DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN DOLLAR

The once-mighty dollar has taken a poetic beating. Various causes - a sub-prime mortgage mess, the Iraq invasion, massive tax cuts enriching the already filthily rich financed largely by massive spending cuts harming mostly the poor (robbing the poor to pay the rich), and the US's status as a country awash in international debt - have combined to inflict this 'market discipline' on the US. Is this the beginning sign of the decline of the American Empire? If probably the most powerful empire in history, the US empire will probably also be the shortest-lived in history. Thank you George Bush Jr, Dick Cheney...your brand of crony capitalism and stolen Presidency 'democracy' has played a significant role in this.

But perhaps there are other causes as well.. A quarter century ago, Canada's Denys Arcand in his movie 'Le Declin de L'Empire Americain' mused (through a character of course) about how the decline of past empires had begun with the ascendancy of matriarchs in the said empires, and how that was certainly the case with America. This point had been made (more obliquely) even earlier in the 60's comedy "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World', where the one British character caught up in the mad chase for buried treasure laments about how America was a raving matriarchy ....... that he found intolerable......all this while the timid American co-travelling henpecked husband is bullied by his tyrannical mother-in-law, and a fine police captain (played by an aging Spencer Tracy) is driven nuts and to crime by the insane antics of his daughter and wife....

A few years ago, Mr. Arcand made another brilliantly incisive observation about the nature of American society with his 'Barbarian Invasions', in which the leading character, a dying historian, grieves over the unknown Holocaust of native American peoples, whose lands and lives had been brutally taken from them by barbarian invaders from Europe.........

An American empire founded by barbarians who carried out the greatest armed robbery in history, which has putrified into a matriarchy in which the male establishment is terrorized by feminists, and otherwise been corroded by the neo-imperialist greed of crooked neo-liberal politicians and a complicit media content to broadcast the propaganda of its political masters - it will be just if such an empire crumbles...... and the sooner the better.