Introduction

I've started writing this because I find myself seriously thinking about leaving the United States, the country of my birth, and relocating to Chile. Others might be interested in my reasoning about the pros and cons. It's possible. Feedback is welcome. Just keep it civil and on topic.

Last week, my application for a U.S. passport went out from the downtown Greenville, S.C., post office. It is almost a given that I will visit Chile in May or June (it will be the start of Chile's winter, unfortunately, as I despise cold weather - we've had our share of it in S.C. recently).

There are two sets of issues I will consider here: call them large scale issues and small scale issues. Each has its own set of pros and cons.

The large scale issues: there are now very good reasons for thinking that the U.S. Empire is toast. Let's look at this in light of my first two premises on political philosophy in society: (1) Concentrations of wealth and power are dangerous; (2) there is in any population a minority that is fascinated by power. This yields the first problem of practical political philosophy: how does society control power? How, that is, do those (probably just a few) who want to live free, untrammeled and self-determined lives place checks on those who do not want us to live free, untrammeled and self-determined lives? The founders of our original Republic understood the problem of power; they tried to check power; it's pretty clear that they failed. The U.S. Constitution contained too many loopholes through which those who wanted power even then were slowly able to climb. The so-called "antifederalists" were right. We should have stuck with a revised Articles of Confederation. But that's another essay, and water under a very old bridge at the very least.

The large scale situation today: the "federal government" of the U.S. Empire is no longer fundamentally different from any other government that exists or has ever existed in the world: all are based on real or potential force, capable of being exercised with varying degrees of brutality. Their denizens recognize very few limits on their own powers. They will do as they please, to the extent they can get away with it.

I've been penning a serious on our Four Cardinal Errors, as I call them (major four-part article to appear in the near future). (1) Our Republic was never as free from the British Crown as the history books lead us to0 believe. Covert servants of the Crown / agents of the evil Rothschild international banking dynasty (Alexander Hamilton is an example) wielded enormous influence on U.S. policy right from the beginning. (2) Courtesy of Horace Mann and his followers, our Republic gradually adopted an educational system steeped in a statism imported from Prussia and utterly alien to our founding principles. Arguably, this system (with relatively rare exceptions) has destroyed whatever potential the American masses' had to think independently, as individuals - as opposed to becoming obedient and compliant followers (and consumers of what corporations produced). (3) We abandoned the religiosity of the Founding Fathers in favor of secular materialism also imported from Europe. The result was an abandonment of every principle rooted in this religiosity. Materialism has no real argument against unbridled greed. (4) We did not recognize the British Fabian Society for what it was, and what it remains. The instruments of control began to descend.

In 1913 our Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, which allowed economic activity to come under the thumb of a bankster class, as I will call it. Money both was and is this class's surrogate for God. The banksters (closely tied to the Crown) were interested in controlling what was even then becoming the largest economy in the world. Their method was that of fractional money - money created literally out of thin air, invariably, over decades of time, leading to an economic system based on indebtedness (to the bankster class). It is not possible, of course, to create wealth out of thin air. Real wealth must be produced: the result of raw materials transformed into usable materials that have been sold and lives improved across the board. Were we talking physics, where it is obvious that you can't get something from nothing, the economics that had begun to develop would have been laughed out of court. But social and economic systems are vastly more complex than physical systems, and the effects of false premises take much longer to put in their appearance. So the rising tide of indebtedness would take decades to exact its consequences and would even seem like a good policy for a long time since it created an appearance of prosperity.

But in 1929, the stock market crashed. The Federal Reserve recently accepted blame for this event. "We did it," said Ben Bernanke. "We're sorry." The Crash of 1929 did not by itself create the Great Depression. It plus the policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave us the Great Depression, which lasted until World War II. During those years John Maynard Keynes (member, Fabian society) published his General Theory.

World War II, not the Roosevelt-Keynes axis, got us out of the Great Depression and into the 1950s.

