Here's a chart showing just one metric of imperial decline, the implosion of the US machine-tools industry (data from the ever-reliable folks at Gardner Publications):
| Region or Country | 2001 Production of Machine-tools as Percent World | 2010 Production of Machine-tools as Percent World |
| BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) | 8.9% | 32.4% |
| Europe (EU plus Switzerland) | 48.7% | 31.0% |
| East Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) | 14.0% | 30.4% |
| US | 7.9% | 3.1% |
(Side-note: the magnitude of the US decline is matched only by the slide of that other former superpower trashed by market fundamentalism, Britain, whose share of machine-tools production dropped from 2.3% in 2001 to 0.7% in 2010).
It doesn't have to be this way. If the US spent $1 trillion every year on education and green jobs instead of neocolonial war and drone strikes on Afghan wedding processions, 90% of our social and economic problems would go away within a decade.
America has a choice: military-colonial ruination, or eco-democratic rebirth.
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