Any politician can cook up a run o' the mill recession, but it requires the GOP to revert an entire people to feudalism. Our status as vassal of China is the evidence and result of our feudal status. GOP policies from which a ruling elite of just one percent benefit are responsible; the results may be seen at the CIA's 'World Fact Book' which lists China at the very top with the World's largest positive Current Account Balance and the U.S. on bottom with the world's largest negative Current Account Balance. Related to this is China's support for the U.S. dollar, a situation that China tolerates so that American consumers can buy Chinese product at Wal-Mart. If China should find this arrangement inconvenient, as many have said it is becoming, then China may 'pull the plug' and the dollar will collapse.

The economic decline of America is behind and the result of U.S. imperialism, a path about which we were well warned by a man that I have called the 'last honest Republican' ---Dwight David Eisenhower.

The way chosen by the United States

was plainly marked by a few clear precepts, which govern its conduct in world affairs.

First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.

Second: No nation's security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only ineffective cooperation with fellow-nations.

Third: Any nation's right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.

Fourth: Any nation's attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.

And fifth: A nation's hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.-- Ike's Cross of Iron speech

My facebook friend, calling himself Abbie Hoffman, points an accusing finger at 'military Keynesianism', also called 'barracks socialism':

"One could argue that the US got addicted to it after WWII, that we haven't resolved the issues and problems of the postwar era. Maybe that's obvious?"

That said, we have a long history of war-profiteering stretching back to the American Civil War, and a war about ever generation of our history.

-- Abbie Hoffman

The recovery from the Great Depression was slow. World War II created a fully employed economy seemingly overnight. New industries sprang up, new products invented, most memorably the Higgins Boast, the landing craft, manufactured in Louisiana remembred primarily for the drop down front that allowed US troops to disembark on the heavily fortified beaches of Normandy. The lesson learned was the wrong one. A war time economy like that created in response to Pearl Harbor cannot last. Perpetual prosperity via Orwellian perpetual war is not possible.

It [ military Keynesianism ] unfolded primarily during George W. Bush's administration with legislation signed in to law by William Jefferson Clinton and the bills to continue this trend are still on the books! Scary, hey? This is why we have to break from spending our energy fighting the left vs. the right fight because it's just an illusion of smoke and mirrors and is taking our focus off of the real culprit; the super class, those who posses over 80% of the world's money supply and ehat needs to be done to reverse the ugly economic trends we now suffer.-- Nancy My Country ‘Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Oligarchy ~ Purchased By ‘The MIC'

Many colonial businesses, including Shipbuilders, made a good living off the 'Revolutionary' war. Rome, arguably, had been bankrupt long before the Praetorian Guard auctioned it all off to Didius Julianus for Greek currency --not worthless Roman sesterces. Much earlier, Rome invaded Dacia for its gold. Rome makes for thrilling movies and gripping TV series. But actually living in it was not nearly so glamorous. Like the U.S. today a tiny and shrinking aristocracy alone benefited from Roman conquest. The currency was all but worthless. Poverty was rampant and growing as 'aristocrats' seized small farms!

Empire is surely the last step toward feudalism --at least in the 'empire' scenario. A 'feudal' Europe filled the vacuum resulting from the fall of decadent Rome. A 'feudal America' may arise amid the ruins of the huge, flashy skyscraper fillled corporate empire of America. In his 'Decline and Fall of the American Empire', Gore Vidal puts a date upon the fall of the American Republic --1950. The 'imperial system', the 'security state' resulting, became the self-reinforcing mechanism by which the US would justify intervention against its 'interest' in far flung reaches --Korea, Viet Nam, the Middle East.

The last President to eschew American interventions in various crises was JFK who refused U.S. air cover for a CIA operation called the Bay of Pigs. Many believe that one motive of several for his assassination, his cold blooded murder in Dallas on November 22, 1963. And Mr. Bugliosi, please don't try to tell me that Mr. Zapruder's camera movements 'explain' the apparent motion of JFK's head backward. I have practiced high-level, exactly photography with still cameras of all formats from 8mm motions picture to 4x5 large format product photography for commercial clients in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas and Houston. Put me on the stand as an expert and I will testify, based upon my own frame by frame analysis of high rez Zapruder images that there is simply no way that camera movement will account, i.e, explain the movement of JFKs head backward upon being hit on Z -313. More on that in a future article.

