the United States of America on the Same Pathway of Ancient Rome Going from a Democratic Republic to an Imperial Empire?

the United States of America on the Same Pathway of Ancient Rome Going from a Democratic Republic to an Imperial Empire? The Signs of Our Times Unfortunately Appear to Be Heading in the Same Direction that Made Ancient Rome the Personal Property of Imperial Emperors with Dynastic Phases Lex Loeb Contributor Network . Do you ever feel exploited when you turn on your television? You probably don't. You survived televised fads and trends of many years unaware of your being exploited. You know more about who Michael Jackson and Elvis are than you do who the present vice president is. You have some sense of concern for the well being of Tiger Wood and Oprah but you probably can't name the Whitehouse chief of staff nor the name of the US secretary of Agriculture. You don't even feel exploited by knowing more about what happened in the later life of O.J. Simpson than you know about how the giant trust fund for Mesothelioma. You are in the dark about the number of major corporations destroyed to create the Mesothelioma trust fund and the number of jobs lost as a result but you can name ten or twelve Saturday Night Live Actors that became big stars and you probably know the address where Donald Trump lives. Do you give a mortgage to a bank or does the bank give one to you? You know less about a lot of things that affect you right between the eyes in our democratic republic than you know about the constant banter about the entertainment industry. Ignorance is bliss so why feel exploited when so much of what you think you know all about is so absurdly trivial and irrelevant to your own well being? The exportation of the mass American mind began probably with town hall meetings and there after newspapers but only became more virulent with the mass electronic media. You are so used to watching movies that the strange sound of a human voice over a microphone seems normal to you. Whether you believe you are being exploited or not you might at least have a bit of hesitation in believing that you are the complete master of your own thoughts. You could believe that President Ronald Reagan really stopped the growth of the Federal Government when he was in office but you should realize that is a false perception. Things are not necessarily as you might think they are especially if you are used to following the crowd or the trends of society as it represents itself in media broadcasting on television, radio ,newspapers , the INTERNET , movies and everywhere around us. It is amazing how the mass media can continue keeping the myth of the Kennedy dynastic Camelot alive after some 50 years when most of that is pure nonsense. The death of Senator Ted Kennedy mattered to you? Did it? Really? You knew President Obama was going to be a historic election before your friends did? How? Why? While all of this nonsense in the media is appealing to your senses and keeps you educated with "popular culture." The country is moving to a much more top heavy configuration of political and economic powers. You may not travel around the country enough to know that the big bank can have 6000 or more location in many of the different states and most of the major American cities and that these are increasingly becoming fewer as the biggest most successful destroy their less apt competition. You sense the rich are getting richer and the working class is not keeping up but you have not actually met too many billionaires in person so you have to rely on reported statistics that are published. You rather seem to believe there is global warming happening? You never studied geophysics and never considered how it was that so much life on earth survived the most recent ice age periods and you never have considered that climate change could be even more abrupt than that which is being promised by cult figure Al Gore. There were ice sheets over most of Canada up to several miles thick just 11 and 20 thousand years ago. You know that from the ice age animated feature movies but you never really thought about the climate change in the transition periods between warming and cooling during those ice age periods, before and after. You are sort of aware that some species died out before the major ice age periods and some thrived during the ice age and then perished sometime, maybe for unrelated reasons, after the ice age warming occurred. All the hysteria about the ocean sea levels rising a few centimeters to as much as a few feet or even 5 meters pales compared to what happened pre and post ice ages with sea level falls and rises enough to expose continental shelf lands up to hundreds of miles out to sea in places like the American East Coast or to see water levels rise as much as 500 feet above present sea level. Sea levels may have been as much as 400-500 feet higher just 25 million years ago which would have submerged vast parts of most of the continents and left little surface ice at the poles. Life survived that and most of the Amazon was under water. So going back to these major climatic transformations what industrial coal burning greenhouse gases caused this to happen? This seems like a giant digression from the history of Ancient Rome and how it relates to modern day USA but it is not. Ancient Rome was characterized by consolidation of power, political and economic. When power in Ancient Rome became most concentrated in the fewest hands at the time of the Roman Imperial