Change Is Coming

http://www.rense.com/general92/goodbye.htm


Changes Are Coming - Things
We'll Be Saying Goodbye To
From Clark McClelland
12-25-10


This is long, but most frightening...

CHANGES ARE COMING
Whether these changes are good or bad depends in part on how we adapt to them. But, ready or not, here they come.

1. The Post Office. Get ready to imagine a world without the post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills.

2. The Check. Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with checks by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to process checks. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the eventual demise of the check. This plays right into the death of the post office. If you never paid your bills by mail and never received them by mail, the post office would absolutely go out of business.

3. The Newspaper. The younger generation simply doesn't read the newspaper. They certainly don't subscribe to a daily delivered print edition. That may go the way of the milkman and the laundry man. As for reading the paper online, get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile Internet devices and e-readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an alliance. They have met with Apple, Amazon, and the major cell phone companies to develop a model for paid subscription services.

4. The Book. You say you will never give up the physical book that you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages. I said the same thing about downloading music from iTunes. I wanted my hard copy CD. But I quickly changed my mind when I discovered that I could get albums for half the price without ever leaving home to get the latest music. The same thing will happen with books. You can browse a bookstore online and even read a preview chapter before you buy. And the price is less than half that of a real book. And think of the convenience! Once you start flicking your fingers on the screen instead of the book, you find that you are lost in the story, can't wait to see what happens next, and you forget that you're holding a gadget instead of a book.

5. The Land Line Telephone. Unless you have a large family and make a lot of local calls, you don't need it anymore. Most people keep it simply because they've always had it. But you are paying double charges for that extra service. All the cell phone companies will let you call customers using the same cell provider for no charge against your minutes.

6. Music. This is one of the saddest parts of the change story. The music industry is dying a slow death. Not just because of illegal downloading. It's the lack of innovative new music being given a chance to get to the people who would like to hear it. Greed and corruption is the problem. The record labels and the radio conglomerates are simply self-destructing. Over 40% of the music purchased today is "catalog items," meaning traditional music that the public is familiar with. Older established artists. This is also true on the live concert circuit. To explore this fascinating and disturbing topic further, check out the book, "Appetite for Self-Destruction" by Steve Knopper, and the video documentary, "Before the Music Dies."

7. Television. Revenues to the networks are down dramatically. Not just because of the economy. People are watching TV and movies streamed from their computers. And they're playing games and doing lots of other things that take up the time that used to be spent watching TV. Prime time shows have degenerated down to lower than the lowest common denominator. Cable rates are skyrocketing and commercials run about every 4 minutes and 30 seconds. I say good riddance to most of it. It's time for the cable companies to be put out of our misery. Let the people choose what they want to watch online and through Netflix.

8. The "Things" That You Own. Many of the very possessions that we used to own are still in our lives, but we may not actually own them in the future. They may simply reside in "the cloud." Today your computer has a hard drive and you store your pictures, music, movies, and documents. Your software is on a CD or DVD, and you can always re-install it if need be. But all of that is changing. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their latest "cloud services." That means that when you turn on a computer, the Internet will be built into the operating system. So, Windows, Google, and the Mac OS will be tied straight into the Internet. If you click an icon, it will open something in the Internet cloud. If you save something, it will be saved to the cloud. And you may pay a monthly subscription fee to the cloud provider.

In this virtual world, you can access your music or your books, or your whatever from any laptop or handheld device. That's the good news. But, will you actually own any of this "stuff" or will it all be able to disappear at any moment in a big "Poof?" Will most of the things in our lives be disposable and whimsical? It makes you want to run to the closet and pull out that photo album, grab a book from the shelf, or open up a CD case and pull out the insert.

9. Privacy. If there ever was a concept that we can look back on nostalgically, it would be privacy. That's gone. It's been gone for a long time anyway. There are cameras on the street, in most of the buildings, and even built into your computer and cell phone. But you can be sure that 24/7, "They" know who you are and where you are, right down to the GPS coordinates, and the Google Street View. If you buy something, your habit is put into a zillion profiles, and your ads will change to reflect those habits. And "They" will try to get you to buy something else. Again and again. All we will have that can't be changed are memories.


