the cubic foot of natural gas. Nuclear plants are not built without the edifice of the capitalist state. Oil ports are not built and protected without the superstructure of the capitalist military machine. Natural gas and petroleum does not get moved from West Africa to Port Elizabeth without a "global force for good" primed to destroy any lesser challengers and enforce the maritime peace of empire.

Chaos and violence are allowed to spread from the capitols and bourse cities of the US and Europe, from emerging China and rising Brazil. They are not allowed to flow back. When "illegals" cross into Arizona, or third generation "guest worker" Turks ask for rights in Stuttgart, the system's managers, officials, factors and armed enforcers respond. When Marxists seize portions of the Colombianllanos, the weapons, funding and material support flow to contain and kill them. When peasants siphon off oil from sabotaged pipelines in Nigeria, mercenaries get their orders.

There are few obstructions, going outward, and countless coming in.

Power's effects flow out from the center, spread by law, exchange and force outward as chaos, as discipline, as repression, as the peace of tombs and graves. As the marketization of love, loyalty, entertainment, hunger, sex and death.

Until they don't.

Because, eventually, the conceit of empire wears thin, ground down by the friction of its own operation. Inhuman events intervene. And while arrogance in the halls of power is rarely mitigated, or itself dispersed, it eventually must encounter the monsters of its own making. Toxic financial crises. Irradiation of whole regions and nuclear catastrophe.