Empire, The Roman people were more likely to be versed in the nonsense of Roman Theater ,Circuses and Games than they were educated in the process of how the state worked. As the power and prestige of Rome grew the Roman people became less versed in their own government process simply because of the growing complexity and specialization of government. Citizenship became almost indistinguishable from Slavery and few Romans gave a damn. Lying to a government official in America is a felony crime but did you know that your government officials lying to you is perfectly legal. That is similar to the way Roman citizens were treated after Caesar's imperial transformation of Rome. The laws that used to apply to everyone equally as citizens achieved a huge brake in more than one double standard. In Ancient Rome the Emperors were powerful enough to name the months and days of the week after themselves. They were no subject to any laws that the rest of the population might be subject to and as chief executives they also had most of the power as the Analogy to our Supreme Court on legal matters where ever they felt they might like to intervene. The only way a Roman emperor could be removed from office was the way Julius Caesar set the new standard in his demise. The Roman Senate completely lost the power to remove an Emperor from power without treason and subversion but that was usually accomplished by coups by armed forces usually from the ranks of the Emperor's own standing armies most dangerous his own private army and security forces. The Senate of Rome did not deliberate in the empire but acted as a rubber stamp Rome went though phases like America did. It had its early ideological inception period, an agrarian pre-urban phase and after that it had major urban industrial consolidation with urban centers like Rome itself becoming a magnet for the people from the country side. There were brief periods of equality and then times when entrepreneurs grew small competing industries that later became giant Roman Oligarch controlled proto-corporations. Then Rome started conquering territories and expanding the oligarch controlled corporations on an international basis somewhat like multinational corporations today. These ended up being consolidated with the exploits of Julius Caesar who found that he could leverage his power by taking spoils and controlling trade in the conquered provinces where he was also the military general governor. He eventually realized that Romans were for sale and could be bought and sold with the capital resources he had on hand. This led to attempts at consolidating the bulk of Roman Industries in his hands and taking that from the land owning oligarch families. Caesar never would run out of cash to continue his acquisitions of oligarch assets by keeping his standing army in Rome and the provinces and living a dream of redistribution which mean to himself and his clan. The Romans did not have the American election process to transfer power and after the death of Julius Caesar a rather typical line of succession war broke out. The Republican era or Rome began with a civil war just like the later Empire did. Caesar tilted the balance complete to his own clan by bribing the population at his death with an popular per capita inheritance allowance which might be a little like President Bush or Obama promising the American people a stimulus cash redistribution payment of $50 each upon their deaths. The Roman's had no term limits for their leaders and no constitutional formula for line of succession. Octavian Augustus won Caesar's position which would sort of be like calling the presidents by the name of Washington as some sort of god like cult figure. In American history Washington worked to divest himself of cult status as not to deify himself as there were no instant palaces for him to take up occupation in as empire they way someone like Napoleon Bonaparte found them ready made after his ascent to power. The more puritan Americans he represented were not going to look to Washington as their god and savior but to their sense of providence. 200 and some years later our savior might as well be Obama after we see in an associated press photo with the great seal of the presidency behind his head as if it is a halo. We see citizens who get into the Whitehouse with out an entry on the guest list who are admitted by the president's equivalent of the Praetorian guard, the secret service, as criminals because they entered without an advance invitation. The Whitehouse in this country might have looked a bit like a Roman Estate from the beginning but originally almost any citizen could walk up to the place as a public place and at least knock on the door to ask to see the president. Ah, but things are much more complex and specialized now. Going to the Whitehouse one is going to be seen and photographed being there potentially or is going to be hidden from the public as a sort of state secret even when the administration in power is saying it is being "transparent." Augustus continued Caesar's industrial and political consolidation of Rome and the provinces. He was both a sort of mafia don and presidential head of state who happened to hand pick the senators who once might have been elected or part of the upper middle class so as to recycle more of the wealth and power of the state into his private family estates. Subsequent emperors kept the process of consolidation going. Today, the analogy would be like the 7 largest banks in the USA being merged