need to play a key role. We must be prepared to diligently analyze all unsubstantiated official claims, and push back against the war-mongers, because we know for certain the oligarch-owned corporate media won’t. We must be prepared to inform our fellow citizens about what’s happening so that we don’t fall victim to a cheap sales pitch with devastating consequences. Unfortunately, we must also be prepared for a possible deep state false flag if the current sales tactic falls on deaf ears.

America cannot win a global war of such a scale if it is based on false pretenses and in the absence of exceedingly strong public support. This support does not exist. Will this serve as a necessary restraint against the masters of war and their devious plans? It’s too early to tell, but I do know that if we are unnecessarily pushed into a global conflagration, it will not end well for us. If this is the road our twisted status quo insists on taking us down, let us never forget who they are and the self-serving motivations behind their actions.

Four months later, the deep state got exactly what it wanted. Trump’s weaknesses have been identified and exploited, and he’s successfully been manipulated into neocon foreign policy like George W. Bush and Barack Obama before him. I’ve spent much of the past several months warning about exactly what happened last night, but the die is now cast. There’s no turning back from the path we’re on.

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