Friday, August 13, 2021

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/08/14/you-need-to-understand-that-the-us-is-the-most-tyrannical-regime-on-earth/

You Need To Understand That The US Is The Most Tyrannical Regime On Earth

You get a lot of moral clarity when you realize that the US government is the most despotic and corrupt regime on the entire planet by a very wide margin. This clarity informs your perspective in a way that helps you see through a lot of the propaganda narratives that are laid over the public’s vision about what’s going on in our world.

Whenever I say the US is the most tyrannical regime on earth I get a lot of objections from people, and these are always people who simply haven’t thought very hard about the horrific realities of US foreign policy. Sure you can name some governments who are more brutal and oppressive toward their own citizenry than Washington, but you can’t name any who are more brutal and oppressive overall when you zoom out and look at the big picture.

The United States is currently circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and waging wars which have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century. Its sanctions and blockades are starving people to death en masse every single day. It works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates by toppling their governments via CIA coups, proxy armies, partial and full-scale invasions, and the most egregious number of election interferences in the entire world.

There is no other government on earth about which you can say anything like any of these things. No other government on earth is doing anything which rises to this level of evil. Not Iran, not North Korea, not Russia or China or any of the other big scary boogeymen we’re told we must be afraid of by the mass media. You can argue that other governments have perpetrated comparable evils in the past, but you cannot argue that any of them are doing so currently. In our present reality as it actually exists, the United States is the worst monster, and it’s not even close.

There’s really no counter-argument to this. Even if you’re an intellectual six year-old and still believed in 2021 that the US uses its military for beneficent purposes, the fact that we now know the US military just wasted trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on a 20-year war which accomplished literally nothing besides making horrible people rich and lied to the world about it the entire time should dispel that childish delusion once and for all.

The fact that the US happens to export the bulk of its tyranny outside of its borders (though certainly not all of it) doesn’t change the fact that it is more tyrannical than any other government. This just means its tyranny dominates the entire world instead of a single nation.

And ordinary Americans don’t even get anything out of it. It would be bad enough if they were consenting to their government committing murderous piracy around the world because all that theft was enriching their lives and making Americans the wealthiest, happiest and healthiest people on earth, but it isn’t. Americans experience some of the world’s worst wealth inequality without any of the social safety nets afforded to people in every other developed nation, so they’re not even getting a slice of the piracy pie. They only consent to their government being the most despotic regime on earth because they are propagandized.

So in this sense all the accusations the US and its allies make against governments which refuse to bow to Washington are in reality a kind of whataboutism. “Whataboutism” is a word empire apologists constantly bleat whenever you point out that the US is perpetrating some version of an abuse it accuses another government of perpetrating (and it always is), but in reality they’re the ones using accusations to try and distract the conversation from what it should actually be about: the most tyrannical and abusive government on earth.

There is no legitimate reason to focus on the abuses of any other power structure as long as the US and its allies are committing vastly worse atrocities. The most powerful and destructive government on earth should be receiving far more criticism than any other, but instead, because its propaganda dominates the world, it actually receives far less criticism. Being clear on this gross imbalance and the need to correct it is instructive for anyone with their eyes open, because it shows where your efforts and opposition should be directed.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/08/11/afghanistan-proves-the-us-military-needs-its-budget-slashed-to-ribbons/

Afghanistan Proves The US Military Needs Its Budget Slashed To Ribbons

US officials are telling the press that Kabul will fall to the Taliban within 90 days and perhaps within the month as US troops withdraw from the war-torn nation.

“One official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the issue’s sensitivity, said Tuesday that the U.S. military now assesses a collapse could occur within 90 days. Others said it could happen within a month,” reports The Washington Post. “Some officials said that although they were not authorized to discuss the assessment, they see the situation in Afghanistan as more dire than it was in June, when intelligence officials assessed a fall could come as soon as six months after the withdrawal of the U.S. military.”