into one and controlled by the same family that controls all the major energy producing companies in the country. This happens to be the model for Karl Marx's dictator of the Proletariat although he probably was more found of Napoleon than he was of the Roman Emperors. Marxist is still all about state imperial control and vesting that control in the cult authority of a person which usually translates to a family dynasty. The horrible thing about contemporary America is it seems to be happening today , again, just like in Roman Times with consolidation of politician and economic power in the hands of fewer and fewer people and the growth of government regulation and taxation such that just about anything that used to be owned is really just borrowed from the government. Americans are mesmerized by Oprah and George Soros as happy go lucky oligarchs that are Worthy of good thoughts and respect when it seems these people are willing to sell the rest of us into slavery and pretend like they actually don't practice the art of passing on their taxes by employing high cost lawyers the middle class cannot afford. The oligarchs consolidate power and the state consolidates the oligarchs and eventually we end up with a dynastic imperial ownership of the whole country. The more regulations one is subject to the less one really owns one's own assets. We have even now entered a period when we think owning a home is having a home with a no equity mortgage. The public does not realize that is just a new fancy way to rent property while directly owing the property taxes on top of that which is dominion of an empire if ever there was one. The self reliant American today is happy being a 35, 40, 50 or 70 percent of income/ hours worked slave to a massive government bureaucracy and a president , congress and legal class of officers of our courts who all act as if they are completely above the laws they make for the rest of us. That is exactly how Romans debased their own future with imperial cult worship added to the mix. We assign titles to celebrities like King or king of pop and it seems we are heading in a similar direction. Some say how wonderful it is that the mass media and public schools are melding all of us into force of like minds. Others can see a 400 million population of media fed zombies oblivious to how they will trade personal liberty for a little free cake and promises of security. The only real security is going to the oligarchs in good standing with the powers that be which is why they pay for so much of what goes on on K-street trying to curry favor. It is curious how the American people can be put into a health plan for their own good that the congressmen passing the law still intend to exempt themselves and families from. It is curios to watch a president flying a giant gas guzzling 747 everywhere over the surface of the earth and telling the rest of us we are sinners for using too much gasoline in our cars. The president could telecommute with the state of the art equipment if he really wanted to but that is not what the power and the glory of empire is about. The signs are everywhere that liberty is being transformed into mono-focused imperial power and we now even see government workers as unionized units that have a special relationship with politicians who aim to create more regulation depriving the citizens of their pre-existing freedoms and keep taxes going up to feather their own nests while always talking about this being primarily about creating great government services for the citizens. Citizenship itself is less and less because one's citizenship becomes more of an obligation to give government officials what they demand than do demand anything from government officials. Government officials cannot be fired but citizens can be put in jail for lying to any government official about any regulatory digression. What happened in the Roman Empire is that Roman Emperors started to become extra-national cult leaders and they rebuilt the seat of government to where ever they wanted to relocate it to. The seat of goverment under one emperor was the palatine hill, and the next the Island of Capri, there after it became a spot on the Adriatic sea but not on the Italian side, Emperor Hadrian created his Hadrian Villa way outside of the center of Rome and Nero ripped out the center of Rome to build his seat of power there. One emperor relocated the seat of power to the southern shore of the Mediterranean and Constantine completely relocated and split the empire in two with a new Rome and not just a private place in Constantinople presently known as Istanbul. This is what we can probably expect to find happening here in the USA soon. When we see Barak Obama campaigning for president in Germany calling attention to the Berlin Wall we can already see how our citizenship is being diluted as it will likely be extended round the world. We see the consolidation of mature oligarch's assets and the world shake down of secret private bank accounts so no there is no freedom or power with more liberty than very few at the top and we see a government that favors high pay for attorneys and limited pay to doctors and other middle class professionals and leading to a bigger and bigger consolidation of government power. The protection racket is amazing because we the people are continually told that this is for our own safety and security and for our own good . The euphemisms are the word's government service. The same administration that talks about giving