Chris Hedges on the Horrifying Decline of the American Empire and the Economic Collapse (2012)

Persistently high U.S. unemployment remains, along with low consumer confidence, the continuing decline in home values and increase in foreclosures and bankruptcies, an increasing debt, inflation, and rising gas and food prices. Hedges' books: https://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&tag=tra0c7-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=75072e827a93cace016f29427ba9969c&camp=1789&creative=9325&index=books&keywords=chris%20hedges

In fact, a 2011 poll found that more than half of all Americans think the U.S. is still in recession or even depression, although economic data show a historically modest recovery. This could be due to the fact that both private and public levels of debt are at historic highs in the U.S. and in many other countries, and a number of economists believe that excessive debt plays a role in causing bank crises and sovereign default.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_2000s_recession

Herbert London has defined pre-emptive declinism as a postmodern belief "that the United States is not an exceptional nation and is not entitled by virtue of history to play a role on the world stage different from other nations".[75] London ascribed the view to Paul Krugman, among others.[76] Krugman had written in The New York Times that "We've always known that America's reign as the world's greatest nation would eventually end. But most of us imagined that our downfall, when it came, would be something grand and tragic."[76]
According to RealClearPolitics, declarations of America's declining power have been common in the English-language media. In 1988, Flora Lewis sighed that "Talk of U.S. decline is real in the sense that the U.S. can no longer pull all the levers of command or pay all the bills." According to Anthony Lewis in 1990, Europeans and Asians are already finding confirmation of their suspicion that the United States is in decline. Citing America's dependence on foreign sources for energy and "crucial weaknesses" in the military, Tom Wicker concluded "that maintaining superpower status is becoming more difficult—nearly impossible—for the United States".[77] In 2004, Pat Buchanan lamented "the decline and fall of the greatest industrial republic the world had ever seen".[78] In 2007, Matthew Parris of The Sunday Times in London wrote that the United States is "overstretched", romantically recalling the Kennedy presidency, when "America had the best arguments" and could use moral persuasion rather than force to have its way in the world. From his vantage point in Shanghai, the International Herald Tribune's Howard French worries about "the declining moral influence of the United States" over an emergent China.[77]
In his book, The Post-American World, Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria refers to a "Post-American world" that he says "is not about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism#Criticism

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