https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/09/12/if-the-us-really-was-what-it-pretends-to-be/
If The US Really Was What It Pretends To Be
It’s wild to consider how many of the world’s problems would not exist if the US really was the thing it advertises itself as.
It’s wild to consider how many of the world’s problems would not exist if the US really was the thing it advertises itself as.
Ukraine would not be at war right now, because the US empire would not have provoked that war, since the US really would be an upholder of peace and international order.
The world would not be staring down the barrel of nuclear armageddon, because the US really would be a normal country that respects the sovereignty of other nations instead of the hub of a globe-spanning undeclared empire which keeps ramping up aggression against nuclear-armed states who refuse to consent to its planetary rule.
China would not be preparing for war, because the US military really would be used for the defense of the United States instead of rapidly encircling the US empire’s top geopolitical rival with massive amounts of war machinery.
The middle east would not have spent the 21st century being ripped to pieces by western aggression, because the US really would care about the lives of the people who live there and not just pretend to in order to promote regime change interventionism.
Mountains of human corpses would not have been amassed in Yemen by violence, starvation and disease, because the US really would oppose tyrannical dictatorships like Saudi Arabia instead of enthusiastically facilitating their war crimes.
The information ecosystem of the western world would not be strangled by empire propaganda, internet censorship and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, because the US really would value free speech and free thought instead of churning out a continual barrage of mass-scale psychological operations designed to dominate the way people think, speak, work, act and vote.
Julian Assange would not be languishing in prison, because the US really would support press freedoms instead of working to set a legal precedent normalizing the persecution of journalists for reporting inconvenient facts.
The people of the United States would not be floundering in poverty and broken infrastructure, because they really would live in a democracy that allows them to influence government policy instead of an oligarchy rigged to benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of normal human beings.
The US would not be a tyrannical police state with the largest incarceration rate on the planet, because the US government really would care about civil rights and liberty instead of only caring about the profits that can be harvested via prison slavery and private prisons from those citizens who don’t make good cogs in the capitalist machine.
Developing nations would be thriving a lot more, because the US really would support their national sovereignty and independence instead of doing whatever’s necessary to facilitate the imperialist extraction of their wealth.
Human civilization would be far more just and equitable than it currently is, because the US really would value every nation’s right to forge its own path, and therefore would not have spent generations aggressively stomping out every attempt to move toward socialism everywhere in the world.
The planet would not be circled by hundreds of foreign US military bases and continually terrorized by US wars of aggression, proxy conflicts, CIA coups and starvation sanctions, because all the US government secrecy which makes this malfeasance possible wouldn’t exist, since the US really would value truth and transparency instead of power and domination.
The world would be a much more healthy and harmonious place if the US really was the peace-loving, tyranny-opposing democracy that it and all its propaganda systems frame it as. But because the US government is actually the most tyrannical regime on earth and values nothing apart from its own ability to dominate as many members of the human species as possible, we live in a world of far greater peril and abuse than we otherwise would.
I write so much about the US empire because that’s just what you find yourself doing when you set out to describe the problems of our world with an open mind; trace those problems back to their origins, and many of them revolve around this strange and profoundly abusive power structure which manages to evade much criticism and scrutiny because it has the most sophisticated soft power narrative control systems ever devised.
The US empire depends on keeping the world asleep to its abusiveness. And the world depends on everyone waking up to it.
....
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/09/10/pay-attention-to-the-everyday-horrors/
Pay Attention To The Everyday Horrors
They make up fictional horrors because they don’t want you looking at the real ones.
Have you ever noticed how the criticisms that both mainstream US political factions make about their opposition tend to be cartoonish exaggerations and whole cloth lies with little or no grounding in reality?
It’s the strangest thing. Since 2015 Democrats have been insisting that Trump’s election would spell the end of American democracy and would turn the United States into a Nazi dystopia with goose-stepping brownshirts rounding up minorities for concentration camps. On top of that they began insisting that Trump is a secret agent working for the Kremlin and that Vladimir Putin was secretly operating as the de facto president of the United States.
