This is how empires collapse: one complicit participant at a time.

Before an empire collapses, it first erodes from within. The collapse may appear sudden, but the processes of internal rot hollowed out the resilience, resolve, purpose and vitality of the empire long before its final implosion.

What are these processes of internal rot? Here are a few of the most pervasive and destructive forces of internal corrosion:

1. Each institution within the system loses sight of its original purpose of serving the populace and becomes self-serving. This erosion of common purpose serving the common good is so gradual that participants forget there was a time when the focus wasn't on gaming the system to avoid work and accountability but serving the common good.

2. The corrupt Status Quo corrupts every individual who works within the system.Once an institution loses its original purpose and becomes self-serving, everyone within either seeks to maximize their own personal share of the swag and minimize their accountability, or they are forced out as a potentially dangerous uncorrupted insider.

The justification is always the same: everybody else is getting away with it, why shouldn't I? Empires decline one corruptible individual at a time.

As the standoff in the eastern Ukraine deteriorates into violence it's up to world powers to step in and calm things down. Despite tough talk from Washington, the US, EU, Russia and Ukraine have managed to reach a framework to peace in Geneva. But will it be enough to avert a civil war? Sophie asks the Russian Foreign minister himself - Sergey Lavrov is on Sophie&Co today.


Full Transcript:

Sophie Shevardnadze: Sergey Lavrov, Russia's Foreign minister, it's great to have you on our show today.

Sergey Lavrov: Thank you for the invitation.

SS: So, just the other day Joe Biden on his visit to Kiev said that time is short for Russia to make progress on its commitments made in Geneva. What is expected of Russia?

SL: Well, it's difficult to say because I discuss this almost daily with John Kerry. And frankly the American colleagues chose to put all the blame on Russia, including the origin of the conflict and including the steps which must be taken. They accuse us of having Russian troops, Russian agents in the east and South of Ukraine. They say that it is for the Russians only to give orders and the buildings illegally occupied would be liberated and that it is for the Russians to make sure that the East and South of Ukraine stops putting forward the demands for the federalization and the referendum and so on and so forth. This is absolute...you know...switching the goal post if you wish. In Geneva we all agreed that there must be reciprocal approach to any illegitimate action in Ukraine, be it in Kiev, be it in the West, be it in the East, be it in the South. And the people who started the process of illegitimate actions must step back first. It is absolutely abnormal due to any norms in a European city that Maidan is still occupied, that the buildings in Kiev are still occupied and in some other cities, that those who put on fire the buildings belonging to Communist party headquarters in Kiev, the buildings belonging to the Trade Union headquarters are not even under investigation. I don't even want to mention the sniper cases because everyone forgot about those snipers. And we only hear that "Let's concentrate on eliminating terrorist threats in the East and in the South".

Turkey has, for the first time, offered condolences to the descendants of the victims of the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman troops during the First World War.

In a rare expression of sympathy on the eve of the 99th anniversary of the mass killing of Armenians, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued an official statement on Wednesday which was translated into nine different languages, including Armenian.

Using an unprecedented conciliatory language, the Turkish premier called for dialogue between the two countries, and the formation of a commission to probe the incident.

"It is with this hope and belief that we wish that the Armenians who lost their lives in the context of the early 20th century rest in peace, and we convey our condolences to their grandchildren," Erdogan said.

"Having experienced events which had inhumane consequences - such as relocation - during the First World War, should not prevent Turks and Armenians from establishing compassion and mutually humane attitudes towards one another," he added.

With the agility of a seasoned Border Patrol veteran, the woman rushed after the students. She caught up with them just before they entered the exhibition hall of the eighth annual Border Security Expo, reaching out and grabbing the nearest of them by the shoulder. Slightly out of breath, she said, "You can't go in there, give me back your badges."

The astonished students had barely caught a glimpse of the dazzling pavilion of science-fiction-style products in that exhibition hall at the Phoenix Convention Center. There, just beyond their view, more than 100 companies, including Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Verizon, were trying to sell the latest in futuristic border policing technology to anyone with the money to buy it.

The students from Northeastern Illinois University didn't happen to fall into that category. An earnest manager at a nearby registration table insisted that, as they were not studying "border security," they weren't to be admitted. I asked him how he knew just what they were studying. His only answer was to assure me that next year no students would be allowed in at all.

Among the wonders those students would miss was a fake barrel cactus with a hollow interior (for the southern border) and similarly hollow tree stumps (for the northern border), all capable of being outfitted with surveillance cameras. "Anything that grows or exists in nature," Kurt Lugwisen of TimberSpy told a local Phoenix television station, "we build it."

Naveed Shinwari hasn't seen his wife in 26 months. He suspects it's because he refused to become an informant for the FBI.

In February 2012 Shinwari, who has lived in the US since he was 14, flew to Afghanistan to get married. He says that before he could get home to Omaha, Nebraska, he was twice detained and questioned by FBI agents who wanted to know if he knew anything about national security threats. A third FBI visit followed when he got home.

The following month, after Shinwari bought another plane ticket for a temporary job in Connecticut, he couldn't get a boarding pass. Police told him he had been placed on the US no-fly list, although he had never in his life been accused of breaking any law. Another FBI visit soon followed, with agents wanting to know about the "local Omaha community, did I know anyone who's a threat", he says.