19 Facts About The Deindustrialization Of America That Will Blow Your Mind

The United States is rapidly becoming the very first "post-industrial" nation on the globe. All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing. It was America that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution. It was America that showed the world how to mass produce everything from automobiles to televisions to airplanes. It was the great American manufacturing base that crushed Germany and Japan in World War II.

But now we are witnessing the deindustrialization of America . Tens of thousands of factories have left the United States in the past decade alone. Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost in the same time period. The United States has become a nation that consumes everything in sight and yet produces increasingly little. Do you know what our biggest export is today? Waste paper. Yes, trash is the number one thing that we ship out to the rest of the world as we voraciously blow our money on whatever the rest of the world wants to sell to us.

The United States has become bloated and spoiled and our economy is now just a shadow of what it once was. Once upon a time America could literally out produce the rest of the world combined. Today that is no longer true, but Americans sure do consume more than anyone else in the world. If the deindustrialization of America continues at this current pace, what possible kind of a future are we going to be leaving to our children?

Any great nation throughout history has been great at making things. So if the United States continues to allow its manufacturing base to erode at a staggering pace how in the world can the U.S. continue to consider itself to be a great nation? We have created the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world in an effort to maintain a very high standard of living, but the current state of affairs is not anywhere close to sustainable. Every single month America goes into more debt and every single month America gets poorer.

So, what happens when the debt bubble pops?

The deindustrialization of the United States should be a top concern for every man, woman and child in the country. But sadly, most Americans do not have any idea what is going on around them.
For people like that, take this article and print it out and hand it to them. Perhaps what they will read below will shock them badly enough to awaken them from their slumber.

Here are 19 stunning facts about the deindustrialization of America :

#1 The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories since 2001. About 75 percent of those factories employed over 500 people when they were still in operation.

#2 Dell Inc., one of America 's largest manufacturers of computers, has announced plans to dramatically expand its operations in China with an investment of over $100 billion over the next decade.

#3 Dell has announced that it will be closing its last large U.S. manufacturing facility in Winston-Salem , North Carolina in November. Approximately 900 jobs will be lost.

#4 In 2008, 1.2 billion cell phones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States ? Zero.

#5 According to a new study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, if the U.S. trade deficit with China continues to increase at its current rate, the U.S. economy will lose over half a million jobs this year alone.

#6 As of the end of July, the U.S. trade deficit with China had risen 18 percent compared to the same time period a year ago.

#7 The United States has lost a total of about 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since October 2000.

#8 According to Tax Notes, between 1999 and 2008 employment at the foreign affiliates of U.S. parent companies increased an astounding 30 percent to 10.1 million. During that exact same time period, U.S. employment at American multinational corporations declined 8 percent to 21.1 million.

#9 In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of U.S. economic output. In 2008, it represented 11.5 percent.

#10 Ford Motor Company recently announced the closure of a factory that produces the Ford Ranger in St. Paul , Minnesota . Approximately 750 good paying middle class jobs are going to be lost because making Ford Rangers in Minnesota does not fit in with Ford's new "global" manufacturing strategy.

#11 As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing. The last time less than 12 million Americans were employed in manufacturing was in 1941.

#12 In the United States today, consumption accounts for 70 percent of GDP. Of this 70 percent, over half is spent on services.

#13 The United States has lost a whopping 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.

#14 In 2001, the United States ranked fourth in the world in per capita broadband Internet use. Today it ranks 15th.

#15 Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.

#16 Printed circuit boards are used in tens of thousands of different products. Asia now produces 84 percent of them worldwide.

#17 The United States spends approximately $3.90 on Chinese goods for every $1 that the Chinese spend on goods from the United States .

#18 One prominent economist is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040.

#19 The U.S. Census Bureau says that 43.6 million Americans are now living in poverty and according to them that is the highest number of poor Americans in the 51 years that records have been kept.

So, how many tens of thousands more factories do we need to lose before we do something about it?

How many millions more Americans are going to become unemployed before we all admit that we have a very, very serious problem on our hands?

How many more trillions of dollars are going to leave the country before we realize that we are losing wealth at a pace that is killing our economy?

How many once great manufacturing cities are going to become rotting war zones like Detroit before we understand that we are committing national economic suicide?

The deindustrialization of America is a national crisis. It needs to be treated like one.