Meanwhile the US is still raining down explosives and murdering Afghan civilians to temporarily slow the inevitable Taliban takeover long enough for the Biden administration to have its ridiculous 9/11 “victory” party. Biden has said the US will continue providing “air support” (imperialist for bombing campaigns) to the Afghan government, for however long that government exists.

This is an unforgivable outrage that cries out to the heavens for vengeance. Not the Taliban takeover; that was always the inevitable result of letting Afghanistan be controlled by Afghans. I’m talking about the invasion and 20-year occupation of that nation by the US and its allies.

It is only by the most aggressive narrative management and journalistic malpractice that people around the world are not calling for the heads of the architects of this occupation. For twenty years the world was systematically lied to that the US coalition was building a government and military that could stand on its own, and that this goal was right around the corner and just needs a little more time. Now it’s crunch time, and we learn that what they’ve been building in Afghanistan this entire time was a fake movie set made of cardboard.

The cost of that fake movie set? More than two trillion dollars, and hundreds of thousands of human lives.

This should be an international scandal for which scores of people should be sentenced to spend the rest of their lives behind bars. More than this, every military which participated in this unforgivable crime should have its budget slashed to a tiny fraction of what it is.

A military which can afford to spend trillions of dollars on a devastating 20-year war that accomplished literally nothing besides making war profiteers fabulously rich is a military which needs its budget slashed to ribbons. Clearly if Pentagon officials can waste such unfathomably vast fortunes lining the pockets of the military-industrial complex to the benefit of not one single ordinary American, they do not need anything like the obscenely bloated military budget the United States currently has.

Just thinking about the things those two trillion dollars could have been spent on instead, like fully ending both homelessness and child poverty in the United States, for example, should make Americans howl with rage. Hell, spending two trillion dollars building a useless brick mountain in the middle of the Mojave Desert would’ve been an infinitely better use of that money than murdering hundreds of thousands of people with US troops dying by the thousands and wounded by the tens of thousands. That last bit alone should have every military family member marching on Washington and Arlington today.

The US government is the single most tyrannical regime on this planet, without exception. It has killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century, solely in its wars that are still currently happening, all in the name of power and profit and destroying anyone who disobeys its dictates. Anyone who cares about humanity should place the defanging of this horrific monster at the very forefront of their values.

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https://www.legalreader.com/the-slow-drain-of-an-expensive-collapse/

The Slow Drain of an Expensive Collapse

Complexity is costly. Civilization’s bills are coming due. An expensive collapse lies ahead, and no political will to fix it.

Complexity is expensive. One of the reasons people are desperate for a “living wage” is because living costs so much more than it used to. New and improved technology starts out as status symbols for wealthy people, but gradually becomes a necessity. Mobile phones, for example, used to be a fancy luxury, and now nearly all of us have to have them, an expense our ancestors didn’t have. Before refrigerators were common, our ancestors kept food cool in root cellars, spring houses, and ice boxes. Yet, the technology that expands the list of items we “need” is the same force driving us towards an expensive collapse. How much longer can it continue before the costs are too much to bear?

All the once-optional gadgets that we now need to live a decent life are the result of a couple hundred years of increasing industrialization. As our standard of living improved, it was pretty easy to ignore the pollution and drawdown of natural resources because offshoring the factories and plentiful, easy credit hid the costs that should have been paid to clean up as we went along. Besides, nobody wants to do without the luxuries they consider necessary, which is a powerful motivation to stop listening when “doomers” start talking, or to send militarized police to rough up protesters who value clean water over yet another leaky pipeline. However, ignoring problems doesn’t mean they go away. Now we’re finding out the consequences of our actions.

The expensive collapse isn’t arriving all at once. Like the climate emergency, it falls unevenly, hitting marginalized people and precarious communities first. This economic death of a thousand cuts will seem like only a slight drag, gradually increasing until the bill for keeping civilization running is simply unaffordable, like paying the internet bill, student loans, and rent while working for minimum wage. It can be done, carefully, until it can’t.