On the right side of the aisle it’s even more ridiculous. They’re constantly babbling about a hostile takeover of the United States by socialists and communists, as though the Democrats are anything other than the same garden variety neoliberal capitalists that Republicans are. The more extreme factions prattle on about satanic plots to legalize child molestation, turn children transgender and make everyone eat bugs, which Americans will be powerless to resist because their guns will have been confiscated and their mandatory estrogen jabs will have made them too soft and feminine to fight back.
It’s just ridiculously bogus drama queenery from both sides, but they push it anyway, day after day, year after year, each year with more sensationalist melodrama and hyperbole than the year before. They do this for a couple of reasons, the first being that if they started criticizing each other for the actual things they are actually doing, people would start to notice that there’s not much meaningful difference between the two parties in terms of actual governance. If Americans started to notice that the US government behaves more or less the same way regardless of which party is in power, the illusion of the two-party puppet show would be shattered, and empire managers would lose a crucial means of social control.
Secondly, both parties criticize each other for fictional offenses because criticizing each other for their actual offenses would draw attention to just how evil they both are in real life. The warmongering. The starvation sanctions. The ecocide. The soaring authoritarianism. Making their citizenry poorer and poorer so their donors can get richer and richer, and then destroying social safety nets and imposing crushing austerity on their poverty-ravaged populace. Facilitating a mind-controlled dystopia in which everyone is brainwashed by propaganda to align their thoughts, speech, labor, actions and votes in accordance with the will of the powerful.
The basic, mundane, ordinary status quo is a waking nightmare that should make us all scream in terror; the only reason we don’t is because we don’t notice it, and the only reason we don’t notice it is because we’re used to it. We’ve never known anything besides this abusive dystopia, so we’ve got no perspective on what a healthy society would look like and how very, very far we are from it. But if someone was transported from an alternate universe where human civilization was functioning in a healthy way, they would fall to their knees and bawl at what they saw here.
They make up fictional horrors because they don’t want you looking at the real ones. They don’t want you looking at the suffering of the homeless on the street. At the working poor flailing in endless toil unable to get their heads above water and relax for a minute. At the families in nations like Venezuela, Syria, North Korea and Iran struggling to obtain food and medicine because of imperial economic warfare. At the emaciated bodies of Yemeni children. At the shredded corpses of drone bombing victims. At the inconvenient facts behind the horrors in Ukraine. At Julian Assange languishing in a maximum security prison for the crime of good journalism. At the indoctrinated masses marching blindly to the beat of the imperial drum while being trained to believe they are free. At the biosphere we depend on for survival being poisoned and fed into the machine of global capitalism. At the nuclear holocaust dangling over our heads by an increasingly tenuous thread.
Those are the real horrors. Not the imaginary ones the politicians and propagandists train you to fixate on, but the real ones they train you to overlook. The mundane horrors. The everyday horrors. The horrors we were born into, and got used to over time.
Stop focusing on the threat of some future hypothetical dystopia and pay attention to the dystopia we’re living in right now. That’s where the real tyranny is at. And that’s what the real tyrants work continuously to prevent us from noticing. The more they can keep us shaking our fists at imaginary problems, the longer they can keep us from solving the real ones.
....
http://themostimportantnews.com/archives/we-have-a-real-life-nightmare-on-our-hands
We Have A Real Life Nightmare On Our Hands
The stage has been set for a societal meltdown of epic proportions. When the United States went through the Great Depression of the 1930s, conditions were extremely rough, but our country was able to successfully weather the storm thanks to the relatively high character of the American people. Unfortunately, several generations later we are simply not made of the same stuff. Just about every form of evil that you can possibly imagine is absolutely exploding in our society today, and there is chaos in major cities from coast to coast. If things are this bad now, while economic conditions are still at least somewhat stable, what is going to happen when economic conditions get exceedingly harsh in this country?
The spike in felonies — homicides and robberies are up 29 and 67 percent from the same time period last year, police statistics show — is not the only data that is causing alarm. The number of juveniles arrested for carjacking has increased slightly since last year, with 41 of the 64 charged between the ages of 12 and 15. As of Aug. 31, a total of 81 minors had been shot in the city this year, compared with 66 over the same span last year and 37 in 2021.