And to underscore the above: 11/9/10: The largest private employer in Saginaw, Michigan will soon be the city government of Beijing, as a 104-year-old unit of General Motors will be sold to new owners from China. The $450M purchase received little attention this summer, but it is a landmark deal - the first time Chinese investors have bought a U.S. industrial operation of such scale and history.

Wikileaks, Israel and the UFO'S

The problem is not Wikileaks, it is the Zionist controlled media that refuse to publish the documents that relate to Israel.

Thanks to this censorship, we now know the media are a Zionist controlled entity.

As for the UFO's - Assange has released a heavily encrypted file on the internet as a torrent which will only be given the unlock codes via his lawyers if he has an 'accident'. This is a massive file.

There are only two subjects that the US government are afraid to admit - the existence of UFO's and their role in the 911 attacks.

This is why Assange had withheld the documents that reveal the reality of UFO's and any documents linked to 911 - as they prove the US government has lied about both.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/12/23/gordon-duff-julian-assange-wikileaks-a-fraud-run-by-press-for-israel/


“FOOL ME ONCE, SHAME ON YOU, FOOL ME TWICE….”

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/SeniorEditor

“it is one thing for the New York Times to edit their own stories but you let them censor everything for all of us”

Today, Julian Assange admitted that Wikileak material had been chosen by the press, not an independent organization after all. Wikileaks, in effect, admitted that it has always been a front for what Helen Thomas refers to as the Zionist controlled media. Assange, in a childish attempt at “spin” blamed the press for having too many “sensitivities ” to Israel and making Wikileaks look bad.

HELLO!

The only reason we needed Wikileaks in the first place is that the press failed so utterly. Is it any secret that Assange turned total control of Wikileaks over to the press, the people who gave him “rock star” status? How utterly sick.

CHICKENFEED ONCE MORE

Now Assange is telling us he has 3700 cables from the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, documents covering an Israeli assassination and the tail kicking they got when they last invaded Lebanon. Anyone who thinks they can expect to hear the embassy communications outlining American outrage at Israeli actions will die waiting. Expect the same “media sensitivities” we have seen all along.

By “media sensitivities” we are simply saying that Israel controls Wikileaks and uses it to bash their enemies, the United States and their neighbors, some we now learn have been their friends all along.

SHAMEFUL ADMISSION DISGUISED AS SPIN

Wikileaks had promised the press thousands of documents about a “UFO War over the Southern Ocean.” I couldn’t wait for this one. Instead, seemingly clever Julian Assange in his most apologetic manner is now telling us that he has sinned. Where did the mysterious UFO story go? Who told you to withhold it? Are we sitting on that story because President Obama is now drumbeating for war with Iran full time?

WIKILEAKS ADMITS TO BEING A FRAUD

He let the press control Wikileaks.

Julian, if we wanted to read the New York Times, we would go out and get one. Now you are telling us that the Times, a worthless rag of a newspaper, has been running Wikileaks all along? Do you know what “fraud” means?

If we wanted to hear what Israel wanted us to hear, we simply would have turned on our televisions. We have had nothing else for decades. Now you admit you have been a part of it. Are we supposed to be surprised?

You weren’t that hard to figure out. Every day, a new photograph in hundreds of newspapers, always posed, always thoughtful. You spend 9 days waiting for bail and we find out that you have been working for the press, working for Israel, working for the most powerful and devious forces known to mankind all along? You needed 240,000 pounds for bail? This wouldn’t be a one month retainer for your lawyer or publicists. The people you work for use money like that for lighting cigars.

We know it was all an act, just like this is part of that act, more drama brought on because some of us caught you early on and have “outed” you. What I find amazing is your chutzpah. You admit to using us all, defrauding us, being a disinformation agent.

Now you are taking a second shot at deceiving us all. What we expect is the same press that you are now accusing, now supposedly “distancing” yourself from will be the lead on this new story. What we are going to get is the New York Times, the Guardian, der Spiegel, the same triumvirate of baloney, your partners in crime, spreading the same old Wikileaks chickenfeed mixed in with Israeli disinformation and leaks designed to hurt the US government and discredit your Islamic neighbors.

Yes, Julian. They are your Islamic neighbors. If you don’t have Israeli citizenship yet, you soon will. They need another comedian and that seems to be your only real talent. I do so love your choice of words.