Here are some of those thousand cuts:

The “new normal” summer heat in the Pacific Northwest caused grocery stores to turn up the refrigeration, and then turn it off altogether. When the temperature is 116°F (46.7°C) outside, refrigerators and freezers can’t keep up. Stores in Oregon and Washington had to pull produce, meat, dairy, and other perishable items from the sales floor. Restaurants and cafés closed for similar reasons. Increased power usage caused blackouts, making the problem worse. This will happen more in a hotter future.

Triple-digit temperatures, emptying aquifers, and rivers going AWOL are stressing the rest of the food supply, too. Farmers lose out when their crops die and they can’t pay the bills. Losses from agriculture’s expensive collapse are passed on to publicly-funded crop insurance programs, taxpayers paying to shield farmers from complete disaster while also paying higher prices for the food that’s still available.

Horned cattle skull rests in the sand.
Public domain image courtesy of Maxpixel.net. CC0

Heat and hunger are killing cattle. In Mexico, ranchers have been forced to slaughter cattle early or watch them waste away and eventually drop. The cattle used to eat grass, but with every year hotter and drier than the last, ranchers resorted to importing higher-cost alfalfa. Then alfalfa farmers couldn’t irrigate anymore because of the drought. There weren’t always cattle in the region, just like there weren’t always giant vegetable farms in California, and they won’t stay there forever. Losing both will mean an expensive collapse for the food system in North America.

One solution to the water crisis is to build desalination plants. They’ll be vital resources in the years ahead, but they’re also pricey to build at scale, which will add another layer of cost to every enterprise that once relied on cheap, plentiful water. Unless they’re powered by the sun’s heat alone, desalination plants are also energy intensive, which indirectly adds to the problem they’re meant to solve.

Meanwhile, where there’s not too little water, there’s often too much. A growing number of people around the world live in flood zones. With more severe weather and stuck weather systems coming, losses from floods will add up. For years, it’s grown increasingly expensive to insure people who live and do business in flood zones. Just as with those who live in areas prone to wildfires, how long can we afford to repeatedly rebuild after every disaster, and who will foot the bill?

A stretch of I-70 in Colorado is the perfect example of the kind of one-two punch we can expect to face more often in the future. Last year, the Grizzly Creek fire tore through the area, burning off the tree cover on the slopes along the freeway. This year, torrential late-July rains soaked the denuded land, causing an expensive collapse of mud and debris that blocked the east-west artery. I-70 has been shut down indefinitely.

This would all be much easier to deal with if, say, we had an abundance of cheap natural resources to throw at the problems, as we once did. The fracking boom that enabled the economy to ignore peak oil for a little longer is coming to an end, though, making it more expensive to do anything that requires a lot of energy. We can’t rebuild houses with burned forests or buy food that never grew.

Adding to the expensive collapse are the bills that are coming due. Some are obvious, like the cohort of (at least) 34 million Americans critically ill with “Long COVID,” who will require disability payments and extra care while being less able to work. Some problems are sneaking up on us, like the cost of repairing, replacing, or deciding to live without the massive amount of concrete-based infrastructure that is coming to the end of its useful lifespan. Expect these problems (and more) to face hostile legislatures unwilling or unable to fund “business as usual.”

Truth is, we’re already faltering. In Michigan as elsewhere, child care expenses are on par with mortgage costs, and families are already making hard economic decisions about whether or not they can afford to go to work. Will they be able to shoulder the costs of an expensive collapse? Supply chains are unraveling, with deliveries to the hinterlands becoming erratic. As the disasters around us erode them further, making the Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020 look like a brief inconvenience, how will civilization maintain the economic base necessary to insure and rebuild everything that breaks? Low-income countries are already unable to keep up, but the United States won’t be too far behind, once it’s no longer “the wealthiest country in the world.”

We can’t avoid an expensive collapse at this point. A country this divided, polarized, and broken will never summon the political will needed for the deep, systemic changes necessary to adapt to the situation ahead. It’s going to be up to people like you and me to help each other find a path ahead. We’re all we’ve got.

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