Empires End

The 'American Empire' seems to be drawing to an end after about seventy years of total economic and political dominance, and as the economy falls into a cycle of deep recessions which is mirrored by the other *Western economies retracting with it, there are some strange stories popping up


Empire Nevada, Modern Ghost Town.

 

 .... not least of these are the rust belt towns in Europe and the USA, and now these are spreading into previously prosperous suburbs.

 

In Europe, the old cotton mill, coal mining and iron smelting towns represent this decline, and in the US its very similar, where the East Coast, North and North East are littered with similar towns. But this week the tale of the decline of a company town in the Black Rock Desert, in remote north-western Nevada encapsulated the collapse of the western world economies in this latest recession .... its name somewhat ironically is 'Empire'.

 

Empire is, or rather was, a company mining town, that last year boasted a population of more than 300 people in a bustling community, that also had two churches, a golf course, swimming pool and a small desert airstrip. Its population mainly worked in a gypsum mine that has now closed because the building trade that it had serviced since the 1920's has dramatically declined. So as he mine has closed, so the town has closed, the residents having all been made redundant, and told to leave the company housing, with just a small maintenance crew left behind .... Ninety years of western industry gone in a few weeks.

There is some talk of re-opening the mine when economic conditions are better, but most of the former residents think the town is now dead for good .....  the knock on effect of this closure is that the other related small satellite desert communities are also facing economic meltdown, as the money from Empire has vanished from the local economy. In the small town of Gerlach, which provided the school for all the small local communities, including Empire, the high school has gone from eighty students and twenty five staff, to nine children and three teachers. No viable school, means that this town will die as well ......

Empire Store Closed For Ever

 

The so called 'investment bankers' who brought us to our economic knees, should think about the end of Empire, and the broken livelihoods that it represents. There are many more such communities across the western world who face as bleak a future, and its these victims who politicians should be helping, and not propping up a banking system that has basically failed us all, in its all out of pursuit of quick excess profits.

*Actually there is nothing inevitable about this, but the will power to turn ourselves into viable manufacturing economies again, seems to be beyond us, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world. At the very least we are going to have to share economic power with the Chinese .....