Not much action at the end of last week… Gold closed the week over $1,600. Oil remained over $100.

The show goes on!

We are watching the destruction of an empire. All empires must go away sometime. They are natural things. And nature puts a time bomb in everything she creates.

The US empire is doomed. Just like all the others that went before it. It is doomed by nature herself — condemned by the gods to blow up and die.

None of this should be surprising to you, dear reader. We’ve seen this movie before. Hundreds of empires have come and gone. We know how this movie ends. More or less.

What we know for sure is that the US is going broke. There is hardly any other plausible outcome. We’ve gone over the numbers so often we don’t need to repeat them.

Yes, it is true that the feds could still save themselves….if they had the will. They could cut taxes to a flat 10%…and spend only what they raised in tax revenue… That would do the trick from an economic point of view.

But it’s too late for that — politically. Empires have lives of their own. They go forward…expanding…spending…stretching…until, boom, they go too far. Empires do not back up.

Some merely go bankrupt. Others are defeated in war. All end disastrously.

Only one candidate favors rescuing the nation’s finances and pulling the empire back from disaster. Ron Paul. He is considered such an unelectable kook that the newspapers barely mention him. And the papers are right. He is unelectable. Because he is opposed by the zombies.

We have explained how government really works. It is barbarism in action. Powerful insiders use force — police and military force — to transfer wealth and status to themselves. In the process, they turn their clients…and themselves…into parasitic zombies. The zombies support the insiders. The insiders throw the zombies a bone or two. Together they corrupt and destroy the empire.

Here is just one example from last week’s news. Bloomberg:

Despite the sluggish economy, the nation’s major health insurers have prospered in large part by expanding their role in government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, according to a study released Thursday.

The share of large insurers’ revenues contributed by their Medicare and Medicaid business has jumped from 36 to 42 percent over the past three years. And the report by Bloomberg Government, a research division of Bloomberg LP, suggests that insurers will further increase their reliance on federal dollars with full implementation of the health-care law in 2014 — when Medicaid will expand to cover an eventual 16 million additional low-income Americans and the federal government will begin subsidizing private-insurance policies for an estimated 19 million more.

The insurers have become zombified. They no longer do honest work for honest reward. Instead, they lobby for more federal spending on health. They tweak the nation’s laws and its public health programs to make sure they get the grease. They are insiders now…

But no sector has more zombies in it than the ‘national security’ industry. Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation in 1961 to watch out for the ‘military, industrial complex.’ He might have saved his breath. The zombies had already taken over. The US was already spending more on ‘defense’ than the net income of all American corporations put together.

“In the years since,” writes Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair, “the trend has warped virtually every aspect of national life, with consequences that are quite radical in their cumulative effect on the economy, on the vast machinery of official secrecy, on the country’s sense of itself, and on the very nature of national government in Washington. And yet the degree to which America has changed is noticed by almost no one — not in any visceral way. The transformation has ten hold too gradually and over too long a period. Almost no one alive today has a mature, firsthand memory of a country that used to be very different…”

Benito Mussolini was a socialist poet. But when he got into power he, like Barack Obama years later, discovered that it was not a good idea to oppose the military. Instead, he put on a silly uniform himself…and attacked Abyssinia!

Dear Readers may have noticed too. Between Obama’s military policies and those of George W. Bush, there is not a dime’s worth of real difference. Why? Because a zombie military is almost impossible to cut down to size. It has already corrupted the political process. Now, the zombies cannot be stopped…or controlled.

A bankrupt government can cut almost anything else. But not its military. National security industry insiders glide easily into the seats left by politicians who try to stop them. Ex-generals counsel wimpy Congressmen. Flies and flakes buzz around the trillion-dollar ‘defense’ honey pot.

Military spending rose about 70% during the George W. Bush years. Today, the US spends 43 cents of every dollar of military spending anywhere in the world. And now, with the hysteria of “terrorism” and a “nuclear Iran,” who will oppose it?

Many of the nation’s biggest manufacturers are weapons producers — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northup-Grumman, L3 and KBR. The jump in employment numbers were largely the result of government hiring. We have seen a figure over 40% for the portion of domestic manufacturing devoted to the zombie defense industry. Among the most profitable businesses in the country are surely the 2,000 corporations getting money for counter-terrorism, homeland security, military intelligence and other boondoggles.

In Washington itself, 33 new building complexes have been put up since 2001 whose occupants are somehow involved in top-secret activities.

Yes, dear reader, the armed zombies pretend to protect the ‘land of the free.’ But they are its biggest enemies. In 2011, they put through a new defense spending bill…which removed Americans’ ancient habeas corpus rights. The Commander-in-Chief also asserted, and exercised, the right to kill anyone, anywhere…on his own say-so. And both the president and Congress continued to spend money they didn’t have on cockamamie boondoggles even though it is obvious that the nation is going broke.

It is only a matter of time now. The empire will be stabbed in the back by its own protectors.

Bill Bonner is the President of Agora Publishing. For more on Bill Bonner, visit The Daily Reckoning.