Vidal points out that the USA has intervened aggressively, waging at least 300 wars in every part of the world despite the fact that the US Constitution requires a Declaration of War by Congress. The last time an American president sought and obtained congressional approval for a war was in 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Today --US Presidents don't bother. My first recollection of the word 'intervention' was the use of US troops in Lebanon by Dwight David Eisenhower. It was not a war, we were told. It was just an 'intervention'. Later, the US would intervene in Viet Nam, a failed and lost war, a perpetual war by Orwellian standards, a tragic loss of thousands of American lives for no good purpose whatsoever. When the US eventually withdrew, the 'two Viet Nams' united, predictably and what had been a killing field is now a prosperous and peaceful nation. We, America, lost that war but from the ashes a prosperous nation flourished. But --it must be pointed out --that result is an effect of our leaving Viet Nam --not our staying. Based on the facts of history, I will wager that when the U.S. leaves the middle east and the CIA is, likewise, muzzzled or, better, smashed 'into a thousand pieces, that part of the world, too, will rebound and prosper.

It is time that someone speak the unspeakable and painful truth: American citizens, some of them my classmates, were sacrificed for nothing in Viet Nam! American citizens, primarily those who could not afford to stay in school and thus 'earn' a deferment, were sacrificed for vainglorious, imperial ambitions. I deny that 'right' of nations and/or empires to to sacrifice its youth, its talent, its wealth for the benefit of the very, very few, an 'elite' few.

Viet Nam was the crime of murder committed by arrogant, vainglorious empire upon its people. It was a crime upon the people by the privileged which makes up just one percent of the US population. Shame! It is time that a real revolution --not a focus group approved, cooked up, top down bullshit propaganda stunt called 'tea baggers' --to put an end to his Leviathan called 'empire'!

' Tea Baggers' will not solve the problems of America

They are, rather a part of the problem . Tea baggers embrace a panoply of lies and various forms of bigotry to include racism at home and the demonization of 'Islam' abroad. Tea baggers are wrong, wrong-headed, mis-informed, perhaps, just plain stupid. They are not the solution; they ARE the problem, a cancer, a sore, an open wound, a scab that was picked.

Keynes himself would not have approved of 'Military Keynesianism' which follows from misconceptions about Keynes, often thought of by 'conservatives' as being just short of communist if not communist outright. It must be pointed out however, that it was a Republican --Richard NIxon --who opined "We are all Keynesians now!"

NOT!

Militarists, by way of the lobbies who benefit most from military spending, 'hijacked' Keynes and drag out his corpse to justify increases in the huge US military budget. Keynes, himself, would have known better. Keynes would have supported expansions of the economy but, as Gore Vidal pointed out, military spending actually represents a contraction --not an expansion, certainly not an expansion that benefits anyone but the rich ruling elite of just one percent of the total US population.

A 'tank', Gore says, is an economic black hole. And so it is returning nothing but 'booty' benefiting only the ever shrinking elite. During the Reagan years, an elite of just 20 percent benefited from the highly touted but unfair and unjust tax cuts. Everyone else lost ground as wealth trickled UP --not down! Things are worse now! Last time I checked, just one percent of the total US population owned more than about 95 percent or more of the rest of us combined. That is called an 'L - curve' in contrast to the normal distribution curve commonly referred to as a 'Bell Curve'. This outcome is the opposite of Keynesianism --an effective contraction of moneys spent, a contraction of the economy as a whole. The L - curve is the result.

The MIC will always create isolated pools here and there. For example, every half-assed town in TX used to compete, lobby and scramble for a 'military base'. Local businesses love it until the base closes down at which time the localized bubble bursts. It is a phony prosperity based upon a bubble that, of late, is created by war crimes. I always hated base towns where merchants always raised prices upon news of military pay raises and cut back jobs upon news of troop reductions.

As odious as are the 'military economies' found in base towns, congressmen exploit local fears of base closings, 'baracks' economics at its worst. Almost every congressman I knew in Texas would campaign on promises of new bases and/or expansion of current bases. Clearly --the modern Praetorians were not, are not content with a one-time sell-out; rather, they conduct an an on-going auction of empire. It's called Congress. Are we beyond reform? We will have to begin and/or restore some of the industries we've lost to China and Japan from scratch. Who will invest in us? Can we trust the liars and clowns who created all this mess to reform themselves? I doubt it.

My friend Abbie wrote: "The rich are going to be holding monopoly money". Indeed, and that is yet another way in which the rich will have screwed us over. The rich will sellout short and thus get even richer. That will, of course, result in a monetary collapse that will swamp everyone. Right now, we are all playing chicken. Millions --who bought into this while thinking themselves rich --will learn otherwise and quickly. As Billie Holiday sang: God bless the child that's got his own!

Len Hart, who publishes a blog called the Existentialist Cowboy, has covered news for ABC, CBS and UPI.including interviews with Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, George Bush Sr., Nelson Rockefeller, Watergate Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, David S. Broder, Sen. Fritz Hollings, Sen. John Tower, Beverly Sills, Gloria Steinem, Sen. Sam Ervin, Bella Abzug, George Plimpton, Milton Friedman, Ehud OImert, John Wayne, Mel Brooks, and many "movie stars", politicians, and celebs.