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The American Empire John Adams, our second President, cautioned, "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
After World War II, America emerged as the most powerful nation on earth, economically and militarily. Challenging us was the Soviet Union, a house of cards built on the utterly flawed system called communism. Eventually, it fell apart in 1989. Aspiring to empire, the Soviets discovered how costly it is to have to maintain a huge military to insure its subject nations paid tribute. Rome discovered this long ago. Now it is the turn of the United States of America, a nation that traditionally has shrunk from imperialism, from the maintenance of colonies, to discover that, like the former Soviet Union, it is just too easy to spend yourself into a deep hole chasing the illusion of empire. The British Empire is no more. The dream of empire embraced by the French is no more. Why, then, does America maintain a military force spread throughout the world at a cost more than the combined military spending of all other nations? Who is the new enemy? The United States has declared war on a tactic, not a nation state. We are at war with "terrorism." Feel free to define it any way you want. Since the attack on 9-11, there has been no further attack on the United States. There have been minor attacks in Spain and Great Britain, both produced by indigenous terrorists no doubt inspired by al Qaeda. Having driven the Taliban out of Afghanistan, we turned our attention to Iraq. The United States is spending a billion dollars a month to create a democratic nation there. This adds to our constantly mounting debt. We are borrowing $80 million an hour. Past empires received tribute in return for providing security. We receive none. Having "contained" the former Soviet Union at considerable cost, we now offer a Pax Americana in which we pay the bills and other nations receive the benefits. This is particularly true of past and present United Nations peacekeeping missions. What every empire needs is an enemy. The new one is an evil ideology call Islam. The President talks of fighting "terror." If he were honest, he would stop saying Islam is a religion of peace and identify it as the enemy. The problem with that are the more than one billion Muslims in the world. It is worth checking the map to see where our combat troops are these days. The United States is militarily engaged in a region on which we depend to provide the oil we require to maintain our vast economic system. That system depends on hundreds of thousands of trucks that pick up imported goods from our ports and distributes them for sale at the local mall. Americans get in their cars and drive to those malls. We drive everywhere. Or we fly and then drive everywhere. At night our cities are ablaze with light. For that you need lots of energy. All nations require energy. There is nothing inherently wrong in that. However, our dependency on oil creates vulnerabilities for an empire that must maintain a huge military to protect its access to it, keeping the sea lanes open, and extending protection those who possess and sell it to us. To put it another way, had Saddam Hussein been content to simply sell us oil and live in his many palaces, the United States would have left him alone. Freedom was not a priority when we purchased oil from Saddam’s Iraq. Freedom was not a priority when we did business with the Shah of Iran prior to the Islamic Revolution. We purchase oil from lots of nations where freedom is not a priority or even a reality. The mistake the Iranian leadership is making is essentially the same one Saddam Hussein made. They are threatening the American Empire’s need for oil and natural gas, the stability of the U.S. dollar, and most stupidly, its client states in the region. At home, while we fret about Iraq, Americans continue their spending binge. The housing market remains strong. Indeed, the economy appears to be growing, and unemployment is low. The catch is that Americans, in general, have very low rates of personal savings. So they refinance their homes as if they were piggybanks. They run up debt on credit cards. Only now, it’s harder to declare bankruptcy and walk away from that debt. The American Empire exists only because nations around the world continue to buy our Treasury bills. Our debt. Awash in our dollars, they purchase our assets even though we tend not to notice or care unless it is Dubai and we get scared about "port security." Never mind that communist China runs the largest U.S. port on the West Coast or that 80% of U.S. ports are foreign owned, primarily by shipping lines. Indeed, never mind that much of what we consider "American" companies are actually subsidiaries of foreign ownership. Joseph E. Seagram & Sons is foreign owned. So is Brown & Williamson Tobacco. There’s Glaxo Wellcome Inc, MCA Inc, Zeneca Inc, and SmithKline Beecham. Japan’s Sony has large investments here. If it weren’t for the cheap goods it imports from China, Wal-Mart wouldn’t even exist and Wal-Mart is a retailer, not a manufacturer. At the end of 2004, direct foreign investment in America amounted to $1.53 trillion, an increase of 8.2 percent more than in 2003. It provides jobs for Americans. It sends tax dollars to the federal government. While Americans get jittery and scared about "port security", they are oblivious to the fact that foreign investors own and operate U.S. power plants, chemical facilities, and one out of every five oil refineries and natural gas facilities. The American Empire exists because many foreign nations and people in those nations believe that this is a good place to do business. Snubbing them as we did with Dubai Ports is probably a very bad idea. No, they’re not all angels, but neither are we. Nor can we continue to borrow and spend at the present rate. We can’t continue to look to the federal government to provide us cradle-to-grave insurance against bad things happening or to pick up the tab for hospitalization, prescription drugs, college loans, guarantee home mortgages, and the myriad other politically "earmarked" programs that shake the American money tree every hour of every day. Despite much about America that foreigners find alluring, there are many nations led by those who harbor a deep resentment and even a hatred of America. They want the Euro to replace the Dollar. They want to raise the price of the oil and natural gas we need to function. They harbor those who want to keep sending the billions in illegal narcotics we consume. And they know that the more money we have to spend on armies, navies and air power, the more parts of America we will have to sell to pay for them. Since 9-11 Americans have had a bad case of the jitters. An attack on the homeland may be the least of their worries. In fabled New Orleans, the motto was "Laissez les bon temps rouller" translated as "let the good times roll." And then their neglected levees broke. Is Global Warming Getting Colder? The first thing we have to do is fire all the reporters, editors and headline writers who have not got a clue about "global warming" except that it scares the hell out of readers and sells newspapers. In late March, my local daily carried an Associated Press article by Randolph E. Schmid with a headline, "Global warming warns Earth of a sea change." It ran the story across six columns and threw in a photo of the Greenland ice sheet. Such stories are best distinguished by how many times the words "probably", "may", and "could" occur in the body of the text. These are very slippery words used by so-called scientists trying to justify their latest "findings." If you look for something hard enough, you are bound to find some signs, some indicators, some intimations that something is happening or about to happen. Every day people find a reason to buy stocks whose value disappears for unforeseen reasons.