“SENSITIVITIES”

What you call “sensitivities,” a word that undoubtedly came from a committee of advisors juggling emails between New York and Tel Aviv is simply lying and cheating to the rest of us. You lied to us all, not once but continually and now you think we are going to take more of your lies simply because they are delivered with a half hearted apology?

Chutzpah

The Police and CPS In Britain are Mad

Hanging the Cross of St.George on a fence in England is now racism.

Those the gods wish to destroy, they first drive mad.

This country is being destroyed by the lunatics in the police and CPS.


http://www.readingchronicle.co.uk/news/roundup/articles/2010/12/23/49936-st-georges-flag-protest-lands-in-court


St George's flag protest lands in court

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THE English Defence League staged a protest in Reading today (Thursday) in support of a man arrested after hanging a St George’s flag outside a mosque.

Around 20 members of the controversial campaign group came from across the South East to demonstrate outside Reading Magistrates’ Court monitored by a heavy police presence.

Among them was co-founder Tommy Robinson, who told The Chronicle: “Our argument is with militant Islam. What’s far right about protecting women’s rights and gay people’s rights? The problem is the teachers of Islam, it’s got nothing to do with your colour. It all comes back to the Koran.”

Inside the court 37-year-old Tilehurst man Ronald Peterson was on trial for religiously aggravated harassment. The court heard he went to the partially built mosque in Oxford Road, west Reading, on May 30 to protest over the way its planning application was handled by the borough council.

Peterson, with two other men, draped the St George’s flag on a fence, posed for pictures and chanted “E, E, E.D.L” and “England”.

Witness Urfan Azad, 32, told the court he was in the nearby Reading Tea House and went outside after hearing the chanting.

He said he dialled 999 because he was concerned the situation could escalate, and added: “My concern was the flag needed to be taken off the fence because it might be seen by Muslims as a religious symbol. I felt upset about the whole incident. I’m British myself, I was born in Reading. It’s made me feel a bit socially excluded.”

Police arrived on the scene within minutes and, without warning him or giving him a chance to move on, arrested Peterson on the spot. Sgt Lee Barnham said he spoke to Mr Azad, and added: “He was offended by the use of what he considered to be a religious cross against the site of worship.

“It was clear he was upset and felt intimidated. I was satisfied an offence under the public order act had been committed.”

Peterson, who described the mosque as an “eyesore” and “monstrosity”, told the court he was unhappy because it had not been built in the required time but instead had planning permission re-granted and was given council funding.

Peterson denied being a racist but said he had a problem with the ideology of Islam. He added: “Go and see countries that are run by that ideology, it’s oppressive.”

District Judge Andrew Vickers reserved his verdict and the case was adjourned until January 13.

Roots, Thor and the Race Double Standard

The casting of black actors in Thor the movie is fine - if the media and Hollywood will start casting a white man in the re-make of Roots, a white man in Porgy and Bess and whites taking the role of blacks in the Lion King.


I wonder if that will ever happen.

Merry Xmas Folks

A merry Christmas to everyone - and lets remember that the meaning of Christmas is Christ not consumerism or mammon.

The Oil Age Ends

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/23/reactor-fuel-sunlight



Researchers develop reactor to make fuel from sunlight

Scientists raise hopes for a large-scale renewable source of liquid fuel with a simple reactor that mimics plants

• Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes

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* Damian Carrington
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 23 December 2010 19.00 GMT
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A simple reactor that mimics plants by turning sunlight into fuel has been demonstrated in the laboratory, boosting hopes for a large-scale renewable source of liquid fuel.

"We have a big energy problem and we have to think big," said Prof Sossina Haile, at the California Institute of Technology, who led the research.

Haile estimates that a rooftop reactor could produce about three gallons of fuel a day. She thinks transport fuels would be the first application of the reactor, if it goes on to commercial use. But she said an equally important use for the renewable fuels would be to store solar energy so it is available at times of peak demand, and overnight. She says the first improvements that will be made to the existing reactor will be to improve the insulation to help stop heat loss, a simple move that she expects to treble the current efficiency.

The key component is made from the metal cerium, which is almost as abundant as copper, unlike other rare and expensive metals frequently used as catalysts, such as platinum. Therefore, said Haile, availability would not limit the use of the device. "There is nothing cost prohibitive in our set-up," she said. "And there is plenty of cerium for this technology to make a major contribution to global gasoline supplies."

