Tom Dispatch And More:

I remember Chalmers Johnson once describing to me his surprise on 
discovering that, after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union 
imploded, the whole global military structure that Washington had set 
up -- which he later came to call “America’s empire of bases” or our 
“globe-girdling Baseworld” -- chugged right on. It didn't matter that 
there was no real enemy left on Planet Earth. It was, I believe, what 
finally convinced Johnson that this country was indeed an empire. And 
here’s the strange thing, though it goes remarkably unnoticed in our 
world: that vast global structure of military garrisons, unprecedented 
in history, ranging from some the size of American towns to small 
outposts, has remained in place to this very second. Though little 
attention has been paid in recent years -- despite the fact that it 
couldn’t be a more prominent feature on this planet, geo-militarily 
speaking -- there remain something like 800 American garrisons 
worldwide (not counting, of course, the more than 420 military bases 
located in the continental U.S., Guam, and Puerto Rico), as David Vine 
reported in his path-breaking 2015 book, Base Nation. 
 
There’s never been anything quite like it, not for the Roman Empire, 
the British Empire, or the Soviet one either. And as TomDispatch 
regular and U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen reports today, with our 
military now in the process of transforming the whole planet into an 
even more militarized place, those bases will be all the more 
relevant. 
 
http://www.tomdispatch.com/ 
 
And a comment from Mr. Roboto! 
 
Cheap conventional light-sweet crude oil peaked in early 2006, but it 
doesn’t seem like it to an awful lot of people living in the “big 
shitties of the FSA” (hat-tip to RE) because improvements in 
extraction and refinement technology, tar-sands, and shale-oil 
fracking are artificially extending the peak, albeit very tenuously. 
However, the price we will pay for doing so will be a “toboggan-sled 
ride” down once world terminal decline in liquid fossil-fuel 
production hits, probably in 2021 or 2022. And the central-bank 
printed-money force-feeding of the world financial economy has 
resulted in steroidal inflation of the markets that will make the 
crash that happens in ’21 or ’22 that much harder. After all, when you 
prevent the self-rebalancing of a dynamic system by forcing even more 
imbalance, the rebalancing will be that much more severe in its 
effects when it finally does happen. So if the way things are right 
now gives us the likes of Orban, Bolsonara, and Trump, I shudder to 
imagine with whom the future I envision will gift us! 
 
https://www.economic-undertow.com/2018/10/06/finance-crisis-political-crisis/#comments