Do yu think the US is the first stages of a long, slow decline and end to superpower status?

In this context, superpower means much more than military might. It means such things as economic and cultural influence, technological leadership, etc., too.

Are today's doldrums temporary or the first of a long, slow slide to diminished world status?

The decline has sped up exponentially in the past ten years and is
proceeding apace.

It started with Reagan.

I'd go one further and say it started with the arms-for-hostages deal that got that bum into office in the first place.

This country's spiral down the toilet began on January 20, 1981 and not thing one has been done to stop it.

Jesus H. Christ do we simply have no ability to connect the dots anymore?

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/lix/?n=ms_flood_history
and
http://www.google.com/search?q=river+flood+crest+history+in+memphis&hl=en&client=mozilla&prmd=ivnsu&tbs=tl:1&tbo=u&ei=PEHJTc2pNYL20gHl-dXYBw&sa=X&oi=timeline_result&ct=title&resnum=13&ved=0CE8Q5wIwDA

This first stage of the decline has been going on for thirty years so far.

Concentration of Wealth will get even worse and the USA will end up in 57th place in all worldwide happiness indexes.

Fascism is here and all around us. It's up to my generation and older to tell young people about Unions, prosperity, education for all, social mobility, economic opportunity, pensions, a fair workplace, and all other stuff that us boomer's took for granted when we were growing up.

there is so much in my life I took for granted growing up, and I have only recently come to realize that young people may not even be aware that it was never supposed to be this way.

For example, there was a recent survey that said that 60% or so of young people are OK with torture? I don't know how true that is, but there was a time in my lifetime, hell, just before 2002, that America deliberately torturing people was unheard of! At least for people in the white House advocating for it, anyway!

-90% Jimmy

"It's up to my generation and older to tell young people about Unions, prosperity, education for all, social mobility, economic opportunity, pensions, a fair workplace, and all other stuff that us boomer's took for granted when we were growing up."

A few will listen. The overwhelming majority won't. The attention span of the average person has been getting shorter since the teevee machine became commonplace and the modern overload of "communications technology" has accelerated this deterioration geometrically.

Younger people today are so addicted to quick-fix technological stimulation (video games, facebook, twitter, smartphones with six krillion "apps" etc, etc) that an ever diminishing fraction of the populace (not that it was ever huge to begin with) simply doesn't give a shit about anything that will affect them further down the road than the next weekend. They have been trained to wallow in immediate self-gratification and have the attention span of canaries. Plenty of folks in the 30-45 age group are just as bad. :(

Americans in the modern era. Arguably, four, if you include 1990-2000.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be, but keeps it's value better than most emotions. ;-)

now it is picking up the pace.

...that the Establishment was finding ways to extend and profit from said decline.

US being a superpower in the 21st century on the present course. We had a formula that worked and it's been under constant assault for about 30 years. We had a good run after WWII and fell off our trolley track and moved into runaway unregulated capitalism into a super-greedy plutocracy. No nation can benefit the majority of the populace with the skewed wealth distribution we now have and growing.

Also, IMO, the decline is not linear but exponential. If things continue as is in about 10 years, maybe less, it will be pretty bad in the US for the majority, but the super wealthy will do just fine. The country is under assault, but still many people just do not get what's going on.

There is clearly a conscious effort to create a mass population of serfs. The super wealthy and powerful run this country, politicians come and go, and are window dressing for the masses. And the masses are led by the nose by powerful propaganda creating a nation of lambs for the most part.

I think we're down the road a bit. We just haven't realized it yet.

I think to do that you need to be more than just white and male, but also straight. Oh, the bygone days of yore, when all white police forces arrested gay people for existing before going to beat the fuck out of the black people for existing! Jim Crow, we hardly knew ye!
You think it used to be better, I do not agree.

That's looking forward, not back.

I still find it amazing that the entire civil rights movement took place within my lifetime (I was born in 1954) I am also still amazed that full voting rights for all was not enacted into federal law until I was in 5th grade!

nostalgia for the past is a much nicer experience if you're a WASP. I can imagine it must have been really bad for minorities of any type.

Hell, women didn't even have a right to an abortion nationwide until 1972, the year of my High School Graduation!

I am nostalgic, but there was never a period in my lifetime where everything was just right for all people. You did get to cut to the head of the line if you were a WASP, though.

Sometimes I think I have an obligation to tell young people what the USA was supposed to be like for all of us - what the ideals of our Founding Fathers should mean for us today. Kind of like in the novel Fahrenheit 451, I have to memorize real American History and share it with as many young people that will listen.

Right now I think we all have to re-learn the history of the progressive movement of the early 20th Century and get our government closer to the joys of progressivism in public policy.

-90% jimmy

:(
rocktivity

I'd leave, but not without my children and grandchildren.

The Dutch? :P

momentum

Progressive countries don't focus as much on their status in the world as they do on the welfare of their people. Not a bad idea. :)

I suspect it will be quite a bit shorter and faster than most might want to believe. The middle class is now hanging by a thread, and the plutocracy and their hired Randian goons are sawing away at that thread with maniacal fervor.

And once the middle class is gone, there is nothing to stop the plutocrats from imposing their ideal model of societal organization: Feudalism based on slavery in all but actual name.

on the world stage for that reason for a long time, but as far as being the world's big global superpower...? I think those days are rapidly coming to an end.

It's only being propped up now by corrupt banks, the Fed, massive speculation on things like crude oil and gold and of course our favorite pastime: wars.

:freak:

power. The question is ,which one?