The fossil fuels used by vehicles, ships and aeroplanes pose the biggest challenge in the search for low-carbon energy, as they are highly energy-dense and portable, unlike alternatives such as batteries or nuclear reactors. An efficient, large-scale way of converting solar energy into a renewable liquid fuel could play a major role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and tackling climate change.

The device, reported in the journal Science, uses a standard parabolic mirror to focus the sun's rays into a reaction chamber where the cerium oxide catalyst breaks down water and carbon dioxide. It does this because heating cerium oxide drives oxygen atoms out of its crystal lattice. When cooled the lattice strips oxygen from surrounding chemicals, including water and CO2 in the reactor. That produces hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which can be converted to a liquid fuel.

In the experiments the reactor cycled up to 1,600C then down to 800C over 500 times, without damaging the catalyst. "The trick here is the cerium oxide – it's very refractory, it's a rock," said Haile. "But it still has this incredible ability to release oxygen. It can lose one in eight of its oxygen molecules." Caltech has filed patents on this use of cerium oxide.

The use of sunlight to make fuel is being explored by groups around the world, such as that lead by Daniel Nocera at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. His group's technology works at room temperature but is more complex chemically. At the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory last year researchers found cobalt oxide could help sunlight create fuels, but only as nano-sized crystals. Imperial College in London is also exploring different catalysts.

Other groups are exploring the use of CO2 from power station flues to create liquid fuels, while a related research effort is testing how algae grown in sunlight can be used to create fuels.

Happy Birthday The State

http://tarpley.net/2010/12/23/december-23-1310-emperor-henry-vii-of-luxemburg-supported-by-dante-arrived-in-milan-and-started-the-process-leading-to-the-modern-state-%E2%80%93-700-years-ago-today/


December 23, 1310: Emperor Henry VII of Luxemburg, Supported by Dante, Arrived in Milan and Started the Process Leading to the Modern State – 700 Years Ago Today
[Translate]

Webster G. Tarpley
TARPLEY.net
December 23, 2010
Henry VII
Henry VII of Luxemburg

Today, December 23, 2010, marks one of the most important world-historical anniversaries of all time. Seven hundred years ago this evening, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII of Luxemburg passed through the city gates of Milan, Italy and set into motion the process leading to the most important political innovation of the past 2,000 years: the modern state.
Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri

Henry VII’s most vocal political supporter and advocate was the Florentine exile Dante Alighieri, by all odds the greatest man of the second millennium AD. Dante’s immediate goal was to end the fratricidal party strife between the Guelf (pro-papal) and Ghibelline (pro-imperial) factions by restoring imperial guidance to the northern Italian city states, which had been gripped by growing anarchy and incipient civil war since the death of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen and the end of his southern Italian kingdom 60 years earlier. One of the victims of this anarchy had been Dante himself, who was driven out of Florence in 1303 by the ascendant Black Guelf party, acting with the encouragement of the simonist pope, Boniface VIII.

The Greyhound

Dante’s Divine Comedy, the first sustained poetic effort in Italian and the first masterpiece in a modern language, was written as an ideological handbook and justification for Henry VII’s Italian expedition and the restoration of a balance between pope and emperor in northern and central Italy. In Canto I of the Inferno, when Dante is lost in the dark wood of error, his guide Vergil foretells the coming of “il veltro” — a greyhound who will destroy the wolf of avarice, the source of all depraved desires, thought by some to represent the banking power, especially its Venetian aspect. The greyhound is a figure for Henry VII. The entire “Divine Comedy” is full of references and prophecies about Henry VII, too many to be enumerated here.

In Milan, Henry VII’s modest retinue of a few thousand troops were awaited by the hostile but politically decrepit Guelf regime of the Torriani family, who had driven the Ghibelline opposition out of the city. Henry VII’s general policy was that political exiles should be allowed to return to their homes, and in the case of Milan this included Matteo Visconti and his followers, who had originally come from the Pavia area, between Milan and the Po River. Before long, the Ghibelline Matteo Visconti had ousted the Torriani family from power and established one of the most important family regimes in all of European history.