At this point, all of us have been deluged with "research" that is cited as proof of global warming, ranging from the migration of a few thousand feet by some furry creatures in a national park to the momentary melting of snow on some African mountaintop. At no time is the activity of the Sun ever mentioned, nor is the increased volcanic activity in the Earth’s oceans, nor the fact that no one knows why clouds do what they do. The Schmid article is just one long list of horrors, all of which, we have read and heard about for years. The research claims that the Earth’s temperature by 2100—a century from now—will "probably be at least 4 degrees warmer than now…" Since few of us will be around 90 years from now, no one will be able to confirm this prediction. Other scientists cited in the article predict "Melting could raise the sea level one to three feet over the next 100 to 150 years…" And "increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the next century could raise Arctic temperatures as much as 5 to 8 degrees." Meanwhile, back on Earth, on March 12 a late season storm dropped 8 inches of snow on northern Great Britain and, a week earlier, there were blizzards in Western Europe that killed 17 people. Some regions of Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy saw the heaviest March snowfall in nearly three decades. In February it had snowed for 50 straight hours in Sichuan, China, and a record freeze occurred in Russia that destroyed an estimated 30% of its winter crops. "This is the worst winter in 28 years," said Alexei Gordeyev, the Agricultural Minister. Are we looking at a trend? Nobody really knows. While the editors of Science magazine were pumping up the hype about global warming, the Earth was providing a panorama of very cold events whose intensity appears to be growing. And why not? The Earth is currently at the tail end of a 12,000 interglacial period. In other words, if the cycle holds true, we are due for another Ice Age. On a recent CBS "Sixty Minutes" program, NASA’s James Hansen proclaimed that humans now control the Earth’s climate. Do you get that funny feeling that there is a major, coordinated, propaganda campaign to convince us—one more time—that global warming is real? Dr. Hansen cited as evidence that the edges of the Greenland ice sheet were rapidly melting. He attributed this to man-made greenhouse gases. Apparently Dr. Hansen had not read up on the history of Greenland because, as Dr. Dennis Avery, a senior fellow for Hudson Institute, pointed out, "Melting around the edges is exactly what the Vikings saw on Greenland 1,000 years ago when they named the island—for its green coastal meadows." During a period climatologists now call the "Medieval Warming", the Vikings thrived for some 300 years. Then the "Little Ice Age" began and, by 1408, Greenland was, well, really cold and the Vikings had abandoned the place. Dr. Avery points out that "Our panic-prone scientists seem to have forgotten their own ice cores, drilled deep into the Greenland ice sheet in the 1980s." Those ice cores revealed that the Earth is in a constant cycle between hot and cold climate. It is instructive that, after the 1970s during which environmentalists were warning of a coming Ice Age, they changed course and began telling everyone "global warming" was coming. And where were all those man-made greenhouse gases in the pre-industrial age of the Vikings and elsewhere around the world that experienced the Medieval Warming? And why didn’t they fend off the Little Ice Age? The warming that has occurred, 0.8 degree Celsius, "virtually all occurred before 1940," notes Dr. Avery, "and thus before much industrial development. Ice cores from the Fremont Glacier in Wyoming "show it went from Little Ice Age cold to Modern Warming warm in the ten years between 1845 and 1855. Naturally." That’s the operative word. "Naturally." It has to due with massive climate forces that were and will remain beyond any "control" by mankind. Is it just my imagination or is global warming getting—dare I say it—colder these days? Your support of The National Anxiety Center was never more crucial if our message is to be widely disseminated. That’s why your donation. is needed. Via this site, it is processed directly by our webmaster. Or, if you prefer, you can send a check payable to The Caruba Organization, 28 West Third St., Suite 1321, South Orange, NJ 07079. Thank you!
©
2006 Alan Caruba. |
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When the United States Congress raised the current debt limit to $9 trillion, it was an act of suicide. When Richard M. Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard, he let the printing presses churn out dollars backed by nothing but the promise that we would honor our treasury bills and other debts. 
Schmid began his article with his opinion that "The Earth is already shaking beneath melting ice as rising temperatures threaten to shrink polar glaciers and raise sea levels around the world." You had to read to the end of the second paragraph to learn that he was proclaiming all this would occur thanks to "new research appearing in today’s issue of the journal Science." The only problem is that this pathetic excuse for a scientific publication has been banging the global warming drum for so long, its editors are desperate to publish anything to support the theory.