In 1971 the economy had gone into the toilet again. President Richard M. Nixon took the country completely off the gold standard and declared "we are all Keynesians now." Our national debt was still small by today's standards (under $400 billion). It crossed the previously unthinkable $1 trillion threshold during Reagan's first term. It was up around $6 trillion when the first George Bush went out of office. Now, with the second George Bush out of office, it is over $10.6 trillion. The entire globe's financial system, meanwhile, began to collapse last year, with the worst coming in September. We heard about the credit crisis, the puncturing of the housing bubble, etc., etc. No one said a word about the money creation spigot, which has been going full blast since the Federal Reserve conveniently stopped reporting its M3 Aggregate in March 2006 - telling anyone paying even the slightest attention that the bankster class knew something nasty was on the horizon!

Thus far every strategy about to be applied by Barack Obama and his team (all former Clintonistas and bankster-class insiders) will drive the debt higher, as we attempt to spend our way back to prosperity.

National Debt Clock.

The collapse of the U.S. Empire might look like the Roman Empire's collapse, only faster. Rome--which also started as a Republic and transformed itself into an Empire--was sacked by "barbarians" in 410 A.D. The U.S. was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001 (I am leaving aside for now issues of who was behind the attack, since many educated people do not accept the government's conspiracy theory about a man in a cave in Afghanistan).

Rome was never the same after 410. The U.S. has not been the same since 9/11, although centralized "federal government" power has increased by leaps and bounds (Patriot Act, Military Commissions Act, Real ID Act, etc., etc.). I believe it probable that future historians will record that our system began to unravel seven years later, in September 2008 with the near-collapse of our financial system and government bailouts (with money the federal government does not have) that will total into the trillions when all the dust settles.

The plain truth is, the U.S. federal government is broke! State governments are broke! The common people are massively in debt. We have all been living beyond our means for several decades--probably since around the time of Nixon. The current wave of expenditures is just liable to bring on a hyperinflationary spiral. The question is not 'if' but 'what.' Almost surely during Barack Obama's first term in the White House. Living beyond our means has caught up with us. We now have a choice. We can expose and throw the bankster class out of power with what amounts to a New American Revolution, or succumb to the banksters' 'New International Economic Order.' (or, if you prefer, their New World Order discussed very openly, not "conspiratorially" by bankster spokesperson Henry Kissinger a few weeks ago).

Of course, a lot of damage has been done. When you add the problems created by bankster-ramrodded trade deals like NAFTA, CAFTA, etc., which has shipped much of our manufacturing base overseas and the illegal alien cheap-labor colonization driving down wages in the U.S., decades of stagnant wages in the face of inflation, we are well on our way to becoming a third world nation within ten years and possibly sooner. The U.S. will see a lowered standard of living no matter what we do. Reforming the "two-party system" is probably hopeless; so are "third parties" who do not have the resources to get the word out in the face of American masses most of whom are too busy watching sports and American Idol.

Conclusion: the U.S. is toast. Recent economics has been built on a false premise, to wit, that it is possible to generate wealth out of thin air, with fiat dollars created by the U.S. Treasury Dept. and the Federal Reserve Corporation. The resulting system has proven unsustainable, and must collapse. There might be one more "recovery," one more "boomlet" that will send the Dow back up. Then the final collapse will come. But the odds are just as good that the much touted "new economy" is history, and that there will be no more "boomlets."

In the meantime, civil unrest might slowly rise. Unquestionably the U.S. federal government is ready to institute martial law, if necessary. Halliburton has built facilities around the country that are capable of serving as internment camps for political dissidents. This might quash the plans of groups such as the Southern National Congress, who are organizing readiness to pick up the pieces, in the South at least, should the Regime go off the rails. It might be too late for a New American Revolution!

In which case, if you are interested in living a free life, your best bet is probably to develop an exit strategy!

Those are the large scale pros in favor of leaving. Frankly, I cannot think of any large scale cons. Nonsense about "staying and fighting" is just that: nonsense. You'll be able to do very little in an internment camp, assuming you've made it that far without being shot to death.

The small scale ones deal with my own professional life and its deterioration parallel to the deterioration of the national economy generally, generating the biggest pros for abandoning this country for Chile - especially given the potential of a job awaiting me there.

The biggest cons are those having to do with family: with a pair of elderly parents who need round the clock care, and whose finances and property I have undertaken the responsibility of managing.

I have written enough tonight. I will return tomorrow to write of these small scale pros and cons of becoming an Expat.