Why American capitalism isn't sustainable Part 3: the Empire Strikes Out

The United States spends more than a trillion dollars per year on "security", which for the most part supports the British Empire Redux. It appears that the U.S. is a British groupie. We have treated aboriginal people the same way that the British Empire did, we exploit resources in territories and allies--our euphemisms for colonies--and developed a system of government and attitude for our homeland like the the UK on steroids.

Much like the British Empire, we use a huge seagoing and land-based military to support huge, multinational corporations that extract wealth from colonies for the crown, which in the US is Wall Street. The problem with this model, as the British showed us a century ago, is that it is not sustainable. The homeland spends so much money extracting resources from all of these places (e.g., South America, Asia, the Middle East) that one perturbation at home (e.g., gas prices jump or Wall Street collapses the economy) or multiple perturbations in the hinterlands (e.g., Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, etc.--in the British Empire it was India) can bring the whole thing down.

The problem isn't that an empire is bad. I love sitting here on my couch made in China, eating food grown in Mexico and California picked by Mexican serfs, and watching a TV made in three different countries, and all of which I can afford on a salary that hasn't increased in 20 years. I can put on my blinders and forget that anyone in the world has suffered under oppressive regimes supported by my Department of Defense to get me these nice things at such a low price that even with my limited spending power, some rich fuck can get still richer selling it to me.

The problem is that this imperial system doesn't follow the rules of free-market capitalism. The profits are not based on supply and demand, because they are propped up by a system that controls the variables of wages, cost of resources, and especially, risk. This causes the system to perpetuate and grow, ignoring all checks and adjustments until a catastrophic collapse. Without the checks built into real free-market capitalism, the system will, without doubt, turn into a boom and bust cycle that will fail catastrophically when the resources of the homeland can no longer support the military support for the corporations, and the price of resources exceeds the spending power of the proletariat (e.g., gas prices rise above $4.00 per gallon).

Keep an eye on this. China is making deals all over the world for oil and coal, because they need it desperately. Instead of using our mythical capitalistic wheeling-dealing "best and brightest" industrial cleverness, we sent "our brave young men and women into harms way to defend our liberties back home", yada, yada, yada. Our military got us nothing when it comes to oil contracts with the colonies who sit upon the reservoirs. Nothing but enormous debt and an unsustainable empire that will, inevitably fall apart, leaving the homeland in dire straights.