"I'm just very frustrated, [and I said] what can I do to clear my name?" recalls Shinwari, 30. "And that's where it was mentioned to me: you help us, we help you. We know you don't have a job; we'll give you money."

Shinwari is one of four American Muslims in a new lawsuit who accuse the FBI of placing them on the no-fly list, either to intimidate them into becoming informants or to retaliate against them for declining.

Filed on Tuesday night in the US district court for the southern district of New York, the case accuses the US attorney general, Eric Holder, the FBI director, James Comey, the homeland security secretary, Jeh Johnson, and two dozen FBI agents of creating an atmosphere in which Muslims who are not accused of wrongdoing are forbidden from flying, apparently as leverage to get them snitching on their communities.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department secretly used a civilian aircraft to monitor the 10-square-mile area of Compton in 2012, recording high-resolution video of all that happened n the region.

"We literally watched all of Compton during the times that we were flying, so we could zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton and follow cars and see people," said Ross McNutt of Persistent Surveillance Systems, according to The Atlantic.

This type of surveillance, which was used to find suspected bombers in Iraq and Afghanistan, allows police to zoom into recordings Google Earth-style.

The technology can stay in the air for six hours and is being marketed to police departments across the United States, allowing police to rewind recordings to watch areas they couldn't monitor in real time.

Sgt. Douglas Iketani of the L.A. County Sheriff's Department openly compared the secret test to Big Brother, though apparently it didn't make him stop short of using it.

"This system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public," Iketani said to the Center for Investigative Reporting. "A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so to mitigate those kinds of complaints we basically kept it pretty hush hush."

On Friday Russia's parliament voted to write off roughly 90 percent of North Korea's debt as Moscow seeks to build a gas pipeline through the Hermit Kingdom.

This weekend Reuters reported that Russia's Duma voted to write off roughly $10 billion worth of the debt that North Korea owes Moscow from the days of the Soviet Union. The vote ratified an agreement made in September 2012, after a meeting between then-President Dmitry Medvedev and then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in Siberia in the summer of 2011.

At the time the agreement was first announced, The Guardian reported, citing Russia's Finance Minister Sergei Storchak, that Moscow would forgive "90% of the debt and reinvest $1bn as part of a debt-for-aid plan to develop energy, health care and educational projects in North Korea." Russian experts hailed the agreement as a sign that North Korea's leadership was looking to initiate market style reforms in the reclusive country.

Why is the federal government so obsessed with grabbing more land? After all, the federal government already owns more than 40 percent of the land in 9 different U.S. states. Why are federal bureaucrats so determined to grab even more? Well, the truth is that this all becomes much clearer once you understand that there is a very twisted philosophy behind what they are doing. It is commonly known as "Agenda 21″, although many names and labels are used for this particular philosophy.

Basically, those that hold to this form of radical environmentalism believe that humanity is utterly destroying the planet, and therefore the goal should be to create a world where literally everything that we do is tightly monitored and controlled by control freak bureaucrats in the name of "sustainable development".

In their vision of the future, the human population will be greatly reduced and human activity will be limited to strictly regulated urban areas and travel corridors. The rest of the planet will be left to nature. To achieve this goal, a massive transfer of land from private landowners to the federal government will be necessary.

So the conflict between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the BLM is really just the tip of the iceberg. The reality is that the BLM has their eyes on much bigger prizes.

The US is to blame for the events in Ukraine as it invested $5 billion in regime change in the country, taking a more radical stance that its EU allies, Vitaly Churkin, Russia's envoy to the UN, said.

"It seems it was the Americans, who tried to push through the most radical scenario," Churkin said in an interview with Rossiya 24 channel. "They didn't want any sort of compromise between [ousted President Viktor] Yanukovich and the opposition. And, I think, they came to the conclusion that it was time to cash in those $5 billion and handle the matter towards abrupt regime change, which, eventually, happened."

This explains why the US, but not the European Union, took center stage when the coup resulted in legal vacuum in Kiev, he added.

US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland told CNN on Monday that Washington has invested around $5 billion into supporting democracy in Ukraine since the fall of Soviet Union.

But Churkin has doubts about Nuland's claims, saying that "any sane person would, at least, say that those investments didn't pay off."

"If those $5 billion were spent on support of democracy, but not overthrow of the existing government and regime change, then no democracy has triumphed there [in Ukraine]," he explained.

The control of the US, and of global politics, by the wealthiest families of the planet is exercised in a powerful, profound and clandestine manner. This control began in Europe and has a continuity that can be traced back to the time when the bankers discovered it was more profitable to give loans to governments than to needy individuals.

These banking families and their subservient beneficiaries have come to own most major businesses over the two centuries during which they have secretly and increasingly organised themselves as controllers of governments worldwide and as arbiters of war and peace.

Unless we understand this we will be unable to understand the real reasons for the two world wars and the impending Third World War, a war that is almost certain to begin as a consequence of the US attempt to seize and control Central Asia. The only way out is for the US to back off - something the people of the US and the world want, but the elite does not.

The US is a country controlled through the privately owned Federal Reserve, which in turn is controlled by the handful of banking families that established it by deception in the first place.