ooops…....Sorry I thought this post was Hedge funds….
Oh well, here goes…I see the biggest problem facing America as the shameful lack of education. This dumbing down of america has it’s roots in the Industrial Revolution when you didn’t need to be educated to run a machine. High school drop out rates are around 35-40% and math and writing skills, science and creative thinking are replaced by sports programs. Education should be a National
Security issue with the same funding the military gets. hegemony???

I think it a big mistake to claim to the lofty peak as the ‘country to look up to’ and at a time when we forced people to ‘look at us’ as a bunch of hooligans that were intent on serious harm to the other countries, which we were. Some avoided us, some stood up to us and a lot just let us run them over. The claim ‘leader of the world’ will only keep a certain elite slant on a continuing hegemony over the rest of the world when we should be just trying to keep up good relations with all countries because any type of we ‘are the leader’ of the world only dictates that we will keep our selfish and empty lifestyles at the expense of the all the other countries, in other words, maintaining our hegemonistic imperial empire.
And a lot of this will be determined as to how the pentagon and the cia are reigned in and contained by congress playing the role the constitution put on them.

While it took a couple of hundred years for the empires of the past to crumble under their own weight (the Spanish, Dutch, English) we seem to forget that everything happens faster in the computer age. While the American empire was faultering as early as 1979, we will look back someday and realize that the Bush II presidency was our swan song. It has already proven the US to be a cruel and vindictive leader. Not that we have not committed attrocities in the past 60 years or so in the name of our hegemony, it’s that the bushies didn’t give a shit who knew! We tortured people with the care free attitude of Tor Kamada wearing a sandwich board, advertising thumb screws and disembowlings at half off.
We have forgotten that while being a good leader requires strength, it also requires compassion. Shrub has irreplable damaged the american reputation. In less than one generation, we have gone from benevolent father to the world, to malevolent big brother. Our charitable actions have been tied to our political and religious asperations.

The rest of the world used to look to America to show them the light. Now they look at us and wonder what we are doing in the dark.

Didnt Jefferson say, “I tremble for my country, when I think that god is just”?

We could have accepted that “all empires fall” with dignity, like the UK did (well, sortve..lol). We could have decided to focus on our economy and closed our military bases.

But USAns do not seem to want to do that. They want to keep flailing aroud for somone who will return us to “our position our moral leadership in the world”.

I , not only do not WANT to do that—we have neither the money nor the influence. The planet is better off with the uS as a minor power.

I find this an interesting idea and that is what it is, an idea most likely true. For one thing how will the military/industrial/congressional complex ever be able to keep up their totally outrageous demand for more and more money from the taxpayers other than just printing it? Most tell tale about it is in their hoodwinking of americans about the dire need of the ‘war on terror’; both the w & dick show along with a fairly strong complicit part of the pentagon have designated the war on terror as something like a D-day invasion senario, you know a full scale world war. All this has accomplished is to hide the real terrorists in the mixes of many different nations that most likely have no clue as to the nature of those people, people that for the most part have straight jobs and function as upright citizens. If our vaunted assholes that started this sham had been forced by congress not to take this path but one used by other countries that treated it as major crimes and investigated and researched the principals involve then there would be far fewer newer recruits for the real terrorist bands. I just wonder if enough damage has been done to really keep a strain on our and other country’s security forces to prevent something like the thugs, pirates and crime families from gaining an overpowering control over the planet just like w & dick have tried. Only time will tell and maybe within 100 days of obama taking office there will be evidence of how things are unfolding. As mentioned above, these pirates that seem to be getting away with everything until India rightfully or not blew their boat out of the water have to be getting support from somewhere. The equipment they use to reach so far out at sea to attack commercial vessels is not cheap and should be a point of investigation to stop their illegal activities.

...as he put it, prepare us for the day when we were no longer the single superpower…the big dog on the block.

Unfortunately we have projected the image of a big, snarling bully as we go on a downward spiral hastened by Bush. Our lives will only be harder if the last memory of the US in the international sense remains what it is.

God help us all.

hegemony is shortsighted and cooperation is not “soft”.