This inequality fuels rising poverty and rising social divisions among the haves, the have-nots, and the increasingly anxious think-they-haves. A desperate empire approaches a version of the Modern Monetary Theory that empire leaders mocked and rejected not very long ago.Įxtreme inequality, already a distinguishing feature of the United States, worsened during the pandemic. The Fed learned that today’s capitalism needs such quanta of monetary stimulus thanks to the three recent crashes (2000, 2008, and 2020) witnessed by the capitalist system. The goal is nothing less than freeing the government to inject still more massive amounts of new money into the capitalist system to sustain it in times of unprecedented difficulty. The purpose goes far beyond political squabbling over the cap on the national debt. Officials at the highest levels are now discussing the possible issuance of a trillion-dollar platinum coin to have the Fed give that sum in new credit to the U.S. Feeding and thereby supporting the rising debts is the Federal Reserve with its years of quantitative easing. Levels of debt-government, corporate, and household-are all at or near historical records and rising. The January 6 events in Washington, D.C., showed merely the tip of that iceberg. Refusing to accept lifesaving COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates in the name of “freedom” mixes a frightening stew of ideological confusion, social division, and bitterly rising hostility within the population.
It now wrestles with a huge segment of its population that seems so alienated from major economic and political institutions that it risks self-destruction and demands the “right” to infect others. A rich global superpower with a highly developed medical industry proved to be badly unprepared for and unable to cope with a viral pandemic. The United States has 4.25 percent of the world’s population yet accounts for about 20 percent of global deaths from COVID-19. Empires can die from overreach and sacrificing broadly social goals for the narrow interests of political and economic minorities. That the defeats were drawn out for so many years shows that domestic politics and the funding of the domestic military-industrial complex were, more than geopolitics, the key drivers of these wars. wars lost in Iraq and Afghanistan showed imperial overreach beyond what even 20 years of war could manage.
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