After being crowned King of Lombardy in the church of St. Ambrose in Milan on January 6, 1310, Henry VII attempted to reconcile the factions of other northern Italian cities. Ghibelline cities like Verona, Pisa, Arezzo, Modena, and Mantua welcomed Henry, but the more numerous Guelf rulers soon formed a league to resist him, including by waging war. The prime mover of this rebellion was Guelf Florence, controlled by Dante’s mortal enemies, the Black Guelfs. Henry VII, despite his inadequate forces, responded by besieging Florence, albeit unsuccessfully.

In Cantos 8 and 9 of the Inferno, Dante and Vergil are for a time prevented from passing through the walls that surround the lower hell or City of Dis by the largest and most aggressive assembly of demons the two wayfarers ever encounter in the underworld. This is a pandemonium of pagan and other monsters, featuring Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera, the three furies of Greek lore, plus the severed head of the Gorgon Medusa, which these infernal guards intend to use to turn Dante into stone. The demonic resistance cannot be put down by human reason as represented by Vergil, who must wait for an angel or heavenly messenger to quell the rebellion against the divine will, which wants Dante to see the lower hell and tell the world what he was seen. This is followed by an admonition to the reader to look below the surface meaning to understand the allegorical message Dante sought to impart. According to Pietrobono and some of the better commentators, the walls of lower hell are to be understood as a metaphor for the walls of Florence during Henry’s siege of that city, with the Black Guelfs as recalcitrant demons. Hell is a city much like Florence under the Black Guelfs, says Dante.

In addition to devoting so much of the Divine Comedy to Henry VII, Dante also wrote about his hopes for the new emperor in three of his few extant Latin letters. Letter V, probably written in the fall of 1310, proclaims the coming of Henry VII as the new Moses and bridegroom of long-suffering Italy. Letter VI is an emphatic prophecy of ruin for Henry VII’s enemies, who will see their cities destroyed as punishment for their resistance, despite their contemptible fortifications (ridiculo cuiquam vallo). Letter VII exhorts Henry VII to stop wasting time with the rebellions fomented in Brescia and other cities, and to strike directly at the heart of the insurrection by launching a new attack on Florence, the stinking vixen of the Arno. Finally, Dante’s treatise on politics and government, De Monarchia, is a theoretical expression of the idea that the temporal rule of the emperor is superior to the political authority of the Roman pope, who needs to focus on spiritual matters.

Henry VII of Luxemburg died in August of 1313, just as he was preparing a new attack on Florence. He is likely to have been poisoned by political adversaries.

Dante’s detractors have never tired of deriding the failure of his attempt to restore civic peace in northern and central Italy with the help or a revivified Holy Roman Empire. But this ignores the two political powers that Henry VII helped to establish. One was Verona under the Scala family; Can Grande della Scala was one of Dante’s benefactors in exile, and for a time seemed likely to dominate northern Italy, perhaps including Venice. The other imperial vicars who became prominent were the Visconti.

By the end of 1313, the Visconti state controlled not just Milan, but also Lombard towns like Piacenza, Lodi, Bobbio, and Novara. In 1314, they added Como, Bergamo, and Tortona. In 1315, Pavia and Cremona were conquered, while Alessandria invited them in to escape the repressive rule of the French-backed Anjou overlords. In 1316, Parma and Vercelli joined the Visconti state. As the leading scholarly study of Henry VII by William M. Bowsky concludes, the Visconti power “owed its start, both militarily and legally, to Henry of Luxemburg.”
Giangaleazzo Visconti
Giangaleazzo Visconti, c. 1400: Architect of the First Prototype of the Modern State

It was a somewhat later Milanese ruler of this line, Giangaleazzo Visconti, who in the years around 1400 created a large northern Italian state which must be considered as the first prototype of the modern state. Giangaleazzo’s state included most of northern Italy, with the key exceptions of Venice and Tuscany. He ruled Verona, Cremona, Brescia, Belluno, Pieve di Cadore, Feltre, Pavia, Novara, Como, Lodi, Vercelli, Alba, Asti, Pontremoli, Tortona, Alessandria, Valenza, Piacenza, Parma, Reggio Emilia, Vicenza, and Vigevano. Another year and Florence would have appeared on the list, and shortly thereafter, probably Venice, making the Kingdom of Italy a viable reality.

Milan was traditionally the richest city in western Europe, and its only serious competitor for first place in Europe as a whole was Constantinople. Giangaleazzo’s political method featured two aspects which have remained indispensable to the modern state. The first was an economic recovery program favoring the middle class: when Giangaleazzo seized control of Milan, he implemented a tax amnesty, cancelling the debts owed by citizens to the tax collector. This would be the modern equivalent of a debt moratorium or cancellation.

