The Dark is Rising...

...but only for a few more days. The celestial clock is about to chime. Thursday is our winter solstice, the longest night of the year. Afterward day length will slowly grow until June 20th and the summer solstice. I loved the series "The Dark is Rising" filled with Welsh mythology, but it is fiction. The dark ages today are real as we experience the slow death of US empire. I thought it might be timely to look at some of the steps that have led to creation and now dissolution of US empire. I'll be interested in your thoughts as well...

Perhaps the US was doomed from the start as aristocrats designed the nation for aristocrats...counting slaves as three fifths of a person, and giving no thought nor credence to first nations peoples. Women were not given rights either.

The United States was founded on the idea of freedom by right, not freedom by bloodline. But that has not stopped the super-rich from creating what can only be called an American aristocracy. So much of our politics is shaped by a few hundred families, the .01 percent. Many of them can trace their wealth and power to the late 19th century.

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” — FDR letter to Colonel Edward House, Nov. 21, 1933

The Gaza genocide has made me think about the similarities of our concept of "Manifest Destiny" and Zionism....both use God as an excuse for genocide.

Manifest Destiny, a phrase coined in 1845, is the idea that the United States is destined—by God, its advocates believed—to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent. The philosophy drove 19th-century U.S. territorial expansion and was used to justify the forced removal of Native Americans and other groups from their homes. The rapid expansion of the United States intensified the issue of slavery as new states were added to the Union, leading to the outbreak of the Civil War.

We also employed the Monroe Doctrine to allow for colonization of Latin America

In 1823, towards the end of Latin America’s independence wars, U.S. President James Monroe famously told Europe to stop messing around in the Americas. No new colonies, he warned, and no political meddling. The “political system” of monarchical Europe, he explained, was “essentially different” from that of the increasingly republican Americas; Europeans should mind their own business, and people in the United States would mind their own in return.
...regardless of whether the new American nations expelled Indigenous people or enfranchised them in regions of settler strength, they all wrestled with how to conquer or at least contain the sovereign Indigenous powers that dominated the rest of the hemisphere—and they knew it. Indeed, the new American nations did not just find common ground in their mostly republican forms of government. They also, and in a way so obvious that they seldom bothered making it explicit, found common ground in the sense of entitlement that they felt towards Indigenous lands further afield, evident whenever they mapped out their national territories into places they did not actually control.

So both Manifest Destiny and the Monroe doctrine were used to justify the colonizaton of first nations' land across the hemisphere.

US global colonization expands with the Spanish-American war. Like most wars, the people were lied into it. The battleship "The Maine" probably blew up due to an accident setting off it's own ammunition.

The media... published stories of atrocities committed by Spain in Cuba — both real and sensationalized — which increased public support for the Cuban rebels...
Yellow Journalism was a style of reporting that emphasized sensationalism over facts. Newspaper publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer used the tactic to influence the public into favoring war in Cuba and the Philippines, along with the acquisition of overseas territories.

After the short war...

Spain ceded the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam to the U.S. Prior to the war, Congress had agreed to the Teller Amendment, which prohibited the U.S. from annexing Cuba. As a result, Cuba was granted its independence, however, the U.S. continued to be involved in the formation of the government and the subsequent Platt Amendment authorized the U.S. to intervene in Cuban affairs.

And so the US becomes a global power and begins building its empire.

Another chapter in the downfall of US empire occurs with the creation of the Federal Reserve, which is as Federal as Federal Express.

...it doesn't take an economist to understand the importance of money. Deep down we all know that the wars, the poverty, the violence we see around us hinges on this question of money. It seems like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle just waiting to be solved. And it is.
The puzzle pieces, taken together, create an image of the Federal Reserve, America's central bank and the heart of the country's banking system. Despite its central importance to the economy, relatively few have heard of it, and fewer still know what it is...
The first piece of that puzzle lies here, in the White House. This is where the Federal Reserve Act, then known as the Currency Bill, was signed into law after passing the House and Senate in late December 1913. The New York Times of Christmas Eve 1913, described the festive scene:
"The Christmas spirit pervaded the gathering. While the ceremony was a little less impressive than that of the signing of the Tarriff act on Oct. 3 last in the same room, the spectators were much more enthusiastic and seized every occasion to applaud.”
There in the White House that fateful December evening, President Wilson signed away the last veneer of control over the American money supply to a cartel—a well-organized gang of crooks so successful, so cunning, so well-hidden that even now, a century later, few know of its existence, let alone the details of its operations. But those details have been openly admitted for decades.
...so the banking cartel wrote their own rules and regulations, called it "The Federal Reserve Act," got it passed into law, and it was very much to their liking because they wrote it. And in essence what they had created was a set of rules that made it possible for themselves to regulate their industry, but they went even beyond that. In fact, it's clear to me when I was reading their letters and their conversation at the time, and the debates, that they never dreamed that Congress would go along and also give them the right to issue the nation's money supply. Not only were they now going to regulate their own industry, which is what they started out as wanting to do, but they got this incredible gift that they didn't dream would be given to them (although they were negotiating for it), and that was that Congress gave them the authority to issue the nation's money. Congress gave away the sovereign right to issue the nation's money to the private banks...
The vast majority of money in the economy, the “checkbook” money in our accounts at the bank and that we use in our electronic transfers and digital payments, is created not by a government printing press, but by the bank itself. It is created out of thin air as debt, owed back to the bank that created it at interest. This means that bank loans are not money taken from other bank depositors, but new money simply conjured into existence and placed into your account. And the bank is able to create much more money than it has cash to back up those deposits.

