HenryGeorge wrote:patrick wrote:The same competitiveness which made the USA the nr1 is now showing it's negative sides.
Perhaps it's the end of an empire, like the Roman empire or how a lot of other great civilications went down. Wars, excessiveness, everything which needed to be done has been done, the land has been taken over and developed, the original people are locked in their camps, no usefull countries left to colonise, no real goal anymore. Just rich people who want to be filthy rich so they can be filthy rich, be happy with it and in the meantime f**k all normal people over. So now the US (or any great empire on it's decline) is just eating itself away from the inside.
It is indeed quite similar to that of the Roman empire.
The great historian, Gibbons, who wrote The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, gave five reasons for the fall of the great dynasty.
First: Rapid increase of divorce, with the undermining of the sanctity of the home, which is the basis of society.
Second: Higher and higher taxes; the spending of money for bread and celebrations.
Third: The mad craze for pleasure, sports becoming every year more exciting and more brutal.
Fourth: The building of gigantic armaments, when the real enemy was within; the decadence of the people.
Fifth: The decay of religion; faith fading into mere form, losing touch with life, and becoming impotent to guide it.
http://www.theexaminer.org/volume6/number6/empire.htm
There's a mix of truth and deception in comparing the fall of the Roman Empire and that of the American Century.
The Roman Empire has been, to the most eminent historians at least, the largest and most ambitious project of social and cultural
inclusion the history of Earth has ever seen, and probably ever will. Please pay attention to the key word here, inclusion. At its peak, the imperial rule of Rome was one of synthesis of every subjected people and culture. A fair trade of local "raw" resources against the "highly processed" resource of a civilisation larger than the sum of its constituents, and one that brought everything, from culture to art and architecture to science and engineering, from military strategy to political discourse to heights only seen, albeit on a much smaller scale, in the Greek Polis.
I don't know too much about American history, yet I suspect the US must have been, at some point of their infancy, informed by the same principles of equality, self-determination and inclusion. Then, as soon as they lost their status of avant-garde colony, the new Rome started to morph into a modern version of Carthage.
Carthage was a city-state near to where modern Tunis is, and capital of the Punic empire. The power of Carthage traced back to the legendary Phoenician skills as sea explorers and traders. Yet, unlike Rome, the bulk of their wealth was rapidly built on a form of cut-troath mercantilism over the Mediterranean: trade with us but at our conditions, or else. An ancient form of militarised commerce, piracy disguised as trading, that never sought a fair deal. Romans would never accept such a trading partner in their "mare nostrum" ("commonal sea") and actually had the military might to crush them in the two famous Punic wars. The famous statement "Carthago delenda est" (Carthage must be wiped out) from Roman politicians referred to their hatred for a kind of approach to policy and commerce that was unfair, arrogant, destablising and against all the rules they themselves and other trading cultures had built over centuries. You can wage wars with guns, or trade. But you cannot trade with guns.
The British Empire only gave into this form of warmongering commerce towards the end of their rule. See the opium wars. The US seem to have started pulling a Carthage much earlier in their history of a superpower. From United Fruits vs the people of Guatemala, countless countries in Latin America and Asia have been subjected to the unfair deal of militarised, single-sided trading, raped, chewed and spat out, and left with a trail of deaths and desperation, US-backed dictatorships and de-facto economic tirannies (see what the Chicago Boys did in Chile, Indonesia, etc.) that have caused civil unrest and more misery. Latin America started as a federation of colonies just as resourceful and resource-rich as the US. Just imagine what Chile, Argentina, Colombia, or Brazil could have been now if their dignity hadn't been stamped on, and their growth stunted by a century-long history of piracy and mercantile colonialism from the US of A. This is not publicity for one of Naomi Klein's books, all of this really happened, and entire communities all over Latin America are old enough to remember.
So, no my friends, America is indeed falling, but not like a falling Roman Empire. It's a modern Carthage imploding on the same corrupting qualities that they had been exporting abroad for a century. Having colonised most of the known world with their mindset and lacking resources to push their interests further, they have no other choice than retreat and cannibalise what's left of their own people.
Thought I don't agree with his premises, Patrick's final metaphor perfectly sums it up: the US are a society that is literally eating itself away from the inside.
moral degradation? in Ukraine too...unfortunately 
Look on this party in Ukraine 