Great Empires fall the American Empire is on the slippery slope.

[Porschenut1066]

Upon analyzing the fall of great empires or super powers I have found that they almost always follow the same path.

1. A severe shortfall of domestic oil or natural gas production over the amount needed to run an industrial economy.
2. A severe and worsening foreign trade deficit.
3. A runaway military budget
4. A ballooning foreign debt
5. A government willing to inject huge sums of it’s currency to prop up failing institutions
6. A military defeat combined with the idea that even with all that is spent on security we are ultimately unsafe.
7. A catalytic event that starts the whole system on a downward spiral.
8. Foreign governments become distrustful of the central government
9. Foreign governments decide to with hold further credit and stop buying bonds issued by the government
10. Foreign countries stop using currency and switch to a new one.

These seem to be common themes I have found having studied the subject. The data appears to be very strong. These events have not been taken from the events occurring in the USA but I think there are some very similar characteristics occurring currently within the USA. I have not included the fact that just before collapse unemployment tends to spike and personal defaults on financial obligations tend to increase.

So that is where I think we are. At the edge of a precipice and I really do not know how we can buck History that we appear not to have learned from. Wake up and get prepared by learning how to grow food, heat homes with solar, and ride bikes or work with horses.
You might just be doing your children and grand children a favor when they come to you and ask how.

[Speck Tater]

1. If you substitue "energy" for oil and gas...

When the Roman Empire could no longer raise enough grain (biological energy) to feed its troops, slaves, population, and draft animals, then it faced the same crisis.

[Porschenut1066]

2. Your right. Good point.

[laststeamtrain]

3. From an interview with Chalmers Johnson

"What hope is there for the international community?"

"The main prospect for the future of the world is that perpetual war waged by the United States against small countries it declares to be "rogue states" will lead to the slow growth of a coalition of enemies of the United States who will seek to weaken it and hasten its inevitable bankruptcy. This is the way the Roman Empire ended.

"The chief problem is that the only way an adversary of the United States can even hope to balance or deter the enormous American concentration of military power is through what the Pentagon calls asymmetric warfare ("terrorism") and nuclear weapons. American belligerence has deeply undercut international efforts to control the nuclear weapons that already exist and has rendered the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty more or less moot (the U.S., in particular, has failed to take any actions it contracted to do under article 6, the reduction of stockpiles by the nuclear armed nations).

"The only hope for the planet is the isolation and neutralization of the United States by the international community. Policies to do so are underway in every democratic country on earth in quiet, unobtrusive ways. If the United States is not checkmated and nuclear war ensues, civilization as we know it will disappear and the United States will go into the history books along with the Huns and the Nazis as a scourge of human life itself."

--From an interview with Chalmers Johnson
http://www.americanempireproject.com/johnson/johnson_interview.htm
*

[Alexander]

4. Also runaway inflation due to idiotic financial policies.

Rome gradually put more and cheaper metals in their coins, reducing the value.

For us, it was taking us completely off any standard of money, ending Bretton-Woods and the Fed printing money pretty much whenever they feel like it.

[LiberalFighter]

5. Nero?

[Porschenut1066]

6. Nero, that's what we need a good fiddler, or does Bush fit that bill?