Realize of course we pay the banks to create our currency accruing debt for each dollar created. The link above to the Corbett Report is well worth the read or 1.5 hour watch.

There have been people and situations where the ship of state has been righted. One episode comes to mind with Smedley Butler's prevention of a coup against FDR.

In the spring of 1934, Butler met with MacGuire again. MacGuire revealed the Business Plot. Butler would go to Washington leading 500,000 men, armed by Remington Arms and financed by DuPont, Carter and the Morgan interests. Roosevelt, intimidated by the show of force, would agree to name Butler “executive secretary of affairs” – in reality a dictator – and FDR would continue to serve as a presidential figurehead.
“If you get 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of Fascism, I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you, and we will have a real war right at home,” Butler said he told MacGuire.
What had most alarmed Butler was MacGuire’s reference to a new super-organization that would back the Business Plot. Weeks after their last meeting, Butler learned the American Liberty League had formed. It included a Who’s Who of right-wing capitalists: Grayson Murphy was its treasurer, Carter belonged, John W. Davis, Irence and Lammot Dupont, Alfred Sloan, Sewell Avery, a Morgan director. The American Liberty League created shell groups – what we would now call astroturf – organizations to oppose Roosevelt’s New Deal.
...In addition to contacting the FBI, Butler did an interview with a Philadelphia Record reporter, Paul Comley French. French then interviewed MacGuire, who confirmed everything Butler told him.

That was a close call into the decent of Fascists oligarchs outwardly running the country. In reality they do so from behind the curtain so as to obscure the inner working of the US government.

When FDR ran for his fourth term he was obviously weak and ill. TPTB engineered the removal of his Veep, Henry A Wallace, in order to insert the more malleable Truman. Truman both dropped the atomic bombs and allowed for the creation of the CIA, the mafia branch of our government. Had Wallace become president it would probably be a very different world.

After WWII it was time to gin up the irrational fear of communism, and McCarthy's red scare was promoted across the nation.

In the early 1950s, American leaders repeatedly told the public that they should be fearful of subversive Communist influence in their lives. Communists could be lurking anywhere, using their positions as school teachers, college professors, labor organizers, artists, or journalists to aid the program of world Communist domination. This paranoia about the internal Communist threat—what we call the Red Scare—reached a fever pitch between 1950 and 1954, when Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, a right-wing Republican, launched a series of highly publicized probes into alleged Communist penetration of the State Department, the White House, the Treasury, and even the US Army. During Eisenhower’s first two years in office, McCarthy’s shrieking denunciations and fear-mongering created a climate of fear and suspicion across the country. No one dared tangle with McCarthy for fear of being labeled disloyal.

Creative thinking people were the natural target because they rarely submit to bullying tactics.

By the time Eisenhower left office he recognized the threat of the Military, Industrial Complex.

3 min

JFK follows Eisenhower. He realizes the evil of the CIA when they back stab him with the bay of pigs. He fires the leadership and vows to break the CIA into pieces.

We all know the price he paid for his efforts to create peace.

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women--not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.

Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles--which can only destroy and never create--is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war--and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.

It is perhaps the best speech by any US president.

Malcolm, Martin and Bobby follow John into a murderous death, and the CIA proved to be made of Teflon. No one dared accuse the FBI and CIA.

COINTELPRO was a counterintelligence program run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from roughly 1956 to 1976. It combined the efforts of the Bureau and local police forces to track, harass, discredit, infiltrate, destroy, and destabilize dissident groups in the United States. COINTELPRO targeted the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the American Indian Movement, those considered part of the “New Left,” the KKK, and most acutely, black civil rights and militant black nationalist groups.

J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, considered militant black nationalist groups to be the most dangerous threat facing the United States at that time due to their perceived potential to cause civil unrest and violence. The FBI’s COINTELPRO focused on the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, and others. COINTELPRO also sought to undermine, intimidate, and slander avowedly nonviolent black leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr.

The counterintelligence methods used by the FBI program included sending undercover agents into the Black Panther Party, where they incited criminal acts and fomented much of the violence that the public came to negatively associate with the Panthers. Other methods included planting informants, video surveillance, wiretapping, as well as phone call campaigns and false letter writing to sow intragroup discord. Indeed, COINTELPRO is suspected to have contributed to the divide that formed between Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam that resulted in his assassination in 1965.
...
Complete information on the origins and activities of COINTELPRO remain elusive, as participating agents are legally bound to secrecy, and the FBI retains control over most the COINTELPRO files that do exist. Due to the highly sensitive nature of COINTELPRO’s actions, many details of the program were intentionally never put into writing so that they could never later be exposed. Some COINTELPRO files came to light in March of 1971 after a leftist group called the Citizens’ Committee to Investigate the FBI broke into a small Pennsylvania FBI office, seized documents, and disseminated them to news outlets. In 1975, the U.S. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (also known as the Church Committee) helped bring other COINTELPRO activities to light, but because the committee only required the FBI to provide heavily redacted documents, its impact in exposing the truth was limited.

