It’s hard to run an empire with neoliberalism as your operating system.

Neoliberalism favors a sort of short-termism, where the next quarter is the only thing that matters. It’s a race to the bottom, a real looters ball. Unfortunately, over the last two decades, the national security focused neoconservatives have largely joined forces with the economically-focused neoliberals, forming a unified ideological block that represents the political worldview of the elites running both American parties.

We saw a pure distillation of these ideologies in Iraq, when after invading the country, the Bremer regime disbanded the Iraqi Army and privatized their economy, in effect turning it over to American corporations and oil majors. As Naomi Klein writes in the Shock Doctrine–“Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves… “

I can’t believe those Iraqi’s weren’t more grateful.

Of course there will be hiccups on the way to this neoliberal/neoconservative nirvana.

Raytheon Chief Executive Greg Hayes admitted last week that Beijing effectively has the US military’s supply chain by the balls thanks to its reliance on rare earths and other materials which come from, or are processed in, China.

According to Hayes, Raytheon has “several thousand suppliers in China,” because of which “decoupling … is impossible.”

“We can de-risk but not decouple,” he told the Financial Times, adding that he thinks this is the case “for everybody.”

So maybe we won’t have a war with China?

Then there’s “cost plus” the practice where weapons companies mark up basic items they sell to the US government, with the result being a $50,000 trashcan and a $49,000 radio filter.

Consolidation of the defense industry is one factor feeding the price-gouging. In the 1990s, there were more than 50 Department of Defense contractors capable of competing for major contracts. Now, there are only five. 

Per the latest iteration of the National Defense Authorization Act, the federal government will spend over $850 billion on “defense” in the 2023 fiscal year, roughly half of which will be devoured by contractors. 

Nice work if you can get it.

Congress is “investigating” the allegations of widespread price gouging by contractors but the members of congress receive millions of campaign donations from the very same contractors so don’t hold your breath. These reports of overcharging come as weapons manufacturers report record earnings, allowing them to give shareholders nearly $20 billion last year through stock buybacks and dividends, so there’s that.

The latest antics of our privatized empire involve the US’s behavior in the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Having organized a coup in Ukraine in 2014, the US sent its proxy army to attack Russian speaking separatists in the Donbass and to seize the Russian naval base in Crimea. After 8 years of provocations a new military attack was thwarted by Russia’s own Social Military Operation. The US and NATO immediately seized Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves and demanded that the rest of the world impose sanctions against Russia, hoping that this would reduce the ruble to “rubble”. All of this was expected to cause Russian oligarchs and average Russian to revolt and overthrow the hated Putin government enabling US maneuvering to install a client oligarchy like the one it had established in the 1990’s under President Yeltsin.

Fortunately for Russia, they still have patriots who won’t sell their grandmother for next quarters bonus like Wall Street speculators. “It’s only business”, they’d exclaim as granny was carted off to the boneyard.

Our Ukraine adventure is emblematic of the problems of a corporate empire. Just like Afghanistan and Iraq, if it all goes south, the various parts of the military/industrial/complex will walk away having profited immensely while suffering zero consequences for their failure. In their eyes it wasn’t a failure but a resounding success–just ask their shareholders if you have any doubts.

This is the end stages of the US empire, brought down by the hubris and greed of its leadership class who gutted the country for profit. Charles Ferguson well described the pattern in his 2012 book Predator Nation. “Over the last 30 years the United States has been taken over by a amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now confined to the the top few percents of the population…If allowed to continue, this process will turn the US into a declining, unfair society with an impoverished, angry, uneducated population under the control of a small, ultra-wealthy elite. Such a society would be not only immoral but also eventually unstable, dangerously ripe for religious and political extremism.”

Sound familiar?

Empire incorporated is a corporate/state merger that exists to send state resources abroad for the benefit of shareholders at home. An alternative name for capitalist imperialism is fascism. The political-theoretical difference between state-capitalism and fascism lies in who controls the state. That would be Wall Street. Maybe we should name it “financial fascism”?

What’s so sad is that the US was divinely positioned after WWII to do the all-American empire, only in a manner that complemented the sentiment from a Third-World that truly believed the jeremiads about freedom, peace and democracy and wanted to emulate a United States that had long since abandoned the ideals of our founders.