Since the end of World War II, the US government has deluded itself,
but like all delusions, the government’s has run into reality. It has
done so before, but this may mark a demarcation. It would be too much to
expect the delusion to give way to wisdom, but the delusion cannot
persist, as even a few of the deluded are beginning to realize.
Washington’s delusion has been that the anomalous position of
supreme, unchallengeable power in which it found itself at the end of
the war—leader of the winning alliance, sole possessor of the atomic
bomb, keeper of the reserve currency, with the only intact industrial
infrastructure—would be permanent. Reality soon intruded. The USSR
penetrated the US nuclear weapons program and detonated its first bomb
in 1949. The Korean war was a stalemate, not a win. Vietnam was a
defeat. The US abandoned the responsibility it had undertaken to
maintain the world’s reserve currency, to redeem dollars for gold, when
President Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. Islamists overthrew the
US puppet Shah of Iran and installed a theocracy hostile to the US. This
sparked an upsurge of Islamic militancy in the Middle East that
bedevils the US to this day.
US hegemonic triumphalism rallied after the dissolution of the USSR,
but it proved to be a dead cat bounce. Welfare state transfer payments,
overall spending, and the national debt continued to grow as the
we-can-have-it-all fantasies of the populace and its politicians
persisted. There was no scaling back of either domestic or global
commitments, even as the economy began to demonstrate subtle signs of
deterioration. That deterioration was masked by central bank
machinations that promoted rising equity, bond, and housing markets,
bestowing paper wealth that served as an imperfect and skewed
replacement for shrinking opportunities in an increasingly
debt-saturated and government-controlled economy.
Read the rest @ http://straightlinelogic.com/2015/03/23/the-partys-over-by-robert-gore/
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