USA: The Dream is becoming a nightmare: The US Empire Is Crumbling Before Our Eyes - by Rebecca Gordon

How can you tell when your empire is crumbling? Some signs are actually visible from my own front window here in San Francisco.

Directly across the street, I can see a collection of tarps and poles (along with one of my own garbage cans) that were used to construct a makeshift home on the sidewalk. Beside that edifice stands a wooden cross decorated with a string of white Christmas lights and a red ribbon—a memorial to the woman who built that structure and died inside it earlier this week. We don’t know—and probably never will—what killed her: the pandemic raging across California? A heart attack? An overdose of heroin or fentanyl?

Behind her home and similar ones is a chain-link fence surrounding the empty playground of the Horace Mann/Buena Vista elementary and middle school. Like that home, the school, too, is now empty, closed because of the pandemic. I don’t know where the families of the 20 children who attended that school and lived in one of its gyms as an alternative to the streets have gone. They used to eat breakfast and dinner there every day, served on the same sidewalk by a pair of older Latina women who apparently had a contract from the school district to cook for the families using that school-cum-shelter. I don’t know, With unprecedented economic inequality and massive overspending on military expansion, America now looks a lot like 476 CE Rome. either, what any of them are now doing for money or food.

Read more at: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/american-empire-decline/

United Federation of Europe - Far from there yet: Towards a truly 'European' Union - by Zdzisław Krasnodębski

When one hears the ensuing speeches of past and present presidents of the European Commission, one is left with the impression EU policy has been a series of successful triumphs, that the Union is champion of the world and that Europe is flourishing.

It seems only the pandemic, global warming and the activity of 'Eurosceptics' or 'populists' attempting to halt the Union's progress, that do not fall in line with this optimistic, complacent self-portrait.

It is enough, however, to look around and see how much more detached from reality this image has become. In fact, we Europeans are now constantly confronted with a series of growing, unresolved problems and successive crises, which we handle only on an ad hoc basis.

Read more at: Towards a truly 'European' Union