From the Summit of the Moral High Ground

Let us take a break from the hustle & bustle loaded to the gills with nastiness and mayhem. Consider some information cookies during the Christmas holiday down time, not without a few lumps of coal. The deceptions are deep; the ranks of dupes are legion; connecting the dots is not so easy. Despite the constant stream of deception and the steady interference by the well-meaning but all too often simpletons in the madding crowd mixed with sheep, the story can be rather extensively told. It takes the new skill of connecting the dots, along with a mental stubbornness mixed with a certain measure of insight. The phrase connecting dots was not heard by the Jackass until a few years ago, from my unusual smart buddy UD in Nevada. His many messages over the years often contain the three words CONNECT THE DOTS. With his help and the guiding hand of numerous suspicious astute colleagues, we have made sense of widely scattered information from the battlefield during the global monetary war....

Immanuel Wallerstein’s highly influential, multi-volume (currently 4 volume) opus, The Modern World-System , is one of this century’s greatest works of social science. An innovative, panoramic reinterpretation of global history, it traces the emergence and development of the modern world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. In essence it traces the shift of economic hegemony from China to Europe. We get to this at the end Although now a retired academic Wallerstein continues to observe and write from his website . I have long argued that U.S. decline as a hegemonic power began circa 1970 and that a slow decline became a precipitate one during the presidency of George W. Bush. I first started writing about this in 1980 or so. At that time the reaction to this argument, from all political camps, was to reject it as absurd. In the 1990s, quite to the contrary, it was widely believed, again on all sides of the political spectrum, that the United States had reached the hei...