And honestly, I will be glad when we aren't the world's policeman anymore.

It started when Reagan was elected. Shortly thereafter our manufacturing base began to be dismantled. And that was the beginning of the end. Of course there was more to it than that. China was waking.


By the way, just one personal example- I got a two year degree in machine tool technology. By the time I returned to see my instructors, two years later, the whole program was being ended, with machines being auctioned off.

are the facts. The Kemp trickle down never ever worked. The working poor never even got the crumbs.

voting Blue

Better days are on the rise....

but until that day arrives, it will be interesting hard times.

While I do believe we are on the wind down, due to a great many issues, mostly to do with colossal ignorance, it will take a long time for it to come to a complete stop.

I don't believe it will be a Soviet Union type collapse, as Dimitri Orlov describes. While the Soviet collapse had a massive effect on the Warsaw pact countries and their various satellites, it had very little effect upon the western nations and their NATO allies.

The US economy is so huge and so all encompassing, that it will be virtually impossible for a single nation in the world not to feel the effect in one way shape or form.

To paraphrase George Castanza, "we will be like an old man getting slowly into a hot bath". It's to the worlds benefit that we don't have a sudden collapse. They don't want to go down with us.

So to all of us who are paying attention, the various supports and props that are paraded out as "fixes" to this that or the other are merely there to delay the inevitable.

Can collapse be avoided if already set into motion? Maybe, but that is a very big maybe. What needs to be done is an massive investment into retrofitting society for a new reality. A society that has to do with a lot less. Not less productivity, not less happiness, just less of everything across the board.

Our over indulgence is what got us here. We have %5 of the population and use 25% of the earths resources.

And now when you have China and India wanting a similar (not the same) standard of living we enjoy, those additional resources have to come from somewhere. And when dealing with finite resources, something has to give.

There is a war going on. No, not the ones we know too well about. The war is one of economics. While China's economy is dwarfed by ours and certainly doesn't have the various safeguards that we enjoy, it still is growing at a rapid pace while ours is just about all but still.

We are losing that war. How? By shipping our industry oversees. By selling out the American public to the lowest bidder.

Once upon a time, the US economy and lifestyle was the envy of the world. Not because we bought crap and wasted everything, but because we had peace from coast to coast. People could earn a decent living and provide for their families. Could send their kids to college.

My dad worked for the Dept of Sanitation in NYC. My mom didn't work. He provided for our family and able to put 4 kids through college, retire very nicely, own a small cottage on a lake in Canada and leave my mom a nice tidy sum of money when he passed away.

Today? That is a fantasy written from whole cloth.

Single income household? Provide college education for your kids without loans? Own an additional house on a lake? Who are you? Rich?

Hell, no, my dad was a blue collar worker. A mechanic.

We have fallen so far and so deep down the republican hole of rhetoric in this nation, that what once was the norm is now looked upon as crazy impossible.

My dad had a great union job. He got the benefits of such from people like him who protested and demanded that the City of NYC treat its workers right. He also benefited from the millions of others who fought and died and protested for those same rights before him.

But what has the last 30 years brought us? We are told that Unions are evil. The majority of Americans believe the complete falsehood that "all unions are crooked", "all unions take money from you", etc.

Sadly, no one in this nation ever checks the source anymore, they take this statements at face value because this lie been pounded into their heads so relentlessly by the few corporations that control everything that they believe nothing else.

The slow and deliberate spiral of this nation is due to something very simple yet has incredible significance.

What is that one thing? The total and complete disregard for the people of this nation. Period.

Once we became labeled "consumers" we lost everything that went with being a citizen. The slow and deliberate whittling away of our rights.

They tell us to go "shopping" in times of despair as if we were some stereotyped 1950's tv housewife. How insulting is that? Not just to women, but to everyone!

We are told that government will solve the problems of security, but out of the same mouth we are told that government is the problem.

We tortured in the name of freedom but are able capture OBL without raising a hand to anyone for information.

We choose to zone out and tune into nightly propaganda to tell us the things we want to hear, not the things we need to know.

We are sliding down. A few of us are trying to snag a branch, a rock or an exposed root on the way down, but sadly, the further we descend, the slippery it gets.

It will be a long slide, it will take a long time, but not like Rome, which took about 300 years (depending on which historian you read). No, for the US, due to globalization, it will take about 100 years to complete.

All along the way, we will continue to give up more and more for our "safety", while budgets for defense will go up and programs for the poor go down. All in the name of "freedom and safety".

We are dying a death by 1000 cuts. Each cut, we bleed just a little bit. We shrug it off, but before you know it, we will have been bled dry.

Will we stand up to this madness? Will we say no more? Will we have had enough when we are scraping for potatoes to get us through another winter?

People will do a lot. Humans are amazing creatures. From the civilians at Leningrad who ate the glue on book bindings to live, to the people of the dust bowl who ate nothing but beens month after month to survive, to the Cambodians who lived through pol pot by drinking cows blood, we will go on.

However, a nation that doesn't listen to it's people can not survive.

It's really that simple.

and very well-written to boot. :kick:

We've moved from democratic supernation to 3rd world fascist state in 20 years. we'll be Rwanda in another 6 years, once voting rights have been repealed in the blue states.

:(

either become the abandoned husk of an obsolete pattern or transition to being part of the butterfly, in the case of the former we can either repeat other nations'/empires' histories or as the latter suggests learn from their mistakes and change the greater conditions while we still have the power to do so.

Here is one small example on a post by Alcibiades.



Thanks for the thread, Stinky.