American Austerity and the US War Machine

 

Yesterday my Australian mother of 90 years came to me in tears because of the events in Washington DC. Despite her age, she relies on her trusty Apple phone, and receives all the 'breaking news' from the New York Times and the Washington Post. Although I've told her to take these two media institutions with a hefty grain of salt, she continues to read them. What upset her was the images of “young thugs” desecrating the sacred capital of the United States of America.

My parents are both Australian, and they both migrated to Canada to then settle in Denver, Colorado. I grew up there during the '60s and '70s, where the US was a much different country today. We lived in a working-class neighborhood where everyone had a job, a house, and families were saving money for their children to go to university. Although the Vietnam War was raging, as a family, we were behind the civil rights movement, protesting against war and looking towards a better future. The future looked positive.

As most of my American friends have told me the US is a much different place. Even before 9/11, the snake-head of neoliberalism was on the rise. The US was continuing to bully and stick their noses in foreign countries. President Clinton essentially turned the government over to corporations; he conglomerated the media giants down to five or six, ejected the Glass-Steagall legislation, separating commercial and State banking, leading to the Wall Street scam of 2008, where millions lost their homes, and the creating of NAFTA, allowing corporations to ship their industries overseas, causing millions to lose their jobs. Then, of course, 9/11 happened, turning the US into a surveillance and police state.

My old home may be a democracy on face value, but in the end, it is a corporation, where elected officials bow down to their donors, and illegal wars continue around the planet. The mask of the government and their supporters have fallen, revealing a government not for the people but wholly devoted to their corporate overlords.

Intertwined into the corporate-ruled US government is a country's economy fuelled by perpetual war. One must be legally blind not to see the trillions of dollars handed over to the Military-Industrial Complex. A country whose economy is based on war must have an on-going war to exist and continue. Thus we have US “intellectuals” blaming Putin for the thug-takeover of the US capital. The governmental corruption is so deep, and the propaganda so pervasive, that any self-analysis effort is psychologically impossible. This is a major symptom of the psychopath. Then COVID 19 hit the world stage.

While governments around the world went into lockdown mode. These countries also offered incentives for people and businesses to close. On the other hand, the US, under the guidance of a clown president and a corrupt government, floundered; thus, the US has the highest cases and deaths on the planet due to the pandemic. Added to this crime of homicidal negligence, the government continues to flail like half-dead fish on the shoreline.

One must also add that the US government is sanctioning countries around the planet, ensuring that the women and children of said US enemies die of starvation and COVID 19.

I believe nothing will change in the US until they put government over corporations. It is insidious and also blatant how corporations dominate US policy. In this corrupt system, the elite win-out, and the rest are left with nothing.

The corporate media in the US also have so much to answer for...dividing a nation over “Left-wing and Right-wing” politics. That is, pulling the population's attention away from a positive policy for the people, filling their minds with lies and contributing to the invasion of the US capital.

Although the gangster and clown that is, Donald J. Trump instigated this thuggish invasion of the US capital and the reason for this breaching is based on the lie that the US election was rigged, I believe unconsciously, these Trump lunatics represented how millions of Americans are feeling at the moment: betrayed, lost, and very angry.

One must add, too, the irony of the public invasion of the capital, when the US government and their blood-soaked spear, the CIA, have been doing this in other countries for decades.

When my mother came to me in tears over this spectacle; emotionally and sentimentally, I understood her grief. However, the US is a much a different place now, where deep-seated change is so needed... for the US people and the planet.