While a preponderance of violence occurs where it often has — in poor neighborhoods on D.C.’s eastern edge — statistics show that the geography of crime has become more diffuse, with prosperous areas less immune than before.
A crime wave has been steadily percolating all over America, and even young women are eagerly participating in the violence…
The shocking moment three women beat an Asian man with a metal pipe before taking off with his car has been caught on camera.
Danxin Shi, a rideshare driver, is no longer able to work after his vehicle was stolen by the gang about 5:30pm on Tuesday evening in crime-ridden, Dem-led Chicago.
Footage shows the moment the Chinatown resident, who lives West 22nd Place, parking his vehicle and walking along the street when he is struck with a weapon and shoved to the ground – where he is beaten repeatedly.
This makes me so sad.
Young women are not supposed to act like this.
But now we live in a society where all of the old rules have been thrown out.
In this environment, literally anything goes. Theft is going to cost U.S. retailers more than 100 billion dollars this year alone, and “flash robberies” that are conducted by mobs of young people have become a daily occurrence…
Cellphone video of the crime showed several men dressed in dark hoodies and blue medical face masks loading up bags of what appeared to be cologne and perfume merchandise.
Today, the heart of the city of Benjamin Franklin looks like something you would expect to see in a third world country…
Disturbing new video from Philadelphia shows addicts on the street in a trance like state, passed out on the sidewalk in the city’s multiple homeless encampments.
In the Kensington neighborhood, the footage shows fires burning on trash littered sidewalks as groups of people set up camp.
Drug users are seen hunched over with no control of their limbs, while others are sprawled across the garbage covered streets.
Large groups have taken over the sidewalks, turning them into homeless encampments where many people live in their own filth.
But this isn’t just happening in our large metropolitan areas.
According to Zero Hedge, authorities are having to deal with “third-world country stuff” in Casper, Wyoming…
A city in Wyoming has been overwhelmed with a growing number of homeless people, who have damaged a local hotel that would require millions of dollars to fix and left hundreds of pounds of human feces in the downtown area, according to its mayor.
Casper Mayor Bruce Knell, in an interview with local news media Cowboy State Daily published on Aug. 31, said the city’s homeless population had topped about 200 people, creating “a mess” as they roam the city’s parks and streets.
“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s third-world country stuff happening in Casper, Wyoming,” Mr. Knell said.
“They destroyed everything,” he added. “It’s horrible.”
With each passing day, conditions in this nation get even worse.
So what is going to happen when the economy finally tanks and people start getting really desperate?
You might want to start thinking about that, because very hard times are clearly on the horizon.
When the economy slows down, there is less demand for rail transportation, and at this point total combined U.S. rail traffic has fallen on a year over year basis for three months in a row…
“August was the third straight month in which total year-over-year U.S. rail carloads have fallen,” Association of American Railroads (AAR) Senior Vice President John T. Gray reported on Sept. 6. Total combined U.S. traffic for the first 35 weeks of 2023 was 16,173,208 carloads and intermodal units, a decrease of 4.9% compared to last year.
Even more troubling, credit card delinquencies and auto loan delinquencies have both hit levels that we haven’t seen in more than a decade…
This year, credit card delinquencies have hit 3.8%, while 3.6% have defaulted on their car loans, according to credit agency Equifax.
Both figures are the highest in more than 10 years.
“The increase in delinquencies and defaults is symptomatic of the tough decisions that these households are having to make right now — whether to pay their credit card bills, their rent or buy groceries,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told the Washington Post.
We had a very sharp recession during the first two quarters of 2020, and then we had another relatively mild recession during the first two quarters of 2022.
Now it appears that a new downturn has begun, and it promises to be very painful.
But our population is clearly not prepared to handle what is ahead of us.
When economic conditions get extremely harsh, I expect that we will see a massive national temper tantrum, and it won’t be pretty.
Are you and your family prepared for that?
I hope so, because the months and years in front of us are going to be full of surprises.
No comments:
Post a Comment