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November 14 2018 Another book review. Recently finished reading Morris Berman's 2006 book 'Dark Ages America: Final Phase Empire'[1] which, although it stands well enough alone, apparently was written as part of a trilogy. Berman[2] is an American historian and social critic, currently residing in Mexico. Unlike most of the stuff I've been reading pertaining to civilizational decline Berman's book does not cite resource limits nor ecological destruction as the main drivers of America's decline. Rather, it's something more heady, the loss of a guiding principle or reason for existence. This is essentially the death of the American Dream. Berman traces the origins of this growing decay back a ways but seems to focus on the dropping of the Bretton-Woods Agreement[3] in 1971 as the point of rapid onset. The Bretton-Woods Agreement was a set of rules governing the commercial and financial relations among the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan after the 1944. The US was in a position of power at the end of WWII and basically leveraged that power to position itself for launching it's empirical ambitions off promoted growth in the member economies, most of which got hammered during the war, Germany and Japan in particular. Among other things, the agreement established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and pegged the member currencies to the US dollar which in turn was pegged to the value of gold. It all worked fairly well for a while until the member counties got stronger and the US transitioned from a place were things got made to a debt-based consumerist economy. Berman seems to look at the beginning of wage stagnation in the US as the smoking gun for laying blame on the unilateral nullification of Bretton-Woods and I think misses the role of US domestic oil production peaking which occurred at the very same time. Once the US had to start buying foreign oil in mass quantities the broadly shared "good times" were over. Between the huge costs of the Vietnam war, other countries gaming the gold exchange provision, and the looming energy crisis brought on by newly emboldened Arab states unhappy with the US support of Israel, it's no surprise that Nixon pulled the dollar off the gold standard, effectively killing Bretton-Woods. Anyway, the book is far-ranging in that it explores the origins of the 9/11 attacks, the loss of authentic culture, the corrosive effects of the Cold War, and the role of a rapacious capitalism in the growth of the military-industrial complex and subsequent decline of America as an ideal. Mostly I think Berman does a good job parsing this stuff out; the origins of the 9/11 attack is a thorough exploration of the UK's middle east resource grabs in the early 1900s later taken up by the US as the British empire waned. This really should be required reading by every American. That said, I did find Berman guilty of some of the very sloppiness of thinking that he accuses the American public of. One glaring example is the citing of a Guardian article in 2003, quickly retracted[4], in turn based on a German news reporting on a presentation made by Paul Wolfowitz in Singapore in which he was miss-quoted as saying the invasion of Iraq was about oil. What Wolfowitz was actually saying was that, unlike North Korea, Iraq had a way of financing whatever ambitions is had because it was "swimming in oil". While a case can certainly be made that the US was very interested in Iraq's oil - in fact the war plans reference using the oil to help offset the rebuilding costs - the Wolfowitz miss-quote was quickly corrected and Berman should have noted that and certainly not hold it up as evidence. It's clear that the 9/11 attacks weighed heavily on the author's thoughts during the writing of this book and I think, miss-quotes aside, Berman does a good job laying out the how and why America's slide seems to have accelerated after the attacks, especially after the launching of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. America's consumer culture - can it even be called a culture? - has produced a nation of the shallow and narcissistic, easily manipulated. Overlay an endless war mentality and you get the thoughtless patriotism and simmering distrust that seems so prevalent in the US today. Not a nation prepared for the coming sustained fossil energy shortfall. -- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBU9Soiwg8E [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Berman [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenton_Wood [4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/07/iraq.comment