Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire CSPAN2 10pm

[Viva_La_Revolution]

Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire
Morris Berman

In "Dark Ages America" author Morris Berman compares what is happening in America today to the fall of the Roman Empire. Mr. Berman argues that the American empire is in decline due to an overextended economy and a self-destructive foreign policy. This event was hosted by New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Morris Berman has been visiting professor in sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC since 2003. He is the author of "Reenchantment of the World," "Coming to Our Senses," "Wandering God" and "The Twilight of American Culture."

[Viva_La_Revolution]

1. "America can always be counted on to do the right thing...

after it has exhausted all other options."

Winston Churchill

[Viva_La_Revolution]

2. Unfortunately we may be one terrorist attack away from becoming

a police state.

that's a quote.

:scared:

[jwirr]

3. Another good book with the same message is "After the Empire"

by Emmanuel Todd.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

4. That looks good too....

Thanks!

From Publishers Weekly
A bestseller in Europe, this provocative but erratic manifesto stands Euro-anxiety about American hegemony on its head. French demographer Todd (The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere) cites Paul Kennedy's theory of imperial overstretch and Michael Lind's notion of the American overclass to paint America as a "predatory" but weakening empire, its unilateralism and militarism a sign of frailty, not strength. Misguided free trade policies, he contends, have hollowed out America's industrial base and decimated its working and middle classes, polarizing the country into a society of plutocrats and plebeians. Dependent on imports, America has degenerated into a parasitic, Keynesian consumer-of-last-resort, injecting demand into the world economy while producing nothing of value. To mask its decline, America pursues a foreign policy of "theatrical micromilitarism," picking fights with helpless Third World countries like Iraq to convince the world's real power centers-Europe, Japan and Russia-of its military prowess and validate its spurious image as global policeman. Written in a witty polemical style, Todd's grand but cursory arguments range across economics, military history and geopolitics in ways that might make specialists cringe. Particularly reductionist is his demographic and anthropological view of political science, in which birth and literacy rates and peasant family structures are virtually the sole determinants of a society's politics (but, it should be noted, he used declining birth rates in the Soviet Union to predict its downfall). Todd's eccentric views-on the American trade deficit, the racial attitudes of "the Anglo-Saxon mind," the prevalence of marriages between cousins in Islamic countries, the "castrating" feminism of American women-pull in too many directions to be classified as right or left. His characterization of the United States may hold more than a grain of truth, but some readers might bristle before they see it.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

[jwirr]

5. It was very good but as an American woman I did bristle!