Daniel Ellsberg releases the pentagon papers, and the Vietnam War was shown to be another misguided war. The public was lied into the war, and much like today's wars the media continues to propagandize the hype.

... a “massive” study commissioned by McNamara showed that four presidential administrations “progressively developed a sense of commitment to a non-Communist Vietnam, a readiness to fight the North to protect the South and an ultimate frustration with this effort to a much greater extent than their public statements acknowledged.” Significantly, the Times promised more articles and more documents in the following days.
...
The 1971 Supreme Court ruling on the issue has shaped the landscape for reporting on government secrets. It also reminded the American people of something essential for our democracy to function, then and now: Voters have the ultimate power to tell the government what to do and not do in their name. To accomplish that, though, they first have to know what their government is up to. ...
As Ellsberg well knew, the Pentagon Papers included secrets — everything from plots to carry out coups to estimates of other countries’ intentions. What it did not include was just as important. The Pentagon Papers contained almost nothing of any military value to an adversary. It was primarily a history of policymaking.

I recently heard an interview with Paul Craig Robert's and he totally changed my view of Tricky Dick. He claimed the CIA set him up for impeachment (remember who broke into Watergate?). The warmongers who control the country were upset that he was making peace with China AND signing arms treaties with Russia. They (deep state) had conducted too many high profile murders so they simply removed him from office. Sure is an interesting hypothesis.
One of his lasting acts was the removal of the gold standard for the USD. The dollar was no longer backed with real wealth, gold. Kissinger manages to engineer the petrodollar with Saudi Arabia requiring all countries to buy oil in USD, and thereby insuring dollar slavery over the world.
That system is now decaying as oil is sold in Yuan and other currencies.

...in the years since the end of the gold standard, there’s been a significant and growing lack of discipline when it comes to government spending. Before 1971, there was a natural limit to how much money could be printed. New issuances were dependent on the amount of gold sitting in the nation’s coffers.
Today, with the dollar backed not by a hard asset but by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government, the federal debt is closing in on an astronomical $28 trillion, which is more than 130% of the size of the U.S. economy.

We haven't paid the price yet, but a reckoning is coming I think.

Clinton sold out the democratic party to the banksters basically creating another pro-business republican party. He did lots of damage from NAFTA, to the telecommunication bill, to his illegal war in Yugoslavia.
How US-NATO Illegal Bombing of Yugoslavia Undermined Global Rule of Law

It was former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who admitted in an interview with the UK Daily Telegraph on June 28, 1999: "The Rambouillet text, which called on Serbia to admit NATO troops throughout Yugoslavia, was a provocation, an excuse to start bombing."
...
"The goal of the NATO bombing campaign was, first, to destroy the last vestiges of socialism in Europe; and, second, to demonstrate to the world that the rest now ran the world and could go to war unilaterally without UN Security Council authorisation," says Kovalik. "The result was the fatal undermining of the rule of law in the world."
...
"The ICTY, the International Court Tribunal for Yugoslavia only prosecuted people from Yugoslavia," says Professor Stevan Gajić, a research associate at the Institute of European Studies in Belgrade. "But the conflict of Yugoslavia involved people from the West, it involved NATO countries. But nobody ever held Bill Clinton or Javier Solana or Madeleine Albright accountable. All of them were war criminals; or Tony Blair, for that matter, Robin Cook and many others, Wesley Clark, of course, the chief commander. Nobody held them accountable."

Clinton also enabled the removal of the last vestiges of the Glass-Steagall act.

The Glass‐​Steagall Act was enacted in 1933 in response to banking crises in the 1920s and early 1930s. It imposed the separation of commercial and investment banking. In 1999, after decades of incremental changes to the operation of the legislation, as well as significant shifts in the structure of the financial services industry, Glass‐​Steagall was partially repealed by the Gramm‐​Leach‐​Bliley Act.

The banks were now allowed to be gambling casinos.

The events of 9/11 fundamentally changed the nature of the US. The patriot act and
The Authorization for Use of Military Force Passed After 9/11 and Is Still Being Used to Wage War Abroad.

Al Qaeda morphs into the Taliban and we war in Afghanistan for more than two decades. War expands to Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Ukraine...

In 2010 the Citizens United decision was reached, equating money with speech. So the more money you have the louder voice with which to speak. Talk about a gift to the oligarchs and corporations.

Today the US supplies and support the Gaza Genocide. The US is morally bankrupt, addicted to war, about to lose its dominance in the world as other countries look to the BRICS+ alliance for development and trade.

There are many other events which shape the nature of this nation. I hope you'll add in the ones I neglected. The road to this point has been rocky, fighting wars over seas and here at home. I take solace in nature and look forward to the turn of the wheel through the darkness and toward the light.