He concludes the article with this:
Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights -- or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State -- that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?
I don't see these cutbacks for public expenditures to be a sign of "imminent" or "imperial collapse". I think that it is an indication of the globalization of capitalism. Where before the capitalist center was located in the US, now it is dispersed across the globe. In the future I see islands of wealth and power lying surrounded by huge seas of poverty and neglect. It is the horrible future of global capitalism--a tiny first world and a huge third world will exist everywhere in the world.
Thus Americans will no longer be privileged by living at the center of the capitalist Empire. American workers can forget about the "American Dream", about a good education, about a comfortable retirement.
The challenge for the local governing class will be to keep them distracted enough so that they remain well behaved and accepting of their fate. Their corporate media will have to work overtime to do this. One way that seems to be working is mainstream media's constant theme of reporting about the economy as only just another temporary downturn in the business cycle.
Meanwhile the ruling classes will spare no expenses to build up their police and military forces to protect them from the "rabble".