Giangaleazzo’s other hallmark was the building of modern infrastructure. For Milan, that meant a very advanced system of canals in and around Milan, and reaching down to the Po and other rivers — the navigli, many of which still exist, covered over with more recent constructions. These canals enabled Giangaleazzo to make rapid progress on the Milanese Duomo, the most ambitious late Gothic cathedral in Europe, and to build the striking Charterhouse of Pavia (Certosa di Pavia), a Carthusian monastery.

Milan was also the European leader in key areas of advanced technology, especially in steel and other metallurgy. The Milanese arms and armor industry was in demand from both England and France, the antagonists in the Hundred Years War of 1337-1453.

By 1402 Giangaleazzo was thus well on his way to accomplishing the single most important thing needed to consolidate the gains of the Italian renaissance — unifying northern and central Italy into a powerful national state capable of preventing the country from becoming a battlefield between France and Spain, as happened in the years after 1494, with the most tragic consequences. But in 1402, just as Giangaleazzo was about to add Florence and Tuscany to his emerging nation, he died in September 1402 under mysterious circumstances, just like Henry VII in 1313 and Dante in 1321.

After 1402, Giangaleazzo’s new state quickly fell apart, but was largely re-assembled by his second oldest son, Filippo Maria Visconti. After Filippo Maria, the Milanese state passed under the control of Francesco Sforza, a military leader who had married Filippo Maria’s daughter. In this latter form it was closely studied and imitated by King Louis XI of France, who successfully created the world’s first modern state, no longer a prototype, during his reign of 1461-1483.

The importance and positive potential of the Visconti has been obscured for generations of readers by the profoundly misleading work of the late historian Hans Baron, who could only regard the Visconti as tyrants and precursors of Mussolini and Hitler — a total distortion. For Baron, the positive forces were the sleazy pols of the Florentine Guelf Party and their spokesmen, oligarchs who refused to write in Italian and reverted to Latin, lest the plebs gain insight into statecraft. Francesco Petrarca, Dante’s successor in the effort of promote a renaissance out of the shipwreck of late medieval Europe, did not agree with the pedantic Baron: Petrarch thought highly enough of the Visconti to go to work for them as a diplomat for five years during the 1350s.

The Holy Roman Empire (Sacro Romano Impero, or Heiliges Roemisches Reich Deutscher Nation) was the direct descendant of the empire assembled by Charlemagne around 800 AD. It was an amalgam of much of central Europe, including Germany, Bohemia, Holland and the Low Countries, northern and central Italy, and some adjacent areas. Holy Roman Emperors like Henry VII were chosen by an electoral college of seven members, including the King of Bohemia, the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier, plus the rulers of Saxony, the Palatinate along the Rhine, and Brandenburg-Prussia. The newly elected emperor was immediately declared King of the Romans, but he then was supposed to go to Italy to be crowned with the iron crown of Lombardy in Monza near Milan. He was then supposed to go on to Rome to be crowned as Holy Roman Emperor by the pope. This was the traditional itinerary which Henry VII was following, even as he tried to restore imperial authority south of the Alps. Matters were complicated by the fact that the pope in 1310 was the Gascon Clement V, a puppet of Philip the Fair of France (whom Dante called “the French disease”); Clement V lived in Avignon, and never came to Rome. Henry VII was crowned by a cardinal in St. John Lateran, which was controlled by the Ghibelline Colonna family, rather than in St. Peter’s, which was behind the lines of the Guelf Orsini clan.

From Thomas Carlyle and Francesco De Sanctis to the quackademics of today, modern oligarchs have mocked and reviled Dante’s efforts to restore legality to northern and central Italy with the help of Henry VII. The lesson of the story is that Dante failed in the narrow sense of restoring the empire, but succeeded in the larger project launching a process leading to the modern state, and with it modern civilization. Success does not always come in the form we expect, but we must welcome progress nevertheless.

Today, with the modern state under assault by nihilists, anarchists, and barbarians of the extreme left and the reactionary right, proponents of civilization and culture need to recommit themselves to the indispensable institution of the modern state, and to the world-historical geniuses and heroes, starting with Dante, who have worked to create it.