The Fall of the American Empire

I have a secret.

I see patterns.

Okay, so  it’s really not as cool as seeing dead people.  But it’s my one super power (so to speak).  In elementary school, I saw patterns in numbers, and used the knowledge to ace every multiplication test on the planet.  (Did you know that there are at least 4 patterns to figuring out the 9s table?)  Later on, I used patterns to remember events in history, find results in science labs, and even write music for a humanities class.  

Outside of school, patterns are not quite as useful.  I still use patterns when writing music, and I see patterns in the plots of books.  Today, though, I want to talk about a pattern that I see in history, and how I think it relates to the current situation in the American economy.

Throughout recorded human history, civilizations have grown from small villages to huge empires, only to topple and be replaced by other empires. From Europe to China, empires rise and fall with regularity in history.  If you look closely, you realize that the vast majority of empires did not fall outright to an external force, such as another empire.  Rather, internal corruption weakened each empire, corruption that started at the top and worked its way through the political organization.  

When I examine history, I see a pattern in this corruption.  It begins when the people at the top of the power chain begin to think that their needs and wants trump the needs and wants of society as a whole.  When people act elite, their decisions become self-centered.  Unfortunately, these same people tend to have the power in society, so the more elite they act, the worse off the rest of society becomes until there is a change.  That change is revolution, whether a bloody affair, such as the Russian revolution at the beginning of the 20th century, or a peaceful affair,  such as Occupy Wall Street.

When our Founding Fathers set up the United States, they incorporated the concept of “We the people” into the documents and philosophy of the new country.  In the beginning, “We the people” only meant white men, but as time went by the concept grew to incorporate women as well as people of other ethnicities.    Now, “We the people” means everyone in this country, from the homeless person living in a cardboard box under a bridge to the wealthy inheritor who has so much money it could never get spent.

The trouble came to our country when the very wealthy acted as if their wants were more important than anyone else’s needs.  When the wealthy act as if they are above “We the people”, you get banks who give out mortgages that cannot be paid back, because it gives the bank a short term profit.  When the wealthy act as if they are an “elite few”, you get corporations who pay less tax than any individual American, but still ask for more tax breaks.  

When the wealthy and powerful act above “We the people”, you get the United States as it stands today.

If history serves as an indicator of what happens next, then the American Empire already began to fall several years ago when the banks and corporations started to care more about short-term profit and money over the welfare of the country.  The only question left is what kind of revolution we will have.  

Occupy Wall Street and the American Dream

I have yet to post about Occupy Wall Street, because quite frankly there are enough people talking about the protests.  But I when I read about the situation, sometimes I think the general public does not realize that protests such as this are an integral part of American history.  In fact, we might still be a colony of Great Britain without people such as the protesters, willing to endure quite a bit of pain and discomfort to get a point across.

In the early 1700s, Great Britain basically ignored collecting taxes from the colonies, focusing it’s attention instead on the wealth of the Caribbean¹. Then King George and the East Indies Trading Company decided to enforce taxes again, one of the triggering events of the American Revolution.  The colonists simply wanted what has become the American Dream - a chance to work hard for a roof over their heads, food, and comfort.  The colonist specifically did not want to work hard so that the East Indies Trading Company, the historically equivalent of Wall Street, could get even richer.

Then during and after the Industrial Revolution, the Robber Barons appear in history.  Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Melon, J.P. Morgan², John D. Rockefeller - these men ruled the financial world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  While these men indubitably helped create the great nation we are today, they used immoral practices to get what they wanted, treating employees as commodities, not human beings.  People protested as these practices undermined the American Dream, and change occurred.  We gained the 40 hour work week, child labor laws, and minimum wage laws from that time in history.

In the 1960s, Martin Luther King wanted the American Dream for everyone, not just white people.  His protests led to a more equal society, so much so that my children do not truly understand why black people were treated differently in the first place.  

And now, the American Dream is threatened again.  Wall Street, as representative of the 1% who hold the vast majority of wealth in our nation, tricked the American people into thinking that we are all just “temporarily poor millionaires”.  Through cajolery, slight-of-hand, fear mongering, and immoral business policies, these financial turned our housing markets into one giant shell game for the world.

Only there was no prize under any shell.   

Every shell held bad mortgages, with a large percentage of the mortgages pushed onto people with no visible means to pay them back.  The banks knew that they were profiting from deals that had to end in foreclosures, but that didn’t stop the money machine.   Their profit crumbled the American Dream into dusts for millions of people.  The protesters at Wall Street, and every other venue, simply want what our ancestors wanted over 200 years ago - a chance to live the American Dream.


¹ The real pirates of the Caribbean appear in history here; several “pirates” were actually part of the British Merchant fleet acting with letters of marquis.
² Ironically, the financial institute called J.P. Morgan seems to have picked up where the man, J.P. Morgan, left off.