Since the global corporate Empire which began its growth center in the US has already exploited the natural commonwealth of the US and it citizens to what the CIA identifies as a level endangering ‘social unrest” (GINI .45), any further economic exploitation would seem to be necessarily done beyond close proximity with the Empire ----- that is, remote in either time or space.
Luckily corporations, and particularly the global corporate Empire, is very practiced in delaying the collapse of Ponzi schemes by materializing profits through the magic of hiding costs over both time and space. Enron famously buried costs (expenses) to appear much more profitable than it was, but their methodology was gross accounting fraud. The preferred and perfected way that corporations hide costs and thus increase private profits to the upper reaches of their Ponzi pyramid scheme is by ‘gaming’ the known market failure of ‘negative externalities’.
Simply stated, undertaking economic actions that generate superficial 'private profits' to the actor, while dumping large negative externality 'social costs' on others, has been perfected as the preferred dirty, but profitable corporate business model. [EG. cigarette companies easily generate high private profits by simply hiding and avoiding the massive health costs of cigarettes in their customers lungs for years as 'social costs'. Oil corporations do the same (Exxon $40B) by selling gasoline and hiding the negative externality costs in our climate over centuries]. Recently, private equity pirates and hedge fund bandits have developed a newer and novel negative externality pumping/dumping scheme for doing the same thing by stripping assets, monetizing them (creating gold out of air) and then dumping a debt bomb on the world. Innumerable variations on this seminal strategy of hiding or ‘socializing’ negative externality costs to increase and ‘privatize’ profit flowing into large scale global Ponzi schemes are widely varied and can hide the externality costs far from the doorstep of the empire by moving them forward in ‘time’ or by removing them geographically in ‘space’.
The only problem with running any global Empire which constantly increases private profits by dumping massively increasing negative externality costs on the whole world is that the people and countries being hurt the most may object strongly, and thus the need for what General Smedley Butler so impolitely called "military musclemen". But, of course, a global corporate/financial elite Empire which has set itself off on this expanding Ponzi scheme can't stop and doesn't want to actually have to pay for the military muscle, and that's where controlling a formerly sovereign nation-state that happens to be a 'super power' comes in handy.
In summary, the global Empire exists, and it "pays off" for the empire itself because they always pump increasing profits to themselves and in a one-way stream pump most costs on everyone else. And those who might argue with the empire's methods get a sharp lance in the eye --- at no cost to the empire. The lance is delivered by military force in wars (or domestic controls) that are justified as necessary in the vague (GWOT) Global War on Terror against terrorists everywhere, and this military power is endorsed by the political charade of a “Vichy America” government which is totally and guilefully controlled by the global Empire, but finally the benefits of this entire military political economic structure are dimly viewable through the reality of the “Economics of Empire”.
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