Jacques

“Bannon’s vision is shared by Russian far-right ideologue Alexander Dugin, who is popular in both Trump’s and Putin’s circles.3 “It is generally important,” Dugin wrote in his 1997 book Foundations of Geopolitics, “to introduce geopolitical chaos within the American daily experience by encouraging all manner of separatism, ethnic diversity, social and racial conflict, actively supporting every extremist dissident movement, racist sectarian groups, and destabilizing the political processes within America.”4”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“Page 61-2

... Rome expanded rapidly ... and became master over the entire Mediterranean Basin. It then had unlimited resources in terms of land, money, and slaves. It collected taxes or tribute throughout its empire and was able to transfer to the central capital massive quantities of foodstuffs and manufactured items. The peasants and the artisans of Italy saw their economic base disappear as this Mediterranean economy was "globalized" by the political domination of Rome. The society was polarized between, on the one hand, a mass of economically useless plebeians and, on the other, a predatory plutocracy. A minority gorged with wealth oversaw the remaining proletarianized population. The middle-classes collapsed, a process that brought about the end of the republic and the beginning of the political form known as "empire" in conformity with the observations made by Aristotle about the importance of intermediate social classes for the stability of political systems.

Since one could not eliminate the plebeians, intractable but geographically central as they were, they came to be nourished and distracted at the empire's expense with "bread and circuses."

Page 64-5:

The positive American trade balance, when only "advanced technology" is counted, dropped from 35 billion dollars in 1990 to 5 billion in 2001 and had disappeared entirely to become one more element in the overall trade deficit in January 2002.

This fall in economic strength is not compensated for by the activities of American-based multinationals. Since 1998 the profits that they bring back into the country amount to less than what foreign companies that have set up shop in the United States are taking back to their own countries.

Page 68:
In conformity with classical economic theory, the general opening up of commercial exchange has brought about an increase in inequality throughout the world. This general exchange tends to introduce into each country the same disparities in revenue that exist at the level of the whole planet. ... The compression of worker revenues caused by free trade revives the traditional dilemma of capitalism that has now spread across the globe: low salaries do not allow for the absorption of increases in production.
Page 17: In developed countries a new class is emerging that comprises roughly 20 percent of the population in terms of sheer numbers but controls about half of each nation's wealth. This new class has more and more trouble putting up with the constraint of universal suffrage.”
― Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order

“Art itself becomes a sport (hence the phrase “art for art’s sake”) to be played before a highly intelligent audience of connoisseurs and buyers, whether the feat consist in mastering absurd instrumental tone masses and taking harmonic fences, or in some tour de force of coloring. Then a new fact-philosophy appears, which can only spare a smile for metaphysical speculation, and a new literature that is a necessity of life for the megalopolitan palate and nerves and both unintelligible and ugly to the provincials. Neither Alexandrine poetry nor plein-air painting is anything to the "people".”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

“Teaching the police to be more sensitive to the most exploited and oppressed is only a strategy designed to prevent police heavy-handedness from unintentionally sparking rebellions as they trample people in the performance of their duties.”
― Peter Gelderloos, The Failure of Nonviolence: From the Arab Spring to Occupy