USA: The Modern Roman Empire

[Guest guest]

The War that Destroyed America

By John Stanton and Wayne Madsen

March 17, 2002

 

John Stanton is a Virginia-based writer on national security affairs

and Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist

who writes and comments frequently on civil liberties and human

rights issues.

 

In a maddening repetition of history, the young warfighters of the

United States, along with those of its coalition partners, find

themselves in battle with an amorphous opponent in a global counter-

insurgency campaign managed by paranoid policy makers who see

themselves as the enlightened sons of God. As the illegitimate and

extremist government of the United States prepares to expend another

generation of its youth for power, money and resources thousands of

kilometers from home, they are negligently and criminally allowing

the infrastructure, health and welfare of the United States to

deteriorate. As America wages World War III against its 21st century

barbarians—the Taliban and Al Qaeda (the Visigoths and Huns?)—in a

war that may well see the use of nuclear weapons, the American

Empire seems doomed to duplicate the concluding events of 476 A.D.

And it's not Al Qaeda's 5,000 militants that will destroy the USA,

it's the current "selected" government that will sacrifice the

future of the world's greatest experiment in freedom on the altar of

fascism.

 

Close to 200 years ago, the English novelist-historian Edward Gibbon

commented that,

 

"The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of

immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the

causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and,

as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the

stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The

empire of Rome was firmly established by the singular and perfect

coalition of its members. The subject nations, resigning the hope,

and even the wish, of independence, embraced the character of Roman

citizens. But this union was purchased by the loss of national

freedom…and the servile provinces, destitute of life and motion,

expected their safety from the mercenary troops and governors, who

were directed by the orders of a distant court. The happiness of a

hundred million [people] depended on the personal merit of one or

two men [emperors] perhaps children [in Rome], whose minds were

corrupted by education, luxury, and despotic power…The

multiplication of oppressive taxes was countered and evaded by the

rich, who shifted the burden to the poor, who in turn also dodged

them and fled to the woods and mountains to become Rome's rebels and

robbers..."

And so it seems America will share the same fate.

http://cryptome.org/usa-destroyed.htm

In the coming years, trillions of taxpayer dollars previously

earmarked for non-military expenditures will be siphoned off to feed

the voracious appetite of the Grendelesqe US military-industrial

complex. And for what purpose? Billions more dollars for a

grandiose national missile defense instead of billions for the tools

the young Special Operations warfighters, who will inevitably fight

and die in countries as far-a-field as Afghanistan, Iraq, Columbia

and Georgia, need to do their jobs. Trillions more dollars will be

directed to a military and intelligence establishment that failed to

protect and defend American citizens and the U.S. Constitution on

September 11, 2001. And as more billions and billions of dollars get

poured into Homeland Defense, it's worth looking at The State of the

Union, or should we say State of the Homeland, to see if the

warfighters who return from their efforts in foreign lands will

recognize the country they left. For while Americans fight on the

frontiers of strange and distant lands, they do not understand that

their country is disintegrating. And the numbers tell the story.

 

Dieing Nation

 

The CIA's World Fact Book 2001 cautions that "long-term problems

[for the United States] include inadequate investment in economic

infrastructure, rapidly rising medical costs of an aging population,

sizable trade deficits, and stagnation of family income in the lower

economic groups." And so it goes.

 

In 2002, over 31 million Americans live in poverty, according to

Poverty USA, a website run by the Catholic Campaign for Human

Development. 1 in 6 American children live in poverty. Minorities,

of course, are hardest hit with 22.1% of African-Americans (who

experience three times the poverty rate for white non-Hispanics),

21.2% of Hispanics, 10.8% of Asians and Pacific Islanders, and 7.5%

of white non-Hispanics who struggle to exist on a daily basis in

what proponents of American greatness like to describe as the

wealthiest nation in history. The United States has the dubious

distinction of having the second highest percentage of children

living in poverty in the industrialized world and one of the most

disgusting track records for low birth weight of infants.

 

If ever there were a subject that was "underreported" it is the

plight of America's children. The National School Boards

Association's Ten Critical Threats To America's Children: Warning

Signs for the Next Millennium provides disturbing data on the state

of America's youth. Despite these obvious disasters, the Bush regime

is more interested in school vouchers and the "unborn" rather than

the horrors that millions of young people in our country, and their

parents, experience. Over 3 million children experienced hunger in

1998 in the wealthiest country in the world. In 1998, approximately

11.1 million children younger than 18 had no health insurance. In

1998, close to 44.3 million Americans had no health insurance and

11.1 million - or 25 percent - were younger than 18, according to

U.S. Census Bureau statistics.

 

Because of lax pollution laws, 900,000 children in the United States

have elevated levels of lead in their bloodstream, putting them at

risk for a variety of health and behavioral problems. There are

96,000 schools serving State subsidized lunches to 26 million

children, which means that these young Americans are starving. The

sheer number of America's youth who have been killed or wounded by

gunfire in recent years is shocking when placed in historical

context. Between 1979 and 1996, more than 75,000 American children

and teens were killed with guns and, further, firearms wounded

another 375,000. That's almost 20,000 more deaths and 225,000 more

casualties than American troops suffered in the Vietnam War,

according to Ten Critical Threats.

 

Infrastructure Blues

 

One year ago in March 2001, the American Society of Civil Engineers

failed America's infrastructure with a grade of D+. "When you've got

rolling blackouts in California, bridges crumbling in Milwaukee, and

kids in Kansas City attending class in a former boys' restroom,

something is desperately wrong," said then ASCE President Robert W.

Bein, a civil engineer from Irvine, California. According to ASCE's

website www.asce.org, "The solutions to these problems involve more

than money, but as with most things in life, you get what you pay

for. America has been seriously under-investing in its

infrastructure for decades and this report card reflects that."