all of us high quality government services gives us more and more punitive regulations and charms us with promises that only the rich will be taxed when the taxes actually proposed significantly hit the same middle class that believed the lies. The oligarchs get richer and fewer and they get consolidated into larger and larger composite organizations that derive benefit for the emerging imperial presidency . This could be Ancient Rome all over again. The most lawless administration has the most professional lawyers running it. Emperor Augustus was just one of the least lawless of emperors but the same laws and regulations he imposed on the rest of Rome really did not apply to him. Emperors that followed could profess their Christianity and then murder 30-60 thousand citizens in a day or less and there was always the equivalent of a US Supreme court to back up the claims that what the emperor did and did not do was completely legal. The Roman Empire was much worse than what we are experiencing to date but beware watching the consolidation go on and seeing that the American People don't much give a damn it may only be a short mater of time when , thanks to technology the Romans never dreamed of , we could become even lower than the Citizen slaves of the Roman Empire were. The American people seem to be dead in the head because when they see living Senators naming major public works projects after themselves instead of waiting to honor them after they are dead, such as a George H. Bush Aircraft Carrier or a Dingle Veterans Hospital that we are already seeing the signs of Empire. The history of Boss Tweed in NYC was that of Imperial power and Tweed even used the iconography of Ancient Rome the way Washington dc did to help cement his power. When we hear a president talking about 'redistribution' and the court never having a chance to consider it as legal in this country from a constitutional lawyer who knows nothing about the just compensation clause of the 5th amendment you know we are quickly slipping into an imperial power pit. It is a warning sign that semantics will uproot all vestiges of wealth and further consolidate them in the powers at the top . Foreigners who listen to the lies about peace and social justice just do not realize that they can be just as subject to the consolidation and conversion of their citizenship to slavery. Imperial empires don't recognize any boundaries. Public works are for showing off and for using to collect more taxes by taxing promised free services. We see that in America with user fees on government services that are already once paid for with substantial taxation. Double and triple taxation will depend on your relationship to the emperor and you can be tax free and unfettered if a family member. One can almost feel sorry for Vladamir Putin who is trying to resist and compete as a sort of political power oligarch in the world empire against the emerging American super emperor. Poor Putin maybe able to consolidate his own oligarch fortunes but eventually the main honcho American emperor will consolidate Russia into the emperor and all of Putin's efforts will prove a waste of time when he should have just conceded to the real emperor and lived a less unnecessarily stressful life. What will the emperor want his slaves to do in the future? Very hard to say. Imagine the wealth of 100 trillion dollars or more in the hands of one person which is the whole US Economy and then imagine 300 to 600 trillion dollars to spend on island palace buildings and what ever else...There is a point where excessive taxes are just the same thing as complete confiscation. You can roll with the trend that tells you that you need to give away your power as citizen because someone is telling you that will save the earth from destruction as a personal government service to your own well being or you can try to literally read the constitution and figure out what it guarantees you the right to do in deposing one government in an election and firing the permanent life time employees of a government who only serve their own interests. I watch Glen Beck on Television as he tries and he looks rather silly trying because people just sense that conspiracy theory stuff he talks about as just paranoid that is until it affects them directly. The government is quiet when it breaks the citizens that citizen it. Government also knows it will live longer than mortal human beings and once we acknowledge we have an emperor-president he can hasten the death of citizens for any reason. Be happy and demand more government services from a class of self serving people and see what you get in the long run. Worrisome signs that America maybe heading in the same directions as imperial Ancient Rome are as follows: The creation of private armies of mercenaries that take government contracts to fight foreign wars and could conceivably deployed domestically. A consolidation of land, wealth and power by nationalization, reform of mining laws, rail road right of way laws and environmental laws that make private land essentially a public resource by define them as a sacred "wetland" or some other designation that removes ownership from the listed owner and uses regulation to transfer deeded properties to the government. Destruction of the constitutional right to bare arms concentrates government power in a way that is fine until they might start abusing power on a wholesale imperial basis. Adolf Hitler would not have succeeded in attaining and abusing power as long as