by Bill Bonner
Not much action at the end of last week… Gold closed
the week over $1,600. Oil remained over $100.
The show goes on!
We are watching the destruction of an empire. All
empires must go away sometime. They are natural things. And nature puts a time
bomb in everything she creates.
The US empire is doomed. Just like all the others that
went before it. It is doomed by nature herself – condemned by the gods to blow
up and die.
None of this should be surprising to you, dear reader.
We’ve seen this movie before. Hundreds of empires have come and gone. We know
how this movie ends. More or less.
What we know for sure is that the US is going broke.
There is hardly any other plausible outcome. We’ve gone over the numbers so
often we don’t need to repeat them.
Yes, it is true that the feds could still save
themselves….if they had the will. They could cut taxes to a flat 10%…and spend
only what they raised in tax revenue… That would do the trick from an economic
point of view.
But it’s too late for that – politically. Empires have lives of their own. They go forward…expanding…spending…stretching…until, boom, they go too far. Empires do not back up.
Some merely go bankrupt. Others are defeated in war. All end disastrously.
Only one candidate favors rescuing the nation’s
finances and pulling the empire back from disaster. Ron Paul. He is considered
such an unelectable kook that the newspapers barely mention him. And the papers
are right. He is unelectable. Because he is opposed by the zombies.
We have explained how government really works. It is
barbarism in action. Powerful insiders use force – police and military force –
to transfer wealth and status to themselves. In the process, they turn their
clients…and themselves…into parasitic zombies. The zombies support the
insiders. The insiders throw the zombies a bone or two. Together they corrupt
and destroy the empire.
Here is just one example from last week’s news. Bloomberg:
Despite the sluggish economy, the nation’s major
health insurers have prospered in large part by expanding their role in
government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, according to a study
released Thursday.
The share of large insurers’ revenues contributed by
their Medicare and Medicaid business has jumped from 36 to 42 percent over the
past three years. And the report by Bloomberg Government, a research division
of Bloomberg LP, suggests that insurers will further increase their reliance on
federal dollars with full implementation of the health-care law in 2014 – when
Medicaid will expand to cover an eventual 16 million additional low-income
Americans and the federal government will begin subsidizing private-insurance
policies for an estimated 19 million more.
The insurers have become zombified. They no longer do
honest work for honest reward. Instead, they lobby for more federal spending on
health. They tweak the nation’s laws and its public health programs to make
sure they get the grease. They are insiders now…
But no sector has more zombies in it than the
‘national security’ industry. Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation in 1961 to
watch out for the ‘military, industrial complex.’ He might have saved his
breath. The zombies had already taken over. The US was already spending more on
‘defense’ than the net income of all American corporations put together.
“In the years since,” writes Todd Purdum in Vanity
Fair, “the trend has warped virtually every aspect of national life, with
consequences that are quite radical in their cumulative effect on the economy,
on the vast machinery of official secrecy, on the country’s sense of itself,
and on the very nature of national government in Washington. And yet the degree
to which America has changed is noticed by almost no one – not in any visceral
way. The transformation has ten hold too gradually and over too long a period.
Almost no one alive today has a mature, firsthand memory of a country that used
to be very different…”
Benito Mussolini was a socialist poet. But when he got
into power he, like Barack Obama years later, discovered that it was not a good
idea to oppose the military. Instead, he put on a silly uniform himself…and
attacked Abyssinia!
Dear Readers may have noticed too. Between Obama’s
military policies and those of George W. Bush, there is not a dime’s worth of
real difference. Why? Because a zombie military is almost impossible to cut
down to size. It has already corrupted the political process. Now, the zombies
cannot be stopped…or controlled.
A bankrupt government can cut almost anything else.
But not its military. National security industry insiders glide easily into the
seats left by politicians who try to stop them. Ex-generals counsel wimpy
Congressmen. Flies and flakes buzz around the trillion-dollar ‘defense’ honey
pot.
Military spending rose about 70% during the George W.
Bush years. Today, the US spends 43 cents of every dollar of military spending
anywhere in the world. And now, with the hysteria of “terrorism” and a “nuclear
Iran,” who will oppose it?
Many of the nation’s biggest manufacturers are weapons producers – Lockheed
Martin, Raytheon, Northup-Grumman, L3 and KBR. The jump in employment numbers
were largely the result of government hiring. We have seen a figure over 40%
for the portion of domestic manufacturing devoted to the zombie defense
industry. Among the most profitable businesses in the country are surely the
2,000 corporations getting money for counter-terrorism, homeland security,
military intelligence and other boondoggles.
In Washington itself, 33 new building complexes have
been put up since 2001 whose occupants are somehow involved in top-secret
activities.
Yes, dear reader, the armed zombies pretend to protect
the ‘land of the free.’ But they are its biggest enemies. In 2011, they put
through a new defense spending bill…which removed Americans’ ancient habeas
corpus rights. The Commander-in-Chief also asserted, and exercised, the right
to kill anyone, anywhere…on his own say-so. And both the president and Congress
continued to spend money they didn’t have on cockamamie boondoggles even though
it is obvious that the nation is going broke.
It is only a matter of time now. The empire will be
stabbed in the back by its own protectors.
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