 

Among the many problem areas, one of the more notorious involves

water. Wastewater declined from a "D+" in 1998 to a "D," while

drinking water remained a "D." Wastewater and drinking water systems

are both quintessential examples of aged systems that need to be

updated. For example, some sewer systems are 100 years old. Aged

drinking water systems are structurally obsolete. The results of

maintaining such antiquated systems have sometimes been fatal. In

1993, 100 people died and 400,000 became ill after Milwaukee's water

supply had been contaminated by cryptosporidium, a virulent

microscopic parasite resistant to chlorine and filtration.

 

That very same year, Washington, DC experienced a four-day boil

water alert arising from excessive "turbidity" in the city's water.

The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta measures turbidity by

analyzing the presence of small "suspended particles" in a glass of

water poured from a municipal water supply's tap. The murky water

from the Dalecarlia Reservoir in Washington in December 1993 was

found to be very turbid—dangerously so. Little wonder, since many of

the reservoir's conduits were built during the Civil War. The

shortfall of $11 billion for drinking water and $12 billion in

wastewater only account for improvements to the current system and

do not even take into consideration the demands of a growing

population.

 

ASCE estimated it would take roughly $1.3 trillion dollars to fix

America's infrastructure. That amount is roughly equivalent to

George Bush II tax cut that benefited primarily this nation's most

wealthy individuals.

 

As of 1997, the richest five percent of U.S. households held more

than 60 percent of the nation's private wealth and the top 1 percent

of households held 40 percent of the wealth according to data from

inequality.org. There are approximately 500,000 to 600,000 homeless

Americans wandering throughout American communities, notes the

National Coalition for Homelessness. And the Disaster Center reports

that for the year ending in 2000, 105,703 Americans were murdered or

raped in their own country.

 

And if that were not enough to pique an interest, now we hear from

our Teutonic-sounding Office of Homeland Security that our nation's

pipelines and refineries are vulnerable to terrorist attack. Wait!

Not so fast! In August 2000, a natural gas pipeline exploded near

Carlsbad, New Mexico, killing 12 people, many of them families on

camping vacations. A little over a year earlier, a natural gas

pipeline exploded in Bellingham, Washington killing two 10-year old

boys and an 18 year-old male. According to the Environment News

Service, since 1986, there have been more than 5,700 pipeline

accidents, killing more than 300 people and releasing some six

million gallons of oil, gas and other pollutants into the

environment.

 

Was Osama bin Laden responsible for them? No. Was it Sadaam Hussein?

No, again. The perpetrator was the U.S. Government. It turns out

that the Interior Department's Office of Pipeline Safety, a whorish

marionette for the oil and natural gas industry, failed to conduct

adequate inspections. The oil industry, which now apparently

controls the White House and the Executive branch, does not want

increased pipeline inspections for fear that they will cost them

money. A docile Congress, bought and paid for by the oil industry,

rejected legislation to force the industry to inspect and fix its

pipelines. The mother of one of the 10-year-old boys killed,

speaking to the Environment News Service, had this message for

the "Evil Doers" of the oil industry:

 

"Your profit means little to us in the face of the lives we care

about."

So, the families of those killed in the explosions had to be content

to bury their loved ones without the satisfaction of seeing the

government correct its evil ways. It's very much the same logic that

results in Arthur Andersen getting indicted for keeping Enron's

books, while chief Enronite "Kenny Boy" Lay remains unscathed. This

would be like the government indicting John Dillinger's get-away

driver while leaving the bank robber free and clear of any charges.

 

Bread and Circuses

 

Historians will write that the American Empire, in its final days,

experienced many of the phenomena that plagued The Roman Empire.

Roman senators formed their own wealthy class of landowners who

rarely attended senate meetings but enjoyed the privileges of their

office. Consider that most U.S. Senators and Representatives spend

most of their time outside of Washington soliciting contributions

from corporations. One does not need a time machine to actually

witness what was occurring in Rome during its tumultuous decline.

William Langer, in his tome An Encyclopedia of World History,

writes "the lethargy" of Rome resulted from "the unwieldy and

inflexible system and…the poor mental caliber of the rulers."

(Gibbon's George W. Bush II and the insane John Ashcroft?).

 

Yes, sadly, it seems that our own neo-Romanesque leaders share many

things in common, with their quirky and demented Pax Romana

counterparts. Take Nero and Claudius for example. The latter is

described by Langer as a "driveling imbecile." Claudius was known

for taking away the power of the Senate to investigate financial

crimes cases and instead granting that power to imperial

procurators. Bush II, of course, is stonewalling Congress's attempt

to investigate ties between the administration and the oil industry,

opting to leave the investigation of Enron up to his own politically

motivated "procurators" in the Justice Department.

 

As we remember the old days, it's worth noting that Nero was

actually responsible for setting Rome on fire—during which he sang

to the music of a lyre a poem about the burning of Troy. It turns

out that Nero used the burning of Rome as a pretext to increase his

already substantial dictatorial powers and exterminate Christian

believers in the city. Like John Ashcroft—who requests anointment

with oil by a follower before the day's activities and holds

mandatory prayer breakfasts—he is orchestrating a systematic article-

by-article disposal of the U.S. Constitution. The man bellows

religious songs at news conferences, turns away in horror at statues

of females with bare breasts, and eschews Calico cats as signs of

Satan. Nero would have found comfort and friendship in such bizarre

behavior.

 

As America seems on a path to repeat the history that swept away the

Roman Empire, we should remember the words of one of our greatest

symbols of popular resistance: "Our only hope today lies in our

ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go into a

sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty,

racism and militarism," said Martin Luther King, Jr. It seems we

owe that to those who expect to return to a vibrant democracy.