he did in Germany in a right to bare arms country. The conversion of private ownership to diluted ownership making one time owners essentially into renters taking orders from big government is the road to serfdom from a country of sovereign owners that America used to be. Laws that say that state policies are voluntary but really are mandatory is exactly what was witnessed in the break from Republican Rome to Imperial Dynastic Rome . When every citizen is automatically considered to be voluntarily accepting orders that are really mandatory that is clearly the way of empire. The Imperialism is also in view with a government that makes it a crime to lie to federal officers but allows federal officers to keep their jobs for life with no possibility of being fired even when they are caught lying to citizens. That is a clear sign that your democratic rights are disappearing. You might have read the Constitution where it says you have the right not to incriminate yourself by yourself so you may still have the right to say nothing to a federal official by taking the fifth but then you might be held to be uncooperative which may also be some kind of federal crime. Take the 5th at your own risk. The 24 hour reporting on every word and movement of the president in the mass media has to be one of the most telling signs of the imperial coming of empire. It just automatically elevates the presidents and other key celebrities to an imperial status that such nonsense is news , happening or something for the public to have to worry about. The supposed secrecy of the H. Bush Administration made the president disappear in the media more often which was a little less imperial but there was still too much coverage of every word , every step and all things presidential enough to make the population insane or just to make them all turn off the television news because emperor worship really does not appeal to anyone except the stupid press trying to find a handle with a famous name for any story. It won't be too long from now that we have a reality TV station dedicated to 24 hours of the president's life so we can all vicariously live his life as a cult figure so important to us that it really does not mater if the Constitution defines his role in government or that his flash whims start to decide. Mandatory Volunteerism like this absurd America expansion proposal is a great worry . The failure of public employees to get fired after clearing being personally responsible for not doing their jobs as was clearly demonstrated by the levee failures leading up to the Katrina disaster. The Army Corp had satellite data showing the levees had subsided and were in danger before the storm happened. They all knew of 500 year flood condition that were expected and of a always possible category 5 hurricane coming ashore and yet they were building Eco fad bike paths on top of the failing levees in stead of replacing them after they spent most of their funding bilging a big new office complex for them to work in. These are the kind of government officials that are allowed to lie to citizens with impunity and dereliction of duty but who can compel citizens to speak to them under threat of the citizen's committing a felony lying to a federal official. A few of the Ancient Roman emperors had the power to the impossible in American and throw people out of their government jobs. That could be the only benefit of going imperial in the USA... As congress builds up its power base in step with the US senate we see the power of the presidency increasing at the expense of these bodies and thanks to the US Supreme Court's Procedural process of waiting to decide if a President or a law is unconstitutional till after there has been harm or a violation committed, A president and congress can quickly move the country into a position to nullify the court and decent. That could be the final blow to the democratic republic. It often is the case in Latin American Roman Style coups. Another sign of the coming of an Empire is when foreign born citizens can attain offices originally reserved for the naturally born Americans. There is nothing a law can't change. Imperial Rome was not built and rebuilt with anarchy as practiced by all powerful emperors but by the imposition of laws, excessive laws and regulations that only really served to control the greater population. The growth in legal nonsense in Ancient Rome is not usually credited for the decline and fall but rather it is bread and circuses but it really should be because it was laws that drained away the wealth and education of Rome and it's ownership by private citizens. Some of the worst abusing emperors just needed to proclaim some new law to justify just about anything they wanted to do. Ancient Rome was top heavy anarchy imposing strict laws for the enslaved citizen masses. At later times in Roman history the slave might have more rights than the citizens especially if they were owned and working for an emperor. When you see the complexity of a state that becomes all too completely focused on the celebrity of one single man and his family living in the Whitehouse as if that is the center of the earth and universe it becomes clear that an imperial empire maybe the direction in which the country is heading. Then we start to see all the Hollywood celebrities going to the white house and bowing down to the imperial president to teach the rest of us who the new god is we are in trouble and the country is not really the same country it used to be. .